ecurity and surveillance installation and repair businesses may cover a wide range of services that require high maintenance and have their own management challenges. Security companies’ fundamental problem is managing entire operations with limited resources and low-cost tools.
The security and surveillance installation business is highly sensitive as bookings arrive during emergencies. Retaining industrial, commercial, and residential customers’ satisfaction is not easy it is high time to optimize the operations faster. Automation and the Internet of Things (IoT) is the key to the success of modern field service management, which security and surveillance businesses adopt nowadays.
Challenges in Security and Surveillance Service Business
Whether it is a CCTV repair or installing biometric security, the workflows and processes are essential to keep a company moving forward. Manual processes do the same as automated processes but with their own limitations. They generally take time, consume more manual effort, errors may occur, and they will become complicated as the business grows.
Business owners may underestimate the negative impact of manual processes on their business outcomes. Let us understand the downsides of manually managing a security and surveillance business’ operations.
Scheduling and dispatching service technicians with different roles, skill sets, and certifications using manual tools and spreadsheets is difficult. It is also time-consuming and requires more manual efforts for a field service manager. Keeping track of ever-changing appointments and matching the right service technician to the right job is often burdensome for dispatchers.
The scheduling process gets even more complicated when they are not aware of the real-time locations of the technician. Improper scheduling leads to productivity issues, negatively impacting your business, and results in customer dissatisfaction.
Also, sometimes, a service technician cannot see what job they will perform that day. The back office team must contact technicians to check when they would be available for a job. A technician may also have trouble reaching someone in the back office team. The root cause of all these troubles? Lack of real-time, centralized communication.
Technicians must keep track of various communication channels to get the necessary information regarding jobs, tasks, and assignments. The risk of inconsistencies between these channels can become problematic if scheduling changes or customer details are updated. If technicians have access to their scheduled tasks and are notified when scheduling changes occur, they can minimize repeat visits or higher rework percentage.
Most security and surveillance businesses rely on paper, even in today’s digital era. It is just what they are comfortable with. But as the complexity of services increases, reliance on paper is no longer a good option. And 33% of field service companies agreed that the complexity of services is increasing.
Without proper system integrations, technicians will need to collect data manually and then be responsible for entering it into their system—or perhaps multiple systems—once they return to the office. The increased risk of data loss due to human error is substantial when relying on the manual collection and updating of information.
Tracking payments by relying on spreadsheets or pen-and-paper is inherently prone to error. It’s too easy for an update not to be made or for a typo to occur. Relying on unreliable accounting methods like these is a recipe for disaster. Errors in invoicing can quickly get out of hand, causing real damage to cash flow—and your ability to conduct business.
Why Security and Surveillance Service Providers Need FSM Software
As crimes become more sophisticated, security and surveillance are becoming increasingly vital. Today’s security and surveillance service providers need the right tools to stay one step ahead, which is where field service management software comes in.
Field service management software helps security and surveillance service providers track and manage field operations. It provides real-time visibility of field activity, allowing service providers to see where their technicians are and what they are doing at all times. It also helps service providers dispatch workers to the exact location and track productivity.
What to Look for in a Security and Surveillance Service Management Software
1. Manage Complex Projects and Ensure Safety Compliance
Security and Surveillance businesses are sensitive. Improper execution of work orders can lead to delays and may harm customers’ safety. Without appropriate tools, work order management can become difficult to implement successfully. Well-designed field service software offers real-time updates regarding technician availability, changes made to open work orders, and the ability to create work orders and convert existing bookings into jobs. Additionally, technicians can be scheduled and dispatched inside the field service software package.
Businesses also benefit from the ability to track both the technician and inventory. Employing a modern field service software package provides increased visibility over the status of jobs in real-time as well as giving insight into the productivity of your technicians. A real-time picture of your technicians is revealed in which you can review inventory and update jobs. Field service management software like Zuper streamlines complex processes and ensures all necessary information is accurate and efficient.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience with CRM Integration
Security and surveillance services must be customer-oriented and work towards increasing customer satisfaction. When customers are unaware of where a technician is and when to expect them, they get anxious. Anxious customers call your support teams; it is unpleasant for the customer, and it taxes your resources. But with Zuper’s software, arrival times and status updates can be pushed to a customer using SMS messaging or email, helping to reduce anxiety levels, minimize calls to the support teams, and lead to and overall better customer experience.
Companies involved in security and surveillance face more challenges handling customers than other businesses. By integrating customer relationship management (CRM) software with field service software, like Zuper’s, you will be able to organize customer issues (tickets) and accelerate your time to resolution. Customers love timely responses to questions and queries—being able to solve them quickly is important to high customer satisfaction.
3. Empower Field Technicians Onsite
To ensure smooth customer service, a field service technician must arrive at the customer’s location with all the needed information to complete a job successfully on the first visit. Relying on paper-based work orders is a good way to ensure this will not happen. Paper-based methods are inefficient, and information is easily lost. With paper, technicians can easily confuse one work order with another, but by moving to a digital medium, job details become much easier to manage, and the opportunity for errors is minimized.
A field service system helps your technicians, and even your customers, to keep track of the service details associated with a job. Customer name, the technician assigned, costs of materials used, customer signs off…all this can be tracked digitally. Attachments, such as property images, can also be included. Field service technicians and customers can have records of the work done, and the customer’s signature assures that the work was completed to an acceptable standard. Instead of paperwork that can be easily lost, digitized job cards provide transparency of information to customers from start to finish—it’s a great way to make a good impression.
With cloud-based field service management software, job assignments will be synced to the technician’s mobile app eliminating the need not to worry about job details. Technicians are provided with electronic “job cards” including a customer’s location and relevant details. Information can be easily accessed in the mobile app, including customer information, site access notes, contact information, and service history—and it is all available in seconds.
4. Field Operations Efficiency by Numbers
Using a reporting module in field service software, you can make informed business decisions based on key metrics about your business’ service operations. Reporting module gives answers to many questions like
- Which technician team is performing well?
- Which services are most profitable?
Field service software centralizes all the information your business requires and provides it to you in the form of reports. The reporting module helps track the performance of your field service team—or any other team. Since the software tracks all necessary data, it helps your business to generate reports to get insights into your business operations, allowing you to make data-driven decisions.
Zuper offers a number of customizable reports that can be exported in any format you need according to your business requirements, helping you to understand where your business is lacking, and where you are doing well.
An analytics module in field service software will assist you in identifying roadblocks to your business progress, as well as ways to improve your business in a specific area. It clearly provides insight into where profitability can be increased by improving efficiency. Security system installation businesses can better understand their service operations are performing and if they are meeting their operational goals. Data can be analyzed in detail to identify red flags using predictive analysis. By analyzing previous performance to see where improvements need to be made, an organization can avoid future failures and ensure optimal allocation of resources.
5. Improve Collaboration Across All Teams
The use of a mobile app in the field will enhance communication considerably. Frequently, multiple teams are involved in the completion of a job, so clear communication between them is important. Field service teams and back-office teams live in different worlds and phone calls, and text messages can only do so much to bridge that gap. But having a central location where your different teams can collaborate with each other? That brings them even closer together—if only digitally.
Transparency between teams is important if they are going to collaborate successfully. Giving field techs a way to contact managers for remote assistance and making sure back office staff have up-to-date information about who is already dispatched or has been reassigned is part of making everyone’s job easier—and it makes for an improved customer service experience.
The back office team can track the exact location of field service technicians using a mobile app with GPS. With the help of modern field service management software like Zuper, you can eliminate discrepancies and boost the productivity of your field service team.
Eliminating the necessity of traveling to a central office before clocking in for the day not only saves money in gas and wear on company vehicles but frees up time in a technician’s day allowing them to complete other tasks—and increase productivity. Not having to start their day at the office is actually really important for today’s service technicians—especially security and surveillance technicians.
Most security and surveillance jobs are already an emergency when they come in, so the ability to dispatch directly to a job site is incredibly valuable. By moving to a mobile app, capturing timesheet information becomes trivial and can be done by any service technician in the field—all from the convenience of their phone or mobile device.
Cloud-based field service software like Zuper helps your security and surveillance business to transform its operations and integrate with a variety of programs. Not all field service software can boast integration with your existing software. Field service software like Zuper, however, is designed with integration in mind and already covers many existing product types such as CRM, ERP, and accounting. With Zuper integration, any department can easily access and import data as required.
For instance, human resource management software can sync with field service software to import timesheet data for field service technicians and convert them into pay slips. Through integration, the double data entry and associated errors can be avoided completely. Regardless of what software your business uses, the collaboration between different departments is eased by integration.
Conclusion
As the security and surveillance system business is moving at a rapid pace, so too is the need for automation of time-consuming and labor-intensive processes. Business operations have become increasingly complex, and automated field service management is here to help meet the demands of today’s businesses and keep customer satisfaction high. Get to know more about how field service management transformed the security and surveillance business here.