Effective Enterprise Communication: The Foundation Of Strategic Field Service

By Sarah Nicastro, Editor In Chief, Field Technologies | Created In Partnership With Zinc

Do you view field service strategically? Leading organizations recognize that service is a great differentiator — stellar field service can be the path to setting your company apart, creating new revenue streams, and driving profits. These organizations are focusing on initiatives such as migrating from break-fix work to outcomes-based service models, better understanding and delivering on customer expectations, and embracing the need to continually improve operations by developing its people, processes, and technology use.

At the heart of all of this incredible transformation in field service is one thing: communication. Effective communication is what will enable you to meet and exceed your customers’ expectations. Real-time access to knowledge or assistance that helps your field workers answer questions almost immediately leads to a happy customer. When a technician finishes a job and can alert the back office in real time, they can quickly be deployed to the next task and downtime is minimized. When your field technicians are armed with real-time, two-way communication they feel more capable and confident in their roles. Without an effective communication method as your foundation, layering technologies on will cause headaches and frustration instead of their intended positive impact.

In this report, we examine how effective enterprise communication enables field service organizations to be more intentional and strategic in their service delivery. Field Technologies conducted a survey of 100 field service leaders in organizations that employ 50 or more field technicians to gather insights on how field service organizations are communicating today, how effective they feel these methods are, and to determine the opportunity that exists to enable teams to communicate more efficiently and effectively. Ninety percent of survey respondents indicated that real-time communication is either mission-critical (50 percent) or very important (40 percent) to their field workers being able to do their jobs effectively. With that being the case, let’s examine the current methods of communication being used and discuss some of the ways companies can improve upon those.