The Future of Field Service: Sales, Big Data, Mobility, and Internet of Things

Field service has always been fairly complicated, from how it's charged to how it's delivered. It stretches across multiple dimensions of time and geography, and involves an intricate dance of customer needs, workforce skills and availability, and parts. The act of tracking all of the moving pieces and creating usable data is beyond the scope of most ERP suites, and has generated its own class of software to manage it. But a number of trends are going to make field service management even more complex in the future. 

Let's start with pricing. There are many ways to charge for post-sales field service, including limited time warranty support and annual contracts. Most companies offer tiered pricing for different levels of service including after-hours and rapid response.  The rule of thumb is that there is no rule of thumb when it comes to pricing - companies may have dozens of offerings, each of which must be managed in order to avoid leaving money on the table. Companies must track these entitlements and service-level agreements (SLAs) closely and have the data quickly at hand when a customer calls for service. If the customer is not entitled to one-hour response time, or if their product warranty has expired, then the company must make sure it bills the appropriate cost for services delivered. 

Even better, though, is to use the field service management system to track customer choices and use the data to enable proactive sales. Expiring warranties can be converted into annual contracts; next-day service can be upgraded to four-hour response time; reactive support can be upsold to a proactive "never down" contract. Look for field service management systems to extend this trend of being used as a sales tool.

With the right system, ...