The paper-based forms often used by service businesses in their customer-facing field service interactions typically include information about the services performed, charges to be billed, and customer acknowledgment/acceptance of those services and charges.
Unfortunately, field service forms are rigid and isolated – they’re difficult to adjust to evolving customer and field service needs, and their information exists in its own little world, difficult to find and utilize within your project management and CRM systems.
What service businesses need to streamline field service customer interactions and improve knowledge about customers is electronic form capture. Moving from paper-based to electronic forms will allow you to flexibly arrange forms to match every customer situation as well as enable automated data sharing between the field service forms and your CRM system.
TimeLinx Customers Asked, and We Responded
With TimeLinx already providing the necessary functionality for our customers to manage projects and share data within their CRM, many current and prospective customers have requested that we extend the TimeLinx capabilities to streamline field service operations. What they wanted most was the ability to create custom digital forms that would display all required information on a single screen.
We answered this call by developing a new module, called TimeLinx Forms, releasing next month.
Two things make TimeLinx Forms uniquely valuable: an HTML template engine that eases form creation and backend integration with project management and CRM. The HTML template engine allows you to create custom digital forms that reflect your field service workflow and data capture requirements. The backend integration with TimeLinx project management and CRM (Infor or Sage) provides two-way information sharing between your forms and your PSM/CRM records. In other words, your field service personnel enjoy pre-population of forms with standard and custom customer data while your backend customer records become richer with real-time data from the field.
Custom Form Creation with TimeLinx Forms
We took your ‘war stories’ to heart, particularly the ones about the field service pains and delays caused by rigid forms – forms that couldn’t adjust to the inevitably changing service scenarios your staff face every day. To address these issues, we incorporated multiple time-saving features into the HTML template engine, including:
- Pre-defined templates with required fields
- Branding headers and footers
- Image ‘drag & drop’
- Controlled data entry areas (e.g., date pickers, edit boxes, combo boxes, checkboxes, radio controls, text editors)
- Conditional layouts driven by logic or customer actions (e.g., only show section “x” if service type is “y”)
- Pre-population of CRM data (e.g., company and contact name, address, service order number, equipment being serviced)
- Electronic signature fields
To streamline business and improve customer relationship management, TimeLinx Forms provides these time-saving functions:
- Form ‘auto-save’
- Form preview and customer email
- Automated PSM/CRM record updating
- Pre-population of reference data into multiple company forms (e.g., week-ending service reports)
Extend Your TimeLinx Implementation to Further Streamline Your Business
Using TimeLinx Forms will increase customer knowledge across the business, leading to a boost in customer satisfaction. And, because we offer TimeLinx Forms as an add-on module to TimeLinx PSM, getting this valuable field service operational enhancement is easy. Contact us to learn more about the feature, or the products offered by TimeLinx!
