Project and services companies typically offer a vast array of services to their customers. You want to guarantee timely and high-quality results for each of them, but multiple obstacles might stand in the way of successful service delivery. In this blog you will discover the three main challenges of Service Delivery companies - and how we faced them with our customer, APTCO.
The 3 main Service Delivery challenges - and how to address them
As a project and services company, your main goal is to delight your customers with services consistently delivered on time and on budget. To ace that, you need to be able to align and integrate a multitude of business units, operational tasks and administrative processes.
How? Start by addressing these three common service delivery challenges.
Webinar: Taking Service Delivery to the next level
Twenty-five minutes of wisdom from industry manager Daan Danneels and solution architect Bart Lemmens – with an in-depth case study of the challenges faced by APTCO Group and a clear demo showing how our service delivery solution helped respond to them. 
Service Delivery challenge 1: high customer expectations
Your service dispatchers are struggling to book the right technicians for last-minute service requests with special requirements. To make the planning puzzle fit, they manually compare schedules, travel times, job requirements and technician profiles. As clients expect real-time notifications of work order status, dispatchers are communicating non-stop with clients and technicians.
Responding to shifting requirements and priorities is challenging, especially without a transparent overview of your team’s availabilities and competences. Keeping everyone in the loop takes a lot of time, potentially slowing down service delivery. Growing customer expectations make it hard to deliver consistently high service levels.
How do you solve this problem?
Connect your service dispatchers, field technicians and customers with a service dispatching tool. This enables dispatchers to have a clear understanding of resource planning across all service operations and automates notifications to both assigned technicians and customers.
Service Delivery challenge 2: empower field service technicians
Your field service technicians need a broad overview to complete their tasks as smoothly as possible. Constant communication with the back office about planning, inventory, service remarks and sales opportunities interrupts their workflows. And since every completed work order requires a considerable amount of paperwork, they have little time left to do their jobs properly.
A lack of a standardized process to monitor and manage work schedules and the status of service tasks is an obstacle that many field service technicians encounter. Inefficient communication and manual administration wastes time and increases the risk of errors.
How do you solve this problem?
Support your field service technicians in their day-to-day work with a user-friendly application. Empower them to get a clear overview of their schedules on any mobile device, register their completed work orders accurately and with the required documents and signatures attached. Set up automated communication between technicians, customers and the back office.
Service Delivery challenge 3: a variety of field service business models
You might have a number of different approaches for your service contracts depending on specific customer requirements. Are you charging customers by the hour, for pre-defined tasks and/or based on a custom point system? In that case, administration and invoicing can become very confusing for your back-office team.
An inconsistent field service business model is a challenge that mainly causes difficulties after service delivery. Some invoicing tools fail to process different types of data entries, which means a lot of manual interventions are needed to make sure your invoices are correct.
How do you solve this problem?
You need a flexible and agile application that supports your project- and services company’s different business models. T
his will reduce administrative work and decrease time to invoice.
How we helped APTCO Group address these 3 service delivery challenges
With the field service application Cegeka built for the internationally active APTCO Group, the company was able to connect their field service technicians with both their back office and customers. They now benefit from a vastly improved service delivery flow, thanks to:
- paperless business processes and customer confirmations
- shorter service-to-cash lead time
- user-friendly work registration tool
- real-time mobile inventory insights
- automated communication and notifications
- up-to-date overviews of tasks, customers and due dates
- uniform service processes across companies and countries
Curious about how this works from service dispatcher and field service technician’s point of view? Check out the demo in the webinar above (starting at 10:00).
Ready to improve your Service Delivery?
Connect your data, employees and customers to successfully address all service delivery challenges faced by your project and services company today. Not sure where to start? We’re here to help you at every step of the way!
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