How to Leverage Your Field Service Automation

From a system perspective, Field Service Management (FSM) is a combination of inventory management, vehicle tracking, scheduling, customer portals, and more. All these components work together to achieve optimized results in the field and seamless communication between the back-office personnel and the field technicians on the job. The cloud portal is accessed from the mobile devices for better flexibility.

While most of the adopters are using field service automation just to automate a once manual process, other field service organizations have reached ‘field-service maturity’ already. The latter organizations are unleashing the transformation of the customer-centric cost centers into profit-making centers. These organizations have already achieved efficiency by automating their scheduling, dispatch, and routing by successfully leveraging FSM.

Enhance Productivity of Both the Managers and Technicians

Advanced algorithm task allocation and flexible access to real-time data on any devices save a plenty of time and energy for both managers and technicians. This advancement makes them available to perform the core job more efficiently and flawlessly. From the back office, managers can supervise technicians’ jobs easily through real-time analytics and live video feeds.

FSM Helps Perform Numerous Tasks:

1. Create work orders from cases

2. Manage and monitor technicians

3. Scheduling and order management

4. Vehicle/technician location tracking

5. Job status updates

6. Route optimization and GPS navigation

7. Time tracking and driver logs

8. Knowledge and asset repositories

9. Parts and inventory management

10. Integrated invoicing/payment processing

11. Customer portals

12. Regulatory compliance measures

Anticipating Customers’ Needs – Making Customers Loyal:

Predicting customers’ needs has become much more effective by analyzing patterns of existing customers’ service records, buying habits, and knowledge gathered during past field services. Inventing and offering products and services with the help of the analysis, even before the customers realize those needs, will bring in higher loyalty across the customer base.

Upsell, Cross-Sell – More Sales

FSM can empower the field technicians to become field salesmen. Enabling these technicians to offer additional products and services on the job, renew contracts and collect signatures will result in saving massive sales and marketing efforts and expenditures, as well as boost sales and increase customer loyalty.

Information, Insights, Improvements

Field services that include maintenance or break-fix operations are an excellent source for collecting relevant information about commonly occurring errors. This data can later be utilized to improve the products and services in-house and adds supportive insights for the other field technicians. Are we seeing an opportunity for an internal social network for the field technicians to share inputs on the kinds of issues they frequently encounter?

IoT Augmentation

Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities can bolster FSM efficiency even more. Introduction of IoT can remove unnecessary human interference for monitoring the emergency or maintenance needs of equipment. It is also useful in regularly collecting data on various parameters so the data can be analyzed to improve the products or services.

FSM’s scope is wide open to increase profit and improve efficiency in the coming future. Companies that are still in the ‘thinking mode’ to make a strategic move into FSM, will fall back in the race. The global field service management market is estimated to reach $3.52 billion by 2019. That’s a compound annual growth of 17.3%. North America is expected to become the largest market in terms of the market size. Europe and Asia-Pacific are expected to experience an increase in market traction.

Customers are expecting FSM as a standard feature for their service. According to market research, 89% of customers prefer modern technology, like the kind used in on-demand cab-booking services, applied to their technician scheduling, and nearly as many would be willing to pay a premium for it.

How’s your organization pulling in the race? Let us know with your comments below.

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