A customer relationship management software (CRM) built for the field service management industry is an operating system that enables businesses to improve customer satisfaction through clear and instant communication. Customers can simply log into a mobile app or a laptop and access the customer portal, track the progress of a task, leave feedback, create new work orders, and directly communicate with a field technician or the head office.
For a field service management company, the benefits are equally impressive. Field service operations become easier to manage as there is a constant line of communication with the customer. Service managers have real-time access to data which allows them to increase efficiency, make data-driven decisions, improve scheduling, minimize travel time and optimize the use of their resources.
Now that we have a broad idea of what a field service CRM is, let’s look at the reasons why your company needs one.
Automate the sales process
Field service management sales cycles tend to be long and challenging. Prior to CRM systems, sales teams used to work in spreadsheets like Excel, Word, or some other static form of documenting critical data. Using phone calls and emails, they would manually insert information into these spreadsheets and try to track the sale lifecycle.
Given the dynamic nature of FSM, and the different variables that go into making a sale, this way of doing sales had always felt a bit antiquated. A CRM solution provides a fully automated solution that helps sales teams manage leads through their pipeline and turn them into paying customers.
Such software solutions give salespeople the ability to categorize, store and update customer data. It makes their life easier and gives them the luxury to actually sell, rather than waste time on making sense of administrative and operational chaos.
That’s not all, though. The real value of a CRM comes when it is integrated with field service management software. Salespeople can easily turn a sale into a work order, never leaving the platform or migrating data from one solution to the next.
Sales pass on the work to field service teams, taking workflow automation to the next level. What you end up with is a comprehensive solution where you can track every single step of a customer’s journey – from lead to customer, to project requirements, to completed work.
Bridge the knowledge gap between sales and field technicians
Field technicians and salespeople have similar goals but parallel lives. On one hand, you have sales teams, trying their best to bring people through the door and ensure they are happy with the service and on the other hand, you have field service teams out in the wild taking care of customer needs in the flesh.
Often enough, there is a disparity of knowledge, communication, and understanding between these two teams. Integrating a CRM solution to a field service software creates a channel for internal communication and a way to bridge this gap.
Field technicians can see what the customer has been promised by sales, their initial pain points, and what led them to choose this specific solution. Sales can see the progress of tasks, projects, and customer feedback in real-time and make informed, timely comments and support suggestions.
Integrating the CRM into your field service software will immensely improve your business processes, strengthen the bond between the company and customers and establish transparency between different departments.
Tailored marketing and meaningful upselling
Sales and marketing are all about timing – being offered what you need at a time of need. By increasing visibility and transparency between departments, you can get more juice out of your data. Let us give you an example.
Field service management software records data and information about preventative maintenance. What a salesperson can do is track this service history data and inform the customer about the upcoming service, educate them on why they need to do it, and sell them one of the maintenance services offered by the business.
Using the same logic, a salesperson can use the information to upsell inventory when it’s about to run out or advise customers on additional features that are suitable to their use case.
Customer data access and security
What most companies still using manual management methods fail to understand is that digital solutions such as job management software, maintenance management software or CRM, are not merely a more convenient way of doing business. They are safer and smarter.
A field service mobile app with an integrated CRM won’t just allow you to know the exact location of your mobile workforce, improve your field operations, decrease your first-time fix rates, and nail preventative maintenance. It will ensure that critical information such as service level agreements, safety protocols, and customer assets will be safely stored in the system.
Job and customer info will be double-checked and verified, decreasing data entry time and the chance of manual errors.
Turn mobile workers to salespeople
CRM is primarily targeted for sales and marketing teams but who said field service technicians can’t use it as well? Field service is by nature a remote-first industry meaning that the core of the job happens outside the office.
Opening their mobile app while working on the customer location, technicians can now have access to inventory info, asset management tools, quoting features, service agreements details, and more. By doing that they can offer step-by-step instructions to the client in order to solve their problem and upgrade the overall level of service, support, and customer satisfaction they offer.
The best part? They don’t need to be connected to the Internet to do that because FSM software such as Frontu offers a fully-functional offline mode, so they can keep the work going. What you need is connected field service at all times and this is what a CRM-FSM integration will give you.
Recap: CRM and Field Service Management software working for customer satisfaction
What’s there not to like about integrating a CRM into your field service software?
You get features like time-tracking, real-time task assessment, work order management, route planning, and productivity statistics matched paired with sales and back-office communication. You essentially give your employees the right tools and assets to share information with each other rather than hunt it down and try to make sense of it themselves.
What this integration does is align the sales and field service departments of your business to the same goal – increase customer satisfaction. You create a connected field service ecosystem where customers and employees can coexist and bring the best out of each other.
