On-field Technician Scheduling: How to Make it Better?
Technician scheduling is one of the foremost crucial factors within the success of any business involving offsite technicians. Despite the very fact that it’s nothing to do with the standard of the technician’s work on a machine when done right, effective scheduling can drive revenue. Done poorly, scheduling can cause your whole organization to return to a standstill.
Having unproductive gaps in your schedule means you’re not billing as many hours as you’ll be — which eats into your potential earnings. Service managers and dispatch teams can spend tons of your time trying to assign the proper field technician to the proper job, which comes with its justifiable share of challenges, including:
5 ways of improving technician scheduling
Transforming your workflow to enhance the online appointment scheduling schedule doesn’t need to be complicated.
Optimize the digital appointment scheduling with the following five steps.
1. Have one view of all technician schedules
Don’t waste time switching from one technician’s schedule to a different one to ascertain what their day seems like. Instead, optimize service technician assignments by viewing all their plans at a look. The best employee management software allows you to visualize workloads across teams, schedule appointments, and dispatch field workers– all directly. You’ll also view and track all of your service tasks’ status directly within the shared inbox. You’ll also view every technician’s schedule on the scheduling dashboard to spot any conflicts or gaps within the calendar.
2. Automate service task assignment
Automations prevent both time and energy by automatically performing repetitive tasks so your dispatch managers and field technicians can specialize in providing service to customers wherever they’re. With the best digital appointment scheduling system, you’ll execute automated actions on every service task as soon as it’s created. For instance, automatically set a service task priority to Urgent supported the contact or company related to the service task. Automating these functions will prevent time to specialize in the tasks that add value to your business, like improving your strategy and handling complicated issues.
3. Group technicians supported domain & skillset
Based on your industry and therefore the sort of service needs, your organization fulfills its good practice to make specialized skill groups supported technician domain knowledge and expertise. For instance, if you’ve got certain technicians who affect electrical equipment et al. who affect plumbing, you’ll create two different groups to form scheduling easier supported the work. With mobile workforce management, you’ll organize field technicians into service groups. Groups allow you to easily assign service tasks so you’ll schedule technicians to support their competence.
4. Assign the proper technician for the proper job
A complicated machine repair might need an expert technician’s hand, while a routine checkup can do with an individual with less experience. Dispatchers need multiple information points like the sector technician’s current schedule, workload levels, and therefore the customer’s history to spot the simplest field technician for every job. Assign and schedule jobs from an integrated calendar view with affordable appointment scheduling software through simple drag and drop controls. Having all technician calendars in one place also helps dispatchers easily assign the proper person for the proper job.
5. Track job updates in real-time
A last-minute request can derail the whole day’s schedule. The workforce management software lets technicians receive real-time job updates through alerts connected to their mobile phones. Using an intuitive scheduling interface, the field service management software lets your dispatcher determine the simplest technician for the work by sorting by the skill set and therefore the technician’s location, and that they can do all of it in real-time.