I’ve worked with a lot of companies over the years, and the thing that always makes me laugh (in that dry, slightly exasperated way) is how many teams insist their on-site process is “fine.” It’s never fine. It’s held together with a dozen spreadsheets, someone’s memory of a phone call from last Tuesday, and about twelve WhatsApp threads that everyone swears they’re keeping track of. Usually the problems don’t show up all at once. They creep in sideways. Before getting into them, I’ll drop this here so it’s out of the way: plenty of businesses eventually end up looking into field service management tools, not because they’re obsessed with tech, but because they’re exhausted.
Anyway, here’s what actually goes wrong.
Appointments keep slipping and everyone’s pretending it’s a one-off
If you’ve ever watched a team try to explain to a furious customer why the third appointment this week went sideways, you know exactly what this feels like. The excuses get thinner each time, the customers get colder, and then, eventually, you’re dealing with this low-grade hum of damaged trust that sits under every interaction. What’s funny is the real cause is rarely incompetence. It’s usually some technician thinking they sent a message but didn’t, or a manager who forgot the calendar still had last month’s version open. Tiny cracks. But enough of them and the whole system wobbles.
The team is running around all day, but you still have no idea what’s happening
This one drives people mad. You see technicians hurrying, sweating, doing the absolute most, and yet when someone asks, “What’s the status on Job 14?” the room goes silent except for someone muttering, “Uh… hang on.” And then you get that uncomfortable pause while they scroll through their phone. This is where the “just work smarter not harder” posters feel like someone’s mocking you. No one’s lazy. No one’s slacking. The information just isn’t flowing in a way any sane person could call a system.
Job details vanish into thin air (or a glovebox)
Half the companies I’ve dealt with seem to think paperwork magically moves itself from the van to the office. It doesn’t. It sits there. Or gets coffee spilled on it. Or someone snaps a photo intending to upload it “later,” which never happens. This becomes a problem the second a customer asks, “What did your team actually do last time?” and you can’t answer without digging through a pile of fading notes. Nothing kills momentum like searching for data that should have taken five seconds to find.
Customer experience depends entirely on luck
Some technicians walk in and the customer practically offers them tea. Others walk in and the customer quietly grips the edge of the table hoping this visit goes better than the last one. Consistency matters. It also makes life easier for employees who genuinely want to do well but don’t have a shared baseline of “how we do things around here.” You shouldn’t need to pray you get the tech with social skills.
Growth makes everything worse instead of better
This is the big one. You hire more people, take on more work, try to expand — and instead of everything smoothing out, the chaos simply scales with you. More delays, more last-minute calls, more confusion. It’s the moment leaders finally admit this isn’t a “bad day.” It’s the natural result of a system that was already stretched thin. And no, this isn’t a motivation issue. It’s an operational one.
