Mobile tasks and job reports issued from your phone – a step towards digitalising your business

Together with a customer, we found a way to keep track of employees' movements, customer records and visit dates – including digitalising job reports.

Customer: a window and door manufacturer

The problem they needed to solve:

• the customer needed to digitalise the planning of its technicians' installation and servicing work, i.e. the following activities:
• accepting an installation or service request
• transferring job data to and from the ERP system
• scheduling the installation or the technician's service call-out
• giving the technician all the information they need
• taking photos of each job
• storing the photos in a place where they are linked to the job
• carrying out all the steps that are necessary – i.e. mandatory – for the given type of job
• showing the customer how to use and maintain the window and what to avoid
• creating a report and having the customer sign it
• sending the report to the customer
• passing the data on to the invoicing department
• scheduling a recurring annual task to plan an inspection of the window

All of these activities can be digitalised and automated as far as possible with Ecofleet Mobile Tasks.

On top of that, the customer wanted to automate a process in which, a year after each installation, a member of the service team contacts the customer and tries to find a suitable date to discuss whether they would like a technician to carry out an inspection (e.g. lubricating and adjusting the windows).

We proposed connecting an SMS gateway to the recurring tasks feature. The employee who creates an annually recurring task enters the customer's phone number and the message the system should send a year later.

Once a year has passed, the SMS gateway sends a text message to the client and the task status changes to “SMS sent”. The client's replies are written to the messages field of the same task, and the task status changes to “SMS reply received”.

This saves the service team the time spent chasing clients to find out whether or not they want a service, and they only schedule service appointments with clients who have shown interest.

Other benefits of Ecofleet Mobile Tasks include:

• The Ecofleet mobile app is ideal for assigning tasks to field staff and checking their work. Assigning tasks has never been more efficient.
• The mobile app determines employees' locations and calculates the fastest route to the customer and to getting the task done – saving time.
• An interesting feature of the Ecofleet mobile app is that it displays all the monitored objects in the fleet. Drivers can see where their colleagues are.
• The app isn't just a web view but a native application that works even without GSM signal.

(One of the advantages of the Ecofleet app is that it lets you complete tasks in offline mode. This means you can keep using the app even when mobile internet isn't available. All information is synchronised as soon as you're back in an area with mobile coverage. This is a big difference compared with online CRM applications, which need an internet connection to complete tasks and manage data. Completing tasks offline in the Ecofleet app can be very useful for drivers or staff on the road who need access to information even in areas with limited internet connectivity.)