Have Data, Will Travel: Why Your Mobile Workforce Can’t Thrive Without Total Visibility

Claire Thorstensen is Director of Product Management at Runzheimer.

What do the Pony Express, Mary Kay consultants, and Willy Loman have in common?

They’re all examples of mobile workers.

While the definition of a mobile workforce has changed over time – and continues to do so – one thing has remained consistent: It’s hard to keep track of your employees. When they’re spread over a large area and constantly moving, it’s challenging to know if they’re working at their maximum productivity.

With mobile workers like sales reps, merchandisers or in-home care specialists, levels of productivity don’t always indicate a good or bad employee. But their day-to-day activities may reveal information about what they can realistically do in a given day based on their territory, where they have to drive, how long they should stay at one location, what activities they perform on site, and more.

Having access to a mobile worker’s daily and weekly activities can improve scheduling strategies, boost efficiency, reduce the amount of time spent in a car, streamline territory design, and allow for more face-to-face time with clients. There are two challenges standing in the way of those goals, however: Measuring this data is hard to do, and even if a business has a way to measure and obtain it, the data alone is not enough. 

The Challenges of Total Visibility

It’s no secret that gaining visibility into a workforce remains an obstacle for many businesses. Some try to determine their employees’ comings and goings based on sheer instinct, which isn’t the smartest way to improve business processes.

Others attempt to use the technology they have on hand to piece disparate data pieces together. Running reports in sales order management systems or customer relationship management (CRM) software can reveal data like how many sales calls a rep made in a given time period and how many miles they drove, which can be compared with written orders, closed deals, or the performance of another rep.

This lengthy process can yield a partial picture of an employee’s activities, but even after spending hours or days trying to put all the data together, you still end up with an incomplete view. Simply having access to various data points doesn’t ensure a way to quantify what it all means or context around the data.

Companies don’t need another spreadsheet of dozens of data points that must be cobbled together; they require tools that can provide data with a purpose, pointing leadership toward actionable insights that can improve productivity and efficiency.

The Benefits of Mobile Workforce Management Solutions

New technology options like mobile workforce management apps get companies to those actionable insights. Using a mobile system to track worker activities and analyze data provide the opportunity to compare against business and industry trends instead of computing these points manually.

Mobile workforce tracking can facilitate a number of productivity improvements. A food and beverage distributor may schedule a certain stop on a route for an hour and a half. The data would reveal if it only took the driver an hour to unload the order. Finding these “fudge factors” across every driver’s route allows the company to schedule more realistically, potentially adding an extra stop each day.

The technology can also help optimize routes and territories. Companies often give sales reps territories located in one state. This doesn’t always make sense in areas of a state that border other states – customers located in Northwest Indiana are closer to Chicago than Indianapolis, for example. Zeroing in on client locations and the routes people take to get to them will provide companies with the information they need to restructure territories, reassign clients, or add more coverage in certain areas.

Client face time can also be distributed more equitably based on a company’s priorities. Data may reveal that Account A is getting more attention than Account B simply because Account A is closer to a sales rep’s home, even though Account B is a higher priority. By charting frequency of visits, a company can ensure the rep shifts his or her sales call frequencies to align with the company’s goals.

Companies can easily determine worker productivity by ensuring reps enter data categorizing each stop based on whether the meeting was scheduled or a drop-in; what product or service was presented; what next steps are and more. This adds extra context to each call, allowing companies to dig even deeper in data by subdividing visit frequency by activities completed during each meeting, to quantify how time is spent on site and on trips.

Managers can view all the locations reps visited in a time period, how long they spent at each stop, and how these reps compare to averages within the company and within the industry. If the data shows that an employee spent 15 minutes at a stop that other reps have needed an hour for, it may mean that employee is phoning it in. Conversely, if he spent three hours at a stop for which the company normally budgets an hour, that may mean the customer now requires more time than before – perhaps due to a change in the customer’s staff – and companies will know to account for that in the future.

These analytics and insights aren’t just helpful for a company; they can also help employees. Sometimes sales reps don’t have a say over how their territory is structured, or are given a schedule of stops that is unreasonable based on drive time, traffic, average time spent with some customers and more. When these metrics are presented to company leadership, they can adjust schedules or territories to ensure they are fair, and allow the reps more time in front of clients and less time behind the wheel, giving reps the opportunity to earn more commission.

What to Look For

Not all mobile workforce management solutions are created equal. For a business to maximize its return on investment, consider a tool that:

Meeting Challenges Head On

All companies, no matter their size, struggle with achieving total visibility into their mobile workforces – and even if they find a way to pull data from a variety of sources to figure out what their mobile employees do on a given day, that data is hard to accurately quantify.

With mobile workforce management solutions, companies have the ability to not just measure data (including some they haven’t even considered measuring), but also gain insights that have a direct impact on the bottom line, meaning problems can be fixed quickly, productivity can be improved, and actions can be quantified.

Changes based on actionable data mean better mobile workforce management with fewer miles driven and more meetings in a day, which translate into cost savings and improved revenue and productivity – ensuring a more successful mobile workforce.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Informa.

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