5 Ways to Use Field Service Scheduling to Drive Revenue Growth

01. Maintain the right staffing level in your field workforce

One of the trickiest aspects of planning field service operations is finding the right balance between staffing levels and scheduled work. If you’re understaffed, you risk having too much work for your team to get through during their shifts. That means burned-out staff, and customers experience delays and last-minute cancellations. On the flip side, if you have too many workers scheduled for the day, they’re left underutilized, and the company spends more on wages without earning it back from provided services.

The right tools take on the burden of this complex operational puzzle. With smart scheduling software, customers won’t have to deal with cancellations and rescheduled appointments. Staff stays busy—but not too busy—and engaged, so they’re more likely to stay with your company for longer.

02. Reduce unnecessary travel time

The bane of a field service worker’s day is hitting traffic or realizing their route to the next appointment won’t work. More time on the road leads to several inopportune situations:

• Less time with customers – Being rushed or having less face time with customers takes away from the customer experience, which might lead to a negative review and maybe even losing the customer. It also leaves less time for workers to potentially upsell or offer complementary services. 
• Staff completes fewer jobs per shift or week –  The more your team members are bouncing around from site to site, the more time they’re leaving on the table during which they could be serving customers. Eventually, this wasted time can add up to significant losses in revenue.
• Using more fuel – Everyone knows the quickest way from Point A to Point B is a straight line. So if your field service workers are taking inefficient routes, they’re eating up fuel, which isn’t cheap in today’s economy—especially for larger fleet vehicles. 

To eliminate these issues, utilize smart scheduling tools that can look for opportunities to cluster and order jobs by location and plan the best route to get from one job to the next.

03. Quickly create accurate and feasible schedules

Behind balancing how many employees to schedule with the number of jobs lined up for the day or week, perhaps the toughest part of managing field service work is creating the schedules themselves. They are highly complex and require you to account for many variables: travel time, location, the customer’s preferred appointment time, how long a job might take, etc. On top of that, in some industries like home healthcare or utilities work, you need to balance regulatory needs and manage a schedule of recurring appointments.

If you can start with an excellent first draft of your schedule, you waste less time fixing it and communicating those fixes to staff. As a result, you leave more time to dedicate to other tasks and cut down on any potential confusion with staff who might be referencing an outdated schedule. 

The right tools ensure schedules are optimized for all of the variables tied to your services and customer base. Plus, the best of these tools can actually automate schedule creation. Together, that means:

• More time – Schedulers and dispatchers are freed up to tackle more complex, high-value work and bring more value to the organization. 
• Better schedules – Technicians and workers can get to more job sites more quickly, saving on staffing and fuel costs and potentially freeing up equipment like fleet vehicles.

Faster scheduling – Customers don’t need to wait for a scheduler or dispatcher to get to their request in the queue. As a result, your risk for losing customers—and their revenue—at the scheduling stage drops dramatically.

04. Adapt to changes effectively

The only thing guaranteed in business is change—it happens in every business every single day. Our research shows more than 85% of respondents have to change their schedules at least occasionally, and almost 40% have to make adjustments very frequently or all the time.

At the day-to-day level, staff call out sick and customers cancel at the last minute, resulting in financial losses. Indeed, according to a recent report from Circadian, unplanned absences cost approximately $3,600 per year per hourly employee. At the macro level, markets can shift suddenly due to world events, and changes in the seasons and weather impact demand for services. For instance, demand for air conditioning technicians skyrockets during hot summer months. Likewise, in winter, requests for heat pump and furnace technicians go up. 

Managing these changes quickly and efficiently is critical for businesses to maintain their strategy and revenue. 

Companies that take advantage of best-in-class scheduling tools have a leg up when it comes to dealing with change. They can reassign jobs on the fly based on custom rules like who the closest worker is, who’s the most qualified to handle the job, and more. And with AI, these tools can even analyze historical data to identify patterns in downtime, overbookings, and late arrivals. 

These capabilities mean businesses are more agile and more aware of cyclical issues. As a result, they can respond quickly to staff changes to help keep customer appointments and have enough time to coordinate interdepartmentally to drum up demand in slow seasons.