Prosper More During the Busy Season in Food Service 

The busy season in food service extends from spring to summer, as people eat out more often when the weather is warm. As a result, companies that sell and service food and beverage equipment, those months are some of the most lucrative. 

The busy season can be profitable or painful; it comes down to whether providers can keep up with whatever comes their way. Not only can these providers expect higher demand for equipment sales and repair services, but they can also justify charging premium prices. However, with those opportunities come higher expectations too. Clients want prompt response times, flexible service offerings, and consistent first-time fixes from the service providers their businesses depend on. 

The busy season can be problematic for service providers  still running on paper-based processes, manually collecting data, and dealing with multiple disconnected systems. The high speed, volume, and stakes of customer calls can easily overwhelm these providers. Alternatively, providers with field service management software in place have the tools and data they need to not just keep up with the busy season, but thrive from beginning to end. 

That said, not all FSM software was created equally.

Next Service: Built for the Busy Season

Next Service is FSM software that handles all the moving parts of field service while running inside the NetSuite platform. The powerful and integrated tools inside Next Service help all year, but they’re invaluable during the busy season when they help providers capitalize on every call that comes their way. Here are a few recommended best practices, supplemented by data from two Next Service clients – Vanrooy Machinery and Australian Beverage Company (ABC) – that have been through many busy seasons serving food service clients:

• Provide Responsive Service: Clients want someone on-site ASAP. Technicians arrive quickly and are fully prepared to perform the work ordered. Next Service makes it easy to swiftly identify the tech with the right skills, certifications, and availability for incoming jobs and manage all in-progress jobs from one location. According to Vanrooy Machinery “The service manager loves that he can just drag and drop assignments onto the schedule and move them as needed.”

• Prevent Inventory Issues: Don’t let lost tools or out-of-stock parts slow down service delivery. Next Service takes advantage of the inventory management capabilities in NetSuite to keep an updated total of every inventory detail, tool, and piece of equipment. Everything from preventing shrinkage to anticipating reordering needs improves during the busy season when it matters most. With this tool, ABC started dispatching spare parts 50% faster, which is a huge plus during the busy season.
• Support Techs in the Field: Give technicians the tools to succeed. The Next Service mobile app, which runs on most devices and works offline, gives techs work orders, asset histories, and more they can access in the field to expedite repairs, improve customer outreach, or even sell more services.  As the Lead Technician at ABC describes it, “NextService has been the best thing we’ve implemented in Service to date. It’s simple, quick and user-friendly.”

• Ensure Consistent Compliance: Keep compliance issues from undermining the busy season. Have technicians follow checklists, submit forms, and get signatures/pictures all through the Next Service app so that providers do everything required and have a digital audit trail to prove it. This also helps with meeting all client requirements. Vanrooy Machinery took advantage of this capability during the pandemic to ensure techs were following each client’s specific social distancing and sanitation protocols.

• Keep Costs in Check: Prevent waste and redundancy from cutting into profits. By bringing everyone and everything onto a shared platform, Next Service improves coordination and communication so that every part of service delivery runs efficiently. Efficient service is not only less costly, but it also leads to better client engagement. ABC took advantage of faster invoicing capabilities, for example, to collect payment for jobs 60% faster.
• Unleash Revenue Opportunities: Maximize opportunities during the busy season and beyond. With improved work order management, providers can capture and bill for more of their work. Likewise, better asset management creates opportunities to sell preventative maintenance packages during the busy season (and beyond). VanRooy Machinery reports, “If we’re seeing repeated issues with a customer’s equipment, we have visibility into the service history of that asset. This is proving to be a massive benefit.”

• Exceed Customer Expectations: Service delivered during the busy season makes a powerful impression on clients. Next Service has tools to upgrade each aspect of service delivery, all working in sync to ensure that each trip to a client’s kitchen meets and exceeds their expectations for speed, quality, accessibility, consistency, and everything else that matters. Vanrooy Machinery credits Next Service with “generating a big savings in time,” which is exactly what clients are looking for during the busy season.

With Next Service, the busier, the better. Make this spring and summer as prosperous as possible by leveraging all our software can do. Contact our team for a demo of Next Service in action.