Field service contracts contain critical information agreed upon by both parties in terms of delivery, financing or payments. Getting your contracts wrong can lead to legal hassles or cause a dent in your reputation in the industry.
Because of its critical nature, businesses take contract management seriously, yet do the work manually. You may have come across contract management software as a solution, but choosing the right one is very important.
The right contract management software will give you the confidence to trust automation and improve business outcomes. A wrong one will take you back to manual work, or worse, increase your workload in fixing loopholes
In this article, we have provided a checklist that you can use while deciding on finalizing a contract management software for your field service business.
What does field service contract management software do?
A field service contract management software will help you centralize, streamline and automate your contract workflows. Your field service teams can collaborate on contracts, and find or edit them as required. Typical features include e-signatures, editable contract templates, managing multiple contracts, etc.
It also helps you gather insights based on your historical data to help you make decisions to improve business outcomes. Usually, contract management is packaged with field service management software to automate complete field service operations. Software like Zuper consists of contract management features such that they work in conjunction with the rest of the field management offerings.
How to choose contract management software for a field service business?
A general contract or project management software is not suitable for a field service business as it involves too many logistics operations, contractual workers and procurement activities. Here’s a useful six-point checklist for you to decide on purchasing your field service contract management software:
User Interface
Contract management should make the life of your field service teams easier by simplifying their work. There is no point of they are spending too much time on the help docs or listening to webinars or product demos.
Ensure the software is intuitive such that they can navigate it within the first few days. Take feedback from your field service teams on the user-friendliness of the software before making a final decision.
Customization
Editing changes and rework is unfortunately a non-avoidable part of contracting. One may want to change the job details or get affected by external market factors. Hence, ensure your contracts are editable and easy to make changes to so that one can improve with a few clicks.
A non-editable contract management software is as good as a paper itself – and that isn’t efficient.
Customer Support
Lack of customer support for a delicate process like contract management can put you in a tough position. Sometimes software may provide premium support at an additional cost of for higher subscription plans. For the price paid, you should expect timely and reliable support.
Also, ensure that the software team is available for onboarding your company to their software.
Scalable
Implementing contract management software ensures that your field service team is serving more customers. With this, your contract management software should be able to handle the increase in workload.
A glitchy software on reaching 500 contracts is not going to work long term. Knowing the scalability of your software is even more important from day-1 because it is not easy to migrate to new software. For this reason, ensure your software provides migration options when you need them.
Customer reviews
Contract management directly impacts your business reputation. If previous customers have had a bad experience with the software vendor, you should be careful to choose them. Sometimes, vendors are known to disengage with customers due to a variety of reasons. They may also be involved in legal battles or controversies that you must research about.
Conduct sufficient due diligence so that your work is not hampered due to software vendor problems.
Security
Contract documents are private and shouldn’t be publicly available, especially in cases where Non-Disclosure Agreements are signed. Ensure your contract management vendor does not have a history of security breaches. Their security breach would directly impact your business reputation and may lead to losing clients.
Check for features like access control, messaging encryptions, e-signatures and tracking versions. Speak to the sales team extensively about data erasure incidences too.
Additional key features in a field service contract management software
Good to have features that are relevant for field service businesses include provisions for mobile applications and data analytics. You can also check for integrations with other software too so that you can share data with your existing tools.
Zuper is a robust field service management software that takes care of your end-to-end contract management needs. Book a demo today and see how Zuper provides you with all the solutions mentioned in this blog.
