7 benefits of guided workflows for today’s field service organizations

It’s no secret that field service organizations are dealing with significant shifts in their mobile workforce. In addition to a wave of retirements among their most experienced team members, companies are seeing a high rate of turnover among the junior ranks, prompting an increased reliance on subcontractor or gig workers to fill staffing gaps.

These frequent changes across the workforce make delivering consistent service a challenge. One way field service teams are addressing this disruption is by adopting guided workflows.

What are guided workflows?

A workflow is a repeatable series of tasks or processes completed to achieve a desired result. In field service, guided workflows provide specific instructions for service activities including installation, issue diagnosis, troubleshooting and repairs, and sales transactions, as well as data capture and administrative tasks.

Recently, Oracle introduced new capabilities that help service organizations build guided workflows into the applications their mobile workers use, making it easier to adopt.

How guided workflows can help your field service team

Service teams can realize a number of benefits from leveraging guided workflows. Some key benefits include:

1. Safety and compliance

Ensuring safety is a win-win for all stakeholders in the service lifecycle. Guided workflows can verify that critical safety protocols are followed and required compliance documentation is captured.

2. Speed to competence

Prebuilt workflows help new mobile workers complete routine tasks without extensive training. They can learn on the job and contribute immediately while reinforcing best practices and building their competency.

3. Service consistency

With preconfigured workflows, your service teams—including new or subcontracted mobile workers—can deliver service to the same standard as the rest of your organization.

4. Improved employee experience

In the Voice of the Field Service Engineer survey released by the Service Council, 73% of respondents reported that they spend too much time on paperwork. Workflows can simplify administrative tasks, reduce irritating paperwork, and make data collection easier.

5. Sales growth

Service interactions present a natural opportunity to upsell, but that may be challenging for service providers, especially those who don’t have natural sales skills or are reluctant to engage customers. A clear, prescribed process for identifying and acting on sales opportunities can boost service provider confidence and ultimately grow revenue.

6. Visibility into service progress

Workflows provide real-time visibility into the progress of a job. Instead of disrupting their agents to request a status update, supervisors and dispatchers can visually track the status of a service activity in their field service management application.

7. Enhanced customer experience

Customers want efficient service with as little disruption as possible. Guided workflows can reduce the time it takes to complete service activities and increase the likelihood of resolving an issue on the first visit.

How to get started with guided workflows

To implement guided workflows across your service organization, you may need to take a phased approach. Try these initial steps to get started:

• Analyze your service activities and list any repeatable processes that can be systematized.
• Review service history and look for service activities where mistakes and missed steps are the most likely.
• Document any best practices that should be built into service delivery.
• Choose the proverbial “low-hanging fruit” from your list of workflows that would be the easiest to tackle.
• Use the workflow builder within your field service management application to create the necessary steps for the workflow you just identified.

If your field service software doesn’t include workflow management capabilities, maybe you should switch to one that does! Learn more about Oracle Field Service and its Workflow Manager feature, and let us know how we can help your organization adopt guided workflows.

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