We share quite a bit on the ClearPathGPS blog about how the right GPS fleet tracking system can save your business money, which it definitely can. But cutting costs isn’t the only way our fleet tracking system creates benefits for your business. It also helps your team save time in a multitude of ways. These time-saving benefits can be just as valuable to your operations, and your team’s sanity.
Just imagine… A prospect called your office with an emergency service request, and you were confident that within a few minutes you’d be able to answer the prospect’s key questions: Can you send someone out soon? When can I expect them to get here? You wouldn’t even need to call around from one tech to another to see who was available or look up your staff’s schedules for the day—because you had all that information on a live map right on your screen.
Or…
You sat down to process your field staff’s timecards for the upcoming pay period—and you didn’t have to spend any time looking up each tech’s jobs during the week to check them against their reported hours. You also didn’t need to waste any time tracking down the two or three employees who always turn in their timecards incomplete. Why was this pay period’s timecard processing so easy? Because your fleet tracking system automatically generated each tech’s timecard for you, accurate to the minute.
Here are 3 ways a GPS solution can add time back to your day:
Keeping track of your field techs, making sure they are where they’re supposed to be and that they aren’t wasting time out there, can be a huge time drain.
If you can’t see what they’re doing in the field, the only way to gain any visibility is to micromanage them, have a dispatcher or office manager call, or text them throughout the day for updates. That's definitely a waste of your staff’s time.
Worse, if your service techs are taking longer than necessary to complete jobs in the field—because, hey, nobody’s watching—your business might not be completing as many orders as possible.
With a fleet tracking system:
Bethany Martinez, Office Manager for Bay Climate Control, tells us that ClearPathGPS “saves us so much time because we don’t have to call a bunch of techs and ask, ‘Where are you right now?’ We can dispatch the right person very quickly. And that means we’re able to provide better service to the customers who need us most.
The right fleet tracking system lets you check-in digitally, anytime, with your entire fleet. As we say here at ClearPathGPS, it’s like virtually riding shotgun with every one of your field techs, all day. And it can save your team massive amounts of time.
A 2019 study by consulting firm Ernst & Young, estimating labor costs of common HR tasks, found that on average, businesses spend the following on payroll activities every pay period:
Now, let’s say you have 15 field techs, each submitting timecards every other week.
That’s nearly $400 per month your business spends on payroll tasks alone!
With a fleet tracking system:
You could eliminate nearly all these expenses. The ClearPathGPS app tracks your service techs in the field minute by minute, and it can generate an accurate timecard for you in minutes via our virtual timecard report.
When a customer calls with an upcoming appointment to ask when your field tech will be arriving—and you don’t have GPS tracking—your ops manager or dispatcher will probably need to call the tech. Let’s say the whole process eats up 7 minutes…
And it happens a dozen times during a typical workday. That’s costing you 84 minutes—nearly an hour and a half— of your office staff’s time every day just to answer customers’ ETA questions.
With a fleet tracking system:
Now, if you had a GPS fleet tracking system, your dispatcher could simply glance at the live map view and let the customer know—right then, in real-time—how far out he is. No calling the tech. No calling the customer back. Instead of 7 minutes, it would take… 0 minutes. That’s a potential savings of 28 hours of your staff’s time each month, and 336 hours—more than 40 days—saved per year.
And you’d have happier customers, too!
We’ve shown in other posts that you can save your company lots of money with a fleet tracking system. And for most businesses in highly competitive service industries like yours, those cost-saving benefits can be reason enough to sign up for the right GPS fleet tracking app.
But as we hope we demonstrated here, you can also save plenty of time with the right GPS solution. The only question is, what will you do with that time savings?
At ClearPathGPS, we are focused on helping our customers improve their operations and bottom line. Our top-rated GPS fleet tracking solutions provide real-time data insights and tools needed to more effectively manage the vehicles, people, and assets businesses send into the field every day. Can ClearPathGPS help your operations get better results? Let’s find out – request a demo or contact us today!