Equipment Dealers, Service, and Rental
How mobile technology can
improve equipment dealer,
service, and rental performance
As an equipment dealer, service, or rental provider, you need to keep your business focused on your customers.
Many successful companies understand this. In fact, Accenture reports, “CIOs at high-performing companies
ranked customer-related objectives as their top three priorities.”1 To successfully accomplish this, you need to
ensure your business systems are aligned with your business strategies. This means making sure your staff has
access to the right tools.
Your field service technicians and sales executives are interacting with your customers out in the field. Do they
have the mobile technology they need to stay connected, informed, and up-to-date? Keep reading to find out how
putting the right mobile field service, mobile customer relationship management (CRM), and mobile warehouse
tools into the hands of your workforce can help increase your organization’s performance and improve your
bottom line.
Table of Contents
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Mobile field service tools
5
Mobile CRM
7
Mobile warehouse solutions
8
Achieve business objectives
Equipment Industry Perspectives
2
Mobile field service tools
With a significant portion of your organization’s
business relying on field service, one of your top
priorities should be ensuring that your field service
technicians can service equipment in the shortest
amount of time possible and get the work done right
the first time. One of the best ways to empower your
technicians is with a mobile field service solution.
The right mobile solution not only gives your
technicians access to the information they need,
when they need it, but also does the same for your
field service planners.
This all starts with making sure that your technicians
have the most up-to-date and accurate information
available to them, no matter where they are, so that
they know what they need to do and where they need
to do it. If field service planners can push assignments
directly to technicians’ mobile devices, your field
service department can be more flexible about
accommodating changing priorities, and technicians
won’t have to physically visit offices to pick up
assignments and work orders.
With the right mobile field service solution in place,
you can:
■
■
Monitor technicians’ electronic acceptance or
rejection of assignments and quickly reassign work
to ensure that customer work doesn’t fall through
the cracks.
Provide planners with real-time updates, such as
notifications when technicians arrive at job sites,
when assignments are started, and through to
assignment completion.
Equipment Industry Perspectives
■
■
■
■
Give technicians detailed travel information using
GPS software and maps, as well as customer
contact details, to minimize their travel time.
Give technicians the tools to input data while
onsite, such as parts used (which can be scanned
using barcodes), the time it took to do the jobs,
expenses incurred, etc. to improve the accuracy
and timeliness of information.
Give technicians access to key information that can
help them do their jobs more effectively, such as
assembly and sub-assembly drawings, exploded
views, photographs, videos, etc.
Provide technicians with itemized safety check lists
to help reduce mistakes and accidents.
“What your customers expect in terms of
speed is growing
more extreme
every day,
accelerating with the pace of technological
development.”2
—Forbes
3
The last two items in this list focus on giving your
technicians contextual knowledge that can help them
get their jobs done better and faster. For instance,
according to Accenture, “Call notes and job histories
can be catalogued, stored, and delivered
automatically to technicians before they answer a
service call, providing a more complete picture of the
customer, as well as the specific job at hand.”3
If your field service solution is integrated with your
ERP system, the flow of reliable and timely information
can come back from your technicians in the field and
be instantly accessible to your back-office staff. This
way, you can bill your customers more quickly
and accurately.
You can also potentially generate more revenue by
taking advantage of the fact that your technicians are
onsite at your customers’ locations more often than
your sales executives. This puts your technicians in
the unique position of being able to identify sales
opportunities, such as for new equipment, service, or
parts. If your field service solution is integrated with
your ERP system, technicians can enter these
opportunities on their mobile devices, and the
opportunities would then be automatically entered
into your CRM system. This way, your sales executives
can gain access to more immediate opportunities than
they would otherwise have access to—especially if
they only visit their customers periodically.
Another plus: “Data gathered from service calls can
help organizations identify and troubleshoot
recurring issues—information that can be routed to
R&D and product teams to make modifications
designed to reduce product failures,” according to
Accenture.3 Additionally, you could use the
information generated by your technicians to analyze
their performance, so you could better identify areas
for improvement and determine if any them could
benefit from additional training.
“The ability to aggregate historical and
real-time data from multiple sources, and
integrate that
information into
enterprise
collaboration
tools,
can help businesses make better decisions at
the point where an action takes place.”3
—Accenture
Equipment Industry Perspectives
4
Mobile CRM
Whether opportunities come to sales executives
through field service technicians or by more traditional
means, the right mobile CRM solution gives your sales
executives the critical information they need to pursue
those opportunities when they’re on the road, such as
information about:
■
Prospects
■
Customers
■
Contacts
■
Activities
■
Opportunities
■
Quotations
■
Orders
■
Deliveries
■
Financial statistics
The right mobile CRM solution can also make your
sales executives’ jobs easier by integrating directly
with their mobile devices’ email, calendars, and
contacts—giving them easy access to key information
and tools all in one place. This can help them evaluate
new business opportunities, and more importantly,
provide better service to existing customers.
Equipment Industry Perspectives
When you arm your sales executives with mobile CRM tools,
make sure that the tools support the full range of sales force
automation processes, including:
■
Generating leads
■
Turning leads into opportunities
■
Turning opportunities into quotes and orders
■
Managing activities like call planning and follow ups
■
Handling contacts
■
Managing accounts
There’s greater profit potential in retaining current
customers than in trying to gain new ones. A recent
Forbes® study states that customer loyalty is on its
way to becoming the primary competitive business
factor: “By 2020 customer experience is expected to
surpass product and pricing as the key business
differentiator, so it’s critical that companies orient
themselves now towards creating and keeping
customers for life if they expect to remain
competitive.”4 The longer you nurture customer
relationships, the greater the potential to
increase profits.
5
Every successful customer relationship has a unique
trajectory—a path that evolves over time, requiring
different patterns of interaction as the relationship
progresses. To make the most of this trajectory, you
should consider a mobile solution that goes beyond
the tactical techniques you typically find with mobile
CRM solutions, and take advantage of the more
strategic and holistic strategies that you get from
insight into your customer relationships, including all
historical transactional information about your
customers. Such a solution is inherently designed to
help you make the most of your customer
relationships over time by giving you access to the
information you need to understand the development
of the customer relationship. As a result, you can
structure and control your lead-to-sales process and
better manage your relationship with each customer
over the full lifecycle of that relationship.
Equipment Industry Perspectives
A fully integrated mobile CRM solution can also
position your field service technicians to better
understand your customers’ installed base of products
before suggesting a new part or recommending
replacements. This can help your technicians provide
great service with fewer surprises.
Additionally, a mobile CRM solution that is integrated
with your organization’s ERP system gives your sales
executives information that is always up-to-date and
available in real time. And if the solution includes
collaboration capabilities, your sales executives can
more easily share relevant information with each
other, which can help them stay up-to-date and “in
the loop.”
6
Mobile warehouse solutions
Unlike sales executives and field service technicians
(who are most often out in the field), warehouse
workers are typically located within the confines of
your warehouses and loading docks. Even so,
warehouse workers can benefit from mobile
technology just as much as your technicians and sales
executives can. The right mobile warehouse
technology can help increase warehouse efficiency,
improve inventory data accuracy, and even reduce
picking errors. It does this by freeing warehouse
workers from fixed terminals and time-consuming,
cumbersome, and error-prone paperwork.
And by giving warehouse workers access to
information in real time, they’ll all have the same,
up-to-date view of what’s in inventory and exactly
where it’s located. This allows you to better meet
changing priorities on-the-fly, such as from updated
pick lists, shifting deadlines, or counter sales orders.
With a large portion of warehouse fulfillment generated by
demand from field service technicians, the ability of your
warehouse to pick orders and get them out the door quickly
and accurately also has a direct effect on the ability of your
technicians to quickly and accurately service your customers’
equipment. This, in turn, helps build customer loyalty and
increase the likelihood that you’ll be able to pursue new
business opportunities with your existing customers.
Your mobile warehouse solution also needs to be
able to support automated data capture technologies,
such as barcodes and RFID. By eliminating
paper-based pick lists and manual data entry, you’ll be
able to speed up picking and reduce picking errors.
And capturing information at the source also gives you
the ability to collect more granular information, such a
package- and lot-level information.
To get this level of visibility and real-time information,
your mobile warehouse solution needs to be able to
integrate directly with your ERP system and they need
to use a single, shared database. The end result is a
more productive warehouse with faster and more
accurate picking, which goes a long way toward
improving customer service levels.
Equipment Industry Perspectives
7
Achieve business objectives
By embracing an enterprise-wide mobile strategy that ties into your field service, CRM, and warehouse
management, you can build a framework that keeps relevant and contextual information flowing to your
workforce in real time. This framework can help you achieve your business objectives, such as the top-three
business objectives that CIOs at high-performing companies identified in a recent Accenture report:
■
Provide the right information to the right person at the right time.
■
Find better ways to interact with your customers.
■
Deliver new services and products to your customers.1
By putting the right mobile tools into the hands of your workforce, you’ll give them the knowledge and power to
better execute business strategies, meet the needs of your customers, build customer loyalty, and convert
opportunities into revenue.
.
Learn more about improving
equipment dealer performance
1 Paul Daugherty, “Masters of the digital universe,” Accenture, February 2014.
2 Micah Solomon, “The One Customer Service Improvement You Need To Make In 2015,” Forbes, December 12, 2014.
3 Accenture, Context-Aware Collaboration: Turning Field Service Workers into Knowledge Workers, May 12, 2014.
4 Forbes Insights, Customers for Life: Technology strategies for attracting and keeping customers, September 2014.
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