Most people and businesses who rely on uniform and linen deliveries, landscaping and pest control, cleaning and janitorial services, or other field services probably don’t appreciate the complexity that goes into making sure the right technicians get to the right job sites at the right time. And that’s exactly as it should be—as a field service provider you don’t want your customers to be anxious about whether the ETAs they’ve been provided are accurate; you just want them to feel confident that you’ve got them taken care of.
Whether you’re supplying uniforms to food facilities or scheduling carpet cleanings in office parks, you need a way to cut through the complexity and achieve real delivery efficiency at scale. How do you make that happen? By looking out for these features in your field service routing technology
Obviously, when you’re a route-based business, the ability to create dense, efficient routes is paramount. To make that happen, your routing engine needs to be fast and accurate.
Let’s tackle those two criteria one at a time:
If your operations involve dividing your coverage areas into sales territories, the efficiency of the way those territories are organized is going to play a huge role in your success. (If your operations don’t involve sales territories, feel free to skip to the next section). Here, many of the challenges that come with planning routes are compounded. You need to account for:
And you need to account for all of those over a period that encompasses multiple weeks. As you can imagine, it’s easy for inefficiencies to creep into territories that are planned or maintained by hand—and if you don’t optimize them, they’re likely to get less efficient over time as small adjustments mount up.
That’s why it’s so crucial to find software that explicitly integrates territory planning over a timescale of weeks with daily route planning limitations. When you’re able to automatically generate sales territories that translate seamlessly into daily routes for your technicians, you can avoid the kinds of sales territories that look good on paper but don’t work on a day-to-day basis. Ideally, your technology should be able to show you a territory baseline for your current plans and then automatically optimize and show you the difference.
That last part is crucial, since it enables you to easily visualize which customers need to be notified if they’re going to be on new routes going forward.
Of course, anyone who’s in the business of providing field services to customers knows that there’s a big difference between planning and execution. A regular pest control client might have a sudden infestation and need to be slotted into a route unexpectedly. Or a carpet cleaning might take much longer than expected for one reason or another. When this happens, your software needs to empower you to spot the problem as quickly and easily as possible and take rapid steps to keep your plans on track and make sure your customers feel like they’re getting the great service that they expect.
From a technological perspective, this comes down to a few things:
Even when your route execution is flawless, your service runs don’t unfold in a vacuum. Rather, they’re part of much larger business processes that might be supported by upselling and cross selling or follow-up from customer service or other teams. This means that service delivery information needs to be readily accessible to other teams, and data from other areas needs to be available within your route management technology. Otherwise, you end up with data and decision-making silos that can hamper your ability to provide great customer service in an efficient way.
Here, there are two things that you might look for in your technology: SaaS native architecture and an open API. The former generally means that your system was built to scale and interoperate with other systems (route accounting, ERP, WMS, etc.), and the latter suggests that sharing data between multiple systems will be relatively easy. When you can make that happen, you can take the first steps towards a digital transformation of your service delivery management. The end result? Smarter routes, increased efficiency, and happier customers.