Going Mobile: How Mobilizing Your Workforce Can Boost Your Bottom Line
Organizations today face more challenges to keep up with the increasingly competitive landscape. The mobilized workforce, once a concept of the future, is now a reality that’s not showing any signs of slowing down. Businesses that are tapping into the power of a mobile workforce are realizing a multitude of benefits, all of which either directly or indirectly boost the bottom line.
There are a few key advantages to going mobile:
- Gain better visibility into the field service workforce
- Faster service delivery for greater customer satisfaction
- Improved efficiency and accuracy for billing
- Enhanced scheduling capabilities for faster customer service
While implementing an enterprise mobility strategy at first seems like a major investment of both time and financial resources, the mobilized workforce actually opens the door to many opportunities to increase revenues and cut costs.
Satisfying customer demand for instant gratification
The mobile workforce isn’t merely a way to increase profits. It’s a necessity in many industries as savvy consumers have come to expect immediate gratification. If your competitors have already mobilized their respective workforces, they’re already positioned to meet that demand. In many industries, mobilization is critical for remaining competitive.
Enterprise mobility means your team is readily accessible for pertinent questions and customer service issues – whether in the field, at the office or at a meeting with an overseas investor. And while that means a greater demand on time, it also means greater flexibility for your team. Mobilization enables perks like telecommuting and flexible hours, which can aid your company in attracting the top-tier talent in your industry.
Utilizing mobile applications that streamline operations
A mobilized workforce isn’t just on the road, but connected to technology. When employees are equipped with mobile devices, it opens the door to a whole new world of applications that can enhance productivity. Some of the top mobile business apps enable users to get authorized signatures electronically, manage tasks more efficiently, maintain a database of important contact information that’s easily searchable and more organized than paper-based methods, brainstorm, collaborate with teams virtually, and much more.
Provide your team members with the tools they need to succeed. Implementing a specific set of mobile business productivity apps across all employee devices creates a consistent workflow. When you provide tools to make the jobs of your staff more manageable, you’re boosting morale and increasing loyalty. Happier employees are more committed to company success and have better performance.
Streamlining field service management
Field service managers are tasked with assigning work orders to field staff, dispatching information from the main office to the field, keeping up with the scope and progress of projects, and responding rapidly to ever-changing conditions.
While paper-based scheduling and project management systems are time-consuming, complex and inefficient, mobile workforce management systems can manage, schedule and dispatch work for mobile engineers, field service technicians and sales professionals – all in real-time, syncing schedule updates to any device with access to the company network. Field service workers and sales professionals benefit from the ability to send progress reports, parts orders, and service call documentation back to the main office without an extra trip at the end of the day, while in-office staff are always up-to-date on current status without waiting for end-of-day reporting.
Reducing unnecessary resource utilization
Before workforce mobilization and the rise of systems and applications to streamline the management of field service operations, enterprises were faced with significant resource utilization and few – if any – ways to reduce it. Resources like time, fuel, and mileage put a strain on the budget, especially if field workers have haphazard schedules that require them to back-track several times each day.
Most documentation for field service calls was paper-based, which contributes to costs and environmental waste. But with software capable of storing all the necessary customer information and progress notes in one location, the need for paper-based reports and documentation is significantly reduced. Scheduling software optimizes the workflow for field teams by enabling management to assign tasks based on the most efficient routes for each worker, which reduces mileage and fuel costs.
Mobilization impacts every facet of an organization, from client interaction, customer acquisition, sales, marketing, and virtually every department, team and strategy. And with increased productivity comes better employee morale, more versatile capabilities and a paved path towards innovation – all the components that serve as the driving force behind modern enterprises navigating successfully into the future.
