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It's the little details


As overwhelmed Oscar sits in his office, surrounded by piles of overdue work order tickets to review and material orders to procure, his heart yearns to give the customer anything they want, yet the tools at his disposal make it difficult. On this relatively ordinary day Oscar receives a phone call from a marquee customer. This new customer has multiple locations and has asked for just three pieces of information every time a person visits their sites to perform service or maintenance. Oscar gathers his thoughts as he prepares to discuss this seemingly small challenge with reluctant Ruth, the dispatcher who has been with the organization for decades, Ruth can be a bit of a curmudgeon. Oscar does appreciate the inconvenience of gathering unexpected information both for the field worker as well as the back office.  A seemingly great example of ending up between a rock and a hard place.



In a world of perfect harmony where all customers, work orders, and requests are exactly the same the aforementioned scenario would never occur. For many of us the reality is simple; we are obsequious hoop jumpers and will do anything for our clients. Certainly balancing one request for three pieces of information from a single client is not a big deal. The challenge happens when we have multiple requests across multiple time frames and multiple individuals handling the data. This screams for an agile and flexible toolset based in the cloud which can gather information quickly and get this data into a format that can be leveraged by existing transactional environments. Just a handful of weeks ago we discovered such a tool included with our Office 365 base subscription, $5 per person per month. The tool is known as office forms and it allows you to gather field information and export it to excel so it can be imported into a transactional system. Gathering field data does not have to be a constraint to your business, instead an opportunity to differentiate yourself.



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Next post:  perceiving the service professional

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See all of the "last mile worker" posts here:  http://lastmileworker.com

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