Field Service Scheduling Software: The Best Option for the Last Mile

Field service businesses have unique needs—how do you find the best field service software to meet them?

When you’re scheduling field services, every day is a new adventure. If you’re an HVAC distributor, you might have a mix of homes, commercial properties, and build sites that all need different kinds of service. If you’re in plumbing, the same mix might apply, but the services (and thus the labor, equipment, and parts involved) will be very different. 

Regardless of what type of service you’re offering, you need to keep track of what technicians and vehicles you have available at what times. You need to track service orders when they’re created, as well during the technician’s route and after the fact in the form of proof of service and any potential follow-up (invoicing, rework, etc.).

Zooming out, you also need to communicate with customers, track completed services, manage exceptions—all while keeping an eye on your costs to ensure that you’re scheduling your services efficiently.

It’s a tall order, which is why the right field service scheduling software is key. 

Index:

1. What Is Field Service Scheduling Software?
2. How to Tell if Your Business Needs Field Service Management Software
3. What Features Should Your Field Management Software Offer?
4. ​​How DispatchTrack Optimizes Field Service Scheduling

What Is Field Service Scheduling Software?

Narrowly defined, field service scheduling software helps you turn service requests—whether that’s a repair on a faulty AC unit or a carpet cleaning—into workable schedules that your technicians can execute on. 

Speaking more generally, this type of software slots into the larger ecosystem for field service management. Most solutions on the market offer scheduling as part of a larger offering, either focused on the financial and planning side of the equation (think something resembling a field service ERP) or more tailored to on-the-ground concerns, i.e. actually executing on those schedules. 

Depending on which bucket a given software solution falls into, you might see a number of different capabilities:

• Invoicing and driver settlement
• Digital proof of service management
• Drive and /technician tracking/visibility 
• Customer engagement/notifications
• Reporting and analytics 
• Route optimization
• Dispatching and driver management
• Driver/technician mobile capabilities 
• Customer service integration

The list goes on. But the key thing to note here is that these solutions vary significantly in what they’re offering, so it’s important to figure out exactly what challenges you’re trying to overcome with your software deployment. 

Are you trying to reduce waste and inefficiency in your service management processes? Trying to decrease drive time and get more out of your existing service capacity? Improve the customer experience? 

Or maybe your goal is to reduce costs across the board by streamlining and digitizing manual processes? 

Whatever your goals are, they’ll point you towards the right capabilities—and by extension to the right field service software.

How to Tell if Your Business Needs Field Service Management Software

If your business involves dispatching technicians to customer sites to manage service requests of any sort—whether that’s installing an appliance or upgrading an electrical panel—at a certain scale you’ll need field service management software. 

Sure, for a few technicians you can probably get by with manually scheduling and dispatching each one, but once you’re talking about more than a few vehicles worth of capacity you’re going to need some help. 

The alternative is to manage every process we mentioned above by hand, which is a recipe for slow, time-consuming, inefficient, and ultimately costly processes across the board. 

The real question is, what type of solution should you look for? I.e., do you want something that veers more into ERP territory, or something that’s more focused on execution and the last mile?

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to figure that out:

• How important is it for your service technicians to show up at the customer site on-time? How hard is it to make that happen given your current setup?
• How much time do you spend on the phone with customers scheduling appointments and providing updates? How much of that could be automated?
• Are you getting as much out of your capacity as you feel like you should be? Does it seem like you should be able to schedule more services per day?
• How are you capturing proof of service? Are your technicians consistent about it? How is your time to revenue?
• What tasks do your team members find themselves spending the most time on? Are there processes that could be sped up through automation? What about with smarter processes assisted by technology?
• How easily are you able to track service runs that are underway? If a customer calls to ask for an update, are you able to provide them with up-to-date information relatively quickly? 
• Do you currently have a way to schedule recurring maintenance checks? What about maintenance for your fleet of vehicles?
• Are you able to maintain customer relationships effectively over time?

Hopefully those can give you some clarity into how your operational goals translate into your technology needs. In that way, the answers to these questions can help guide you towards the right capabilities to seek out and help you narrow down your search to the most impactful software options. 

What Features Should Your Field Management Software Offer?

From our perspective, field service scheduling software that covers the entire last mile can be hugely valuable for service businesses. The sorts of capabilities that a last mile delivery solution would typically offer can be just as impactful for field service programs, but they’re often not built with the needs of field service businesses in mind. 

What would it look like to have last mile service management software that’s designed around service organizations’ needs? Here are some key capabilities to seek out:

AI-Powered service route optimization

Scheduling your routes is about more than just checking boxes—it’s about finding an efficient sequence of stops that your technicians can easily accomplish. More than that, it’s about finding a schedule that lets you get the most out of your capacity. 

To make that happen, you need to find the routes that arrange the day’s stops into a sequence with the shortest distance (or the least time), and you need to factor in variations in service times in order to avoid overscheduling and enable accurate service ETAs.

Simply put, factoring in all these by yourself as a human planner can be next to impossible. Even once you’ve got a relatively optimal route, you may not be able to adjust it if a last minute order comes in. That means you’re stuck either starting from scratching or completely blowing up a technician’s existing schedule. 

AI and machine learning solve that problem. This isn’t an experimental use case for AI—rather, it’s a tried and true method that service providers have been using for years to speed up route planning and improve ETA accuracy. As such, it’s a crucial feature for your field service scheduling software to have. 

Customer experience integration

At the end of the day, the most effective schedule is the one that makes your customers happy. After all, they’re the ones paying the bills. So you want to be able to offer them a five-star experience across the entire journey. 

This means providing:

• Accurate ETAs for when the service technician is going to show up
• Clear communication at multiple touchpoints before and after the service
• Real-time tracking to see where the driver is on the day of delivery
• Digitized proof of service for receipts
• Open lines of communication between your team and the customer, ideally via text, email, and chat. 
• Self-scheduling and rescheduling from the comfort of the customer’s own device

Unfortunately, many solutions don’t give service providers the tools they actually need to ensure customer satisfaction. Even if they deliver on many of the back-office needs that service providers are looking for, they stop short of empowering users to put the customer first. 

Sure, you could handle customer engagement in a separate solution, but there are downsides to doing so. Scheduling and routing are so intimately tied with the overall customer service experience that you need to be sure of extremely close integration between these two functions. 

"It says a lot about DispatchTrack that there are larger companies out there trying to emulate them. We’ve been able to improve the level of service that we offer to our customers, and we couldn’t have done it without DispatchTrack." - Bob Devlin, Sr Vice President NE, Spirit Logistics Network

Mobile functionality to empower technicians

Streamlining all of the complexity at the back end of the service scheduling equation is critical to success—but when the rubber meets the road it’s your technicians who act as the face of your brand. They interact directly with the customer, and it’s up to them to make sure they have a great experience. 

That’s why it’s so important to make sure your field service management app empowers them to do their jobs more easily and more effectively. 

What does this look like in practice? Here are a few key elements:

• The ability to capture proof of service via pictures, signatures, and notes
• Turn-by-turn directions to each stop on the route
• Two-way communications with dispatchers via the app
• Configurable service forms and checklists
• Easy barcode scanning for items  
• The ability to send notifications to customers with the push of a button, e.g. when that customer is the next stop
• Automated status updates so dispatchers don’t have to call drivers while they’re out in the field

The key here is connectivity—you want to be sure that you're connected to your technicians while they’re out in the field. More than that, you want them to feel connected to you, and be able to reach out with issues without necessarily having to pick up the phone and call. 

The result is that you can track services in real time. This helps you reduce your costs through smarter exception management and improved customer service. 

SaaS-powered capabilities

At a certain point in the selection process you may ask yourself: should your service software be on-premise or cloud-based? 

From our perspective, the cloud is the clear winner. Why? Because it helps you effectively future-proof your service scheduling and optimization. On-prem deployments may give you added flexibility in the short to medium term (though in the very short term they can be hard to implement), but in the long run you’re going to run into compatibility issues. As other software solutions evolve, your team will have their hands full updating your on-premise deployment to ensure that it still plays nicely with the rest of your tech stack. 

With SaaS, you don’t have that problem. The provider handles all necessary updates in the background without your team having to lift a finger. This means that all of your connections between your FSM software and the rest of your technology will continue to work just fine over time.

It also means that as your needs evolve, the software can evolve with it. SaaS providers build out new features and deploy them to customers on a regular basis—meaning that you’ll be able to get even more out of your software over time.  

How DispatchTrack Optimizes Field Service Scheduling

If you’re looking for a true technology partner for optimized field service scheduling, DispatchTrack provides last mile field service management software that helps service providers around the globe optimize their operations. 

Our platform has helped businesses like yours achieve: 

• 98% on-time arrival rates 
• 50% faster routing times
• 10% reduction in miles driven
• 29 pt improvement in NPS
• 99% success rate
• 40% reduction in customer cal
• 13% increase in capacity utilization

We make that happen by providing best-in-class SaaS functionality that covers the entire last mile service journey from end to end. 

With DispatchTrack, you can:

• Optimize routes in seconds
• Schedule and dispatch technicians 
• Track services in real time
• Communicate directly with customers across the entire lifecycle
• Capture photos and signatures for proof of service

Our route optimization and scheduling account for differences in service time, driver/technician skill, and host of other factors to help ensure you get the most out of your existing capacity. And the best part is that DispatchTrack integrates easily with other field services solutions to create a technology ecosystem designed for efficiency. 

<< Learn more about how we empower field service businesses to delight their customers here >>

Get in touch with one of our experts now to learn how we can help you provide the right service at the right time—every time. Book a demo here.