Here goes a simple question, the answer to which is already known, yet putting it forward just to ensure that we are on the same page. Your car's tyres are punctured, on what basis would you choose your car service provider - quick service or cost?

In our present world of instant gratification, downtime is difficult to live with, thus no one mind paying a few pennies more for speedy, convenient, and efficient customer support.

For a service-based business like a cleaning company, prompt customer support is a key differentiator that positively impacts customer retention as well as customer acquisition.
The right implementation of automation strategies can help in effectively achieving promptness in service delivery by replacing various time-consuming manual processes that are also prone to human errors.

Use of cleaning business software is useful in data gathering and management capacity, which is imperative for delivering better quality, responsive and personalized services.

Automation can be implemented in various fronts, but as cleaning services are field-oriented so let's dive into key automation strategies that can enhance the efficiency of your field technicians so that your brand can transform into a customer-centric company and pull more customers.

1. Let your field workforce spend less time on roads

Assigning a far-off job to a technician will increase his travel time and thus can lead to delay in service delivery, also spending much time on the road will reduce the per day appointments of the technicians.

Using cleaning service scheduling software for scheduling jobs will allow your managers to assign a job to the nearest available technician, thus confirming quick service delivery.

The travel time of the technician can further be reduced using route mapping automation that shares the shortest yet safe route with the technicians.

Also, the live location/movement of the technicians can be tracked by both the manager and customers.

2. Be efficient to target more appointments per day

What time a field agent checked-in and checked-out from a job, how many hours he spent on travelling, how much time the technician took to serve an appointment, number of per day appointments, customer's feedback, all such information related to performance effectiveness of the employees can be tracked real-time using the location tracking automation.

Being provided with cleaning business scheduling software that provides real-time updates about the field agents' job-status, managers can measure the overall efficiency of the technicians and can also effectively plan and assign the next job. This way more appointments can be targeted on a day.

3. Don't rely on random facts and figures, focus on accuracy

Integrating automation into reporting, replace the 'recall and file' culture with real-time filing. Filling timesheets at the end of the day, sometimes even at the end of the week lead to errors and inaccuracy.

While through real-time reporting, field technicians can submit accurate updates about the status of their work from anywhere.

4. Increase the utilization of analytical data in strategy making

The most valuable asset of any service enterprise is its Data. The data captured during field services can be transformed into visually descriptive reports using smart analytics.

These reports offer meaningful insights into sales, revenue, cost and payment history of the customer. Proactive strategy making for customer acquisition is one of the immediate benefits of cleaning business apps.

5. Build an enterprise knowledge management system

Many challenges related to field jobs can be resolved through real-time data or knowledge sharing. Be it the troubleshooting information of a new kind of problem, job details, client details & service history, product information, service pricing and quotations, or any other enterprise-related data, no one knows when the need for information can arise.

Dependency on others for data access, delay the workflow and process, while a centralized cloud database is an appropriate solution that will allow one and all to have real-time access to the company’s knowledge repository.

Conclusion

Automation can provide cleaning businesses a chance to focus on service quality in real-time. Companies can oversee where and what the individual member is working on and how much time the technician will take to complete the job. Based on the data, they can schedule the next job, while ensuring that they have the right tool to complete the task.

Author's Bio: 

Bhupendra Choudhary is the Business Head of FieldCircle—a renowned field service management software enabler.