How The Connected Consumer Is Revolutionizing Field Service

By Julio Hartstein, Director of the Field and Project Service Customer Success team at Microsoft

In field service, as in other areas of commerce and industry, the most successful businesses are those that let their customers drive change and progress. As most field service providers recognize today, through making the metamorphosis from break-fix to more proactive, customer-centric business models, mobile service activity can turn profits and add value to sales and marketing efforts. 

Your Customers as Agents of Change 

As customers enjoy ever-more advanced ways to connect with service providers, so their influence on the way business is conducted increases. In fact, connectivity itself is leading consumers of field service to demand and drive change in the way providers interact with them. 

It wasn’t long ago that customers had only two options to communicate in real time with service providers—the telephone and the face-to-face interaction. Now they are spoiled for choice. Your customers might still wish to communicate by phone, but they’re also just as likely to require text or real-time online chat for their interactions with your service call center, field technicians, and management team. 

Because your customers want these new options, you need to provide them, or lose out to competitors that do. As a result, your customers are acting as change agents, driving your organization to improve relationships by offering the communication options that connected-consumers demand.