Practical Ways To A Paperless Service Organisation

Akhil Rajan, Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, details the benefits of going paperless for businesses. 

These days, businesses involving heavy paperwork prove costly and largely inefficient, not to mention a considerable risk of vulnerability to the COVID-19 virus. As per local business sanitation guidelines, it helps to reduce or eliminate paper-intensive processes wherever possible. A paperless office allows you to serve customers faster, personalise your communications and show your dedication by staying in touch after your work is done.

The immediate benefits of moving to a paperless office go beyond environmental impact. When you switch to paperless, you can save time and money, reduce clutter, speed up the billing process, and more. The switch to paperless sets you apart from all other field service businesses and offers excellent customer service, qualified technicians, and fast and efficient repairs. Utility companies and service-oriented companies that deliver, repair, or clean on-site also use Field Service Management and Field Service Scheduling Software. There are many tips and tricks. Here are some tried and tested for adopting a paperless field service organisation:

1. Create a Paperless Customer Experience: Paperless transition sets you apart from other field service companies and offers excellent customer service, qualified technicians, and fast and efficient repairs. In addition, the paperless office allows you to serve customers faster, personalise your communications and show your love by staying in touch after your work is done. You can go from being paper-dependent to paperless and improve the customer experience.

2. MDM software & FSM software: A digital stock management system or an FSM solution with a stock management feature lets you replace messy stock sheets with a simple, streamlined program that makes it easier to keep track of your stock. The field service tracking software enables technicians to keep track of the time they spend on each service task. If the customer is billed for service in a timely manner, the technician is able to start a manual timer during service, making the process transparent even more.

3. Schedule inventory alerts: This is a crucial step in the process. With a paperless solid inventory management system, field technicians can track and search parts from their vehicle and be alerted to nearby warehouses or offices that have details necessary to complete their service orders. In addition, the Inventory Alerts solution eliminates the risk of relying on employees to monitor and report critical inventory data and ensures that you automatically receive real-time inventory alerts via email and SMS about significant changes.

4. Create a Paperless Marketing Strategy: Sending marketing materials through post turns marketing from fun and lucrative to intense and expensive. You need to check the paper customer file to find out who to send what doesn’t help. Instead, save the environment, retain money and improve your results by sending personalised and efficient automated emails. If you organise your marketing communications ahead of time, your paperless solution will work for you while you sleep.

5. Whether or not to purchase devices: A paperless office does not necessarily mean buying a device for every employee. Some companies have a Bring Your Device (BYOD) policy where they allow employees to use their own devices to access the company website or portal. For example, a team leader will use their smartphone or access a company tablet as needed. This could further be economical while still ensuring reliability. That said, we are still ready to print the work of the day on paper if required.

6. Shift your mentality: In business, there can be a “we always do things this way” attitude, which is vicious. You’ve probably been a paper-based organisation for decades, with excellent systems for managing work orders, inventory, invoicing, planning, and every step of the process. However, when mobile devices are ubiquitous and customers are changing their perception of the digital and fast-paced work environment, you need to develop a strategy so that your field service organisation is out of paper. In the end, it’s better for your profits and customer relationships.

With mobile software, you can plan routes more efficiently. Field service software combined with mobile field service management tools can optimise your business operations. Paperless, you don’t have to search through tons of formless files that are hard to read and keep on file. More and more service organisations realise that removing paper can save a lot of time and money. In the end, it’s better for your profits and your customer relationships.

Akhil Rajan is a Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, an intelligent workforce management platform for service-oriented businesses. Working with customers on a daily basis, he has a deep understanding of their needs and pain points and so he is able to contribute to the marketing strategies for Zuper with the content he writes. He writes on topics like how to increase workforce utilisation, how to reduce the service turnaround time and increase workforce efficiency, customer adoption, cost reduction strategies, etc – to name a few. He is often found buried in books or playing chess in his free time.