Essential Technologies For Mobile Field Service Management

By Kurt Dobbins, President, Nrby

Well-oiled field service organizations are invaluable. They drive higher profitability, top-quality services/products and enviable customer experience. To keep them running at peak efficiency and effectiveness, you have to invest in enabling technologies. As Aberdeen found, best-in-class service businesses are three times more likely than others to have increased their technology spend.

So, which technologies should you focus on? When it comes to empowering field technicians and management to achieve fast, reliable service and streamlined operations, you want location-based services, geofencing, mobile messaging, IoT and Field Service Management (FSM) systems. Let’s take a look at why, and how you can leverage them in an integrated mobile field service strategy.

• Location-Based Services

With all the major social networks having adopted location-based features, it’s fair to say we’re pretty familiar with how they can be used in personal situations. Yet we are still only scratching the surface of what’s possible in the business world and, particular, field service operations.

Location is vitally important in field service. Why? Because field locations are where the field service work gets done. Whether it’s a customer service repair, an asset inspection, a plant maintenance activity or a response to a service outage caused by storm damage or other unforeseen events, location is the key variable that associates the worker with their work.