5 ways to improve your field service operations in 2019

Make 2019 a benchmark year for your field service company. Here are our top 5 tips to improve your field operations offerings and win more business in 2019.

1. Enter New Field Service Markets

The easiest way to drum up new business is to enter new markets. Many field service operations can’t enter new geographic locations until they can justify hiring a full-time field service technician. But, you can’t justify hiring a field services provider until you’ve entered and built up the market.

The answer here is to find skilled contract labor using a field service marketplace. Contract field service technicians allow you to enter and build markets faster. Service companies that can build, scale, and respond to demand are the ones who ultimately win more business. Using contingent workers allows you to reduce overhead labor costs and expand geographically. It also allows you to scale with customer demands of field service technicians with an agile workforce.

Our study showed that 80% of Freelance Management System users reported improvements in geographic coverage. This is compared to using traditional labor, which is hard to adapt to meet demand.

2. Make More Accurate Bids

What’s an accurate bid? One that is competitive with other bids, not at the top or the bottom of a client’s price range. Your end-clients know that you get what you pay for. They aren’t looking for the cheapest or the most expensive bid, but are looking to balance their need for price and quality. The best way to find a competitive midpoint is to use historical pricing data. Field Nation service management software lets you filter data by geographic location and skill set to find the typical range of costs.

Of course, you also need to price to accommodate your own costs. The Field Nation platform can show you what to expect in labor costs based on a project’s required qualifications and skill sets. It also accounts for the cost differences between W2 and contract workers.

3. Integrate Systems to Improve Efficiency

You aren’t growing your field operations business when you’re doing data entry. Field Nation integrates directly with the systems you already use. This allows all of your systems to talk to one another and sync data automatically. That way, all data is always up-to-date and viewable at a glance. Improving efficiency is how operations managers grow business in 2019.

Integrating your system with Field Nation isn’t hard, either. Find instructions on how to start syncing your data with Field Nation here.

4. Use Data to Make Decisions

Operations managers need to accommodate many different requirements to make decisions. A single dashboard of all data helps them make better decisions, faster. The Field Nation platform can help you manage time-sensitive projects, competing demands, and technicians onsite across the country. Rather than focusing on day-to-day revenue and costs, it’s better to take a higher level view to find inefficiencies and areas for growth. The Field Nation dashboard can show total spend, top types of work, and highest performing service providers.

You can use this information to grow your business faster. By tracking pay rates and reset pricing in different markets, you can improve your pricing accuracy. This prevents delays in service provider request times or overpaying in particular markets. You can also automate assignment processes using the auto-dispatch feature. This takes work time out of dispatching and into business development.

5. Lower Costs with Contractors

One of the easiest ways to achieve business growth is to lower overhead, but this step is so often overlooked in the fight for new business. Supplementing your W2 field services technicians with contract labor may be the answer.

Try this Contingent Labor Savings Calculator to see how much less you could be spending on labor to meet demand. It can be expensive to hire field service technicians full time when you don’t yet have the business in a new market. But, you’ll miss out on bids without the people power to fulfill them. Instead, use a blended workforce of both full time and contract technicians to respond to changes in seasonal demand and fill coverage gaps.

With Field Nation, field service management is becoming more sophisticated and efficient. Use it to enter new markets, make more accurate bids, and lower costs, integrate your systems, and wrangle your data.