A mobile app for field work is not a small version of the office system, and building it as one is why so many of them go unused. The office needs a board; the technician needs a list. Four things belong on the phone and almost everything else is better on a desk, including most of what makes a demo impressive.
What a field service management mobile app shows first: today, in order, with the address
The first screen is the jobs for today, sorted by time, each showing the customer, the address and one line of the problem. It has to be readable in three seconds and it has to work with one bar of signal, because that is the actual environment. Anything that requires a good connection to show anything at all will be abandoned.
One tap to say it is finished
Completion has to be a single action, with the detail asked for afterwards. Every field between finished and done is a field that gets a full stop typed into it at half past four. Capture first, enrich second, and the notes you get back are worth reading.
The document, made where the work happened
A work order, a signature, a photograph, a meter reading. Produced at the address these are records; produced that evening they are reconstructions. This is the whole reason the app exists rather than a group chat, and it is the feature most worth testing on the worst phone in your team.
Time, because it is paid and it is the input
Arrival and departure per job give the real length of a call, which is what capacity, pricing and payroll all rest on. Hours worked has a specific meaning under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and a record made as it happens is worth considerably more than one assembled later from memory and a diary.
Mobile dispatching software: what the dispatcher can do from a phone, and what they should not
Mobile dispatching software is a different product from the technician's app, and the office tends to discover that on a Saturday. What the dispatcher genuinely needs on a phone is narrow: see the day, see which visits are running late, reassign one, and ring the customer. That is enough to cover an evening or a weekend without a laptop. What does not work on a phone is the thing the dispatcher does on a Monday morning, which is laying out the week across several people at once, because the whole value of that view is seeing everybody's day beside each other and a phone can only show one. Judge a product's phone side on the reassign and the call, and keep the planning on a screen.
Questions people ask about mobile field service app
What does not belong on the phone?
The full board, reporting, customer management and anything that needs typing at length. Those are office screens and putting them on a phone makes the phone worse.
Do we need native apps?
Not necessarily. What matters is that the day loads instantly and completions queue without signal. How that is built is the vendor problem.
Is there a per user cost?
Not on Dispatchzo Pro. One price for the whole team, so nobody is left off the app to save money.