5 Key Features That Maximize Efficiency of a Mobile Field Service Application

Thanks to latest technologies and the ever growing influx of mobile devices in almost every service industry, most maintenance companies are turning to enterprise mobile applications to manage work orders and maximize the efficiency of Field workers.

The use of mobile applications, help field workers complete work orders on-site and also lets managers track and schedule work efficiently, without any waste of time.

Let’s take a look at the 5 key features for any Mobile Field Service Application that maximize work efficiency:

1. Centralized Work Order Scheduling and Tracking

The ability to view and keep track of all your work orders from an easy to use and well-worked dashboard is one of the most sought after features any manager would crave for.
By having a centralized view of all work order statuses, and the progress made by field workers, the manager can stop worrying and focus on making fast and better decisions on the go.
The dispatchers can view the location of their techs through the map in real-time.

2. Hassle Free Field Worker Assigning
Minimizing scenarios where the field workers would not complete work orders and reject work orders is important to complete work orders on time. For this, there is a need to have an automated scheduling system to find out which vendor is apt for the current work order. This reduces the burden of dispatchers having to re-assign work orders and eliminates the need of making calls and contact attempts for field workers to figure out their availability.
The auto-assign feature will allocate the most apt field worker for the work order based on matching skill set, availability and a ranking system that takes into account various vendor attributes.

Having such a system is a great step forward to make the most out of your field workers.

3. Priority Wise Task Management and Notifications
Field workers are busy people, travel a lot and might not be always tuning into the app, to check if any task needs to be completed. As a result, it may cause a delay in work orders being seen and hence increase completion time.

It is important to clearly have a way to mark the emergency work orders as such and have a notification system with automatic status updates to-and-fro, where the field worker is prompted for every new work order and will have to accept/reject within a set time, so that the next field worker will be assigned the task if it is rejected by the first. The field worker will be reminded always about his daily tasks that needs to be completed in their dashboard and thus will never miss out on work anymore.

4. Capture Photos and Customer Signature
Having an image upload feature integrated is of utmost importance for field service applications. This lets the field worker upload pre and post work completion photos as proofs, which is also handy during work review, audits and conflicts.
A canvas feature with tenant signature capture is the easiest way to get the work approval from customers. Adding a star rating along with it, would be an icing on the cake and will motivate workers far better.

5.Generate Finance reports
Each time a work order is complete, you need your field workers to create invoices and start paying them for work completion. All these invoices should also be synced with the overall Finance module in your system. The app should sync the invoices generated into other third party finance modules or should have the ability to generate finance reports.

6. Bonus: Show your team some love
To conclude, a mobile field service application is all about timely notifications, easy to digest work schedules, intuitive and simple fill up forms and a centralized view to be always reminded of the big picture.

Moreover, field workers are humans too and would love to have a pat at the back after a good day at work. So instead of just showing them all that needs to be done. Show them the work orders they’ve completed, show them the awesome ratings they got for the completed work, show them some love. Being reminded about your accomplishments can be great fuel to completing even more!

Contact us to develop a mobile application that will benefit your business.