Where are your engineers right now?…and we’re not talking about vehicle tracking!

Whether you’re tracking your Service Engineers, your food delivery or your Uber pick up time, you don’t need to be a technical whiz to realise that the tracking data you get doesn’t really tell you much!

Just as you’ve no idea if an Engineer has left site on time or had an extra break in the van, you’ve no idea if your Deliveroo driver is getting his own McDonalds first before they start your delivery. The point here is tracking data is only part of the puzzle of information Service Manager’s need to understand to do their jobs’ well.

The fact of where someone is, is a small part of the information you need when an important or urgent job comes in, and you need to make a critical decision on who to send and how to re-allocate work efficiently. Businesses that do this well achieve great customer loyalty, good Engineer retention and good first-time fix rates, so they make more money too.

So, whilst we might think tracking software helps, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg, and only forms a small part of leading service management systems. Rather than focusing solely on location and traffic routes – all things we can’t control that easily, systems which support Engineers to do a good job on site also provide unrivalled real-time data for intelligent decision making.

When an Engineer has to accept a job to access task information and add data as they complete steps, it’s then you start to gain real data and can properly support your Engineers on site. This means Service Manager’s know if an Engineer is in the middle of a long job so there’s no point diverting them to an urgent site, they’re closest to. They know when the Engineer has completed the job and they also know when the customer has signed it off – and there can often be a time delay here as customers ask questions and seek reassurance before your Engineer can leave the site.

More importantly, systems that do more than tracking can also see who has the skills and the parts to complete the task rather than just who’s the next closest. All this data – both on Engineer skill set, van parts, location and current stage of work builds a complete picture. It’s not about slagging off Engineers for taking too long on-site because you can see the work they’re doing as it progresses and you’re helping them reduce admin – something they often have to sit in the van to complete before the next job otherwise you would bend their ear about that too!

So when you next wonder where is that Engineer and load up your tracking software, put yourself in their shoes and think about what you really need to help them and help you deliver a more efficient service. And stop kidding yourself when you’re constantly refreshing a delivery app because you know it’s not really telling you what’s been going on!