Executives in the field service industry work with a lot of moving parts: employees, equipment, materials, service contracts, scheduling and dispatching, clients, and more. Executives and their teams must effectively manage and track countless details.
The challenges
Field service organizations often encounter these five challenges:
- Scheduling and dispatching. Late technicians and late deliveries can be aggravating. When employees stay on schedule, customer satisfaction and loyalty typically improve. In addition, sending the right person for the job is essential.
- Fix rate. It’s frustrating for customers when employees must return a second or third time because they do not have the proper tool, parts, or information. It’s also frustrating when a delivery arrives at the wrong place at the wrong time.
- Communication. Is the technician running late? Has the part been back-ordered? Customers need to be kept in the loop so that they know what to expect.
- Performance management. Executives need to track progress toward short- and long-term goals. Access to targeted reports can streamline decision-making and help an organization grow.
- Reactive readiness. Organizations and team members depend on and must maintain many types of equipment and technology. Artificial intelligence and the internet of things (IoT) empower predictive maintenance and can help field service organizations avoid equipment downtime.
The solution: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service
The Microsoft Dynamics™ 365 Field Service solution provides helpful tools for customer service agents, service managers, inventory managers, dispatchers, and field technicians. Team members can use the solution to perform these 11 tasks:
- Assign the most qualified technician by matching technicians’ skills with the specifics of each work order.
- Balance workloads and resources through identifying and organizing available resources by category.
- Optimize schedules to help decrease travel time by considering geography, personnel availability, and customer preferences.
- Stay on schedule by providing turn-by-turn driving directions to technicians for each appointment.
- Create work orders directly from a case, an email, or a customer portal and track the orders against service-level agreements, entitlements, and invoicing.
- Complete work orders by using the solution to photograph completed work, obtain customer signatures, and collect payments.
- Organize service contracts, warranties, and entitlements for easier access by qualified personnel.
- View customer preferences and order histories and align customer records across sales, marketing, customer service, and field service teams.
- Manage assets and equipment by increasing visibility into warranty and service agreements, total revenue, related costs, and audit history.
- Access analytics and KPIs in a central repository designed to support decision-making.
- Drive operational efficiency with IoT by proactively detecting, troubleshooting, and resolving issues – dispatching technicians only when necessary.
Visit CroweCRM.com for more information about Crowe CRM services for Microsoft Dynamics 365 software. Have a question or interested in evaluating the CRM functionality in Dynamics 365? Contact us today.
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