Scheduling and dispatching involve crucial tasks directly impacting your field service delivery quality. For example, if you assign the wrong field service technicians to the job, your customer’s and technician’s time gets wasted. Your field service teams have to put in additional efforts to correct their mistakes and dispatch the right skilled worker for the job.

Assigning the wrong job to the wrong field service technician is just one of the errors that affect your service delivery. But by using field service management software, it is possible to reduce such errors, automate manual work, and improve customer satisfaction – read more to learn how.

What is a field service management software?

Field Service Management Software is a dedicated automation and management solution catering to the operational needs of a field service business. This includes automation of manual work across marketing, sales, project management, invoicing, inventory allocation, customer service, and much more.

How does FSM software help improve field service dispatching?

Here are three key areas in which FSM software impacts improve dispatch schedule efficiency:

Real-time visibility on dispatch schedules

FSM software provides a centralized dashboard that helps field service teams view ongoing projects, pending work orders, customer support tickets, etc. This provides much-required business visibility in otherwise ‘remote’ operations. It is possible to design the views of your dashboard that suit your business needs.

For example, if you have too many projects in the execution phase, you can align the dashboard views to showcase reports of field service technicians’ activities, quality check results, tackle urgent issues raised by workers or customers, and more.

Optimize dispatch

FSM software that uses GPS technology helps optimize routes for field service technicians. It will consider the real-time location of the worker such that it will assign two or more jobs that lie in nearby areas to the same field service technician to improve output. Such optimizations help improve resource efficiency and reduce operational costs. 

A key optimization includes assigning the right job to the right field service technician. This means the algorithm will search for relevant skills, availability, proximity to job location, customer feedback, and more before assigning jobs for acceptance.

Mobile access for real-time communication

Having a mobile application for your FSM software means you can reach out to your workers and communicate scheduled jobs, tasks available, updates about the job, etc in real-time. They can quickly accept or reject jobs, know about any changes to job details as they happen, and check for documents or files when needed to perform work.

Workers can share information about job sites by sharing files, images, and videos, or make calls to connect with supervisors or managers. This is especially useful when a dispatched worker reaches the job site and notices a difference in the requested service versus the job details provided.

Five features to consider when choosing FSM software for dispatching operations

You can opt for a more specific dispatch software to help automate your scheduling and dispatching operations. Or if you’re choosing FSM software, make sure they include below key features that help with scheduling and dispatching workflows:

1. Prioritize tasks: should be able to understand the urgency of tasks based on requested service, customer’s value, worker availability, order size, etc to prioritize them for field service teams.
2. Calendar view: having a drag-and-drop interface over the calendar view helps visualize schedules and edit them as required.
3. Track real-time location: helps calculate travel times between job sites, optimize routes, and track worker activity or inventory stock delivery. It also helps share Estimated Arrival Time (ETA) with customers and provides the real-time location of a worker when they start their travel towards the job site.
4. Push notification: software can include templated emails and messages that help share real-time updates about the job progress with customers, details about assigned workers, discounts, etc.
5. Allocate productively: you can allocate jobs to ensure workers do not feel overworked. For example, FSM software can allocate jobs based on acceptance volume, completed jobs in a day, upskilling opportunities for workers by doing practice jobs, and more.

At Zuper, our field of IT service management solutions takes into account the above five features and more to help you optimize your scheduling and dispatching activities – book a demo to learn more.

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The post Error-Free Dispatching: The Role of Field Service Management Software appeared first on Tricky Enough.

You know that old saying about a plane taking off from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time — but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups — except they may start out heading toward Alaska.” ~ Evan Williams

It is the same story that repeats every time. Initially, teams come up with ideas to begin a startup. Further, they put time and money into the MVP process and decide which features to include and leave out of the MVP. Ultimately, after the MVP launch, the startup moves with a stable and mature product when everything works as planned.

Then what goes wrong with this fairy-tale success story? In reality, over 90% of them fail.

So what leads startups to fail?

Because they fail to recognize MVP as not only a product to work and finish within 2-3 months and launch; instead, a more precise amount of effort and work goes into the process after the MVP launch as well. After launching the MVP, it doesn’t end there; rather, the list goes on. MVP development is a repetitive process and continues until a robust product has found its best fit market.

Here’s the to-do list to follow:

Collect Feedback

Until the MVP launch, the MVP was built based on essential features for the user’s mind. As soon as the product launches into the market, it’s open for feedback- which is better advice to follow- what the potential customers have to say after using the MVP.

After the MVP launches into the market, collect these actual data and determine whether and why customers are using your product and why not!

Tracking user behaviors is vital for engine growth; businesses can measure and learn from user interactions and decide which features to improve, add, or delete. Use the data to analyze what it is that would make your product more commercial and successful.

Don’t be discouraged by the negative feedback from the customers. Don’t hesitate to go back to square one, if needed, because most startups do it multiple times.

Prepare to Scale

Startups worry more about examining their assumptions, validating the same in the market, and gaining tremendous traction. The Salability factor becomes a later stage concern.

The world of startups believes a vital aspect of technical stability can be avoided. Startups are more burdened about testing their assumptions and validating them in the market to cater to huge tractions. At the same time, Scalability comes to be a later stage concern.

This blind belief has unfortunately led some startups to fail miserably. A home-service startup, ‘TaskBob,’ which had raised around $5.7 million in funding in 2014, had to shut down in 2017 as it could not scale up and generate profits. Thus always be optimistic of standing a chance of the MVP, as there’s always a standing chance of the MVP catching up quickly and sign-ups start rolling in.

Thus hosting your product in a fully scalable platform for plenty of new users is vital. For example, Dropbox chose not to launch an MVP product. Instead, they came up with a simple explainer video about what the product does.

This video generated 5000 to 75000 beta signups overnight. But the question lies in whether they were ready to handle these vast numbers.

The head of server engineering at Dropbox, Rajiv Eranki explained that the Dropbox team used Python for virtually everything in a RAMP Conference presentation. This means that the whole platform “could get to 40 million users writing thousands of lines of C code.” The use of Python allowed the Dropbox team to scale quickly and cater to the needs of potential customers. Thus, Dropbox made a planned move by launching its MVP with complete preparation to digest the success with an ideal dose of Scalability.

Set the right Pricing

Eventually, they analyzed the product demand and found an optimal monetization approach. Deciding the pricing quotient is usually kept at the backset during the MVP development or the launch; the general notion for this is the thought process of whether the product is not ready yet.

The argument provided is- how can you charge for a ‘minimal.’ product?

However, what is vital to understand is whether the product is still in the MVP stage and the top pain points of the customers are already addressed, and the customer development process is done, then you are ready to go ahead on the success journey.

For example- Buffer recognized this winning strategy. Initially, they analyzed the product demand with a basic MVP (a landing page) within the potential consumers. After the landing page started catering to more traffic, they added more pages carrying the pricing plans for their signup process. Eventually, the company analyzed the product demand and also found an optimal monetization approach.

Don’t Shy Away from Marketing

As we read earlier, MVP is an early-stage product development package. Nevertheless, businesses should get ahead with their marketing strategies to let the world know that their product is finally live. It is advised to get started with the product promotion as soon as the MVP launches in the market. However, marketing the MVP and marketing the final product is different.

“Mint,” a personal finance app, is a perfect example of how they utilized an ideal marketing medium right from their MVP launch to future success. The founder of the Mint app, Aaron Patzer, came with an excellent marketing strategy. He came up with “Whatever we can do, basically, for cheap or for free.” Content marketing was the way to achieve this the right path for them. They initiated a personal finance blog to build their audience for Mint.

And as a result, the app hit a milestone of 1,000,000 users in just a couple of years since the launch. By simply putting an email subscription form at the end of each article, led the startup to accrue around 20,000-30,000 emails from potential customers in only nine months while the app was still in the development phase.

A Journey from MVP Development to Product Development — Final Thoughts

While there are enough pitfalls to avoid when building your MVP, even more, will be waiting for you once you launch your MVP in the market.

However, after following all the points mentioned above, you will get to know whether or not your idea has a spark; if it is possible to move forward from MVP development to product development. Remember to be unemotional and pragmatic about the results. If you didn’t get the desired results, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You might be just a few tweaks away from success.

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The post 4 Steps to Help You Move from MVP Development to Full-Scale Product appeared first on Tricky Enough.