Too much to do and too little time to do it in? It's a familiar challenge, especially for businesses facing ever-increasing competition.
For a business with a mobile workforce, making the team work as efficiently as possible becomes critical to commercial success.
This blog shows you how technology can help your business to reduce time spent travelling, time spent on administration, and time spent communicating. So, you can do more, in less time.
But what can you do to boost productivity for your business?
They say that travel time is 'down time'. That's why anything that can be done to reduce this will boost business productivity. Thankfully, there are leading technologies you can use to significantly reduce travel time wherever possible.
Why make mobile workers go to the office in the morning when they could go directly to the customer? With the latest fleet efficiency technologies business travel of all kinds can be organised, monitored and managed entirely remotely. Your drivers won't have to go into the office to collect job details – as all the information they need can be sent directly to their navigation devices.
There are many routes to get to a destination, but only one will be the fastest. By using world-class navigation technologies, you and your drivers can avoid traffic and other obstacles along the way – such as traffic lights and roundabouts.
Traffic congestion is particularly harmful to business efficiency.
According to recent research published by TomTom, traffic jams increase journey times in Europe by up to 24%. For an average commercial vehicle, that amounts to the best part of a month, each and every year. The latest technologies, however, can give your business the edge because they make journey planning much smarter.
Live and historic data can be used to work out the best time of day to take a journey. And mobile workers can be managed so that jobs are assigned not just on the basis of who is closest to the customer, but who will arrive fastest, given the current road conditions. Efficiencies such as this impress customers – and make a real difference to your bottom line.
Sometimes the slowest part of a journey is finding the exact location of the destination. Modern technologies make this a thing of the past.
It's not just time on the road that has an effect on productivity. Technology can also reduce the time spent on administrative tasks.
In a recent study, more than half of the drivers surveyed (54%) spent more than two hours a month recording and submitting mileage records. What's more, many admitted to submitting inaccurate mileage claims. For businesses employing a number of mobile workers, this has the potential to have a sizeable impact on business mobility. Today, drivers' logbooks – so essential for claims reimbursement, management reporting and tax compliance – can be maintained fully automatically.
Accurate, real-time records of working hours Mobile technologies can also be used to monitor working patterns, manage overtime and control costs. And by integrating this data with payroll and billing systems, your administration time can be reduced even further.
Want to find out what more technology can do to help improve your customer service? Book a free online demonstration today!