How to prepare a business case for a Field Service solution

Faster and more effective, reducing incidents, predictive maintenance, saving resources, more satisfied customers, service contract renewals … You know all the advantages of a field service solution.

But how can you convince decision makers in your organisation to invest in a Field Service Management tool?

Often when changes are proposed to the internal workings of an organisation great obstacles are faced.  One of the first difficulties lies in demonstrating to decision makers, the need to implement new systems to help build the future of the company.

This initial reluctance is exacerbated in the case of field service, a business area that until now had no big profit margins.  For this reason, many managers did not consider essential investment in the area of field service.

However, today this trend is changing due to the evolution from just selling products to offering additional services.  Customer experience has become an essential part of ensuring the future of your business.   By providing high quality services, an organisation creates memorable experiences that engender loyalty and result in recommendations.

Creating your business case for a field service solution

If you are responsible for improving and implementing your company’s Field Service Management (FSM) solution, it is important to prepare a good business case in which you set out all the arguments and benefits.

Include these areas for maximum effectiveness with your business case:

1 Measurements

The usefulness of a field service solution is to accurately measure operational performance.  The solutions can allow a view of consumed billable hours, percentage of positive outcomes per visit etc.  This measurement will allow the business to reduce wasted costs and increase customer satisfaction.  If your current processes do not easily give you current metrics to measure or benchmark against, then this in itself is something to include in your business case; otherwise some base measurements and targets to improve against is a good idea.

2 Benefits to improve the customer experience and ensure “word of mouth”

In a highly competitive environment, customer retention and the ability to acquire new ones is a great competitive advantage.  Quality service will help you to distance yourself from other companies in your sector.   A happy customer is always willing to recommend your company.  This is particularly relevant at a time when users increasingly are guided more by the comments and criticisms of other consumers.

3 Build complete experiences

This shows the importance of providing consistent customer experiences, which field service management solutions can accurately provide.  By optimising task management, users can access the solution remotely whilst out in the field; this in turn reduces the risk of repeat incidents because issues are resolved more quickly and efficiently.

4 Decisive results for the company

The service industry is quickly evolving to put better customer service at the heart of its efforts.  This is an inevitable process that will impact your business sooner or later.  The sooner your business embraces best practice in measuring and benchmarking KPIs on task resolution, customer satisfaction and project performance, the faster its positive effects will be felt in your bottom line.

These are just some steps to start to create a commercially focussed business case.  If you want to delve further in this issue, we recommend downloading the Field Service Management whitepaper on how to prepare a business case.