Mobile workforce management helps improve ROI for businesses with field workers. With the right mobile workforce management software, companies can reduce risk, create visibility, and improve operational performance, workflows, and customer reach. All of it can be done at a lower cost than ever before.
How to manage a growing mobile workforce and equip these workers to deliver best-in-class customer service—and remain profitable—are increasing concerns for businesses around the world. By 2022, the global mobile workforce is predicted to reach 1.87 billion workers, adding up to 42.5% of the total global workforce.
With the aid of mobile workforce management software, an operations team can automate the schedule of daily work, dispatch the right resource to the right customer at the right time, and provide service updates in real-time. Easy integration with a company’s CRM or other system of record ensures that everything you need to serve the customer is stored in one central location that can be accessed at any time for reporting or performance insights.
But for all this investment, what’s the true ROI of mobile workforce management? Read on to learn more about the benefits of focusing on your mobile workforce and the tools they need to succeed.
4 Benefits of Mobile Workforce Management
Happy customers and hard-working, motivated employees are the lifeblood of any company. Mobile workforce management software gives you extra visibility—and the opportunity—to understand and improve the way you deliver service to customers.
Here are four key transformative results you can achieve with mobile workforce management:
1. Optimize the Customer Journey
Today everything is digital. Business processes occur across multiple channels, including mobile devices, websites, and social media. For a company with a mobile workforce, this often means that new appointments and service requests are initiated inconsistently, from different sources, many different devices, at all times of the day.
When new appointments and customer needs are coming in from every direction, organization is key. A consistently excellent customer experience across all of these channels requires a centralized scheduling system connected to your systems of record. Manual scheduling and convoluted spreadsheets—leading to missed appointments and frustrated customers—should be a thing of the past.
About 80% of businesses believe they provide excellent service, but only 8% of customers agree, which is an enormous—and costly—disconnect. In the U.S. alone, companies are losing out on $62 billion every year due to poor customer service.
But for many companies, the difference between a $62 billion liability and a $62 billion opportunity is clear: effective mobile workforce management. With better workforce management, employees on the go have more positive interactions with customers, see more customers every day, and perform their jobs more easily.
Field employees can use a mobile workforce management app to see and accept new jobs and appointments in real-time. They can also access important customer and appointment details to ensure they are prepared to provide great service from the moment they knock on the door.
At the manager level, a great mobile workforce management solution helps optimize for different business goals, including cost reduction, balanced workloads, reduced travel time, customer preferences, employee preferences, and more. For businesses that need to improve the customer experience and retention, an advanced scheduling engine like Skedulo balances complex scheduling restraints and can prioritize customer needs above all else.
Key benefits of optimizing the customer journey:
- Customer satisfaction scores increase
- Customer retention increases
- Upsell and cross-sell revenue increases
Skedulo Customer Results: On average, Skedulo customers report a 8% increase in customer satisfaction. Rocket Fiber, a residential telecommunications company, reported a 68% increase in customer satisfaction.
2. Create Simple Schedules from Complex Requirements
Regardless of how many workers a company has out in the field, scheduling mobile workers efficiently is a difficult task. There are competing priorities, schedules, personal obligations, absences, and plenty of other variables that make scheduling seem like an ever-moving target.
Mobile workforce management software reduces the logistical complexity of scheduling employees and contractors out in the field. Any scheduling system worth considering will make the finding available workers and time slots simpler, but a mobile workforce management system that can deliver true ROI will be able to achieve much more.
For example, Skedulo has a recommendation and optimization engine called Mastermind that takes business logic into account and helps companies optimize for different business goals. If your goal is to reduce travel costs, Mastermind can arrange and assign appointments based on the most efficient route. If your goal is to improve customer satisfaction and retention, Mastermind can actually assign appointments based primarily on customer preferences, not just the next available person and time.
When you optimize based on your most pressing needs—and use a system that automatically pushes these updates to everyone who needs to know—the results can be astounding.
Key benefits of intelligent scheduling:
- Employee utilization increases
- Route and travel time optimizations
- Waiting period for urgent jobs decreases
- Response time for status updates decreases
- Rescheduled or missed appointments decreases
Skedulo Customer Results: Skedulo customers report a 20% increase in resource utilization, i.e. a worker that normally does five jobs per day can now complete six in the same time frame. Furniture Bank, a nonprofit firm, increased the efficiency of its fleet by 50% without adding headcount to the scheduling team.
3. Empower the Mobile Worker
Happy employees work harder, are more invested in a favorable business outcome, and are less likely to change jobs. Unfortunately, more businesses are doing it wrong than doing it right, since disengaged workers worldwide outnumber their engaged counterparts nearly 2:1.
A large portion of employee dissatisfaction at work stems from not having the resources they need to do their job effectively. One of the best ways to improve employee satisfaction is to think about what your employees need to succeed, how they currently get it (or don’t get it!), and what you can do to improve.
Consider how you can improve the following:
- Job Assignments: Provide job assignments and scheduling changes automatically in a consistent, timely way. Always-on connectivity allows the field worker to communicate with managers promptly and easily. And making it simple for employees to request changes, time off, or other scheduling needs is highly valued by workers with variable schedules.
- Field Logistics: Make it easy for your field workers to know where to go, when to go, and whom they’ll meet. When the data is provided in real-time (usually through an integration with the CRM) and automatically updated as a situation changes, it relieves a burden and stressor on your team so they can focus on getting the job done.
- Data Collection: Give employees the tools to collect customer data, like signatures and approvals, as well as important details about the customer experience, or notes for the next appointment. When this information is synced with the back-office systems, the entire company benefits from better data and a smoother customer service experience.
Key benefits of empowering the mobile worker:
- Employee satisfaction scores increase
- Employee retention increases
- Employee productivity increases
- Customer interactions improve
Skedulo Customer Results: After implementing Skedulo, customers report an average 28% increase in onsite job execution and job visibility. On top of that, 27% more jobs are reported as completed. Solace Pediatric Home Healthcare, saw an 84% reduction in patient no-shows for appointments, just within one quarter of using Skedulo, while AWP, a commercial security provider, realized 86% more efficient scheduling and dispatching.
4. Reducing Operational Complexity
Back office complexity can create enormous operational headaches, especially for the finance and accounting departments. Companies with multiple legacy systems and no centralized location for accounting and operational needs are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to servicing customers.
Mobile workforce management software helps back office teams streamline payroll and invoicing, lowering general and administrative costs. It also reduces invoice turnaround time and can help a company get paid faster by sending accurate invoices faster after services have been rendered. When payroll is accurate, too—no more need to make manual corrections on a timesheet —the result is happier employees.
Key benefits of reducing operational complexity:
- Decreased overhead expenses
- Improved payroll accuracy
- Decreased invoice turnaround time
- Day sales outstanding (DSOs) decrease
Skedulo Customer Results: Skedulo customers report a 48% reduction in time it takes to schedule workers, allowing companies to take on more work and more customers without taking on additional operating costs. The Roof Depot, a residential building and construction firm, reported a 10x return on Skedulo thanks to the extreme reduction in scheduling time.
Putting the ROI of Mobile Workforce Management Into Practice
The dollar value of mobile workforce management solutions is different for every company, but the principles are the same: an effective workforce management tool leads to higher employee satisfaction, higher customer satisfaction, less complexity, lower operating costs, and better visibility—all of which boosts the bottom line. With the right mobile workforce management software, you can automate complex business processes while empowering mobile workers with the tools and information they truly need.
Skedulo is a mobile workforce management platform that integrates natively with Salesforce and ServiceNow to bring an advanced scheduling engine to your existing tools. Plus, the Lens API gives businesses the flexibility to add Skedulo capabilities to any existing system of record or proprietary app.
Mobile workforces around the world use the Skedulo mobile app to share real-time updates with employees and contractors out in the field. Teams in the field and the back office get simplified workflows and communication; managers get robust performance data and insights from analytics and dashboards; and everyone gets the benefit of well-designed schedules that account for customer needs and business needs.
Learn more about how mobile-first, cloud-based deskless productivity software can increase the efficiency and impact of deskless workers, or book a demo today!
