The days of assigning jobs via text messages and emails are behind us for small and medium sized businesses. Dispatch via text and email still requires your field service team member to then write that information onto a work order or estimate before outlining the rest of the work they do on a job. And that piece of paper cannot be texted or emailed back. Text and email are one way dispatch systems.
Sending text and email job information drains your business like a black hole next to a star (source).
How much time does your field service staff spend filling in paper forms? If you could reduce that by as much as 30 minutes per day per technician then you could get another few jobs per week completed. Over a period of a year you would be looking at 150 additional jobs. Your labor costs wouldn’t change, but your revenue would rise significantly.
With the arrival of the smartphone (and now tablets), businesses have much more efficient means for assigning jobs to their field service personnel. With a light dispatch app, field workers are able to receive their jobs via their smartphone or tablet and send the data back right away.
The data dispatched is pre-filled into the appropriate section of their form so the technician doesn’t have to re-write it. All the technician needs to do is start working! He or she can then fill in the rest of the form electronically to describe the work being done and any materials used. The customer’s signature can be captured with the swish of a finger across the screen and your technician is on the way to the next job in the queue (Conveniently listed on their smartphone/tablet).
Not only do dispatch apps make technician’s work faster, but also eases the work at your office. Once completed, all forms are submitted electronically to the cloud. It’s easy to integrate these submissions to your own databases such as Salesforce or QuickBooks. Simply download an xml or csv file of as many submissions as you need. Hours once spent on re-entering data are now freed for other, more productive assignments.
Want a real world example? See how Fulmax, a pest control company, saved time by switching to a dispatch app.
