What Will Drive The Future Of A Maturing Mobile Field Service Landscape?

As mobile field service evolves from a method of location tracking, towards a fully realized mobile workforce management utility, what do service firms need to know?

Mobile Tracking is a Given. What now?

Forward-thinking field service managers have long understood that in order to have a fleet that functions well, you need to be able to track, manage, and provide oversight to your workforce with ease. The increased affordability of these utilities in the consumer space has made it so that even a mom-and-pop service shop can monitor its mobile workforce.

Aberdeen’s recent Mobile Field Service Survey offered a window into the levels of maturity for firms across the service spectrum, and the results were illuminating. To determine levels of maturity, we categorized capabilities that organizations employ and developed three groups:

• Immature: only investing in capabilities specific to location tracking
• Moderately Mature: tracking location and performance
• Mature: focused on several areas (such as data cleansing, breaking down business silos, incorporating mobile data into systems of engagement)

Based on these criteria and our research, Aberdeen identified that 54% of service firms met the criteria for mature mobile providers.

Such a high number was a surprising finding, but it speaks to the ubiquity of location tracking in service. All service technicians have a tracking device — their phone — available at most times. This makes mobile workforce management the default, allowing organizations to make investments to augment those technologies beyond their consumer roots.

Building the embedded technology infrastructure to manage a mobile workforce is not the end of the story, of course. Iterative advancements will continue to push the capabilities and expectations of mobile field service forward, and today’s mature firm will become tomorrow’s laggard — without the appropriate mobile strategy.