Property management businesses require many workers out in the field such as maintenance teams and estate agents. They all need mobile access to the right data and information while managers need to know their team’s schedules and whereabouts. Without this, productivity and efficiency will suffer.
Dynamics 365 Field Service allows organisations to deliver a fully connected field service experience with a single view of your customer data by deriving insights that can help you drive key business processes. That means you can worry less when your teams are out in the field…but let’s take a deeper look.
The features that can benefit the property management industry
Intelligent planning through a clear and efficient work scheduling system
It’s challenging to schedule work as resource-efficiently as possible if you don’t have access to the right information at the right time. For example, things such as resource availability, skillsets and upcoming appointments. Field service software gives you that visibility.
This means you can:
- Improve cost efficiency as you can assign the nearest team member to the required property, saving on miles travelled and decreasing costs on fuel
- Provide faster response times as you will know which field team members are available at any given time
- Achieve higher first-time fix rates as you will assign the field team member with the right skills for the job
This will help you improve customer experience and overall satisfaction.
Clear data visibility
Not only will improved visibility help your day-to-day scheduling but you can now dig a lot deeper into your data. Because D365 Field Service will centralise your data, you no longer need to manage and analyse it across disparate platforms. This is key to implementing automation and integration capabilities across apps, processes and systems to drive better business growth.
For property management specifically, you’ll benefit from the following:
- A better understanding how long your maintenance teams are spending on site
- Quick and easy visibility on invoices (overdue, pending etc)
- Creates and empowers a mobile workforce – they can check their schedules, access customer information and perform real time troubleshooting via app
- Increased speed of your response times
- Clear analysis on property-by-property maintenance and any external contractors
The best thing is you can access all this information in just a few simple clicks.
Improved invoicing and payment management
Without up-to-date property management software, efficiently managing your invoicing and payment processes can be challenging. Slow processes resulting in slow payments, no immediate visibility, missed payments and a general lack of transparency - it can become a problem.
With D365 Field Service, your mobile teams can access this information anywhere and take payments on site. This mitigates the issues of slow or missed invoices and will help in other areas such as cash flow, customer satisfaction and the field team themselves.
Proactive problem solving through preventative maintenance
Without data insights, you will likely be taking a reactive approach to problems. D365 Field Service allows you to integrate tools such as Internet of Things (IoT) which will deliver preventative and proactive maintenance instead.
This feature will improve the following:
- Regular servicing of equipment/resources to mitigate unnecessary downtime (e.g. cars, tools)
- Reduced frequency of emergency call outs due to serviced equipment
- Field-based teams are no longer stretched because of an increased workload
- Better service management overall, resulting in a better customer experience
Tightly integrated departments
Aligning individual teams is great but you can’t stop there. Ensuring your employees can collaborate across departments is essential and one of the key benefits of using Dynamics 365 Field Service.
Without this integration between departments, you cannot build a 360-degree view of the customer and this will have an adverse effect on the customer experience.
This file sharing enables:
- Shared knowledge so you can make better informed business decisions
- Easier to identify gaps in resources when teams are communicating productively
- Ability to make proactive decisions instead of reactive
- Easier to manage general service requests
- Active remote support of field teams
See D365 Field Service in practice
Carter Jonas, a property management firm, sought the help of Columbus to achieve their vision in two core areas:
- Strengthen their position as a major and distinctive national firm, providing a full range of integrated property services to both corporate and private clients
- To deliver these services by providing outstanding client advice against a culture of constant innovation
To reach these goals, they needed to address the following challenges:
- Upgrade from an old on-premise CRM system to a modern cloud version
- Improve a poor customer profiling process
- Consolidate disparate information and improve the efficiency of data analysis
Columbus upgraded their Microsoft 2011 CRM to the modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement system which meant Carter Jonas could:
- Leverage additional features and benefits of the latest D365CE
- Align with their cloud first strategy
- Improve their management information
- Achieve GDPR compliance
Read more about how we helped Carter Jonas here.
Choosing the right property management software
It’s important you choose the right property management software for your business. Dynamics 365 Field Service will ensure cross team collaboration for both your sales team and field service team, providing them access to all the information they need. Ultimately, this will ensure the most efficient management of time and resource to result in the best customer experience possible.
You can discover more features and functionalities that the right field service management software should offer in our solution factsheet below.
