Managing
field teams has become highly complicated, with a significant number of people,
processes and actions to oversee. Field marketing managers constantly face
great number of challenges including weak feedback, slow data workflow, significant
time gaps between field marketing events and appropriate company’s actions,
data errors and lost paperwork, fraudulent reports and so on.
The
good news is that today mobile technologies provide solutions for all the challenges
identified and even more! Using field service
management software for standard mobile devices, we all are already used
to, allow field team managers to effectively organize and control sales reps on
the go.
In
the previous article we identified the benefits
of field marketing software. The purpose of this article is to consider the
common challenges field team managers face and to describe the ways field
service software can help solve these challenges while improving productivity
of field reps and reducing costs.
In
the table below there is the list of typical challenges field marketing
managers face to, and the features provided by field
service management software to solve the issues.
Field
Service Management: Challenges and Solutions
Challenges
|
Solutions
|
|
Scheduling
and time-planning challenges (a rep can’t find customer’s location, got sick
and must be substituted)
|
Planning
visits in bulk or individually;
Rescheduling
appointments on the go;
Adding
visits and tasks during a day from web-application by office managers or by
field reps themselves;
Customer’s
locations on the map; Field reps GPS-monitoring on the map
|
|
Getting
inaccurate or undue information from the field reps (fraudulent reports,
errors, lost paperwork, improper use of the working hours)
|
Store
data is collected using automated task templates;
All
the data is GPS- and time-stamped;
Field
reps are constantly monitored on the map;
Real-time
data workflow due to automatic synchronization with the office;
The
information can be collected even offline
|
|
Wasted
time and productivity due to weak communication (via e-mail, SMS,
office-calls) and slow paper submission,
Concentrating
on the paperwork, not customers
|
Mobile
forms allow to collect data very quickly and accurate eliminating paperwork
and minimizing mistakes;
Route
optimization allows to squeeze an extra visit for the day;
All
the data collected by field reps is automatically being sent to the office
|
|
Significant
amount of fragmented information field reps have to consider
|
Mobile
access to all corporate data: product catalog including photos, customer
information, prices and etc.;
Orders
and returns from a point of sale
|
|
The
security of corporate data storage and sharing
|
Cloud
solutions allow to have the best performance and scalability
|
|
Weak
analytics (managers often don’t have time and enthusiasm to analyze big amount
of data from points of sales)
|
Ultimate
custom reports and dashboards in seconds;
All
daily and weekly statistics reports on visits, customers, tasks, field reps
|
|
As
you can see, field service management software
can help companies to overcome most of the common problems that office managers
face managing field teams. Companies that have adopted field service management
software out-perform those that haven't through streamlining of the processes
in the field and in the back-office.
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