Field Service: The Foundation for Innovation in Customer Experience

People raised on cloud computing and throw-away electronics never experienced the old-school field service technician. These techs drove to customer sites in company vans laden with spare parts, toolkits, and binders full of schematics. They were the salt of the technology earth, and an entire category of software was developed to manage their efficiency. For years, field service management was the boring sibling to other business management suites, particularly as remote software fixes outpaced the need for onsite, hands-on repair.

But there's been a paradigm shift in field service. Rather than focusing only on the three core pieces of service - scheduling, work order management, and mobile - today's executives are recognizing that innovative service technology can alter the dynamic of how a service business can be run. Field service has become a springboard from which companies can create a long tail of services.

This shift started when tight margins in product development required companies to look elsewhere to increase profits. One avenue was to better control the costs of service delivery, which required technology that could manage the depth, nuance, and complexity of multilayered entitlements and service level agreements. Solutions now can dynamically change based on new data, proactively generate new service requests as needed, and contain the flexible business logic that makes the information useful.

Yes, these solutions have resulted in measurable improvements in service delivery and efficiency. They have helped reduce field engineer (FE) windshield time and return visits, while increasing annual entitlement revenue. They have decreased time to repair while increasing first-time fix rates. But they also have enabled companies to go a step beyond, to ...