Going Remote in The Service Industry?

Written By Service Fusion

Topic Must-Haves, Small Business, Tips,

It’s a unique time in the history of remote work. For some of us new to working from home, it can be a real challenge at first. The good news is that we already have many advanced tools in place to help us stay productive and connected in any environment.

While work environments may be changing right now, the value and effectiveness of clear communication are not. It’s more important now than ever to start conversations around the long-term benefits of remote work and provide essential digital tools to make the transition as painless as possible for you and your business.

Digital tools matter more in remote work because they are the foundation of communication and help keep everyone in the same room, no matter where they are. All it takes to manage a successful remote team is a WiFi connection, time tracking tools, productivity apps, project management capabilities, and good ol’ fashioned focus & attention to detail.

Essential Solutions and Tools for Remote Work

Project management
To ensure your remote teams stay productive and efficient, here are some things to look for in a project management tool:

• Team collaboration
• Innovative features
• Customizability
• Customer-focused product roadmap

Project management applications like Basecamp, Trello, and Monday.com provide a range of features and tools for businesses to stay productive from anywhere. From easy task management and team collaboration to robust capabilities like visual project timelines, progress statuses for your projects, and tons of integrations — the list goes on and on. Additionally, Service fusion helps your service jobs with project management capabilities by offering a way to organize multiple jobs and estimates for a related goal into groups.

Communication/Instant messaging
An absolute “must” for everyone to stay on the same page is remote communication. Messaging and chats are designed to reduce your email inbox count so that you can spend more time on sharing ideas and collaborating, and waste less time digging through countless emails looking for “that one PDF.” Here are some of the top messaging apps your team could use:

• Slack
• Skype
• Microsoft Teams
• Glip by RingCentral
• Google Hangouts Chat

VoIP

VoIP, which stands for Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol, takes your phone system and puts it online. All of your calls are routed and managed through the internet and provided to you via a web browser application, like ServiceCall.ai, or native application on your computer. By using VoIP combined with a home service software, your team’s productivity and efficiency will dramatically increase without any unwanted interruptions in your day-to-day operations. Additionally, a VoIP system makes it easy to see where your calls and business are coming from and identify what the outcome of those calls are.

Video conferencing
Face-to-face communication is important, especially if you can’t meet in-person. With a video conferencing solution, you can meet, collaborate, and communicate with your teams or with customers effectively, no matter where they are. Here are some of the best free video conferencing tools you can use for your remote teams:

• Zoom
• Google Hangouts
• FreeConference
• Slack Video Calls
• UberConference

Screen capture software

Screen capture tools offer you multiple features to capture, edit, save and share screenshots with your teams. As studies have shown, 90% of information entering the brain is visual and that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. To save cost and time and improve productivity, a visual communication tool for your teams to understand issues faster is essential to fit the modern multi-location team structure. Snagit, Greenshot, Xsnip and Window OS’s’ Snip and Sketch are some of the popular screen capture tools.

Field service management tools

Field service software is specialized to automate your entire process such as servicing, billing, routing, scheduling, dispatching, and storing customer information all in a virtual filing cabinet. By digitizing the entire paperwork workflow and aligning your customers with technicians in a single service network, this gives you the advantage to improve overall customer experience and increase the number of jobs your team can perform without being tied to office operations. The following are key benefits and features you can find in Service Fusion’s FSM solution:

• Remote dispatch & scheduling
• Touchless eSign solutions to send and sign agreements securely
• Online invoicing and fast payments
• Customer management
• GPS fleet tracking

Conclusion

The tools on this list, whether sophisticated VoIP phone systems or real-time instant messaging capabilities, can drive productivity growth and revenue for your home service business. Consider these resources to see how they can help your day-to-day operations sustain momentum and give your team better solutions to tackle everyday tasks during this time. If you have any questions about VoIP or how Field Service Management software works, don’t hesitate to contact our team at Service Fusion for a free demo today.