The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the entire world and brought about significant changes in how people live, work, and interact. In this new normal, there is an increased focus on safety and cleanliness while maintaining social distance, and customers will turn to those brands that are taking the utmost precautions in this regard.

The need for Self-Auditing and Inspection

As stores and offices gradually reopen, they need to go the extra mile in ensuring they meet safety and process standards through frequent self-auditing and inspection. This not only helps protect employees but also assures customers of quality and safety standards being met.

Moreover, regular audits enable the business to identify and fix shortcomings in its processes and drive continuous improvement. Conducting these inspections as well as managing field staff using traditional field service management systems, however, can get quite complicated. They involve several redundant and manual processes for tasking, scheduling, and data entry, which complicate the auditing process and require more time and effort.

The need for an integrated Field Service Management System (FMS)

With communication becoming more challenging due to remote working, businesses need to adopt an integrated service synchronization system for more efficient field-office communication. These integrated systems leverage technology and automate the entire process, eliminating the need for paperwork and reducing manual tasks.

For example, with an integrated field service management system (FMS), both managers and field staff can conveniently keep track of tasks and progress through a single mobile application, without the hassle of coordinating over phone calls or filling up timesheets.

Benefits of an integrated FMS

Apart from the convenience in self-inspection, an integrated FMS system can enable managers to update and assign tickets instantly, as per the field staff’s availability or skill, and monitor progress in real-time. In turn, the field staff can view these updates and alerts instantly and coordinate with the managers more efficiently. This allows field staff to engage with customers and provide them with better customer experience, concerning response speed, updates related to delays or setbacks, and feedback. Thus, this highly increases productivity and improves the interaction between managers, field staff, and customers.

Business Insights through Data Analysis

Furthermore, in traditional paper-based systems, the data collected could not be further utilized or analyzed easily. Integrated FSM systems address this problem by process and analyze data to help businesses find key customer insights. This can help them identify underlying patterns and make more informed business decisions that enhance the customer experience.

How does Pulse help?

As customer demands and expectations increase, along with the complexities in managing resources, businesses are increasingly discovering the benefits of adopting an integrated FMS to manage field services. Several innovative FMS software solutions are being deployed, with the FMS industry projected to reach $10.81 billion by 2026.

A key player in this space is Pulse, a mobile application that enables convenient field inspection and audits through service synchronization. Businesses, such as stores or office spaces, can efficiently conduct regular field inspections to ensure 100% compliance, such as routine screening of employees and customers at entryways or assigning tasks to field staff. Managers can assign and track tasks to field staff and sort them as per priority, enabling them to improve performance and sales.

Pulse also comes preloaded with safety and audit checklists that can easily be customized as per the industry or use case and created in a few clicks. For instance, if you're in the retail industry and would like to make a daily COVID-19 inspection checklist for your store, all you have to do is choose Retail from the preloaded checklists, click on Covid-19 as your use-case, and you have a checklist ready to be ticked off.

In addition, the app includes advanced dashboards that analyze data and enable the users to review performance metrics, identify patterns, and extract key business insights. These, in turn, can help enhance the customer experience further and drive business growth.

Conclusion

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technology by businesses on the whole, as they strive to drive operations while minimizing human interaction. For service-based businesses that may require their staff to be on-field, a robust and integrated field management system will really help build an ecosystem of safety to protect the employees as well as customers, while efficiently managing the field-service process.