How to get data to and from your third party service providers in a simple, secure, and cost effective way

Our team had the opportunity to attend Field Service Hilton Head this past August 2022. At Field Service Hilton Head, we connected with various organizations and large enterprises across the field service industry to better understand how Appify can solve their top pain points. Leadership in innovation, operations, customer support, finance, technical, and continuous improvement in these organizations all managed large external workforces comprised of contract, partner, and gig workers. When working with external teams, these companies wanted a better way to manage and set expectations plus share data and important information securely between their internal teams, customers, and external partners. During our roundtable, team members Kyle Egge and Larry Taylor spoke with these organizations to better address digital solutions and process improvement through rapid application development.

Pain points of organizations with regards to managing their third party service providers include:

• How to get data to and from partners and external teams securely
• How to track partner performance and collect key performance indicators (KPIs)
• How to ensure partners are delivering a standard experience to customers, regardless of location, partner organization, or other variables
• How to improve onboarding and training for a standard and efficient experience

How to manage partner, gig, and contract workers effectively to benefit customers and internal stakeholders

In some of the pain point instances, there are multiple software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions on the market. Integrating many SaaS solutions in a way that effectively pushes and pulls data, in real-time, is not as common. The majority of the organizations we encountered relied on Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP and required integrations with each to be effective.

Organizations also had their teams, both internal and external, flipping between multiple systems to do singular tasks. This led to additional time spent simply navigating the legacy technology from their teams, not to mention the training involved for new team members and partners on navigating the systems – and that doesn’t account for the manual processing of data that happens outside of systems, as well.

Appify was created to be a single pane of glass view for an organization’s data and systems that could be easily accessed through a modern user interface by all parties. In order to effectively share data across various individuals who interact with your organization, you need a way to integrate with all your systems to grab the data you need, when you need it.

How to get data to and from partners and external teams securely with rapid application development

Security is a top priority for enterprises. When there is a need to share data externally, whether with customers or third party service providers, there is a risk involved. Understanding this, Appify created a way for your organization to build applications that securely integrate with and share enterprise data. Your enterprise does not need to go through the lengthy and expensive process of ripping out and replacing legacy technology where the risk of lost data is high or deal with complicated middleware solutions. With Appify, a modern layer is placed on top of all existing technologies, software, integrations, and data so that you can securely share all important information from each between them and your external teams.

Beyond that, Appify understood that many organizations still rely on manual paperwork or PDFs and that those documents needed to be shared, as well. With Appify, you can take photos or upload PDFs and other documentation within an application and add them to work orders, quoting, and more. This way, all paperwork – digital or otherwise – can be shared easily and securely and remain associated with the appropriate job plus handled in real-time.

How to track partner performance and collect key performance indicators (KPIs) with rapid application development

Tracking performance is something that is important to every company. Without the ability to track performance, it is difficult to make investment, budget, or hiring plans. Tracking performance of external team members, especially in the field, has its own set of complications.

“Every company strives to achieve a highly productive workforce. Alleviating the administrative burden to free up employees to focus on tasks that drive revenue is key – especially in the current labour market.”Kyle Egge, Appify

One company shared their particular struggles in managing region-based third party service providers. Each regional third party service providers acted as their own organization within an organization. Despite this, the teams needed to share work orders, adhere to similar workflows, and push and pull data across the parent company’s multiple systems. Switching from a manual to digital process was daunting, given the challenges of coordinating these changes across an extensive number of third party service providers.

This company needed to track their partner performance and return on investment across the various regions in a way that was standardized. With Appify, this company could create a single application that third party service providers could access via mobile to communicate on-the-job with the parent company. The parent company could then consolidate the data acquired to better handle decision-making and future processes in an effective manner.

“Partner networks can be strengthened by understanding the quality of work that partners are doing.” Larry Taylor, Appify

How to ensure partners are delivering a standard experience to customers, regardless of location, partner organization, or other variables

When working with partner organizations or individuals, the enterprise has a lot of trust that the brand is well reflected through each external team member to the customers. Customers also have an expectation that third party service providers are providing the best experience on behalf of a brand. It can be challenging for your internal teams to know what happens in the field and being able to effectively track that from a customer and third party perspective is key. To do so, collecting data from all involved parties digitally to report back to the internal teams is key to success.

“Digital field service will create a better customer experience in the long-run. That’s the focus of a lot of the enterprises. The more you invest in upgrades in technologies, the more you are investing in the customer experience.”Kyle Egge, Appify

With Appify, your enterprise can build a system that communicates between internal teams, external team members, and customers. Creating an application that provides updates and expectations to the customer, job duties and tasks to the third party, and a report on completed work plus a review from the customer to the internal teams ensures all involved have up-to-date information to act on.

“A company’s biggest asset is their customer base. To provide the best experience to customers enterprises need to invest. Field service can digitize or improve to enhance your customer experience.”Larry Taylor, Appify

How to improve onboarding and training for a standard and efficient experience

Gig work has increased due to the labour market shortage yet onboarding contractors and partners effectively into a company’s existing systems is still a struggle. One company we spoke with spends 3-9 months training their third party technicians. This onboarding experience was not a positive one for the technicians, the company, or their customers.

A poor onboarding experience can lead to turnover, which can cost an organization 100-300% of the employee’s salary in total. Creating a fast and effective onboarding process, especially for external team members, can be a challenge, which got our team thinking…

What if the technician could pull up the application, access the shared knowledge base of training data, and receive support from the internal team with questions, images, or other documentation?

An application to handle onboarding and training for external team members could lead to shorter time-to-field for the partner, as well as an improved onboarding experience for all involved. The end customer would also feel confident in the enterprise’s performance and technicians could be deployed sooner from initial onboarding.

Let Appify run your business and provide continuous process improvement to your organization

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth and spoke with us at our roundtable at Field Service Hilton Head 2022. Having met with leaders in large organizations in field service across many verticals such as postage and mailing, medical, petroleum, electronics, and more we were keen to learn more about their shared pain points. Our goal at Appify is to digitize your processes under one roof so that you have a single pane of glass view into all your data, systems, and history that is easily accessible and digestible. Rapid application development allows your organizations to quickly launch applications that your internal teams, customers, and partners can use and interact with.

How rapid application development can run your business.

Can’t get data to and from your partners? Can’t get a standard experience for your customers? Struggling with onboarding and training? Build an application for that – with Appify.

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