Eleven Benefits of Real-time Mobile

3. All Together Now – If you have dispersed locations with dispatchers at each one solely for the purpose of distributing tickets and work to the local drivers, you could see an even bigger advantage. Real-time mobile can help you consolidate dispatchers to a central location. You could have a smaller number of dispatchers, with better tools, centralized in fewer locations, and actually improve the communication to the drivers at the same time. Zapping work to your workforce in the field over super fast 4G networks from a central location is fun. Why? Because saving time and money is fun.

A dispatcher can send a new delivery to a driver’s handheld during their shift.

4. It’s a two-way street – With real-time mobile, the communication goes two ways. The dispatcher sends work to the drivers and technicians. Then throughout the day, real-time status updates, GPS data, parts used, BOLs loaded, and all sorts of other goodies get sent to the back office automatically. What can the back office do with all this good real-time data? Customer service can give better status updates to customers who call in, service managers can order parts sooner, delivery drivers can monitor the position of trucks, and accounting can post faster. Real-time two-way mobile gives you rich information during the day to help you react faster and be more efficient.

5. Will they call? Yes they will call. – Let’s get really specific. Maybe you have a lot of great automatic full service customers on budget. Maybe you have a smaller number of demanding will-call customers who you don’t want to ignore, but they always seem to call at the worst times. Modern real-time mobile solutions let you know where your trucks are during the day via their GPS. This allows you to dynamically slot will-call tickets into existing routes that are already dispatched. “Who’s closest to this customer right now? Who will be closer later today? Jimbo? Ok, I’ll dispatch that one to Jimbo.” Automating the dynamic routing of will-call tickets into existing routes is a revenue booster on your busiest days.

6. Keeping the Customer Satisfied – Good customer service is like apple pie or the new iPhone – everybody wants it. Real-time mobile can help you provide better customer service. How? Simply by taking advantage of the data provided back from the mobile. When customers call wondering about their delivery, you can say, “The driver just finished the delivery before yours, so you should see him soon.” Or better yet, “I see in the system that he’s on site at your house. Look out your window.” This level of service is maybe the icing on the cake, but it’s a competitive world and when you’re duking it out selling a commodity product, customer service is a key differentiator.

Drivers can leave attractive invoices and capture signatures.

7. Right here, right now – Mobile delivery and service applications allow you to leave better professional looking tickets and service invoices with the customer at the time of the transaction. Tickets can dynamically show customer-specific payment terms, pricing, budget information, pre-buy amounts, and automatic credit card payment dates. Print the GPS coordinates on the ticket to avoid disputes about exactly where you delivered. The best systems can even split the ticket automatically if a delivery goes over their special pricing limits. On service, the best systems will let you capture a signature and print a full-page invoice, while saving that invoice directly to the back office. Invoices and tickets are an outward facing reflection of your company, so use mobile to print them in real-time and also to make them look good.

8. Is that a graph of your margin or a picture of the Rocky Mountains? – Selling commodities with volatile prices is not for the faint of heart. What does this have to do with mobile? Modern real-time mobile will allow you to blast midday price changes out to all your tickets currently on routes even while the driver is out delivering, ensuring all your tickets have the absolute latest pricing when they are delivered. This benefit of real-time mobile can help you keep your margin graph looking like a nice plateau versus all those peaks and valleys.

9. At the end of the day… – People are so fond of that phrase At the end of the day. For example: At the end of the day, it’s all about margins. Or maybe: At the end of the day, it’s all about customer service. How about this: At the end of the day, it’s all about the end of the day, meaning that with a real-time mobile solution, and the real-time flow of data to the back office, your end-of-day processes just got simpler and faster. There’s no more manual posting; it’s all there as it happens throughout the day. The end of the day becomes just that, the end of the day.

10. After the end of the day – Have you ever had a customer call the after-hours driver to try to circumvent your credit processes? What if that driver could look up the customer on their mobile device and see if they owed money? What if that driver or technician could create after-hours deliveries or work orders directly on their device for any customer and have it flow back into the office where it will be waiting for the eager dispatcher as he’s enjoying his morning coffee?

11. You’re a people person – I don’t know if you’re a people person or not. Maybe you like tank wagons more than people. What I do know is that your business does not operate without good people, and good people need good tools to do their jobs well. This by itself is not a reason to invest in a mobile solution, but if you can justify it based on the other benefits, you will get the added soft benefit of employee satisfaction. Employees appreciate when a business is willing to invest in the tools to help them do their jobs better. Happier employees mean better teamwork and better customer service.

These are some of the main benefits of investing in a real-time mobile solution for your company. I hope this helps as you continue to evaluate your options and forge onward in this competitive world. As for me, I’m still waiting for that flying car.