Field Service: The Ultimate Customer Touch

Companies have spent a lot of time and effort trying to drive the costs out of delivering post-sales field service. They pushed as much support as possible to remote methods, including to the call center. And for the repairs that absolutely, positively had to be done in the field, they scaled back the number of spare parts that field technicians used to hoard on their trucks, optimized routes to be more efficient, and tightly managed work orders and schedules. These are all great advances, driven primarily by field service management software solutions. But something funny happened along the way - companies started to realize that the field service technician wasn't just a liability to be managed and optimized, but a potential ambassador for customer relationships.

First, let's talk about the advances that have made field service far less costly. The Holy Grail for both the company and the customer is enabling the three Rs on each call: Right Tech, with the Right Part, at the Right Time. The embrace of geolocation and skills mapping technologies have enabled forward thinking companies to optimize the skills and time of their techs. One of our customers, a home services provider, developed a guided call path for the agents who take incoming calls from homeowners, most of whom have no clue as to what's causing the leak in their basement or why their furnace won't kick on. Rather than investing in expensive training for agents, they now use technology to walk through the process of querying the homeowner about the problem. By gathering the right information, they can assign a field tech with the right credentials, licenses, tools, and parts as well as one who is the best geographical match. Call turnaround times are slashed, meaning each tech can be more ...