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Managing large numbers of employees is hard enough, now imagine if those employees are deployed nationwide, with different skill sets and different clients to serve. Any company who relies on their field agents know dispatching field agents the old manual way won’t cut it in this day and age. So, how do we manage our field agents while maximizing their productivity?
Monitoring your field agents remotely while getting real-time updates
Are they on their assigned location or are they taking 3 hours break at a coffee shop? Are they doing their jobs or are they running their own personal errands? These are some of the daily concerns of supervisors and managers that manage numbers of field agents remotely.
With the old manual way, management team often got kept in the dark about their own business until they could see the reports at the next day or even months after reports got compiled. Supervisors, on the other hand, have to constantly call or message individual field agents to make sure they are on track to meet sales target.
Live tracking enables managers to monitor field agents on a real-time basis so they don’t have to wait until the end of the day to see all the reports. It also eliminates the time-consuming manual morning headcount see who’s active on a certain day. Advotics develops SaaS (Software as a Service) technology to digitalize your offline field and trade activities. We assist management in being a more transparent, efficient and scalable business with a cloud-based platform.
Another tricky thing about managing field agents is whether they have sufficient knowledge of the areas they are about to cover. Even when they do, there is still a probability of them constantly asking around because they have trouble finding client or customer sites, especially if the customer is still new or field agents just joined the company. Hence, their whole daily schedule will be delayed.
If we can cut off this unnecessary process, it will not only help field agents to seamlessly transition from one site to another but also eases supervisors in onboarding new agents. Advotics’ live tracking system comes with a detailed navigation system that can help field agents with their daily assignments. The app also provides information on nearby client sites depending on the field agent’s location. This allows the them to adjust their own schedule in their own terms because the app can suggest nearby client sites to be their next destination.
Ensuring performance transparency
Let’s say the company has adopted a tracking app to manage your field agents, how many times have supervisors heard of field agents losing their reports? system glitching? no internet connection? dying battery? Or worse, what if field agents found a way to manipulate the live tracking system by using a fake GPS or manipulate attendance by using other field agent’s phone?
We in Advotics have designed our system to minimize any data tampering from any employee. To make sure the field agent is at the client site, the app requires a selfie of the field agent with the client site on the background. For field agents who try to manipulate attendance by log-in on another field agent’s phone, their IMEI number is saved and locked. This means one phone can be only used for one account, even if they logged out, they have to log-in with the same initial account.
Other than that, field agents won’t be able to start doing any activity if they’re outside of client’s site range (50m or customizable based on client’s preference). Advotics also has a built-in fake GPS detector to further tighten its security.
We also understand that internet coverage in our country isn’t the best, so our team in Advotics has come up with a hybrid mode solution for data syncing. In other words, the app can save all information beforehand (with and without an internet connection) and later on when the coverage is better, it will automatically update itself. This will minimize any data tweaking from sneaky field agents as it will record its initial time stamp.
The last and most classic excuse that supervisors got is the dying phone battery. This case is always tricky to debate around until we found a solution to show a battery percentage indicator into the supervisors and managers dashboard. So, if any parties want to argue about the phone battery, they can easily pull up the dashboard that tracked the phone battery percentage all day long.
Ready to innovate and grow your field team? Get in touch with us to find out more about Advotics sales and distribution and contact us now!
