Which Works Better for Your Customers: A Mobile App Or 3 Sheet Form?

by James McDonald on June 1, 2015
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How many forms does it take to change a lightbulb? If the answer is several, with the addition of follow up emails and phone calls, you may need to revise the way you approach facilities management. If you’re still using paper forms to submit requests for minor facilities repairs, you’re missing out on the flexibility and ease that comes with mobile apps.

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The Challenge of the Paper Form 

You’d be surprised at the number of ways that using homegrown facilities management systems or paper Paper forms for facilities management aren't the best methodforms limit your ability to respond to the needs of your workforce. When employees use paper forms, they must be in a place to physically fill out those forms. The forms then need to make their way to the right person, who has the possibility of losing or forgetting about them. Paper is not only unreliable, it’s cumbersome, inefficient and often wasteful. Your employees would probably appreciate a better option to submitting these necessary forms. 

Mobile Apps are an Emerging Trend for Small Businesses 

Today, 40 percent of small businesses find that mobile apps are essential to their business. Many facilities managers have moved away from paper forms to facilities management software. However, that software should also have a mobile component. Mobile enabled, web-based FM systems can have huge benefits for your workforce.

Why Choose Mobile Forms? 

When you turn to an online form, you choose flexibility. In a facility with multiple rooms, multiple sites, or very mobile employees, this allows employees to submit requests as they discover a need, rather than forgetting and submitting them after the fact. An employee could even submit a request on the way to the office or on the way home. 

Mobile apps simply service requests for facilities managers

Mobile Apps Save Time and Money 

Applications are also very time efficient. Instead of walking to their desk or to a service desk to ask for help, employees can simply submit the request online, wherever they happen to be at the time. Software-as-a-Service based requests are easy to track and much more difficult to forget, since they’re recorded online. Your system can present to you a list of what needs upcoming repairs and where, so that you can organize those repairs in specific areas of your facilities, before there’s a problem. After they’re completed, you can also track and report on the repairs. It streamlines preventative maintenance, and takes the human error out of keeping track of expiration dates and past repairs. 

Apps Enable Mobile Work 

In today’s workplace, many of your employees may work part time or full time from home. It’s becoming much more common and employees are beginning to require it of the company they work for. By switching to a mobile form of communication, your facility can begin to offer these benefits. Mobile apps allow workers to respond to customer needs for service requests without having to make a call or fill out a paper form. If a customer requests a piece of equipment or notes that a repair needs to be completed, your mobile workforce can simply send in that request through the app, whether they’re at home or in the office. 

Automating your facilities management and taking it mobile has innumerable benefits for a mobile workforce. When you want to improve your facilities management processes, turn to iOffice. Our service request module will help your workforce focus on what’s important: completing repairs and improvements that help your work flow smoothly and reduce employees’ stress about minor repairs and requests. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James McDonald

James McDonald is a sports enthusiast, brother in Christ and once swam in a tank with the infamous TV sharks.

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