At Skedulo, we’re big believers in the power of scheduling to drive business results.
But while we have plenty of stats that show how Skedulo increases efficiency, improves productivity, and lowers costs, there’s another side to the Deskless Productivity Cloud that’s a little tough to quantify: happiness.
At the end of the day, happiness is the metric that matters most. If you think that wasted time, missed appointments, and last-minute rescheduling don’t impact the happiness of your deskless workers, your scheduling team, and your customers… well, think again.
Friction in your scheduling process causes schedulers to quit from burnout, deskless workers to show up late, and customers to take their business elsewhere. And while happiness might be difficult to quantify, the impact on your bottom line most certainly is not, making business owners perhaps the most frustrated of all.
When it comes to technology, the deskless workforce often gets the short end of the stick: Despite representing the majority of the global workforce, only 1% of the total venture capital invested in software is invested in tools designed to help deskless workers.1 As a result, existing solutions for mobile workforce management fail to address the full spectrum of the needs of deskless workers, their schedulers, and your customers.
Why make scheduling easy for customers?
A poor experience doesn’t just send customers to your competitors or cost you positive word-of-mouth; now, customers share their poor experience with your business all over social media and on review sites, tarnishing your brand permanently in the process. It’s no wonder that 81% of companies say they now compete primarily on customer experience.2
We live in a world where people can track their packages, pizza delivery, and rideshare pickup by the minute. In a post-pandemic world, the customer experience can be even more difficult to deliver; according to our research, 34% of deskless workers say quality of service was negatively impacted during COVID-19.3 With expectations higher and the customer experience suffering, Skedulo works to ensure your deskless workers are prepared to provide personalized service.
Life Without Skedulo
Sofia has a weekly scheduled appointment at her home with a behavioral therapist for her autistic daughter. While the usual therapist always arrives on time, today, no one arrived until an hour past the scheduled appointment, causing Sofia to miss the start of her shift at work. To make matters worse, the replacement therapist doesn’t speak Spanish and Sofia’s daughter doesn’t speak English, which wasted everyone’s time.
Life With Skedulo
Sofia’s regular therapist woke up with the flu and couldn’t keep her appointment. After hearing from the therapist right away via the instant communication capabilities within Skedulo, the scheduler contacted Sofia and gave her the option to reschedule the appointment or have a different therapist sent over. Due to her work schedule, Sofia had to keep the appointment, so the scheduler sent over a Spanish speaking therapist who had access to insights into Sofia’s daughter’s needs. Her daughter was able to get the care she required without disruption.
Why make scheduling easy for deskless workers?
More than 80% of workers worldwide are now classified as deskless workers.4 And they’re not just busy, they’re in demand. Whether they’re healthcare providers, repair technicians, solar installers, or any number of other specialists, deskless workers have skills and experience your competitors would love to get their hands on.
At the office, you do everything you can to create a winning work environment to improve employee retention. But when you have employees that spend all day out in the field, their cars, or other peoples’ homes and offices, your opportunity to improve their work environment boils down to what you can do to enhance their work experience. It’s no wonder that research has found that 80% of businesses would benefit from a dedicated technology platform that’s focused on the specific needs of deskless workers.5
Life Without Skedulo
Jim is a rep for a local residential solar panel company. He already has two consultations on the east side of town, but his scheduler just added a last-minute consultation to his schedule. Unfortunately, he didn’t know about it until he got back to his truck to find an email waiting on his phone. He hit rush hour traveling all the way across town; not only was he late, but he had zero information on the prospect, making Jim look unprepared. Now Jim will be late for his final consultation back on the east side, endangering what should have been an easy commission. Jim’s been thinking of working for a different provider, and this was the last straw.
Life With Skedulo
The scheduler knows Jim already has two consultations on the east side. Using Skedulo, she gives him another appointment on the east side that easily fits his calendar and gives the consultation on the west side to a colleague. The new appointment is automatically added to Jim’s smartphone calendar, ensuring he gets notified in plenty of time. With all the pre-sale discovery information he needed at his fingertips in the Skedulo app, Jim managed to close all three sales, helping him earn his monthly bonus.
Why make scheduling easy for schedulers?
With one in two workers now working remotely in some capacity,6 scheduling deskless workers is like planning a complex military operation. And as any effective military leader can tell you, no plan survives contact with the enemy. For schedulers, the “enemy” can be anything from canceled appointments to traffic to sick employees—also known as “real life.”
All it takes is one unforeseen event to send the most carefully coordinated calendar completely off the rails. When this happens day in and day out, the job becomes less about managing schedules than it is about managing the chaos of constantly updating files and manually calling contacts to sync schedules. Our research shows 62% of businesses plan to increase their deskless workforce in the next year,7 making now the time to start managing your deskless workforce more effectively.
Life Without Skedulo
Martha is a scheduler for a mobile phlebotomy service. She just found out that one of her technicians was in a car accident. Now she has to call all of her other technicians until she can find enough of them to cover the rest of the appointments. This rescheduling ends up taking 45 minutes of time Martha didn’t have today. Meanwhile, all the technicians now have to spend time acquiring the information and equipment they need for their new appointments, making them late to appointments the rest of the day.
Life With Skedulo
Martha just found out one of her technicians was in a car accident. She looks up that technician’s appointments for the day and quickly assigns them to other technicians who are available. She’s also able to automatically sync the client information to the new technicians’ devices so they have everything the technicians need to complete the blood draws safely and accurately. With just a few clicks, everyone knows where they’re supposed to be and what they’re supposed to be doing.
Why make scheduling easy for business owners?
No one needs to tell you that time is money. But in our 24/7 world, time is the most valuable currency. It’s too bad that business owners spend 2/3 of their time putting out fires, with only 1/3 of their time spent on strategic activities to grow the business.8
With everything happening faster and expectations continuing to increase, you have no margin for error when it comes to wasted time. Your ability to manage the clock is just as important as your ability to manage people, vendors, and finances. Research shows 61% of businesses seek to boost deskless worker productivity through software.9 By automating more of your workforce management, you spend more time working on the business instead of in it.
Life Without Skedulo
As the owner of a residential cleaning franchise, Molly has a busy day ahead of her. She needs to figure out how to achieve a 10% increase in billable technician time, but her cleaning techs are already complaining that they’re spread too thin. Every time she sits down to try to optimize operations, she gets a call from a tech asking for client information, like lock codes or service history records. So much for getting work done today.
Life With Skedulo
As the owner of a residential cleaning franchise, Molly has a busy day ahead of her. Thanks to Skedulo, she’s already increased her billable technician time, employee retention rates, and customer satisfaction scores. Back-office complexity has been reduced, which allowed her to redeploy one of her schedulers as a sales rep. As a result, Molly is putting the finishing touches on her plan to open up another franchise location in the next town over.
The Skedulo Impact
References
1 “The Rise of the Deskless Workforce,” Emergence Capital.
2 “Key Findings From the Gartner Customer Experience Survey,” Gartner.
3 “The 2020 State of Work Report: Defining a New Normal Amid COVID-19,” Skedulo.
4 “Champions of Customer Service,” VentureBeat.
5 “Full Report: Solving the Software Gap for the Growing Community of Deskless Workers,” Skedulo.
6 “Measuring digital transformation progress around the world,” Dell Technologies.
7 “Full Report: Solving the Software Gap for the Growing Community of Deskless Workers,” Skedulo
8 “Pulse Survey Time Management,” The Alternative Board.
9 “Full Report: Solving the Software Gap for the Growing Community of Deskless Workers,” Skedulo
