Information Silos: How Work Order Software Breaks Them Down
January 1, 2025Help Us Help You: Technical Support Best Practices
January 1, 20251. Don’t Let High Fuel Costs Burn Up Your Profits
When you send paperwork back and forth to the customer site, you might lose money. Instead, have your technicians fill out work orders while they’re out in the field, using their laptops or handheld computers to enter data right away. This begins the easy process of making invoices right away. You speed up the billing process and save money on technician time and gas.
2. Share Information to Work Smarter
You can enter data into a central database just once, and then your sales, service, parts, and contract administrators can all see it right away. This cuts down on or even gets rid of tasks that you do over and over again, which boosts productivity.
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3. Improve worker productivity by sending them to the right places
Even small gains in efficiency, like making dispatchers and technicians more productive, add up to big savings over time. With up-to-date customer, contract, and service information at their fingertips, dispatchers can handle calls faster and make better plans for when technicians should arrive.
4. Don’t Let Billing Slip with Automated Invoicing
Send bills for every job on time. Having billing done automatically is the safest way to do this. Old-fashioned methods that are done by hand often make mistakes that cause payment delays or even not sending an invoice at all. When the job is small, it’s easy to forget to pay the bill. It’s the little mistakes that add up. Your billing stays on top of things when you set up invoices to be sent automatically.
5. Make things run more smoothly with mobile communications
A company that can’t talk to its clients and field staff in real time is seriously losing out on business. These days, many mobile apps make it easy to share information quickly and correctly. Not as many misunderstandings. Your staff will have more time to do their jobs. When you use remote solutions to free up valuable human resources, you can watch your company’s output go up.
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6. To make money, automate your parts inventory
To do their jobs well, service technicians need to be able to quickly get the parts they need. But a warehouse that has too many items can waste money. You can find the right balance between supply and demand for parts with automation software designed for service companies. It will cut down on inventory loss and lower the costs of keeping inventory, which will lead to higher profits.
7. Plan preventative maintenance to get the most out of your machine
Make sure your PM schedules are in line with the terms of the contract, and when jobs need to be done, they will be created automatically. A good system also lets the dispatcher who is on a service call know when the next PM is due so that it can be set up at the same time. This will improve both efficiency and customer happiness.
Extra Tip: Don’t forget about the customers who aren’t under contract. Make sure all the PMs are set up in the system. Then, whenever a PM is due to bring in new business, call non-contract customers.
8. Focus on Retaining Existing Customers
It’s better to have one customer than two in the bush. You can always keep a customer you already have instead of getting a new one. Service software will help you predict what your customers will need, be more responsive, and cut down on callbacks, which will help you keep your customers.
Also Read: Who Is Your Best Service Technician?
9. Analyze the Profitability of Service Contracts
You can’t afford to lose money on a service contract that isn’t making you money right now. Does each of your contracts really cover how much it costs to provide service? You should look at the profitability of each contract to see where the profits and losses are so you can act accordingly.
10. Evaluate Your Team’s Performance with Data
Do all of the people on your team work as hard as they could? Performers who aren’t up to par can hurt the company. Service software will tell you useful things about how productive each technician is, like how long it takes them on average to finish service calls, how long it takes them to respond, what parts they use, how many call-backs they get, and how much money they make per technician. This kind of information helps you figure out what your staff does well and what they could do better so you can make the necessary changes and improvements.