How Mobile Workforce Management Affects Finance Teams

 
When your business sends teams of people to work onsite with customers, it offers reward and creates risk at the same time. The reward is happy customers who stay loyal to your business, which is increasingly rare in today’s economy. The risk is that as soon as employees walk out the door, or work is turned over to contractors, your business loses control over the experience. The casym between what actually happens and the data that comes back to the office can seem impossible to surmount. And when the mobile employees that are in front of your customers lack the proper tools to do their work, their satisfaction drops and turnover increases.

Managing mobile work effectively requires new technologies and processes. That’s why mobile workforce management technology is a huge boon to businesses that meet customers where they are. It’s a software category that helps connect all the data and people who are touched by mobile work to create better financial outcomes, including efficient use of resources, customer retention, and engaged employees.

For finance teams, mobile workforce management can help you protect your company’s financial integrity by reducing costs, connecting data across the business, improving invoicing processes, and more.

Challenges for Finance Teams

The workplace of today is drastically different from the workplace of 10 years ago—and the same goes for the CFO position. In the age of digital disruption, financial executives are taking on a more far-reaching role with a broader impact on the organization. Their knowledge and expertise increasingly cross business functions, including IT, operations, and business strategy.

Some challenges that financial teams face today are:

  • Efficiency: Reducing and streamlining non-revenue-generating activities cuts costs. Efficiency enables CFOs to invest the savings in other business areas, but it can be difficult to determine where to cut without impacting growth.
  • Return on investment (ROI): Prioritizing new expenditures in technology that will create significant long-term cost savings enterprise-wide is a priority for anyone in Finance.
  • Bottom line growth: Making decisions that enable companies to capitalize on new revenue opportunities and avoid risk is the seemingly contradictory responsibilities facing every CFO.

Empower Your Finance Team with Mobile Workforce Management

Managing a distributed workforce is complex. Companies must enable their employees to be productive and collaborative while working onsite with customers, where the tools and support surrounding desked employees in the office is not available. At the same time, management requires visibility to run the business efficiently and cost effectively.

This is where mobile workforce management comes in. Mobile workforce management is a category of software that helps manage employee scheduling, capacity, and more in order to increase productivity, ROI, and long-term growth. Mobile workforce management (MWM) tools use intelligent automation to give managers more visibility into their workforce and collect the right data to use in future decision-making.

MWM can uniquely address the challenges that your finance team faces. Let’s explore how.

Reduce Overhead Costs

Whether mobile employees are in primary revenue-driving roles or not, managers need to keep overhead costs down. The most effective ways to reduce costs are to cut travel time between clients, increase utilization, and eliminate missed or late appointments. Greater workforce visibility helps managers identify the most likely opportunities to reduce costs and keep remote teams working efficiently.

Mobile workforce management tools allow managers to optimize their remote workers’ day so they can increase productivity. An intelligent MWM system will automatically optimize travel routes, estimate job completion time more accurately, and replace or add staff to a project seamlessly, without interrupting business.

Provide Trustworthy Data for Financial Decision-making

Finance teams rely on accurate data for insight into the health of the business. One of the CFO’s greatest potential strengths is the ability to capture and make better use of data to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of departments across the organization. Without the right data, finance teams are at risk of making ill-informed decisions. Inaccurate or incomplete data about your mobile workforce, including revenue- or cost-generating activities, can lead to all kinds of problems, such as inaccurate financial forecasting.

A primary advantage of a mobile workforce management system is its ability to collect and centralize trustworthy data for more accurate financial forecasting. An intelligent mobile workforce management platform collects data from the field and instantly shares it with your CRM or other enterprise systems. Your mobile workers can record key metrics, such as when they arrive and how long it took to complete a project, supplying the data needed to estimate resource requirements and demand for specific services or skills. With a wealth of data at your disposal, you can make decisions that increase efficiency and profitability.

A strong mobile workforce management system also manages information about customer preferences and employee skills. With that information, operations managers can assign mobile workers to cases based on the best fit for skills and prior relationships. This alignment leads to greater customer satisfaction, which leads to a higher customer retention rate and a healthier bottom line.

Drive Faster, More Accurate Invoicing

If your billing department has ever accidentally invoiced a client for the wrong amount, you understand how time-consuming invoice errors can be. A mistake as simple as an employee transposing a number can create huge financial issues that result in inaccurate cash management and damaged customer relationships. A more serious error, like a no-show or failed appointment that wasn’t properly recorded, can cause a lot more pain than a headache.

With mobile workforce management software, all data necessary to bill for a service is captured electronically—no more manual, time-consuming paperwork—enabling more accurate billing that translates into faster, more consistent cash flow. One company, Area Wide Protective, reduced invoice errors by 41% after implementing a solution that provided service delivery information directly to the billing team via the company’s CRM system.

Centralize Information for Increased Productivity and Collaboration

When companies lack visibility into what is happening offsite, the results are inefficiencies and poor customer experiences. By providing mobile employees immediate access to relevant customer data, including that customer’s service history, purchased product information, employee interactions, stated preferences, and more, they can more quickly complete projects, resolve issues, or close sales.

Companies using mobile workforce technology gain a unified view of business performance that integrates information from the mobile workers and the back office. They have real-time data of every customer’s interaction with the business. This access to insights drives more timely decisions, and CFOs can easily identify underperforming areas and take action to prevent further revenue loss.

A Mobile Workforce Management Solution for Your Finance Goals

Skedulo is an intelligent mobile workforce management solution that gives comprehensive, real-time data to better understand who the customers are, how the business is running, and how growth strategies affect the bottom line and improve ROI. Schedule a free demo to see how Skedulo can improve your business today.