In this article we’re going to take a look at exactly how this process works, what beat planning really means, how beat planning software can help organizations, what are the best route optimization solutions in the market in 2023
Shoaib Ahmed
4 minutes
January 3, 2024
Visit Planning
The Ultimate Guide to Route Optimization Software
Shoaib Ahmed
January 3, 2024
What’s On This Page
Introduction
What is beat planning?
What are the benefits of using beat plan software?
The five best beat plan software for 2023.
Best practices for beat plan software
How to choose the right Beat planning solution?
About Fieldproxy
Imagine orchestrating a symphony, where each instrument plays a crucial role in creating harmonious melodies. Each instrument has it’s own role to fulfil, each performer their own character. It lies in the hands of the conductor to bring out the best in each and every member of the band, without undercutting or overshadowing any one person.
If we were to liken this to the realm of field service management, beat planning - and route optimization in general - serves as the conductor, coordinating across all the other functioning and performing aspects of your operation, creating the perfect symphony that makes money for your company.
In this article we’re going to take a look at exactly how this process works, what beat planning really means, how beat planning software can help organizations, what are the best route optimization solutions in the market in 2023, and how you can go about choosing one for yourself (Psst, if it’s anything other than Fieldproxy, choose again)!
Beat Planning is the process of creating route plans for a large network of customers, such that your agents, delivery personnel, or field reps can move about their day in the most efficient way possible. Usually it involves a dispatcher planning all of this ahead of time so your field teams can start their day without thinking too much about where to go. This however requires lots of resources and efforts, and still cannot be tursted to be executed with 100% accuracy by human abilities. That's just the way it is, because manual planning can only be as good as the person who plans it.
A beat planning software or a visit management solution is designed to help you effortlessly create optimized route plans and delivery routes for millions of retail stores in multiple routes. The coordination between your reps or beat route travellers and your managers often happens through a single mobile app, but more on that in a bit. First let’s take a look at what you benefit from getting a route optimization solution.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Beat Plan Software?
If you're still wondering how a route optimization and beat planning system can benefit your business, here are some key benefits
More Efficient Operations
When you’re using a beat planning software, service operations become far more efficient and cost-optimal
Fuel Savings: When you’re traveling across optimized routes and can significantly reduce fuel consumption by finding the most efficient paths, reducing unnecessary mileage.
Vehicle Maintenance: Efficient routes can minimize wear and tear on vehicles, extending their lifespan and reducing maintenance costs.
Faster Routes: Route Optimization solutions like Fieldproxycan calculate the quickest routes, reducing travel time and allowing for more tasks to be completed in a given timeframe.
More efficiency also means your agents get more work done across the board.
More Deliveries or Visits: By optimizing routes, businesses can increase the number of deliveries or service visits their teams can make in a day.
Resource Utilization: Efficient planning ensures that resources such as vehicles and drivers are utilized to their maximum potential.
Better Data Analytics And Reporting
Effective communication is essential for any business, especially as it grows. However, managing communication can be a daunting task. Beat planning software simplifies this by enabling you to keep track of and manage employee communications more easily.
Performance Analysis: Route optimization software often provides analytics and reporting tools, allowing businesses to analyze performance and identify areas for improvement.
Data-driven Decision Making: Businesses can make informed decisions based on historical data and trends provided by the software.
Get a free demo today!
Safer Operations
With visit planning solutions like Fieldproxy, you digitize all of your data in a secure silo. This helps organizations protect assets important to them, or if you’re a small team, scale without worry about data management and migration.
Regulatory Compliance: Fieldproxy also helps ensure that routes comply with local regulations, such as restricted zones or hours.
Safety Measures: Optimization can also factor in safety considerations, avoiding high-risk areas or challenging road conditions.
Better Customer Experience
How many times have your customers had to fill out detailed request forms just to schedule a service that could’ve been a phone call away? Beat planning platforms also come with customer experience solutions that help your customers get along with not just your product but your service as well
Accurate Arrival Times: Route optimization solutions provide accurate estimated arrival times, helping businesses communicate more effectively with customers.
Real-time Tracking: Some solutions like Fieldproxy’s live location tracking also offer real-time tracking, allowing customers to monitor the progress of their deliveries or services.
The Five Best Field Team Beat Plan Software For 2023
There are a lot of different field team beat planning software programs out there, and it can be tough to choose the right one. But don't worry - we're here to help.
We've compiled a list of our top five picks for the best field service Beat planning software for 2023.
So, without further ado, let's dive into our list
Fieldproxy
Beatroute
Unolo
LeadSquared
Innomaint
Fieldproxy
Fieldproxy is the ultimate tool for end-to-end visit planning and is the all-in-one service management software for all of their field operations.
This feature-rich software product is designed to assist managers in various industries, including cleaning services, ISPs, electrical equipment manufacturers, and HVAC service businesses, in collecting data in a more organized format.
Fieldproxy allows managers to easily create automated workflows for their employees and assign tasks to agents through the web dashboard. The user-friendly mobile app enables field agents to update tasks as they are completed and provides real-time updates to managers.
The software also includes special workflows designed to ensure the safety and security of on-site field agents. During the pandemic, these features were especially useful for tracking contact, hygiene compliance, and accountability.
Fieldproxy’s feature-rich cloud-based application brings all your field tasks under one roof with the most interactive web application and highly capable mobile app. The heavy-duty software provides ample features like:
BeatRoute is a sales enablement platform that enables collaboration between their sales teams, channel partners, and B2B customers.
More accurately, it is a modular field sales management platform that helps companies with territory and visit management. It’s a good solution with a range of features like custom reports, data logs, and route maps, to name a few.
Prices start at $12 USD per user, and the reviews leave a bit to be desired.
Unolo
Unolo is a mobile and web application that works to help managers keep an eye on field service activity, idle hours, and performance, and do this all seamlessly and cost-effectively. It’s completely cloud-based and offers integration with popular services. Unolo is also simple to use and saves a lot of time for businesses that need this kind of field service tracker daily.
There are only a handful of companies that do a better job than Unolo at field service management (one of them being Fieldproxy). They’re easy to use applications.
However, they cannot thoroughly customize how field services will be tracked, and to what degree. So essentially, you’re not in control of how much data about your field services is being tracked.
Leadsquared is a mobile and web application that works as a sales CRM and marketing automation software to help managers keep an eye on field service activity, idle hours, and performance, and do this all seamlessly and cost-effectively.
It’s completely cloud-based and offers integration with popular services. Leadsquared is also simple to use and saves a lot of time for businesses that need this kind of field service tracker daily. We’re done a complete review of Leadsquared vs Fieldproxy right over here, so be sure to check it out!
Innomaint
Innomaint is a software platform designed specifically for small scale businesses and is tailored toward inventory and asset management needs. It provides tools and features to help these businesses manage their operations more efficiently and effectively. Or so it seems at the surface.
We took a free trial of the Innomaint app to give you a feel of what it is like using the application. Read more about what we thought of Innomaint in this detailed review
Best Practices For Managing Your Routes
It's important to manage your Beat planning software properly, regardless of how it operates. This will ensure that it's helping, not hindering, your customer service team.
By following these 10 best practices and tips, you can enhance your customer support, increase customer satisfaction, and improve your support team's performance.
Ensure proper agent training
Decide how to prioritize visits
Ensure your team isn't overloaded
Monitor activity across services
Use proper tracking metrics
Set visit KPIs
Collect customer feedback on the operational change
Track Track Track!
Ensure Proper Agent Training
Agents need to be properly trained on how to use the visit planning system that you go for, and on customer service best practices in order to handle customer inquiries effectively. Good training ensures that agents will be able to use the route optimization solution efficiently, provide high-quality customer support, and help maintain customer satisfaction.
Decide How To Prioritize Visits
There’s always going to be visits that clash with your agents’ schedules or that are of immediate attention. Question is, will your current route management process be prepared to handle it? If not, then you might want to consider shifting to a new system.
The old way to go about this would be taking a look at all your visits scheduled for the day and find out which agent has more time on their hands, then see if they’re closer to the client’s place and schedule a visit.
At Fieldproxy, we do things a bit different. All you have to do is, head over to Fieldproxy’s AI visual builder, ask it a question, and it will show you actionable data for you to interact with, in 5 seconds.
You instantly know who’s available and who’s not, and allocating tasks to your agents becomes child’s play. The point is, if you’re not able to prioritize your visits for your agents, you will have a hard time scaling your operations.
Ensure Your Team Isn’t Overloaded
This builds up on our previous point. No one likes feeling overwhelmed at work. If your support team is constantly bogged down by an unmanageable number of customer requests, it will lead to decreased productivity and, eventually, burnout.
Avoid this by ensuring that your team has the adequate support it needs, whether that means hiring more staff or implementing automation tools to lighten the load.
Monitor Activity Across Your Services
It is extremely important while managing beats and performing route planning that you have your eye on the ball at all times - knowing where your teams are, what activities are being carried out, how effective is your least effective agent compared to yesterday, how can you make that better today - as a fleet and field team manager you need to be able to stay on top of all of these questions.
Once you have that data, you will be able to make faster, more accurate decisions that help you scale your business beyond what you might’ve though possible.
Use Proper Tracking Metrics
It’s no use collecting all of that data from your team on a daily basis if:
A) It’s not being measured
B) You’re measuring the wrong metrics
Both can amount to serious damage to your organization over the long haul. So it’s important that you measure data for your teams. What kind of metrics do you really need to track? We’ve put up a detailed article about it right here, so do check it out.
Just to give you a quick outlook, tracking metrics for teams varies widely and there’s really no one-size-fits-all for what kind of data you should be looking at, but most of our clients here at Fieldproxy love seeing a few key metrics:
How many visits scheduled for a day (both at an individual level as well as an organizational level)
Average time spent per location
Visit coverage (percentage of customers visited)
Frequency of visits, with reasons and added remarks
Just to name a few. Go check out the detailed article here to learn about more metrics you should be tracking, and how to go about measuring them effectively.
Set Visit KPIs
Data metrics are nothing if your agents are not incentivized to collect them. Because if your agents do not collect real-time data from the field, you do not have any metrics to work on. This is why incentivizing agents based on targets aligning with Visit data is important. Some key metrics we collect here at Fieldproxy for our clients include:
Agent visit count: how many visits an agent has completed on any particular day
Average time spent on each customer
Historic travel log to measure productivity
Number of Scheduled Vs Completed Visits
Your field teams are cost centers that can turn into revenue centers if you incentivize and make the right data backed decisions. That’s what we help you do at Fieldproxy.
Collect Customer Feedback
Data from your customers is just as important as data from your field teams. To make a beat plans are successful, not only when your agents go from point A to point B in the most efficient way possible, but also maintain the quality customer experience that your business prides itself in. Collecting customer feedback helps you know that your agents are doing a great job.
Track Track Track!
And if we haven’t emphasized it enough in this section of the blog, track your metrics. Know what’s happening on the field, then make calculated decisions to take your company to the next level. That is how manage your routes the best way possible.
Now that we know exactly what you need to do to make sure your visits are organized, efficient, and customer-centric, let’s move on to choosing a software that can help you achieve all of that. Obviously, our biased answer’s going to be Fieldproxy - arguable the best field team route optimization solution on the planet, but in case you want to look around, here are a few things you need to consider while choosing your beat plan and route optimization software going into 2024 and beyond:
Visit Automation
Manual Beat planning is time-consuming and can lead to errors. We’ve already seen that. With visit automation, you can create workflows that automatically assign tickets to the right person or team based on the issue type, priority, or other criteria. That’s if you’re a service team.
If you have a field sales team, you can simply assign visits based on agent productivity, workload, availability, capacity, or proximity to the client. This saves hours of time for your dispatcher, and ensures visit requests are handled promptly and efficiently.
Service level agreements (SLAs) set expectations for response and resolution times for customer requests. A good beat planning system should allow you to set SLAs and track the status of each ticket against them. This helps you ensure that you're meeting your service commitments and identify areas for improvement.
Visit Categorization
Effective beat planning relies on accurate categorization of customer requests. Look for a system that allows you to create custom categories and subcategories to match your business needs. This helps you prioritize tickets, allocate resources effectively, and track the most common types of requests.
Customizable Templates
Creating responses from scratch for every ticket is inefficient and can lead to inconsistencies. Customizable templates allow you to create pre-written responses for different types of requests. This saves time and ensures that all responses are professional and consistent.
Customizable Queues and Status Options
Your Beat planning system should allow you to create custom queues and status options that match your business needs. This helps you prioritize tickets and track their progress through different stages, from new requests to resolved issues.
Integration with Other Tools
Your Beat planning system should integrate seamlessly with other tools you use, such as your CRM, inventory management system, or project management software. This saves time and avoids the need for manual data entry.
Effective Beat planning requires accurate time tracking. A good system should allow you to track the time spent on each ticket, including the time spent on different stages of the resolution process. This helps you identify areas for improvement and ensure that your team is working efficiently.
Reporting
We’ve gone through this enough time already for you to know it’s important. Extremely important. Look for a beat planning software that provides comprehensive reporting capabilities, including metrics such as ticket volume, response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction.
How Does A Field Team Route Planning System Work?
A routing and attendance management system helps customer service reps manage service requests by automatically creating a ticket from platforms like Live Chat, Email, Call, Social media, or another platform.When an field agents receives a ticket, they can see all the customer data associated with it, which helps them resolve the issue quickly and efficiently.
A Little Bit About Fieldproxy
As businesses expand and operations grow more complex, managing field teams can be a daunting task. From managing tickets to scheduling jobs and everything in between, keeping track of everything can be time-consuming and inefficient. That's where Fieldproxy comes in - an end-to-end field team management solution that aims to simplify these tasks and streamline operations.
Beat planning Solutions
One of the key features of Fieldproxy is its beat planning software. With this feature, businesses can create, assign, and manage tickets, ensuring that issues are resolved quickly and efficiently. This means that customers get the service they need, and businesses can maintain their reputation for quality customer support.
Schedule Jobs For Field Agents
Another important aspect of Fieldproxy is its job scheduling feature. With this tool, businesses can schedule jobs and assign them to field teams in real-time. This helps ensure that the right team is on the job at the right time, which can save businesses time and money.
Generate Quotes And Estimates
Fieldproxy also offers a mobile application that allows field teams to generate quotes and estimates on the go. This feature is particularly useful for businesses that operate in industries where quotes and estimates are necessary, such as construction or landscaping. With this feature, businesses can provide accurate quotes to their customers quickly and easily.
Raise Invoices And Collect Payments
In addition to generating quotes and estimates, the Fieldproxy mobile application also allows businesses to raise invoices and facilitate payment collections through integrations with popular payment gateways. This can help businesses get paid faster and with less hassle.
Collect Valuable Customer Feedback
With features like customer happiness index, and historical customer data, ensure your customers are always satisfied with your products and services. Know exactly how your customers operate and provide better quality services.
Dashboards And Reports
Fieldproxy’s easily-presentable data dashboards and reports allow managers to make sense of all the data their field teams collect, in real time.
Create, curate, and manage different dashboards and reports to help make better data-backed decisions for your service teams.
Get 3 free customizable reports just by signing up for a demo. Book a Demo now!
Closing Thoughts
So why should businesses consider Fieldproxy? With its comprehensive set of features, Fieldproxy can help businesses save time, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction. And with a free demo available, there's no reason not to give it a try.
If you're looking for an end-to-end field team management solution that can help you manage tickets, schedule jobs, generate quotes and estimates, raise invoices, and collect payments while also providing customer feedback support, then Fieldproxy might be the solution for you. Book a free demo today to see how Fieldproxy can help your business improve its operations and customer satisfaction.
Route optimization is a process of managing problems and requests from customers. It's built into beat planning and route software and is a common business tool.
2. Can Google Maps do route optimization?
Google Maps has been synonymous with giving the most efficient driving instructions for the longest time. So much so, that we incorporate google maps into Fieldproxy.
This is because Google Maps is good at one thing: showing you efficient routes, and Fieldproxy is amazing at creating field team solutions that just work. Combine them both and what do you have? An unbeatable field team route optimization solution that is used by 65000+ agents around the world.
3. List of route optimization solutions, please?
Fieldproxy
Beatroute
Unolo
LeadSquared
Innomaint
Trockobit
This is an older question and now has been added as part of the article itself, but we’ll answer it here anyway.
4. How much does a route optimization software cost?
Fieldproxy starts from as little as $10/user/month. That’s less than the price of a regular coffee cup! Get a free demo today!
