How to Automate Scheduling for Your Mobile Workforce

There are many different challenges that businesses can face when trying to create schedules for mobile workforce. Elements such as overbooking, coordinating with vendors, reducing maintenance costs, keeping the team updated regarding changes and analytics can all make maintaining an optimized and efficient mobile workforce difficult. Automation strategies can help solve many of these challenges and can decrease overhead while increasing customer satisfaction. Scheduling automation software combined with mobile applications can help your business become more efficient.

By using scheduling software, you are able to streamline all of the different elements that go into creating and maintaining optimized scheduling. Making appointments takes more than just a customer service agent taking a phone call and coordinating a specific date and time with a field representative. There are different types of appointments and each of these types has their own elements that are often initiated in different departments. A work order can be initiated by a sales agent who just signed a customer up for a new two-year contract. A repair order can be created after someone at the helpdesk who spent time with the customer trying to resolve the issue. There are also warrantees and protection plans that companies have in place. Anyone in the field who will be servicing these customers needs to know that kind of information as well is their order history in order to take care of and bill that specific customer. 

Scheduling software allows management to coordinate the different routes that a company has and make sure that each representative is taking care of customers in their routes in the most efficient manner. This can mean making sure that the representative travels the most efficient route between appointments to reduce mileage and cost costs. It can also mean making sure that the representative has enough time to travel between appointments to reduce overbooking and rescheduling.

Mobile applications help to automate scheduling for your mobile workforce and enable those in the field to communicate and coordinate with people in the home office. This can include making sure that representatives in the field have the most up-to-date information on a customer before they arrive for an appointment. GPS applications can help track mileage, create an efficient route, and help get them back on track if they take a wrong turn.

Mobile applications can also benefit customers. Some customers like to be able to attempt to fix the problem themselves before scheduling an appointment. A self-help application will enable these customers to attempt to remedy the situation on their own and reduces the need for scheduling an appointment with a representative. The company can also create mobile applications that will help a customer schedule an appointment, look up that appointment time and if necessary change that appointment to a new day or time.

Not only do these mobile applications help customers they also help the company to make more efficient schedules and update service representatives so that they’re not wasting their time going to an appointment only to find no one at home.

By using scheduling software combined with mobile applications, a company will be able to make each appointment faster and easier because the representative has up-to-date information. The company can reduce overhead costs by creating more efficient routes and setting up appointments to save on mileage and gas usage. The business can also increase efficiency and customer satisfaction with self-help applications and scheduling. Businesses that are looking to update and reorganize their mobile workforce may want to look at automating their scheduling process with service management software and mobile applications.

Robert Stanley is a content producer at ClickSoftware’s mobile workforce management, a company which also offers a variety of resources on capacity planning and mobile business apps.