Creating The Field Service Virtual Expert Center

By Bob Hogg, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Serenova

The greying of the field service workforce is one of the biggest challenges facing many in the field service industry. As the Baby Boom population ages into retirement, companies are struggling to bring in a new generation of replacements and bring them up to speed at the same rate that more experienced workers are retiring. As Sarah Nicastro, editor in chief of Field Technologies Online noted in a recent blog post:

“Under the umbrella of that one challenge (the aging workforce) are a handful of really big problems:

• It has proven very difficult for field service organizations to find quality replacements at the same rate at which experienced workers are retiring
• As field workers retire, companies are often losing significant amounts of ‘tribal knowledge’ that isn’t well-documented anywhere except in their minds. This can include important details of customer history and preferences that if not captured runs the risk of resulting in negative customer experience
• Companies are tasked with determining how to quickly, but effectively, capture and transfer this knowledge to new employees
• Companies are challenged to learn how best to manage new, younger workers while often simultaneously managing the older workforce – where each group may have different needs and respond to different methods

Sarah has laid out three suggestions to address the problem:

1) Recruit New Talent

2) Enable knowledge Transfer

3) Consider Alternatives

In the “alternative” category, I’d like to offer a suggestion that has been running around my brain for a few years – What if you take your most experienced technicians and clone them so every new hire had the ability to have their own expert coach looking over their shoulder on every service event? Sounds good, you might say, but I can’t ever find enough people to replace the one’s I’m losing. How in the world could I get my most senior people to just hand hold a new employee till they can be dispatched on their own? Stay with me and see if this makes sense:

What if you could leverage contact center type features to establish a Virtual Field Service Center of Expertise. Ok, but what exactly does that mean, and how would it help address the greying workforce challenges?

Several technology advances in contact center technologies could be used to help provide a multiplier effect to your most senior and experienced resource and the new hires they could mentor. These are:

1. Presence – the ability to know a person’s availability at all times and if they are logged in, taking a break, in training, working, but fully consumed or available.
2. Skills & Proficiency - Tied to presence is the addition of skills and proficiency. Each tech would have associated to their profile the type of skills they have and at what level of proficiency
3. Capacity Rules – How many types of work or interactions can a technician handle at a given time. Maybe they can only handle one break/fix event at a time, but maybe they could handle several requests for assistance from other tech’s. Once they reach their maximum, no other work would be routed to them until they are free of the previous tasks. Capacity rules can address not only the number of interactions at a given time, but vary the rules by channel. So, as an example, a technician might have a rule that they can handle five emails, two chats and one voice call at a time
4. Routing – This is not dispatch routing in the traditional field service scenario, but rather a routing of the types of work that a given set of tech’s have the skills, proficiency and capacity to handle. If a new tech sends in a email about repairing product A, the email will be routed only to a sr. tech with that skill, proficiency and available capacity to address the request. Same thing would occur with the routing of a text message or a phone call.
5. Interaction Recording – recording of the interaction between parties. This can include not only voice, but screen capture as well. 

Field Service organizations could use these capabilities to create a virtual center of knowledge that could bring inhouse (or work from home) the most senior technicians and then have them available via any of the communications channels to help guide newer, less skilled tech’s in the accomplishment of their tasks. So, you have a tech who has been on the job for 3 months and is faced with a problem they have never seen before. From their device they could call, text, launch a video session which would then be routed to the senior tech with that skill and proficiency, who is currently available and who could help guide the newer Tech though the process. At the end of the process, the senior tech could categorize the interaction recording which could then be added to the knowledge base and be made available for others when they encounter a similar issue.

The advantages to this approach are many, but a few that jump out to me are:

1. Capture of the tribal knowledge for reuse later. The capturing of interactions via interaction recording can be categorized and become part of the knowledge base
2. Provide a backup for newer tech’s to help them gain skills and proficiency
3. A way to help reward the more senior tech’s with in-office (or home office) flexible schedules and a chance to get off the road.
4. Retain senior staff who may be having challenges with the physical demands of the job, but are still mentally sharp
5. As concepts such as IoT and IIoT take hold and the paradigm of “dispatch to diagnose” changes to “diagnose to dispatch”, you will already have your IoT center of expertise in place.

What if your most senior technician comes into work on Friday and tells you they need to retire to help with the grandkids. As you discuss the situation, you find out they will be taking and picking up the children from school. You suggest that instead of retiring, what if they reduce their hours and become part of your virtual experts’ center and be available between the times they drop off and pick up the grandkids. Now you’ve given them an option to ease themselves out of the workforce gradually and a chance for you to utilize their expertise and capture their knowledge. A potential win-win for both parties. As many of your technician’s get closer to retirement age, the physical demands of their jobs may become more challenging. Having an option for them to reduce the physical nature of their day to day work, while still leveraging (and capturing) their knowledge would be beneficial to all involved.

Think this could work? Know of anyone doing it already? Let me know your thoughts.

Bob is the Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Serenova, a Cloud Contact Center Solution Provider. Bob’s background has been focused on customer interaction management, customer service and support and service operations management with many companies over the course of his career in primarily asset intensive industries (US Air Force, Defense Contracting, High Tech Manufacturing, ERP, CRM, & Contact Center software providers).