The Office
Whether your office is made up of three people or thirty, the folks who make it run each and every day have a lot to shoulder. Service orders. Customer follow up. Dispatching field techs. Expense reports. Travel reports. Payroll reports. Phone calls. Emails. Follow up and more follow up. And that is when everything goes well. During the high season when one or two members is out with the flu, forget about it.
So, where do we help find efficiency in the Office? We start with what we can control. How fast can we see customer data, past service records, future service calendars? We use data and create systems that offer context. Any task that currently takes 10 minutes, we want to take 10 seconds. When is the next time we can get two of our crews on a jobs site on back-to-back days in a remote part of our service area? Which driver is in the best position to drop off or pick up within the next two hours at our most important customer’s back dock? Getting the right data to office staff in an immediate fashion gets field the right field personnel to the right place at the right time. And, it is critical that office staff is not required to spend 10 minutes solving every issue that comes across her desk.
Easy to manage service histories and customer notes make for shorter hold-times for customers calling in with questions. Automated emails mean less time spent processing notifications. Syncing with third party software such as Quickbooks or Office 365 means no replication of data entry efforts. Creative solutions that custom fit a business are not meant to replace office staff, but free them up to address more critical issues for a business all while supporting customers and field staff.
The Field
How often are people in the office making calls or sending emails to “chase down” guys on the road or on job sites? How often are field techs calling back to the office asking for a given piece of information that only an office worker could possibly have access to? How much time and money is your business losing continuing to operate like this year after year?
At Unifeyed, we preach that data is powerful. Putting all of the data in a field tech’s hands is powerful. Rather than giving him just a paper job sheet for today, give him a tablet with a complete history of all service done on the property, complete with equipment profiles, service notes, outstanding balances. Enable him to clock in and out of a job so that there is a precise record of labor time. Give him a database of equipment for easy billing. And, send all of his job data to the client and back to the office for every job, instantly. Your field techs have hundreds of hours spent learning their trade and thousands of hours honing it in the field. Why are they being assigned an hour’s worth of paperwork on every shift when they could be doing what they were trained to do?
The Connection
Walk into any “old school” contracting office, service outfit or towing business and you will find a lot of paper. You will hear frustration. Talk with the people in the office and they will tell you how hard it is to reach guys on a jobsite. Speak with the people on the jobsite and they will tell you that there would be no reason to reach them if they had just had all the right information in the first place. Everyone’s problems are solved with more data being made available in real time. This is what we do.
Getting Started
Let’s get everyone in a room and begin tackling the toughest problems first. Call the Unifeyed team today so we can begin identifying challenges today and start working on solutions tomorrow.
Development
In any competitive industry, every minute counts. Time adds up. When it comes to your business, for every extra minute your team members spend correcting a mistake or looking for missing data is a minute they could be spending serving a client, completing a job and otherwise growing the business. And if time is money, how much of it is your business wasting by continuing to use an outdated data management system, CMS or reporting platform?