The Field Service Management (FSM) software market, with the increasingly growing proportion of cloud SaaS solutions, is one of the tech trends of 2020. Obvious to see the opportunity to try and win your share of the FSM software market. At the same time, the existing SaaS FSM providers already face competition. You may feel uneasy about entering this market. However, there is no time to be deterred as we are sure that this mature competition can be challenged effectively.
Product Strategy for Field Service Management
When aiding companies to develop their SaaS product, we as Texas Software team always recommend them to innovate with advanced technologies. We suggest meticulously decide on the core product functionality. We also focus on attractive User Interface (UI) and intuitive User Experience (UX). Thus, to compete effectively with other SaaS FSM providers, we suggest building a winning strategy using two main blocks: a SaaS FSM product’s functionality and its look and feel.
Look and feel
According to our developers’ and UI/UX designers’ experience in developing field services software, the end-users expectations towards UX and UI of FSM software are very high. We know that the customers want an FSM system to be responsive. Further, it also needs to look attractive, be intuitive, and work in a logical flow. We want to point out that for field service management software, these requirements are essential too. The ease of use helps FSM resources reduce the time spent on their tasks. This in turn reduces operational expenses. And for you as a SaaS FSM software provider, that means higher chances for customer retention.
We recommend you to elaborate UI and UX of your SaaS FSM software carefully. This is essential if you want to succeed in achieving this goal. It would be best if you involved a team of UI/UX specialists, system architects, business analysts, and web designers for conducting thorough research. This team should analyze the target audience and create prototypes of potential users. Further, they should gather usage scenarios, and user journey maps. After all, you can create a UI prototype of your FSM solution to see its functionality. And its logic in action allows discovering usability and performance issues. This allows you to make necessary improvements before proceeding to development.
Functionality
We recommend you focus on the following points when preparing the development of your field service management software solution
Feature optimization:
Based on our previous experience in developing FSM software, we can name several must-have features for your cloud-based solution. There include online job request, job tracking and resource tracking. Further, it should also have job scheduling/ dispatching, calendar tracking and time tracking. Some other great features can be performance management, invoicing, reporting, and electronic documents. And lastly, social media connections, a popular trend in field service management software. We at Texas Software, have created robust FSM software solutions. They feature the right balance between FSM-specific features like job tracking and social features like linking the ads, discounts, getting quick quotes, and social media integration.
To try out and further tweak the defined feature set, we advise you to start with developing a minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP approach is taken to win customers and is more comfortable. The software solution should contain FSM features that your target audience finds most needed. Further, they should not be offered for free by your competitors.
Innovation:
The increasing use of advanced technology is one of the most influential trends in FSM software development. Over 50% of FSM specialists see evidence of AI becoming a regular part of FSM within the next few years. So, we strongly recommend adding Business Process Automation (BPA), Artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive analytics to your SaaS FSM product to be a magnet for a wide range of customers with the opportunity to make better use of their field service management data. Thus, intelligent analysis of user activity and user feedback allows getting insights about customer satisfaction. It also improves the efficiency of team collaboration, predictions and productivity.
As for BPA, it allows automating routine processes of services like the most efficient way of allocating the resources as considering the resource job locations and resource availability along with other administrative tasks. For example, Texas Software experts developed a base solution for an FSM software which can take into account resource locations and their calendar to show the best available resources for a dispatcher to schedule the job quickly and easily.
Read more about Business Process Automation
Integration-friendliness:
It would be best if you made your cloud FSM system flexible enough to easily integrate with other popular corporate software (accounting, HR, workforce management, learning management systems, etc.) and ensure interoperability of integrated systems. For example, in one of our projects, we were required to integrate an FSM software with the individual qualifications module that allowed assigning tasks to specific resources, and tracking their status as well as the results. Another project, we integrated an FSM tool with a document management system to fully automate the electronic document management.
Read more about Custom Software Development
Epilogue
In this blog, we have described the product strategy of an FSM software solution development, which is likely to entail other architectural implementation initiatives. Going SaaS, you can avoid significant infrastructure investments and don’t need to pay much for cloud hosting and storage. As for enhancing your product with advanced technology, AI-based features can be developed on open-source and highly functional frameworks. Still, in case you find it problematic to define an optimal feature set for your SaaS FSM software solution, make your system integration-friendly or equip it with smart technology, you are welcome to reach out to Texas Software experts for assistance.
Contact us for a free evaluation to discover your options for developing a custom software solution!