Updated 08/09/2021

When all your employees are at the same geographic location it can be difficult to keep everybody on the same page without a system in place. When your team is spread out across the country, or even globally, this becomes a hundred times harder. Unless you want a million phone calls a day, asking you what happens next, then you need to get organised. The key to a consistent service is a clearly defined business process, or in other words, having the step by step actions required for your offer clearly laid out. Putting this information into an online software platform allows your remote workers to access these details wherever they are based. Your remote workers then have the same information to hand as the staff based in your head office.

Automate

Once you have your workflow identified and distributed to your entire workforce, you can begin to take advantage of automation and other features. If you need to allocate work to your remote staff based on the geographic region that they cover, then you may currently have an entire logistics team responsible for assigning and managing work for your field agents. However, you could implement simple logic to automate the allocation of tasks to remote workers, by matching the skills required for a job and the geographic location of the work, with those of your remote workers, combined with their availability.

Do More With Less

For example, we worked with a motor trade expert services provider, who inspect vehicles that have been involved in road traffic accidents. They have over 2,300 expert engineers across the United Kingdom, who have specific qualifications to perform different types of assessments. The engineers manage their own time, with a requirement to carry out a pre-determined number of assessments per month. Before we implemented an automated solution, the logistics department was split into regions that covered North, South and Central UK. This equated to approximately twenty staff whose sole responsibility was to book work for the engineers. We created a workflow that allowed the end-customer to book their own appointment, as they were best placed to know their availability, via a calendar system. The calendar was generated from the availability information, kept up to date by the engineers, the list of skills per engineer, and the geographic location of the engineer. The job information would then appear in the task list for that engineer. Through this automation, we removed a couple of steps from the original process andreduced the staffing requirement from twenty positions to five – a 75% decrease!The staff working in that department were reposted to customer success roles, increasing the company’s ability to delight their customers. SwiftCase helps thriving businesses, swamped by growing demand, automate and organise, to focus on what matters — loved by 1000s of users across Insurance, Finance, Legal, Service & Contractor sectors.