Your field service business could be more profitable - here's why!

Field service businesses have a number of potential weaknesses which can be like holes in a bucket. If the holes are too big the money being made leaks out faster than you can fill the bucket. Ultimately, a business cannot survive if the bucket leaks faster than it can be filled. Here are the main causes:-

Field Operatives Time

The ability to maximise field operatives when they are making money is a key factor. Ideally, field operatives would spend 100% of their working day with clients or on invoiceable activity. Obviously, that is an impossible figure to reach as most field operatives need to travel from one site to another in the course of their working day. The time spent on travel is usually marked as a loss in terms of revenue. You are paying for operatives' time plus the cost of travel.

The solution to this is harnessing a solution such as that provided by Jobable, which has built-in smart scheduling to ensure your operatives' travel time is minimised. When a job is booked, Jobable analyses field operatives' routes over a customisable period of time and even includes their start/finish location each day (e.g. home or office). The most efficient option can then be scheduled to minimise travel, saving time and travel cost. This can add up significantly over time and can help plug one of the holes in the bucket!

Back-Office Team

Historically, a large team could be needed to both process incoming customer job requests and also process jobs once completed by field operatives. Every employee in your back-office team costs money and although some are, of course, needed, modern software and automation offered by solutions such as Jobable can automate tasks and make processing jobs much faster and more efficient. Here are just a couple of features that can reduce the requirement for large admin teams:-

1. Enable customers to book their own jobs

Reduce calls and emails by enabling customers to log in to a customer portal where they can submit job requests (which are auto-scheduled in the most efficient way by the software).

2. Integrate with your bookkeeping software

Reduce double entry by integrating with your bookkeeping software such as Xero or QuickBooks. This reduces the time it takes for your bookkeeping person/department to process invoices and payments.

3. Realtime electronic communications

Field operatives ideally should receive all jobs electronically and be able to feed back photos or information to the office in real-time. Field operatives should also have access to job history so they can be aware of any previous issues or work carried out while on site.

4. Automate regular communications

Regular reminders should be sent automatically and customers prompted to leave good reviews for your organisation. Don't spend time doing these types of emails or text messages manually when automation software can be set to fire these out to customers automatically on a scheduled basis.

Lack of Management Metrics

Management teams cannot make properly informed business decisions without the correct business performance data. How many new customers have you acquired this week? What was your profitability last month? How often do field operatives have to recall to jobs? How quickly has your business been responding to customer jobs? These and other questions are good indicators of performance and watching these types of metrics over time can help you adjust your business process or focus resources to improve weaker areas.

Jobable field service management software encompasses all the above features, which makes it the perfect choice for any field service-based business to reduce costs and maximise profit. Get in touch with us today for a free personalised demo of how Jobable can work to save your business time and money!