Solutions for Field Service Management Challenges

Field service management (FSM) is a critical responsibility for many businesses across several industries. It involves managing mobile workforces dispersed across multiple locations simultaneously and ensuring those teams have the tools and support they need to complete tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently. 

Companies will need to overcome several well-known challenges when managing mobile workforces, in addition to current challenges posed by a skilled labor shortage and higher churn rates. Because FSM is vital to staying ahead in a highly-competitive market and providing excellent customer service experiences, we will discuss top field service management challenges and provide solutions to those challenges in this article. 

We will then showcase Tourmo's Operations Insight solution as an innovative and intelligent software that can help field service managers maintain a competitive edge. 

Top Field Service Management Challenges

Field service management is a continuous process involving coordinating and scheduling work for mobile workers and ensuring they have the necessary tools, equipment, and resources to complete their tasks. Further, it requires ensuring workers adhere to all applicable laws, regulations, and company guidelines.

To say that field service management is a complex process would be an understatement. FSM frequently involves dealing with unexpected daily issues, requiring field service managers to have access to the advanced tools and technologies they need to handle unexpected problems effectively to keep operations running smoothly.

Field service management requirements vary by industry, but at its core, it involves scheduling, dispatching, and tracking workers and task completion. Companies must overcome several top field service management challenges to simplify and accurately measure the process. These challenges include:

• Scheduling conflicts
• Monitoring mobile workers and task completion
• Paper documentation
• Communication
• Training

We will discuss these challenges in greater depth below.

Top Field Service Management Challenges

1. Scheduling Conflicts

Scheduling conflicts frequently occur when mobile workers' availability and ability to meet customers' needs do not align promptly. These conflicts are common when multiple customers request service simultaneously, resulting in a need for more workers to fulfill requests. They can also occur when a company needs more available mobile workers due to employee illness or being short-staffed.

Scheduling conflicts create: 

• Significant source of frustration for customers and employees
• Reduced satisfaction rates
• Productivity loss
• Reputation damage

To overcome them, companies can use advanced and intelligent technology solutions that enable them to view the availability of mobile workers in real time, assign and reassign work accordingly, identify and communicate delays, and gain oversight and control over scheduling conflicts as they arise.

While many FSM solutions on the market help managers handle scheduling conflicts, the continuous human oversight required by these technologies can significantly reduce employees' time to delegate other vital responsibilities.

This is where an AI-powered solution can be deployed to optimize and streamline the multiple time-consuming tasks involved in managing disparate FSM solutions, which will enable more efficient and automated management while eliminating the need for human involvement and additional disruptions.

AI-powered technologies, like Tourmo AI, can automatically optimize schedules and dispatch technicians to the right location at the right time based on technician availability, skill level, and location. Tourmo can also automate all of an organization's processes for complete visibility, helping large workforces stay on schedule, stay on top of scheduling conflicts, and remain in complete control of field service management issues. All of which improve customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

2. Monitoring Mobile Workers and Task Completion

It can be challenging to track mobile workers and their completion of tasks accurately, whether a company uses manual recording processes or several disparate FSM solutions, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or customer relationship management (CRM) systems.  

Manual data entry is known to be time-consuming and error-prone. Further, accessing the siloed data needed to monitor mobile workers and task completion accurately can be difficult for companies that use multiple FSM systems that are not easily integrated.

Because maintaining trust between mobile workers, managers, and customers is critical, a company will need to utilize advanced AI features and functionalities to get the most out of their standard FSM and tracking solutions to accurately track where their employees are and the status of what they're working on.

Advanced AI-powered monitoring systems, such as Tourmo AI, can manage multiple FSM, ERP, and CRM solutions, automatically monitor job performance, and take, or recommend, immediate action when issues occur. Our technology can monitor whether work is being executed to plan, notify your customers when there is a change, and manage issues like delays at client sites, unplanned stops, route deviations, and out-of-sequence deliveries. Additionally, clear and intuitive reporting on those issues helps identify frequent challenges for focus and improvement.

3. Paper Documentation

The field service industry has historically relied on paper management systems. While many businesses still use paperwork orders to date, these processes are inefficient and frequently result in resource waste, delays, communication problems, and other issues.

By eliminating the need to search for, handle, and transport paper documents, digitizing documents saves workers time. It allows workers to complete tasks quickly and more efficiently and move on to the next job. Further, it allows field service managers to easily track and report on digital documents, giving them real-time visibility into the status of various tasks.

If you’re still relying in part or wholly on paper documentation, digitizing paper documents can help improve organizational efficiency and reduce costs while more accurately meeting regulatory reporting requirements.

Tourmo AI can make it easier for field service managers to automatically prepare regulatory reporting about your mobile workforce’s carbon footprint as stricter CO2 regulations continue to increase on both the state and federal levels, with:

• GHG protocol-compliant reporting
• On-demand and scheduled reporting

4. Communication

Communication breakdowns and delays can cause customer service issues to take longer to resolve, make it challenging to coordinate employee and workers’ schedules and prevent workers from accessing the information they need to complete tasks.

Because open communication is essential for customer and employee satisfaction, companies must use solutions that enable communication via phone, email, or text message and allow mobile workers to communicate with each other and with customers in real time, 24/7, regardless of their location or time zone.

When it comes to mobile workers, every minute of delay or waste counts. Tourmo's AI-powered technology can significantly improve communication in field service management by automating and optimizing how businesses communicate with their customers and employees. A company can deploy intelligent technology to handle customer inquiries, resolve service issues, and provide real-time assistance to field service technicians on the job.

5. Training

Many companies struggle with delivering employee training and scaling existing training programs to accommodate growing workforces. Training is critical for keeping employees updated on their field's latest techniques, technologies, and best practices. It also enables employees to work more safely and efficiently, leading to improved customer service and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

If your current FSM solutions lack features that support ongoing training, Tourmo AI can help. Our intelligent technology can provide personalized training and support to mobile workers, encouraging them to stay motivated and engaged in their work and providing ongoing opportunities for them to improve their skills without the need for manager intervention while participating in gamification.

Tourmo AI can help mobile workers identify potential safety issues, such as fatigue or distracted driving, and provide alerts to help prevent accidents. Tourmo allows supervisors to maintain complete visibility while our technology offers practical and positive automated feedback that enables mobile workers to perform at their best.

Tourmo AI’s Operations Insight Solution

Tourmo's AI-powered technology can help your organization overcome complex field service management challenges, reduce costs, and unlock higher satisfaction and productivity levels. Our patented technology can analyze data from your existing FSM solutions to identify trends and patterns, providing valuable insights into your current operations, and enabling field service managers to make more informed decisions in real-time.

Further, Tourmo can help your organization streamline and optimize processes involved in managing multiple disparate solutions, resulting in rapid efficiency gains and reduced overall workload for field service managers. 

Our Operations Insight solution can help you capture and leverage all of the data generated by your operations to deliver the right information to the right people, make better decisions and take action sooner, with features such as:

• Exception Management: With the use of our AI technology, we can take disjointed datasets and harmonize them, discovering correlations within your data. These systematically generated correlations and cross-system exceptions are presented to you to provide valuable insights about your operations and identify new opportunities for improving your business.
• Predictive Insights: The correlations uncovered within your operations’ data allow us to identify valuable insights that can predict outcomes. You can then use these insights to improve the outcomes.
• Population-based Insights: Our AI platform employs a technique called population-based learning, which breaks down the data from your operations into groups of data points that share a common context. By considering this context during analysis, we can generate unbiased insights.
• Accurate Insights: Our system retains your data's full history and granularity to train our AI for more accurate predictions. All insights are available for data visualization and further analysis through our included clear and intuitive tools.
• Workflow Management: Tourmo's AI-powered business process management tools provide automation, task management, insights, transparency, and accountability across your organization. These features allow you to extract value from your data and seamlessly integrate it into your workflows, improving efficiency and effectiveness across your company ultimately resulting in bottom line, financial, improvement

Tourmo AI Can Help You Overcome Field Service Challenges

To combat the challenges faced by field service management, such as market disruptions, labor shortages, and high churn levels, companies should consider implementing AI-powered technologies that can automate and optimize their most complex and time-consuming processes. This can be especially beneficial for companies in various industries, including transportation, construction, heavy equipment, service fleets, and beyond, helping them to significantly improve their operations.

Tourmo can help you improve your company's process structure, including the way your company processes compliance reporting, by leveraging AI technology. With Tourmo, you can get more value from your existing technology investments and improve your ability to monitor, verify, and manage your workforce operations, leading to increased efficiency and productivity.