Today’s connected consumers live in an on-demand economy where, with a few taps or swipes of their mobile device, they can have whatever they want, whenever they want it. Tech-enabled companies like Amazon, Postmates, and Lyft deliver instant gratification wrapped up in a great customer experience. Customers have responded by setting a new, higher bar for customer experience in all of their transactions, regardless of whether they are on-demand consumer services or longstanding B2B services. They want immediate value and will go elsewhere if a company cannot provide it.
If you manage a residential or commercial services business, this requires a fundamental shift in how you operate and engage with your customers and employees. Mobile workforce management technology can streamline your operations and create an outstanding experience that keeps customers coming back, giving you a distinct advantage in a crowded marketplace.
How to Choose a Solution for Residential and Commercial Services
At their core, residential and commercial services require sending employees and contractors out to multiple locations throughout the day or week, where workers provide on site diagnostics, support, troubleshooting, and more.
When your business depends on sending mobile employees to homes and businesses, your scheduling system has to be user-friendly and efficient. A powerful mobile workforce management system seamlessly connected to your primary business systems allows mobile workers to provide consistently high-quality service in every interaction.
When you choose a mobile workforce management system, look for a system that offers value to each of the key stakeholders in your business.
For the Mobile Worker:
- An intuitive, easy-to-adopt interface that allows employees to get what they need on mobile devices they are already familiar with.
- Ability to access customer history and appointment details to ensure the best possible service in the initial interaction.
- A reliable tool to connect with HQ and make delivering exceptional work easier.
For Operations and Schedulers:
- A visually pleasing interface that simplifies the complex process of aligning work to customer availability, employee capability, and business constraints.
- Intelligent, automated scheduling and matching that takes goals and constraints into account, such as business hours for commercial repair, or working hours for residential services.
- A reliable system of record with trustworthy data for managers to deepen the business’ understanding of their customers’ experience and mobile workforce efficiency.
For the Back Office:
- A cloud-based infrastructure that effortlessly syncs schedule changes and updates across the workforce.
- A tool that improves efficiencies and reduces recurring costs like travel and labor overtime.
If you’ve traditionally thought of your company as a field service provider, keep in mind the differences between mobile workforce management and field service. While many of the principles are the same, understanding the difference between optimizing systems for people versus materials can help you choose the right solution.
The Benefits Mobile Workforce Management Offers Residential and Commercial Services
Harnessing the power of mobile technology creates a link between your office staff, mobile workers, and customers. It also increases the efficiency of your operations while delivering a stellar customer experience.
Mobile workforce management technology gives you the power to:
- Simplify scheduling & matching: Make it easier to process appointments and increase volume.
- Optimize routes: Get your employees to the right place at the optimal time, reducing delayed appointments and travel expenses.
- Boost customer satisfaction: Personalize customer service for preferences regarding specific appointment times and service personnel. Prepare mobile workers for each interaction with secure access to customer information and appointment details.
- Increase productivity: Streamline and automate routine tasks, such as submitting timesheets or service-related paperwork, so employees can spend more time with customers.
- Improve communication: Connect remote employees to your back office through real-time notifications and share customer histories for improved service.
- Reduce administrative tasks: Eliminate paperwork for everyone, process scheduling requests faster, and use analytics to improve operations.
When your remote workforce is equipped to handle challenges in the field more efficiently, your business will benefit from higher employee and customer satisfaction, lower operating costs, and greater visibility into every facet of your business—all of which will boost your bottom line.
Use Cases: Mobile Workforce Management for Residential and Commercial Services
A growing number of service companies are discovering that mobile workforce scheduling solutions make it easy to create a competitive advantage in an age when speed, simplicity, and efficiency are critical differentiators.
Intelligent scheduling through mobile workforce management benefits a wide range of businesses, including residential cleaning services, commercial carpet cleaning, window cleaning, solar panel installation and maintenance, security system installation and maintenance, and many more.
Residential Cleaning
ServiceMaster Clean Vancouver has grown rapidly over the years and now juggles more than 1,000 monthly appointments across six service lines. With so much valuable customer information being collected by employees in the field, managers needed a way to ensure data accuracy so that information can be harnessed to fine-tune the customer experience.
ServiceMaster Clean implemented a mobile workforce management platform to centralize data and personalize communication for a better customer experience. With accurate, real-time data pouring in, ServiceMaster can follow up with customers about their experience and introduce cross-sell and up-sell opportunities at the perfect time.
In addition, ServiceMaster delivers a more consistent, customer-centric experience with personalized communication. Different types of cleaning service require different interactions on-site; some jobs require notifying the property manager, while others only require notifying the on-site contact. By notifying the right person, mobile workers spend less time tracking down customers and more time on the job itself.
Commercial Security
Area Wide Protective (AWP), a commercial security service committed to customer safety, grew faster than its paper-based scheduling and dispatch system could handle. With five acquisitions over two years and 5,000 mobile workers across 60 offices and 19 states, AWP’s incredible rate of growth and scale bred operational challenges that were impacting how fast jobs could be confirmed, scheduled, and invoiced.
Since implementing a mobile workforce management solution, AWP has realized 86% more efficient scheduling and dispatching. AWP reduced invoicing time from two weeks to less than five days with huge improvements in accuracy. With more centralized, accurate data, the back office staff for AWP no longer has to spend so much time manually correcting timesheets or payroll issues.
Residential Pickups and Deliveries
It is not only consumer goods companies that make deliveries and move goods. Nonprofits like Canada-based Furniture Bank need to simplify and scale operations without straining their budgets. Furniture Bank brings life-changing furnishings to families in need while giving new life to unwanted household items. As the charity’s work expanded and it increased its fleet of trucks, schedulers realized they needed better communication with drivers in the field.
Mobile workforce management makes it easier to manage pickups and deliveries and understand what’s happening on routes in real-time. Furniture Bank increased its fleet efficiency by 50% without adding headcount to the scheduling team, doubling the charity’s social impact in the community.
Get Started With Mobile Workforce Management
The demand for residential and commercial services is growing, and customer expectations are higher than ever. Companies that deliver more personalized and efficient services than everyone else will be best positioned for success.
Are you ready to discover how a powerful mobile workforce management solution can transform your business? Book a demo today to see how Skedulo in action.
