4 Signs Your Business Needs a Mobile Workforce Management Solution
In today’s global workforce, 80 percent are deskless workers, meaning that the work that they perform is outside of a traditional office or fixed location. That’s over 2.7 billion people worldwide across almost every industry with many workers performing services with customers at different locations throughout the day—in other words, they are mobile.
Your business may employ these mobile workers in a variety of different ways. Some are full-time employees of the company whereas others might be employed on a part-time or casual basis, which can be hard to manage at scale. You may need a mobile workforce management solution to help solve challenges related to employee retention, customer satisfaction, process optimization, and having the right data to impact transformative change.
Here are some symptoms that indicate you could benefit from a mobile workforce management solution:
Low Employee Engagement
Managing these mobile workers and the work that they do presents unique challenges for your business. For example, operational inefficiency that results from being unable to manage your mobile workforce has a direct impact on your employee engagement. Consider the home care industry, where the median caregiver turnover rate was 66.7% in 2017. This includes in-home nurses, clinicians, and practitioners that experience burnout and stress not only from the care and services they provide to patients, but with the inefficient administrative processes necessary for their work. With much of this turnover occurring within the first three months of employment, home care businesses are spending massive amounts of time and money in hiring, training, and turning new employees. If you are experiencing high employee turnover, consider a mobile workforce management solution to help give them what they need to be successful in their roles.
Unhappy Customers
The challenges that come with a mobile workforce can manifest in business outcomes, not just via disengaged employees. A telltale sign that it’s time for a mobile workforce management solution is that your customers are unhappy or dissatisfied with the services you deliver. The mobile workers that you dispatch may not have the right information about customer needs or preferences, or you may be setting unrealistic expectations about when your customers can expect service providers to arrive.
Customers are more empowered and enabled to provide negative feedback about their experiences and find alternative service providers when their needs are not being met. If your business implements a mobile workforce management solution, it should help improve the experience you provide to your customers by doing the following:
Addressing Your Challenges with Customer Satisfaction:
- Will this solution help us provide an exceptional customer experience from the first moment of service to the last?
- Does this solution give us data and insight into what is happening onsite with our customers?
- Does this solution help us communicate with our customers in a timely and efficient way about the services we are providing them?
- Is vital data about our customers—including their needs, their preferences, and our obligations to them—used intelligently by this solution to help us make better decisions?
Inefficient Operations
The impact of having inefficient processes and tools is magnified at companies that employ a mobile workforce. Many businesses find that using separate or manual tools such as spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, or whiteboards serve their purpose for a short period but become cumbersome to maintain over time. Executing mobile work adds a layer of complexity if you’re trying to optimize your operations to be more efficient.
If you are trying to grow your business in order to reach more customers, being unable to manage a mobile workforce can prevent you from reaching your goals. It can become difficult to manage more people (both employees and customers), locations, and types of work within a system that cannot scale.
A mobile workforce management solution can be the catalyst for digital transformation within your business, if it addresses the following questions:
Preparing Your Operations for Efficiency
- Will our employees at desks and outside the office save time and work more effectively by using this solution?
- Will this solution increase the productivity and utilization of our mobile employees and contractors?
- Does this solution have the capacity to optimize our scheduling and allocation decisions to meet our business goals, not just fill open time slots?
- Can this solution reduce our dependency and spend on outside resources to serve our customers?
- Will we be able to serve more customers and grow our business faster by using this solution?
Untrustworthy Data in Disconnected Systems
Savvy companies will use operational data to drive their decision making, particularly when making plans to grow revenue, expand their services, or improve their operations. If data is not organized, accessible, or trustworthy, it can be difficult to make the right business choices and effect change within the organization. There’s also a lack of accountability when your data is stored in disparate systems, like a manually updated spreadsheet that is kept separate from other core systems of record.
For companies with mobile workforces, this data can include employee information like skills and working hours, customer information like addresses and preferences, or data related to travel reimbursement and payroll. Without control over this data, you won’t have visibility into what’s going on with customers and therefore won’t know how to improve your business so it can grow.
A mobile workforce management solution can help bridge the gap between these systems — like your EHR or CRM — and give you the information you need to drive growth in your organization. Consider a system that integrates into your end-to-end business:
Improving the Quality of Your Data:
- Will this system provide visibility into what is happening onsite with customers and our mobile employees?
- Does the solution capture important data we need easily, even automatically when possible?
- Does the solution sync data captured outside the office back to my other systems in real-time without manual intervention from my mobile teams?
- Will this system connect and integrate with my other systems of record to improve our business workflows and overall data integrity?
This Sounds Like My Business! Now What?
Now that you understand the impact that your mobile workforce has on your business goals and customer satisfaction, consider a mobile workforce management solution that will seamlessly fit into your existing processes and help you optimize your operations.
Are you ready to learn more? Download our Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Workforce Management here! Packed with valuable information, key questions, and detailed checklists, this free guide will give you a better understanding of the tools available to solve your mobile workforce management challenges.
