6 Reasons Your Field Technicians Aren't Using Your Mobile App
By Sara MacQueen, Big Fish
When an organization commits time, money and people to implementing a mobile field solution, its leaders have several hopes in mind, such as:
- Make field technicians more efficient so they can take on additional revenue-producing tasks
- Consolidate back office headcount as the need for manual entry is reduced or eliminated
- Improve customer experience by boosting transparency and responsiveness
- Elevate brand perceptions by using the newest technology
All those hopes are dashed if the field technicians, envisioned as the primary users of the app, won’t use it. This can happen whether you have a custom-developed mobile app, or you’re using a third-party field service solution.
When it becomes clear that your field technicians are not using your mobile app, it’s important to understand why. Even more important is knowing what causes this before you choose a software vendor, so you can prevent it from happening in the first place.
More often than not, the reason your field technicians don’t use your mobile app will fall into one or more of the following six categories.
1. Your App Doesn’t Meet Their Needs
When a new mobile app is handed off to field service reps, they have an expectation that it will do all the things they need it to. If the app fails to meet their expectations, they might stop using it all together.
Your field service app may work exactly as designed, but if it’s not aligned with how your technicians do their job, it will be met with resistance.
The key to finding or building an app that meets your field team’s needs, is to involve a representative group of them in the purchasing process from the very beginning.
2. Your App Is Not Easy To Use
Ask a team of field service reps if the new mobile app they just downloaded is easy or hard to use and you’re likely to get answers that cover the entire spectrum of possibilities. Individuals are different, and whether they view a new app as a convenience, or a burden, will differ from person to person.
What makes an app difficult to use?
- Not being familiar with using apps. For some people, a smartphone is nothing more than a way to call their family and friends. Some of them may be your best field technicians. They are smart, capable and reliable techs, but they find it difficult to adjust to using your app on a smartphone or tablet. Since it is new behavior for them, they will need more training and practice before they are comfortable with the app.
- Conditions of use. How your field team uses the app, and under what conditions, is a factor in how quickly they adopt the app. Consider these two examples. In cold climates, techs who work outdoors and frequently wear gloves will have a difficult time accurately pressing small buttons that are very close together. Similarly, techs that work outside in high-glare conditions will have a tough time reading their device’s screen. These examples illustrate how important it is for a company to design the app to suit the environment it will be used in.
- Poor design. Some apps are so poorly thought out and designed that even the most tech-savvy person will struggle to use them.
If your managers are hearing that the app is difficult to use, a few clarifying questions will get at the root of the problem.
What makes an app easier to use? Training, support, practice and involving real users from the get-go so it is designed with them in mind.
Training should be provided for all technicians, whether they all work out of one location or are distributed among several. People learn in different ways, so employ a variety of training options to ensure you meet every technician’s needs. In person training, videos, conference calls and guided practice sessions all help.
User manuals can help your team find answers to questions once the app is in use, but a user manual is no substitute for training.
3. Old Work Routines Can Be Hard To Change
People, and teams, become set in their ways. It can be difficult to replace the way something always has been done with a totally different process, even if the new process is an improvement.
Some members of your team might be early adopters who embrace any kind of technical change, while others are the exact opposite. You may even have some field service workers who don’t like technology at all and prefer working the way they always have because it doesn’t involve technology.
It’s easy to assume that the older an employee is, the more resistant they will be to change, and that younger employees will embrace change. But that is not always the case. There are early adopters in every generation, and people in each generation who are resistant to change. You can’t assume that any individual will respond a certain way simply because of their demographic co-hort.
What you can do is make sure you implement a good training program and invite those who are most enthusiastic about the change to serve as agents who help less receptive employees through the transition.
4. Your Field Technicians Feel Left Out
Imagine your boss telling you that for the last six months a committee of experts has been working on a plan to make your job easier. Now all you have to do is learn to do everything in a completely different way and employ these brand-new processes as soon as possible. Might you feel a little left out?
That is exactly how field technicians feel when their employer informs them that they are implementing new software — without the technicians’ involvement — and all techs will be using it as soon as possible.
You might think that in a business environment where culture and transparency are highly valued, this kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore — but it does. And when it does, many employees resist using the new app, which puts the company’s investment in the app at risk.
The easiest and best way to keep your field teams from feeling left out is to involve them in the planning, selection or design processes from the beginning. Here are some ways to do that:
- Include a field technician on the committee that is driving the project
- Invite several of your field service reps to provide feedback during the design phase before development begins, or during the vendor selection phase if using a third-party solution
- Make sure an enthusiastic field technician contributes to the discovery process with the vendor and becomes a cheerleader for the app throughout its design and development
Keeping your field team in the loop, listening to what they have to say and keeping in mind that their use of the app will go a long way in determining its success, will help ensure that your field technicians do not feel left out.
5. Your Mobile App Slows Them Down
Just in case the section above doesn’t convince you that field technicians really do need to be involved with your new app from the beginning, this should. The following true story is an example of what can happen when you don’t involve your employees in decisions about technology that impacts their job.
Management of a logistics company that had been using legacy software for years decided it was time to “upgrade” their platform. They did so without involving any of their employees who used the software, some of whom had been with the company for more than 20 years. The employees had refined their operation to the point where they could complete their most common tasks in just a couple steps and did so hundreds of times a day.
Since the company didn’t involve the actual users of the software, they didn’t have real insight into how their employees used it to do their jobs. When the new logistics platform was introduced, the two steps they needed to take on the legacy system were replaced by six steps on the new software. As a result, the entire team had to start working overtime to accomplish the same amount of work they had been getting done before.
In this case, the company spent millions of dollars on a “solution” that negatively impacted operations and cost them even more money, when the goal was to streamline operations.
The lesson here is clear. Involve your users and understand their needs before you start planning.
6. Doubt And Fear
If an app is slow or buggy, the technicians who use it will doubt its effectiveness. They’ve been doing their jobs well and want to keep doing so. Now they have a mobile app to use that is slowing them down and perhaps, causing them to make errors they never made before.
This leaves a technician with some poor options:
- Use the new app, even though it slows them down and causes them to make errors
- Report the new app to management as not working correctly
- Stop using the app and go back to doing things the way that’s worked in the past
Since their livelihood depends on their use of the new app, each of these options comes with a certain amount of fear:
- Fear of being blamed for forced mistakes and delays
- Fear of claiming the new app doesn’t work properly when management thinks it does
- Fear of being accused of not being a team player
What would you do under these circumstances? For a field technician, the best option may appear to be to stop using the app.
How To Make Sure Your Field Technicians Use Your Mobile App
If all of this makes you despair that efforts to improve your organization through technology aren’t worth it, don’t.
Organizations can use technology to gain strategic and competitive advantages. The six “reasons” we’ve provided are warnings or mistakes that organizations sometimes make. You can proactively avoid making these mistakes by following these four tips:
- Get your field technicians involved in the software selection and design process from the beginning. See reason #4 for ways to do that.
- Provide training, support and practice time that meets the needs of all your field service technicians. See reason #2 for suggestions.
- Value and implement the input your technicians provide.
- Let your field team know you understand that the new app entails a learning curve. Rather than going live with it on the first day, give them time to practice before it’s rolled out across your organization.
Apply these tips to your company’s project and your field service technicians will feel involved, respected and valued. They will buy into your new technology. What’s more, your mobile field solution will be better as a result.
About Big Fish
Big Fish is a boutique mobile app design, development and consulting studio. We exist to help our clients innovate and grow with custom-crafted iOS and Android applications. Field Service companies hire us when a generic, one-size-fits-all software solution won’t meet their needs. As a 100 percent senior level team, we hit the ground running so you can get your Big Idea to market sooner. After-all, innovation requires speed and agility – with Big Fish you’re in capable hands.