Improved Scheduling and Dispatching Increase First-Time Fix Rates for Commercial HVAC Firms

Low first-time fix rates can be a headache for commercial HVAC Firms, here's how to mitigate those issues in today's article.

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    Low first-time fix rates on service incidents are a major headache for commercial HVAC firms. In addition to upset customers, extra costs are incurred as technicians go back to customer sites again—and maybe even a third time—to remedy the situation.

    Some cases of failed first-time fixes occur when technicians arrive too late in the day—perhaps they traveled inefficient routes in handling their work orders throughout the day. In other cases, technicians arrive without the correct tools or replacement parts. Then there are the situations where technicians simply don’t have the right skill set, and they’re not able to get remote support from a senior technician.

    Manual and Legacy Approaches Create Inefficiencies

    Often, these scenarios occur when field service teams rely on manual dispatching systems. The manual approach is prone to mistakes when the field service teams are under pressure or if one or two key people with knowledge inside their heads are not at work that day. It can also be difficult to find customer, work order, and HVAC equipment information that might exist in different systems. If too many things happen all at once, dispatchers might simply forget about a customer who called in an hour ago.

    Field service teams that rely on legacy software to bring information together can also run into trouble. The software may no longer sync with new process workflows. And most legacy systems do not have the required mobile and artificial intelligence technology to automate processes and keep up with today’s pace of business.

    Operational Maturity Assessment

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    The Keys to Improving Field Service Efficiencies

    When evaluating solutions to take on the challenge of increasing first-time fix rates for your field service teams, consider a customer engagement platform that gives you these key capabilities:

    Improved HVAC scheduling

    • AI-enabled scheduling recommendations
    • Automated selection of the right technician at the right time
    • Graphical schedule board to visualize where everyone technician is located
    • Drag-and-drop capabilities to reassign technicians to different work orders
    • Interactive maps to assign the nearest available technician
    • Vacation tracking and forecasting to proactively identify bandwidth shortages
    • Skills and certification tracking to assure ample coverage of all HVAC systems

    With these capabilities, your field service team can minimize travel time and maximize utilization. They can also be more agile in responding to delays, cancellations, and urgent work by using the built-in schedule board optimization feature that helps identify where each technician is needed most.

    Dynamics 365 for Field Service: Deliver Predictive and Proactive Services

    Many Velosio HVAC customers have turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service for its helpful dashboards that provide valuable insights to analyze service opportunities. With the ability to deliver predictive and proactive services, you can improve customer satisfaction and resource productivity. The advanced scheduling, resource optimization, and mobile enablement capabilities also give field services teams more flexibility in responding to customer demands.

    Running in the cloud, Dynamics 365 for Field Service integrates easily with all other Dynamics 365 applications as well as Office 365. With data flowing automatically across all applications, you can further boost the productivity of internal and field service teams. It’s also easier for everyone to work effectively as they eliminate context switching between applications, which can cause confusion about the status of work orders.

    Through the combination of automated field services and end-to-end customer engagement, Dynamics 365 for Field Service makes it possible to increase your first-time fix rates. And that will make for happier customers along with lower operational costs.

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