How Automated Scheduling Solves the Challenges of Mobile Workforces

But you can’t run a vibrant and growing business using manual processes. Mobile workforce scheduling can transform this headache into the best possible customer service from the first appointment request through to task completion. By moving beyond manual processes, you can collect schedule inputs from every team member—creating effective employee schedules in a streamlined and systematic manner. Using business rules, schedule constraints, employee certifications, and customer relationships, you can build the optimal schedule.  Online schedules are easier to share and there’s never a question about the most updated version.

Modern solutions can bring the schedule to the mobile worker (with built in workflows and geolocation) and tie back to customer-relationship management systems for an end-to-end solution. The result? You learn more about your workforce’s activities and productivity and improve customer satisfaction.

Smaller organizations lack resources to create customized scheduling solutions

Given the scale of their operations and volume of appointments they manage on a daily basis, it’s no surprise billion-dollar telecom companies have invested tens of millions of dollars in customized hardware and software solutions to govern the scheduling, routing, and location of their teams of field-service employees who often drive around with thousands of dollars of inventory and equipment. These military-grade systems use rugged devices to interact with custom-built, robust enterprise applications.

The investments large companies have made in these enterprise systems have more than validated the concept of automated scheduling. However, it’s also clear they can require years of development and implementation and teams of IT personnel to maintain and support them.

In the mid-market, that model doesn’t work. Thousands of smaller companies—call them “Non-Traditional Field Service”—have similar challenges but can’t afford that level of investment and technology risk. 

Fortunately, new alternatives have emerged to meet the needs of a broad range of industries. The key to these new-breed solutions is the use of the cloud model where the vendor operates and maintains the software, eliminating the need for these smaller companies to invest in and manage complicated software. Instead, mobile workers use simple smartphones and tablets while central dispatchers work with an easy web application. By bringing workforce scheduling to the entire workforce, these affordable, easy-to-implement solutions are opening up the service economy to new levels of speed, efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction.

Customer experiences suffers due to subpar experiences 

It’s an all-too-common scenario. A customer schedules an appointment and waits at home for the arrival of their field worker . . . only to wait and wait. No on-time arrival. No notification of delays. Only frustration. Worse, when the worker arrives, they often don’t have the right skills to solve the problem. The customer must call to reschedule the appointment and start the process all over again.

One of the greatest sources of customer dissatisfaction is simply the endless friction involved in the process—delays, paperwork, and missed appointments.