Smart task assignment, a key task for the dispatcher
Are you a dispatcher? In that case, one of your key tasks when organising the workforce is precisely the appropriate assignment of tasks among the available work team. The customer’s SLA (Service Level Agreement), proximity, the specialisation of the required professional and of course their availability, are variables which must be combined with intelligence and common sense before any assignment. In this sense, Field Service Management solutions such as Task4Work give you much of the work done.
The key is to optimise the times, without prejudice to the necessary quality of customer service. It is a question of maximising the number of tasks which each technician is able to perform, reducing the resolution times. All this improves customer service, which is the ultimate goal both in attracting new customers and in their loyalty.
But as we all know, however much we intend to organise the work at the beginning of each day, there are external factors which also influence it and of which we have to be aware:
- Managing customers with urgent problems and last-minute calls.
- Dodging traffic problems, with integrated navigation systems and being prepared for it.
- Taking unexpected customer cancellations into account.
- Reacting quickly to accommodate service visits when others are lasting longer than estimated.
- Matching the real availability of technicians with the incidence of possible accidents at work and casualties.
Given all this, it is vital to be able to recover or reduce the lost programming minutes which are added throughout the day, maintaining the operational efficiency of the system.
How will we be able to plan the tasks and organise so that we can react at the last minute?
Three complementary modalities: assisted, manual and automatic
It is clear that as the business grows, support for computer tools specialised in field services is essential to address this very important task. Gone are notebooks, Excel sheets with linked tables and more or less elaborate quadrants, and our memory capacity.
Aware of this need, our Field Service Management tool, Task4Work, has three task assignment modalities, in addition to an easy-to-learn and super-agile work environment, which is supported by drag-and-drop functions so that usability is optimal.
- Assisted Assignment: The dispatcher can establish certain criteria for assigning tasks (availability, work shift, technical knowledge or segmentation), and the tool will suggest the most appropriate technicians, sorted by geographical proximity and travel time.
- Manual Assignment: Simply by dragging and dropping, you can maximise the productivity of workers by easily assigning tasks, with real-time calculation of travel times, route visualisation and modifying those routes to optimise times.
- Automatic Assignment: It has an allocation engine with rules which can be adapted to each business, so that dispatchers can engage in tasks which really add value.
All this reduces the slow and low-quality allocation processes, which would undoubtedly have a negative impact on your business.
Smart programming increases productivity and reduces costs
These are some of the benefits derived from the use of intelligent task scheduling technologies, available in Task4Work:
- Improves accuracy in the management of appointments, with the consequent compliance of SLAs.
- Real-time control of the activity of the organisation. Work in progress and pending, as well as worker availability.
- Technician programming tools, parts and assets.
- Segmented work programming (parts, teams, collaborators).
- Availability of information and data collection in real time through mobile devices for technicians.
- Geo-positioning, for visibility both of the next job and of the rest of the assigned tasks.
- Automation of assigning forms to tasks programmatically.
- Programming optimisation based on Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Monitoring and reporting of information with compliance and performance of the schedule, which can be exploited using Business Intelligence tools.
With Task4Work, dispatchers can use analytical tools, as well as obtaining reports to evaluate performance and make the necessary adjustments, making the best decisions in real time.
If you are interested in getting to know Task4work, our native cloud solution which does not require its own infrastructure for its rapid start-up, in greater detail and trying it without commitment, contact us and you can see how it can contribute to improving the profitability of your business. Shall we talk?
