What is Field Service Management (FSM)?

Field Service Management software helps you to bring together many different elements of your service offering, from people to processes to parts – so you can provide the “moments of service” your customers increasingly demand. It can help managers and technicians process job orders, automate scheduling and dispatch, keep track of service and repair tasks, manage customer service contracts, collect payment and more.

Every business is different – so the elements of service will vary too. The right Field Service Management solution allows you to adapt to the needs of the customers you serve – providing the right points of data to the right points of your organization, while providing the technology tools you need to make service happen. 

Ultimately, FSM helps you to minimize repetitive and paper-based tasks that your end users face from day to day such as coordinating resources, including employees and equipment, optimising operations in the field aiming to improve the efficiency and response times of those teams. It also helps you start changing the way you do business – helping you to move toward a more service-oriented business model, building your business around improved outcomes for your clients.

Read more on transformational service management – how to optimize workforce efficiency, grow revenues, and deliver service excellence. 

Field Service Management software helps you to enhance the service experience for your customers, while providing that service efficiently as you can. At the same time, it can help you transform your organization – by making service a central part of your business strategy. 

With many capabilities, field service management systems can offer a variety of benefits, such as improved customer experience, increased first time fix rates, resource and cost savings.  You can use Field Service Management software to:

Enhance the customer experience

Creating an exceptional customer experience is priority for any successful organisations. Your customer doesn’t care about factors that might affect their service, such as the heavy traffic at rush hour in their city, the difficulty sourcing replacement parts, or the availability of technicians to get the job done; all they care about is the level of service they get. Your field service management software helps you to bring together the multiple elements that make good service happen. 

Provide service efficiently

Providing good service is about making sure you have the right information in the right place at the right time – moving away from paper-based solutions toward automated software that minimizes duplicated effort, saving your peoples time. But, it can also be about streamlining processes and performing complex calculations that only computers can do well. For example, if you need to schedule a fleet of 100 engineers to reach multiple appointments a day, where you need effective software to do so efficiently.

Make service part of your strategy

Perhaps most importantly of all, a Service Management solution can help you to put service at the heart of your strategy. For example, if you’re transforming your business from a product-based approach to a service-based one, technology can support your day-to-day operations while also supporting the required changes to your processes

Discover how Spencer Technologies sees benefits from IFS Field Service Management

Service organisations are challenged to expand and refine their workforce to address the skills shortage affecting the industry, yet finding and retaining the right people is increasingly difficult. A combination of the pandemic, the shift to a digital customer / service experience, and the acceleration of new technologies have forever changed the service model. Today, finding the right people with the right characteristics, skills, and experience is difficult and time-consuming. Attracting them is even more challenging. Prepare yourself for this changing dynamic by examining the current state of the service employment such as attrition due to retirement, job dissatisfaction, limited candidate pools, shifting qualifications, and experience; and reviewing technologies to attract, expand and refine your workforce.

Over time, organisations may have deployed numerous separate solutions and are now left with multiple tools that don’t work or communicate well together. It is critical to have cohesive, integrated, end-to-end solutions that are easy for the teams out in the field to use and see. This including being provided with clear dashboards for enterprise-wide visibility of their organisation’s resources. 

Field Service Management software can be highly complex – so to choose the right solution, it’s important to thoroughly assess your service needs as an organization. That way, you can hold technology features up to scrutiny and make sure the solution works for you. 

Be aware that the different service functions in a business can be highly disconnected from each other – and it’s the job of Field Service Management software to bring them all together, creating a seamless experience for the customer.

So, when looking for a Field Service Management solution, try asking yourself questions like these: