Including Photos With Your Work Orders in the Field Service Industry

Augment your work orders with photos to track the work you've done, settle disputes, and help market your successes.

In the grand scheme of the universe, photography is still a very very new thing. Photography, as we know it today, began in the late 1830’s in France, where Joseph Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first photograph.

The art and science of photography has advanced considerably since then. Notably (for field service businesses), photographs have recently gone digital, and you’ll find cameras built into essentially all new phones and tablets. Digital photos come with exact timestamps, which makes them doubly valuable for field service businesses. In this article, we’ll explore some of the advantages of including photos as part of your work orders (and elsewhere in the day-to-day job process).

The Benefits of Photos in the Field Service Business

Photographs record light, and therefore can show you anything light touches. This makes them incredibly valuable to field service businesses. How many times have you wished you could remember what a job site looked like or where you installed critical equipment? How many times do you wish you had hard evidence of a problem, like a break or crack in an important system?

Consider the old adage “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This holds doubly true for field service businesses. When you have a dispute with a customer, a simple photo often settles the matter. Photos serve as historical records. They can show us exactly what something looked like at a specific moment in time.

The value of photos doesn’t stop here, though. Photographs also allow us to appreciate the beautiful. This can apply to work you’ve done. Before/after photos can work wonders for you when you use them on your website or for other marketing purposes. Let the world see that you do good work!

Integrating Photos with Work Orders

Of course, simply filling up your phone or tablet with work pictures won’t get you far. Doing this will mix job records with personal photos and leave you with a disorganized mess.

Fortunately, field service businesses now have a much better option. Field service management software allows you to attach/associate photos with work orders. The Smart Service mobile app, for example, has photo slots built-in to each digital work order a technician executes.

This photo integration allows customers to clearly see what parts they have received or what their service looks like. After adding these photos via the mobile app, techs can send them back to the office with a simple flick of a finger.

This gives your company records anyone can easily access when they need to reference the work completed. Smart Service also gives users the ability to attach a specific photo to a specific piece of equipment. This can show up in a customer record or in a location record. Technicians can take up to 25 photos per job in Smart Service. For companies that require more than 25 photos, Smart Service offers a PDF form that can support 40 additional photos.

Again, your team can access all of these photos and historical records in both the office and field. Anyone can access old photos and additional files when completing new work for a customer. Integrating photos into your work orders will make a game-changing difference for your company, allowing you to prepare for jobs, resolve disputes, and better market yourselves. To learn more about Smart Service and its photo/work order capabilities, request a free demo today.