Many small businesses tend to think of “we’ll get an app”. This is perfectly fine for lightweight work, or perhaps for capturing a new sales lead, but, consider your field service engineers using a 5 inch phone screen all day long and the strain on their eyes and thumbs trying to navigate around an app that cannot show everything on the screen at the same time as well as keying meaningful reports. They clearly need something bigger.
Low Cost Android Tablets
Now that the price of 10 inch tablets has come down, the larger corporates are supplying their field service engineers with tablets. Why? Well for a one off outlay of around $100 / £75 per engineer, you can purchase a new quad core 10 inch tablet that can connect through the engineer’s existing phone and utilise that 3G/4G phone data contract so that there are no further recurring costs.
Improving Customer Service
Why is this better? Well, as in the photo, the field serivce engineer would get a full bluetooth enabled keyboard in which to enter data on. A full report can be updated on the case, rather than a phone thumbed short 20 character text. As the field service engineer now has a full keyboard, they are more likely to take the time in using the system properly, enter more information as they can now type properly. In having more meaningful comments and reports, it will assist with your overall customer service impression to your client.
Recommendations
So, small businesses should perhaps ditch the idea of running Case Centre Pro on a tiny 5 inch mobile phone, and instead consider investing in some tablets for their field service engineers which long term will improve the feedback they give to your clients and improve your customer service relations.
