In this special guest feature, Rick Agajanian, VP of Product Management at WorkWave, believes that when a company has the right business analytics tools in place, it has the potential to be a massive game-changer for their company and its place within the field service industry. Rick leads the strategic direction of Workwave’s product portfolio. He is focused on creating great user experiences and leveraging the power of SaaS software to improve the operational efficiency for Workwave’s clients.
One of the most powerful tools a business can use to ensure they are growing the right way is analytics. There’s a wealth of information available to help grow your company, big or small, based on smarter insights that drive greater profitability. Although, many organizations still struggle to extract insights from their data. Business analytics helps companies identify, understand, and adapt by looking into operational data, like percent callbacks and orders not serviced, to financial benchmarking such as renewal rate percentages and services gained or lost.
Currently, the need for this type of technology has escalated, so much so that it’s now required for technicians to adapt their tools and processes to cloud-based field service software. Companies are learning they can not only improve field operations, increase technician performance, and boost profitability, but gain actionable insights into their business performance through the data their digital solutions collect.
The essentials of business analytics
Many moving parts go into business analytics, but it is challenging to know where to find the most important data and how to draw meaningful conclusions from it. For starters, business analytics is the tool your company needs to make actionable decisions. These decisions will likely impact your entire business as they help you to improve profitability, sales and operations.
For example, field service companies might be interested in data such as the percent of customers not serviced, to understand if their company is as efficient as their competitors or if there are internal issues causing an increased amount of missed services. Other helpful data might be things like rate of retention on service renewals to retain customers or average invoice age – is it taking a business longer to collect money than it should? Should they consider hiring a billing manager? Also, what is the ratio of work orders to technicians so you know how to scale proactively – is it the right time to bring on a new technician?
How is business analytics reshaping the field service industry?
The data within business analytics dashboards can go beyond answering the simple questions to provide insight into which services drive revenue or profitability. Let’s take it a step further by analyzing these intuitive and highly-visual dashboards with management in mind, to see how specific branches, technicians, and service teams are performing, why they are performing that way, and how to make improvements in the future.
1. Amplify management involvement
Managers can’t act on what they can’t see, therefore, obtaining trusted, actionable information at their fingertips is the key to success. Traditionally the biggest weakness of BI technology has been its inability to show managers, day in and day out, where they can take action before opportunities are missed or mistakes are made. Studies have shown that nearly 72% of organizational data remains untapped for further analytics in a typical company. By using these business analytics tools, field service businesses can create management solutions and tie actual results to key performance indicators (KPI’s), so business owners can have a better understanding of how they are performing against their business and operational goals.
2. Increased sales, finance, and operations performance
One of the main benefits of actionable business analytics is that it allows your business to plan for the future. Business analytics can model the trends in an organization’s sales, profits, and other key metrics while projecting them for the future. This allows businesses to see changes that may occur annually, seasonally, or on any scale, which empowers companies to prepare and plan. For example, predictive analytics uses past performance data to recommend how to handle similar situations in the future. Not only does this type of business analytics determine outcomes, but it can also recommend the specific actions that need to occur to have the best possible result. Additional benefits include:
- Gaining insight into customer-oriented information that can guide sales and marketing plans.
- Understanding what is contributing to revenue, expense, and profitability to make changes that improve them.
- Statistics that aid in driving employee productivity, efficiency, and use of time.
3. Transform the customer experience
Analytics can create new dimensions for customer satisfaction. It’s crucial for businesses involved in field services to keep a close check on the satisfaction levels of their customers. Today, some of the world’s leading field service management organizations use predictive analytics to understand the needs of their customer base and ensure an exceptional service experience every time they are engaged.
When a company has the right business analytics tools in place, it has the potential to be a massive game-changer for their company and its place within the field service industry. Organizations that tap into its strength can utilize insights to form a baseline for decision making within their organization and help not only improve field operations, increase technician performance and boost profitability, but gain actionable insights into business performance.
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