The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has impacted the way people look at shopping and services.
While getting chores done and shopping were majorly offline affairs, people now prefer at-home services. Field services are not anymore restricted to the age-old door-to-door marketing and insurance selling. Resultantly, several companies require extra field force and field operational executives.
Field executives now represent the brand they are working for to a larger audience than office employees. Therefore, companies have to pay extra attention to managing their productivity and happiness.
With advanced metrics and managing systems, managing even office staff manually is a huge chore. You can only imagine how difficult it could be to manage field force remotely. Managing such a team comes with several challenges that can only be fixed with a software-aided field force management system.
Challenges Faced While Managing Field Operations Teams
Managing a team of fleet operations executives is nothing smaller than managing a consignment fleet. In fact, it can be more complicated since managing vehicles doesn’t come with human behavior complications.
If you’re managing a field operations team, you are sure to meet the following challenges:
Time and Location Management
Most field operations managers struggle with tracking executives' locations. Therefore, managing meeting times and knowing how productive their team is becomes difficult. When setting meetings with clients, managers should be aware of their executives’ locations.
Manual field force management involves getting constant text updates or call updates from executives. However, this can be too taxing when someone manages a team of over two to three people.
Attendance Management
Attendance management can be a massive task, especially if managers stick to biometric attendance. It is not practical for executives to travel to the office every morning and evening only to mark attendance. However, if companies offer digital or remote attendance marking systems, executives can find ways to fluke the system.
Marking is not the only issue though. Raising leave requests or stating reasons for leave in person is also time-consuming.
Task Management
This issue is similar to attendance management. It makes no sense for managers to delegate tasks to field executives in person in the office. After all, why should executives waste company time and resources on task allocation?
Other task management challenges include allocating emergency tasks, checking task status, and getting clarity on the task’s purpose and trajectory.
Documentation Management
When a company hires any employee, they naturally need to submit some documents. While maintaining employee files is so-able, it is not the best thing to do in the digital era.
Field executives need to carry several sensitive documents that cannot be misplaced. Trusting executives with such documents is the only way out, but there can be ways to minimize their chances of misplacing or misusing such documents. Moreover, managing all documents manually can be another difficult task.
Task Coordination
What does an executive or a manager do when they need to coordinate on task? How do they communicate while documenting the conversation? They naturally send emails and texts. But exchanging texts and checking tasks on different platforms can be very confusing.
Productivity Management
Until everything an executive does is documented and analyzed, there is no good way to check their productivity. Managers who manage their field team manually often find themselves dealing with complicated figures and statistics. Even with that, there are always metrics that cannot be taken into account in offline mode.
Unless managers know how productive their teams are, how are they supposed to take actions to boost that productivity?
Solutions Offered by Field Force Management Software
Now that you know what problems come your way while managing a field operations team, you should be better prepared. You can think of solutions and techniques that best suit your team’s productivity patterns. However, using software is the first step to making your job more effective and easier. Here are the solutions you can expect from a field force management software:
Real-time Tracking
Consensual real-time tracking is an unbeatable boon to field force management. Now managers do not have to constantly take updates from their executives. They also do not have to be plagued with updates notifications. All managers have to do is jump on the field force management software dashboard and check each executives’ location in real-time.
Real-time tracking also allows managers to give accurate ETAs to their clients. Moreover, knowing where each executive is allowed easier emergency task assignments.
Smart Attendance
Field force management software developers can analyze the ways in which field executives can fluke the remote attendance system. Then, they can create bulletproof systems such as geofence-aided and geocoded image-based attendance marking allowing executives to ethically mark attendance remotely.
Smart attendance systems also allow executives to rise leave requests and managers to respond to them. All of this can be done digitally and executives might never have to step into the office for attendance-related issues.
Task Dashboard
Any field force management software is designed to make task management easier. Resultantly, software allows managers, employees, or both to add and edit tasks from the app or web page itself. The task description can be as descriptive as necessary.
Both executives and managers should be able to check all tasks by an executive. Moreover, employees also get to update the task’s status from the dashboard itself as well.
Employee Database
No more do managers have to maintain a large paperwork file full of employee details. Instead, they can upload all the data and documentation provided by executives on the cloud itself. This is a sure way to ensure that all documents stay safe, secure, and organized.
In-Built Chatboxes
Good field force management software comes with in-built chatboxes. Through these chat spaces, executives get to correspond with their managers and colleagues in one place. All these conversations can be supervised and documented. Moreover, this removes the hassle of shifting between several apps for simple task implementation.
Custom Forms
Custom forms is a unique solution offered only by the best field force management software. Through this feature, managers get to share forms made with custom entries and formats for different clients and projects. This way, employees only have to collect relevant information and not beat around the bush with each client.
Detailed and Organized Reports
When all location, time, and task information is recorded in one place, data analysis becomes simpler. Through machine learning and simple statistical tools, the software can generate comprehensive task and employee reports. These reports allow managers to know how productive their team is being.
Through software, managers can view productivity reports through several metrics and in varied formats. They can general charts, graphs, and even statistical analytical; reports for their ease of understanding.
Practical Benefits of Using Field Force Management Systems
Solutions are a general affair, especially if they do not fit into the practical realm. What looks great on paper might not be the best in practicality. However, field force management solutions are no such case. Here are a couple of practical benefits you will use by managing your field force operations digitally:
Effective Management
When software takes care of things such as executive,m attendance, and task status reports, their work is cut to half. Now, they need to spend less time on manual work and more on the things that require their experiential expertise. Moreover, the software reduces the possibility of manual errors in day-to-day tasks.
Clearer Operations
Humans are prone to eros and might create haphazard reports leading to unorganized operations. However, software is always built to allow organized and clear information storage.
When both managers and executives have a clear picture of the work on their plate, operations become smoother and cleaner.
All-In-One Functionality
Field force management software is built to manage location, time, attendance, tasks, documentation, and coordination in one place. Therefore, all the data is effectively collected and stored in one platform. Moreover, executives and managers do not have to keep shuffling between different apps - making workflow cleaner.
Boosted Productivity
Field force management software takes care of all manual work that managers had to previously do themselves. Paired with the actionable insights it generates, field force management is a sure-shot way to improve field productivity. Managers now get to focus on more important things and executives get to utilize all their time on their tasks instead of unnecessary commuting and confusion.
Moreover, when executives are under surveillance, they are likely to produce better results than when they aren’t.
Improve Your Field Operations With TrackoField
By now you know how challenging it can be to manage a field operations team. Through this article, you also know the benefits you can reap by using a software-aided field force management system. So, now it is time for you to look for software that fits the best into your organizational structure.
Now that you're looking for field force management software, you should have a look at TrackoField. The software is very flexible and can solve any field force management challenge thrown its way. So, what are you waiting for? Get a demo now!
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