5-step plan to enhance the productivity of your field agents

As on-demand services and gig work takes center stage, customers look for excellence in every aspect. Businesses are no longer competing on price. Acquiring and retaining customers through delightful experiences is the new battleground.

If you are a part of this fast growing economy, you will agree that the productivity of field agents goes hand in hand with the operational efficiency of your business.

Having established the role of field agents in your business success, let us understand what it takes to empower your agents' productivity meter and how you can do it better than competition.

5 Steps to win loyal customers for your services

Step 1: Show up on Time

“Last time, when I was expecting a plumber to fix my home leakages, I had to wait for another 30 minutes past the scheduled appointment time. While the service was good, I might not choose this app in the future.”- A dissatisfied customer

Businesses lose potential customers because of delays in the field technician showing up. Punctuality is important, consistent punctuality wins repeat business.

In an increasingly mobile world, you probably have a field service app for agents to manage their work. But does your app use background location and cloud geofences to log the arrival of your field agent at the assigned job?

We’ve got you covered. Ask your developer to add this functionality to your field service app and operations workflow. Read on to understand how far the right technology can make your business grow.

Pro-tip: Getting device-to-cloud location technologies to work in production is evasively hard. Let your developers focus on growing your business, and not your location infrastructure. Start here to try for free and go live within a sprint.

Step 2: Measure and reward performance

It is always fair to set specific KPIs for your field agents and set clear benchmarks for them. To make sure you are rewarding the right field agent while keeping an eye on low performers, you need a reliable performance report. You can not make the judgement entirely based on anecdotal evidence. So, how are you going to measure and respond?

Does your field service or sales management system use location automation to generate on-field performance reports? You can automatically log the time spent by field agents at expected places, and routes taken on the way, and correlate that effort with the outcomes achieved from the place. This will reveal productivity scores and trends for the individuals as well as teams.

Also read: How Seven Lakes Technologies helps field get more productive in the Oil & Gas industry

Step 3: Proactively handle exceptions

Next in the list is to dynamically orchestrate actions from your agents while they stay on-field. When visits are running delayed beyond a point and there is a risk of no-show, assign another agent before it’s too late. When an urgent escalation shows up that needs priority attention, find the nearest available agent with the right skill to attend to the job pronto. When agents are found inadvertently killing the app or denying permissions, thus impacting customer experience or system reports, alert the supervisor or directly notify the agent to take corrective action.

Field service and sales apps have workflows that are built assuming static locations and schedules. They fail to factor in the dynamism of work on the move. When things change with agents, customers and the on-field circumstances at large, the system needs location-based automation to proactively manage this change.

Simple use cases require complex location infrastructure to make it work on the ground. Focus your development resources on implementing the use cases for your business, while building on top of an enterprise-grade managed service for location.

Step 4: Multiply customer feedback

If you wish to win the market, first plan to win your customer’s heart.

Once your field agent has completed the job, the next step is to get feedback from your customers about their experience. Many companies fail to get responses from customers.

I’ll let you in on a secret. When asking for feedback, timing is everything. You need to ask at the right time.

The right location technology will help you trigger a workflow when the agent leaves the place of work. In turn, this can be used to notify the customer in the app or email to fill out the feedback or survey form.

Besides feedback automation, background location technology is useful to automate attendance, timesheets, travel expenses, arrival notifications for customers, and more. Join thousands of businesses, and tens of thousands of developers to build location-based automation.

Also Read: How Groundworks improved NPS scores by using geofence exits in a clever way

Step 5: Resolve grievances with non-repudiation

The agent claims to show up on time, while the customer claims otherwise. The regional manager expects routes to be faster or shorter, while the agent claims to have taken the most efficient one. The system shows that a place was not visited at all, while the agent claims to have visited multiple times and spent substantial time.

If you are running a field service or sales set up, these problems are weekly occurrences. Multi-party grievances drain out trust from the system. Some incidences can take a while to recover from, while others might be a death knell for that business relationship.

What if you had a way to replay the ground truth as a timeline of the agent’s movement? Get to your ops dashboard, pop up a map, and watch the day play out as it happened, then pause at the precise moments of concern. It takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure involving device, cloud and mapping technologies to achieve this feat. Add this power directly into your ops dashboard within one sprint.

This same view may be shared with all involved parties to fulfill the non-repudiation promise.

Want to make your field operations more productive at a fraction of your operational costs? Book a virtual coffee meeting with us to learn more.