Field Force Management

Automating interaction with a distributed workforce to drive down operating costs

An organisation reliant on a distributed workforce to fulfill several thousand new appointment requests each day, had been investing substantial amounts of time and effort managing the fulfilment process for each new appointment. Mobile workers were contacted by telephone to establish their availability and WFM software was updated manually based on the outcome of each call.

View the Field Force Management process

Step 1

Send SMS for each new appointment to all mobile workers operating within a specified proximity to the appointment

Step 2

Request a response from the mobile worker to confirm if available or unavailable

Step 3

Issue appointment to first mobile worker confirming availability

Step 4

Send a further message requesting a post-appointment status update

Boomerang has allowed the organisation to now issue new appointments to multiple agents ‘en masse’. The WFM application triggers an SMS message to all mobile workers operating within a given proximity to the appointment location. Workers are able to receive and respond to simultaneous appointment requests by SMS, to claim the work on a first-come-first-served basis; a confirmation message is then returned to the agent for each successful appointment claimed.

In addition, the organisation prompts the agent to advise of the outcome for each appointment, using the agent’s response to update the event in the WFM application.