5 Steps to a More Healthy Provider Network
Busy facilities managers need a proactive approach for ongoing provider management that ensures continuous improvement to boost service quality, reduce costs, and build stronger relationships.
Lisa Rosato
Director, Relationship Marketing
Activate your provider management playbook.
You’ve heard the saying that if it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it. But when it comes to the health of your provider network, ongoing optimization that prioritizes real-world performance is not only a “table stakes” best practice — it can turn facility management into a competitive advantage. Follow these simple steps to shift your provider management from reactive to proactive.
1. Take stock of who you’ve got
2. Understand your provider performance
3. Identify opportunities for immediate improvement
4. Discover, test, and swap new providers regularly to minimize risk
5. Measure, rinse, and repeat
1. Take stock of who you’ve got
Make sure all of your providers are in your Service Channel network. By bringing all of your existing providers online, you won’t just increase your efficiency and ensure planned maintenance work is completed on time. You’ll get accurate, real-time data to easily benchmark their performance and powerful insights to coach them for even better service that will strengthen your relationship over time.
ServiceChannel Compliance Manager makes it easy to review insurance documents with the help of AI to get your providers set up quickly and help you stay in compliance over time. Simply click on the provider’s name in the Compliance Overview tab, then click on Insurance Documents.
You can also see all underutilized providers you’ve onboarded into your network that haven’t been assigned to a location in your Provider Assignment Waitlist on the Locations & Provider Assignments page. This streamlines the process and helps you quickly and easily assign and rank them, so they’re ready to roll when you need them!
2. Understand your provider performance
Once all of your providers are onboarded, you’ll have real-time visibility into their performance metrics — and can quickly identify areas for coaching when there’s room for improvement. Your Contractor Scorecard displays key metrics on service quality, speed, price, engagement, and more.*
Through the Benchmarking tab in your Contractor Scorecard, you can meaure and compare exsisting providers in your network, in addition to benchmarking against the entire marketplace to identify underperformers. Make more confident decisions using objective data in a fraction of the time.
3. Identify opportunities for immediate improvement
Your Network Opportunities in Provider Search shows where your weak spots are and exactly how much you could improve. With data-driven insights, you don’t have to research or crunch the numbers yourself to discover when there may be more cost-effective, responsive providers.
Use Provider Search to easily browse your network categories and compare your providers against thousands of similar pros nationwide based on their actual performance from over 180 million work orders.
4. Discover, test, and swap new providers regularly to minimize risk
It’s a best practice to have at least 2 emergency back-ups with proven experience who can be ready to step in when you need them. Provider Search makes it easy to find the top-performing providers for each of your locations and trades based on actual performance.
It’s important to allocate at least 20% (or 10 work orders in a 3-month period) to properly evaluate performance. If they significantly outperform your incumbent, promote them. This encourages better performance across your network.
With ServiceChannel, you can quickly reroute and reassign work orders right on the Locations & Provider Assignments page for on-the-fly network optimization. This makes it easier than ever to replace underperforming providers with providers that prove they can deliver you better service at a lower cost.
5. Measure, rinse, and repeat
Don’t just set and forget your provider network. Schedule regular quarterly reviews to analyze your network-level performance through your Contractor Scorecard and address ongoing issues. Consistent oversight means you catch issues early before they require more drastic changes — an ounce of prevention truly is worth a pound of cure.
As your facilities and needs change over time, reevaluate your provider coverage to reveal network gaps or redundancies and see exactly where you’re over- or underserved regionally. Use the power of Provider Search and to monitor the marketplace, uncover trends, identify network opportunities, and recruit top-performing providers.
Continually updated data based on real-world work order performance allows you to make data driven, proactive, continual improvements to your provider network. And tracking improvements and savings over time further illustrates and reinforces the value of your team to leadership.
Following this simple approach can transform your reactive provider network into a proactive competitive advantage: take stock of your current network, benchmark performance, uncover quick wins, make sure you have reliable back-ups, and conduct quarterly network-level reviews.
Optimizing your network ensures you have the right team behind you to improve efficiency, lower costs, foster better relationships, and ensure you get the highest quality service possible. Learn more about your Contractor Scorecard, Provider Search, and the power of the ServiceChannel Marketplace.
* Price Scores are only available for provider work performed in the U.S. Links to Provider Search will only be visible if the Provider Search feature is enabled in your account.