Employee and Truck Tracking Systems for Field Service Businesses

What options do field service business owners have when it comes to truck tracking?

In this article, we will discuss various truck tracking systems for both your trucks and your employees, and how you can use this technology to better benefit your field service business through efficient and honest customer service.

Honors System

To start, a lot of businesses, especially smaller businesses, do not use tracking systems for either their trucks or their employees. This can be a perfectly fine solution for these kinds of businesses, as employers in this position likely trust their technicians by virtue of knowing them personally. However, ultimately, this solution is lacking. With it, the employer cannot actually track their service vehicles or employees. Even in cases with bone-deep employee trust, there are some shortcomings. If a customer complains that a technician never arrived at their house, the employer in question cannot actually verify the truth of the claim or the employee’s present location/ETA.

GPS Tracking

The next approach to tracking both your assets and your employees? A GPS unit you can attach to the asset (usually a service vehicle) in question. In this way, you can reliably track the asset. Of course, there are some possible issues with this approach as well.

First and foremost, most GPS units have only small, barebones phone or desktop applications associated with them. This allows users to verify where the vehicle has gone, but not necessarily at the most opportune of times, or with as much data or metrics as an employer would like. In addition, while tracking the vehicle provides a piece of the puzzle, this does not necessarily track the technicians themselves. This might sound odd to a certain extent, as you can usually assume your technician is with or near their truck, but when you only have a definitive location for the truck, you still have to rely on their word.

Better GPS Tracking 

Our next approach involves using a GPS unit of much nicer quality, one that provides an employer with real-time metrics and data without the need for the GPS unit itself to go back to the office or warehouse. This allows the employer to look at information about the vehicle in real-time, even while the truck is far away from the office. This iteration might even have an app for the technician in question, allowing for partial tracking of the technician, something that the prior approach lacked.

Unfortunately, the big downside to this approach is that the GPS tracking for both the technician and the truck does not integrate with any scheduling or routing software or platform that the employer or office staff might use. Again, while not of the utmost importance, you should consider this when you want to track your two biggest cost factors, trucks and employees, under the same collective roof.

Truck Tracking and Field Service Management Software

Our last approach combines an employer’s desire to track both their trucks and technicians independently, combining these elements into an existing routing and scheduling software. This keeps all relevant items under the same collective sphere of operation. This approach means using the award-winning field service scheduling software Smart Service, a premier scheduling, routing, and tracking software for the field service industry. With Smart Service, you can track both your employees and your trucks via a mobile app that sends information about the technician and the truck back to the office to view by dispatch and management staffs. Every aspect of your business, from route optimization to rescheduling to tracking costs is included. If you want everything under one roof, consider requesting a Smart Service demo today.