Is this your first gig?
If you’re a musician then you immediately remember your first gig – when you played in front of an audience, or maybe for just a handful of friends. But today’s gigs are jobs or projects that people take on, often on a short-term basis. The idea of freelancing on-demand has turned into a whole economy – think Uber drivers on-call for rides, Handy workers on-call for providing handyman services. Sites like Upwork, Gigster and TaskRabbit are just a few marketplaces that will connect you to people who can perform a variety of services on a short term, on-demand basis. To put it simply, the gig economy is alive and well, and growing.
According to a recent Forbes article, more than one in three workers today are freelancers and by 2020, half of the U.S. workers will be freelancers.
So what does this have to do with Field Service verification? Commercial service providers and service aggregators know that most retail Service Level Agreements require photographic verification of work performed especially for exterior services, like parking lot sweeping and striping, signage, lighting, landscaping, and snow removal.
This is a major challenge as many national service providers rely on outsourced partners or subcontractors to complete the work. It is nearly impossible for those managing a far-flung portfolio of retail, restaurant or convenience store locations to comply with their contracted agreements 100% of the time. And the expense involved in sending inspectors to audit these locations is cost-prohibited and time consuming.
The good news is that the gig economy can help.
By outsourcing this function to the gig economy, service providers can quickly and cost-effectively provide their clients with instant proof-of-service, verification of SLA compliance and real-time information on the locations they service. Solutions like iVueit were borne from the service industry by those who struggled to meet the facilities management industry’s never-ending demand for real-time documentation. With more than 30,000 registered ‘Vuers’ with smartphones in 50 states, iVueit enables anyone required to provide service verification to leverage the gig economy via a software platform and mobile app built for this purpose. The result is not only photographic field service verification on-demand, with GPS and timestamp coding, but also a simple survey report by independent workers who are being paid by the Gig to deliver the requested information.
Are you using the gig economy to provide better customer service? Share your solution with us so we can share it with the industry!
