Technology is critical for growing and improving field services that put organizations ahead of the game. Businesses need technology to be highly effective and efficient. This includes core infrastructure and productivity tools that follow, understand, and interpret consumer behavior and scalable field service. Companies must look at all relevant categories as they upgrade their technology stacks.
Using new technologies effectively is crucial in boosting productivity and increasing revenue. According to the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), there are specific ways to implement new technologies into field service organizations to facilitate new and effective outcomes. This field service blog will outline how TSIA research found that field service management (FSM) solutions improve productivity and increase revenue.
Boosting Productivity
Peer-to-peer support is vital in bringing new technologies online and enables sharing internally and externally. In addition, consumption monitoring and analytics can help organizations understand and track how effectively new users understand and adapt.
Efficient contract management also boosts productivity, which field service management technologies assist, ensuring you meet response time commitments. Additionally, contract management tools adjacent to incident management tools work across sales, marketing, and service to ensure the program tracks leads, opportunities, campaigns, accounts, and contact history. These are crucial to improving productivity.
Investing in new field service technology stacks helps manage and organize outcomes by tracking analytics for customer experience, email response management, scheduling, device management, parts and logistics, repair, diagnostics, and recurring revenue management. In addition, customer-facing productivity and infrastructure layers allow stacks to meet technological needs that improve productivity.
Increasing Revenue
High-quality field service requires organizations to update technology stacks and may offer a high return on investment, states TSIA’s recent Field Services Technology Stack: Automation Is Critical to Boosting Productivity and Increasing Revenue. Three components to focus on are contract/entitlement, case management, and scheduling/dispatch systems, where services align with outcomes, which minimizes “free service” that can erode margins critical to an organization’s success.
Leveraging mobile and video technology gives field service technicians access to current and past issues that increase first-visit repair rates by up to five percentage points. As smart tech continues to grow, connected products will help improve handling the variety, velocity, and volume of data produced. In addition, consumption monitoring is a key part of field service teams’ mobility tools that improve sales with their analytic capacity. Upgrading your stack is a great way to boost revenue ultimately.
Additionally, field services companies are taking steps to differentiate their offerings by outsourcing some of their operations to third-party providers. According to TSIA’s State of Field Services 2022, 78% of organizations say their main reason for outsourcing is to broaden the geographic location they serve, allowing them more opportunities for revenue generation.
Integrating Technology
TSIA recommends integrating technologies in the initial phase of implementing field service technology solutions. Identify important integration points in the first phase, and avoid pushing these integrations to the second phase, which typically doesn’t happen.
Field service organizations need to remember there is nothing wrong with asking FSM technology providers questions. Technology advancements help generate revenue and productivity, but fully grasping them takes energy and study. Questions help facilitate answers to technological successes.
And finally, TSIA research reminds us to benchmark the technology footprint against other field service organizations. Hence, you know how you measure up in important categories, such as optimization, quality, and revenue goals. Integrating knowledge and incident management can drive improved production and performance.
References:
Vele Galovski, John Ragsdale, 2018 Field Services Technology Stack: Automation Is Critical to Boosting Productivity and Increasing Revenue, TSIA.
Vele Galovski, The State of Field Services 2022, TSIA.