MYOB Advanced will make field service a profit driver in your business: here’s how!

Discover how you can streamline field service to increase customer satisfaction with a new Service Module available as a standard feature of MYOB Advanced.

Excellent customer service is not a nice to have. It’s a must-have—in any industry. Customer service includes many touchpoints. One of the most important is field service, but it’s also a component that can be hard to monitor and coordinate well. 

Small to medium businesses struggling to manage all the moving parts and a mobile workforce can benefit greatly from MYOB Advanced—an enterprise field service solution that now encompasses field service and equipment maintenance management.

Your field service employees are an essential part of your customer experience

Almost every organisation deals with people in some capacity, but service-based businesses depend heavily on customer satisfaction for their revenue and growth. 

When your workers and technicians travel to people’s homes or workplaces to deliver a service, they personify your brand and the value you bring. When people have a positive customer service experience, they’re more likely to:

• Remain a customer for longer, generating a higher total customer lifetime value.
• Share their positive experience with others through word of mouth or online referrals.
• Increase their purchasing, adopt new products or pay more for higher-end services.

More than 80 percent of customers say they would pay up to 25% more in order to get a better customer service experience. 

On the other hand, poor experiences stick out and people want to avoid them. If a customer is left waiting too long, or their problem isn’t fixed properly—they might start looking for an alternative provider or business partner.

Is poor service management a potential barrier to your business growth?

Field service may be your bread and butter—or an additional offering to make life more convenient for customers and ensure minimal disruption to machinery or assets that you build, manage, manufacture or sell. 

Service-based businesses include in-home care and nursing, telecommunications and utilities, IT support, property maintenance and cleaning, real estate property management, HVAC, and equipment sales and servicing including medical equipment, business equipment, and heavy machinery. 

A ‘servitisation’ business model is gaining popularity in many industries as a means to generate business growth. For instance, a manufacturing business that assembles equipment might seek to enter contracts with customers for ongoing preventative maintenance and replacement parts over time (above and beyond a warranty).

Providing great field service relies on technical skills, people skills, resourcing and logistics. It’s not always easy to develop a cohesive approach that ensures your customer’s needs are fully met in a timely, safe and effective way.

MYOB Advanced recently launched a Service Management module: making it possible for businesses to capably manage field service and equipment maintenance as part of broader business management.

Holistic visibility and control from the board room to the field with MYOB Advanced

Field service management requires strong internal communication, robust planning tools and seamless coordination of staff, resources, and routes. 

Compared to separate field service management software that needs to be integrated with your accounting package, implementing MYOB Advanced gives you a complete view of customers and sales, operations and inventory, financials and field service in one, cloud-based platform.

Field workers can do their jobs better, and business leaders get high-level visibility of performance, profitability and customer experience. 

Enterprise-wide business management solutions don’t have to be complex and costly. MYOB has right-sized their ERP solution for growing small to medium businesses that want their whole team on the same page, regardless of where they work. 

That means it’s easy to use, accessible anytime on any device, and has all the functionality you’d expect in terms of managing the entire life cycle of service orders.

Field service management features in MYOB Advanced 

Managing customer relationships and sales is a core aspect of MYOB Advanced. Every interaction with a customer can be tracked from an initial quote through to installation and work in the field. 

You can schedule an installation appointment and other follow-up service calls as you’re finalising a sale within the system. At any point, you can see the history of what a customer bought or signed up for, machines or equipment they have installed at different sites, and even track repair parts in stock.

It’s easy to track warranties including multi-dimensional warranties (different periods for different components), track staff skills and certifications, and manage service orders, and contracts for ongoing maintenance including service schedules unique to each customer. 

Coordinating appointments, personnel and travel are effortless. MYOB Advanced field service solution allows you to:

• Allocate the right person, with the required skill and qualifications, to open jobs.
• Use visual calendar planning tools to schedule service appointments, and create recurring daily, weekly and monthly events (which can be linked to a contract).
• Align purchasing and inventory management with servicing, so when parts arrive an appointment can be scheduled.
• Graphically map out and optimise routes to minimise drive time and provide workers with guidance and information about equipment and resources needed so they can plan their work.
• Slot in unplanned or emergency calls, work out route adjustments for minimal impact and send new service orders to field workers via mobile.

You can invoice for servicing and capture all costs of parts and labour, or track all service/installation costs as a project by using MYOB Advanced’s robust project accounting functionality. 

Shorten the time from a customer’s call to dispatching a field worker to get the job done, manage and renew ongoing contracts with ease, and build a loyal and highly satisfied customer base. MYOB Advanced field service solution can help you deliver superior service management by improving data-driven workflows across all parts of your business. 

Do you want to serve customers better, including in the field? Contact us to get answers to any questions you have about opting for MYOB Advanced in your business.