Supporting Your Field Service Organization Through New Technology

By Bill Pollock, President & Principal Consulting Analyst at Strategies For Growth^SM

The results from Strategies For Growth^SM’s (SFG^SM) 2014 Field Service Management Benchmark Survey reveal that Field Service Organizations (FSOs) aspiring to attain Best Practices do not merely look at outcomes, like improving the bottom line, or increasing customer satisfaction; they also look at ways in which to identify the root causes of major problems and leverage process improvement opportunities through the implementation of effective technologies and tools to support their resources both in the field and in the front and back offices that support them.

For example, a majority of FSOs currently support their field technicians with a variety of online capabilities, including the ability to initiate service orders (80%), ability to track and update the current status of work orders (80%), access to product schematics/ documentation (68%), access to customer/asset service history (66%) and ability to provide customers with an Estimated Time for Arrival (ETA) (59%). Each of these capabilities also reflects between 21% and 30% of the respondent base citing them as planned actions for the next 12 months as well, suggesting a strong and growing importance within the overall services community.

Whether it is access to data and information that represents the past (i.e., customer/asset history), the present (i.e., current status of work orders), or the future (i.e., providing customers with an ETA), the leading FSOs already recognize the importance of real-time data and information access.

However, the key to success for many best practices FSOs is that they also provide their customers with a comparable set of online tools to make both their – and their field service provider’s – lives easier. By providing customers with the right mix of Web-enabled self-help capabilities, the leading FSOs have essentially been able to run their respective services operations more effectively, while also increasing existing levels of satisfaction by allowing customers to become part of their own “support team”.

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