It’s essential to act on creative thinking to solve business problems and stay on top in field services and construction. Your industry might have standard KPIs and processes that “work for everyone.” However, as business owners and operators, we know it’s our job to ensure that we’re constantly innovating, improving, and making the most of the time available daily. That’s where Zoho Applications come in – with their innovative solutions for field services and construction, you can optimize your operations and streamline your processes to stay ahead of the competition.
As a result, how you work is almost guaranteed to change over time, and you’ll need to keep solving new problems. The beauty of Zoho CRM and all other Zoho applications available is that they allow for creative solutions to business problems.
This includes the data you capture and your Zoho systems, including what you’re doing with both to make your business profitable time and again. In this article, we’ll share four common business problems that we see Field Services and Construction firms encountering often. This includes everything from your deals and quoting to how to save time calculating commissions. And we will tell you some of the ways that Zoho applications provide a framework. You can ensure you’re staying on the edge of innovation and setting yourself apart from the competition, if that’s your goal.
Let’s take a look at some common business problems and which KPIs you can track in Zoho to stay on top:
Problem 1: Your scheduling and routing efficiency needs help
For Field Services businesses especially, the routing efficiency KPI is big, but consider scheduling, too. Are these tasks cumbersome and waste time that could be spent on the job? You might be asking and wondering:
- Are techs arriving at jobs on time?
- Do you have the right person scheduled for the work they’re doing?
- Is time wasted with crews making trips across town?
- How much loss happens when an appointment cancels?
- How much productivity – and profit – is lost with extra movement?
Making sure your business has a handle on routing efficiency measurements using geolocation can help you see where you can make up losses. But this is just the start. With the correct creative thinking to solve business problems and the right tools for the job, you can achieve gains in productivity.
The Zoho Scheduling App allows setting appointments based on sales rep calendar availability, location, skill level, or any other metric you define. The app also recognizes cancellations and can suggest appointments to fill cancellation gaps. For use with a larger sales team, the Zoho Smart Scheduler combines savings to positively impact revenue!
Problem 2: You’re losing deals because of a disconnect in quoting.
Do any of these sound true for you?
- Updating product pricing, calculating, and then generating proposals takes forever and are prone for error.
- Collecting necessary signatures for a job is a hassle.
- Some of your products are missing descriptions or images in your system.
- Customers don’t have a way to electronically approve your estimates.
This losing deals issue exists in a lot of businesses, not just construction and field services. However, when your project profitability, service level agreements, and customer satisfaction rely on accurate quotes, it’s paramount to start each job on the right foot.
Optimizations give you beautiful looking quotes, faster quote delivery, more accurate quoting, and an easier transition into creating jobs. Assemble quotes with the click of a button when Zoho CRM is customized for your construction or field service business . The information required is stored in your CRM! That is: items details, photos, and any other information you require for each SKU. Integrate your Zoho quoting (CPQ) tool with an eSignature tool of your choice, and approval signatures become a breeze.
How much time would your staff save with this sort of integrated quoting and communication tool? Do you think a stronger – and quicker – quoting process would help you land more deals?
Problem 3: Calculating commissions is an overwhelming task
It’s time again for you to calculate commissions for your staff and your business has grown to a complexity that makes this task, well, overwhelming. For you and for your employees. They want to compare month-to-month earnings. You both want easy to access statements and to get this finished on time. Ideally, you envision all of this working in a single system to save you time and effort.
With creative thinking to solve this business problem, Zoho created the Zoho Commission Calculator. Saving time and making this process more straightforward, now you can focus on your next innovation to tackle. And your sales staff can back to what they do best – sales.
Problem 4: Job Costing and Time Tracking feel impossible to capture
With Zoho as your hub, tedious and often difficult tasks of job costing and time tracking are made simpler in FieldTech. This app connects your field service operation and optimizes your workforce. The benefits are far-reaching in terms of your new ability to report on accurate data around these two specific tasks.
And the result of accurate reporting? You receive a direct line to the improvement opportunities that exist in these daily operations.
Let’s take a look:
Time Tracking
When your techs arrive on the job, they can select from available work orders and log time against individual tasks assigned on those work orders. One feature that stands out here is geo-location that automatically clocks techs in when they arrive on site. They spend less time on data entry, and don’t miss this task.
Of course, time tracking data is visible to managers, and in reporting. Bottlenecks become easily identifiable, and you can act on them – whether that’s staff training or an innovation in process.
Job Costing
Does your job costing process currently take you between spreadsheets and several applications to find the full story and get answers you need? To find material, equipment, labor, and other direct costs is taking a lifetime. With FieldTech implementation you can see how profitable your jobs are right from a centralized dashboard.
Job Costing ties into time tracking, too:
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- See which of your field techs are doing the best/most efficient work.
- Get granular and see time spent for a particular job against expected time.
- Easily see gross profit and how it compares against other jobs.
Imagine being able to compare data from your jobs to find out which are most likely to be successful for your company when you start searching for new leads. Kick off your next marketing campaign armed with data from job costing.
This holistic company view, accompanied by accurate data gives you uncomplicated, actionable insights.
If you’re looking for ways to solve your business problems with the help of Zoho applications, we’re here to help. At ZBrains, our team of Zoho Certified Consultants is ready and eager to assist you with an assessment that’s tailored specifically to your business needs. Whether you’re in Field Services or Construction, we’ve got the expertise and creative thinking to help you find the best solutions. So don’t leave things to chance – get in touch with us today to see how we can help you optimize your business processes using Zoho applications.
