Five ways to manage a field force poorl

Barriers to field force management optimization are strong. Besides the common resistance to a change of staff, there may be limited budget, resistance from the IT department and the complexity of an integration with legacy systems. Here are five more situations that can go wrong.

Don’t take the opportunity to talk

Meeting customers often brings a unique opportunity to get to know their opinions and ideas. But if nobody bothers to ask them specific questions or register their reaction from spontaneous feedback, it’s impossible to find out how customers feel about your services, and what they might expect in the future.

Accept an uncertain daily schedule

Most days, the typical field force staff will not be able to perform everything that was on the schedule they received that morning. Traffic problems, missing spare parts, absent customers, unexpected technical conditions, you name it. Working with a daily schedule does not solve these unforeseen problems, which means lower productivity and a lot of idle time.

Send invoices sometime later

Many companies are slow in producing invoices after they have delivered their field services. They are held back by the typical situation where you have manual administrative processes and a shortage of staff to do the necessary work. A manual cash flow cycle based on human intervention results in higher costs, inconsistent processes and a long time before the money comes in.

A field force is a cost

When it’s hard turning a field force into a break-even operation, you could try to solve the problem by squeezing the costs even more. But this implies denying the critical role the field force plays in the customer experience. What’s more important, lower costs or higher customer satisfaction and therefore retention?

Hit the road

Not managing a field force in real time results in the team members driving at least 30 extra kilometres every single day of the year. Fantastic for those who love to sing along with the radio while on the road, but a missed opportunity for bringing down operational costs by 25%.

Want to do better than that?

Are you tempted to overcome these problems with real-time automation?

We have an inspirational opinion paper that you can download here.