Field service businesses are working in an increasingly competitive environment, which requires them to be ever more efficient and productive. This implies improving processes and abandoning traditional systems based on paper forms.
Using an IT system limited to the office is no longer an option. There is no point in field workers having to spend part of their day in the office transferring information to the system or delegating in administrative staff who may inadvertently enter mistakes that will alter the data.
The benefits of a field service management system affect many of an organisation’s processes, such as scheduling, monitoring, and the automatic generation of reports. Thanks to all this, the staff will have more time to dedicate to customer service.
Organisations whose workers have an intense workload each day or who have to deal with changeable schedules due to cancellations and unplanned tasks tend to get much more out of the scheduling optimisation offered by FSM solutions. And organisations that need to plan multifaceted work in advance, such as sending spare parts or tools, ensure that various resources arrive when they are needed, or coordinate approvals with subcontractors, require systems capable of more complicated workflows. Not all FSM solutions can handle all this.
What is the trend in FSM?
According to the latest report on Field Service Management systems by the consultancy firm Gartner, the demand for the inclusion of certain technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, video streaming, or the Internet of Things (IoT), will be the trend in Field Service Management from now until 2020:
- 70% of organisations will mention customer satisfaction as the main benefit derived from the deployment of a field service management system, compared to approximately 50% who think the same about current systems.
- 10% of urgent field service tasks will be controlled and programmed by artificial intelligence.
- More than 40% of field service tasks will be performed by technicians who will not be employees of the organisation that has direct contact with the customer.
- More than 75% of field service organisations with more than 50 users will deploy mobile applications that will go beyond the mere simplified collection of data and will add capabilities that will help technicians to do their jobs successfully.
Cloud-based solutions that will improve customer orientation
There are FSM solutions today that are hosted in the cloud, which frees companies from most of the investment in local infrastructure.
If that solution also facilitates mobility (accessible from a tablet or smartphone), we will be adding the important ingredient of real time, and all the workers will be able to access the information they need at all times, in addition to entering the information on each visit immediately.
In these cases, customers will also benefit because they will be able to receive immediate confirmation of future reactive or preventive maintenance visits because they will have direct access to a calendar with available slots that is updated in real time by the head office and by other workers.
In these mobile scenarios, the availability of the system in off-line environments is also important because it is not always possible to guarantee communications either due to geographical coverage or simply because workers may be working in isolated areas.
And what if the tool were able to assign tasks and routes in a smart manner, taking into account the availability, distance from the site, and the skills of the workers?
If you are looking for a Field Service Management (FSM) solution that truly allows you to stand out from the competition, take a look at our free webinar on the Task4work solution, which combines centralised information and knowledge with artificial intelligence technologies.
You will learn that you can concentrate much more on your customers, involving them in the entire field service experience, providing them with feedback, notifying them of the estimated time of arrival, and all this through self-service portals. Don’t think twice, don’t miss the chance to make a difference.