You know this ends up costing your business more money, man-hours, mileage, and negative customer experience; seldom does it turn out to be a first time-right-fix. What's the best alternative?
Improper allocation of resources and work schedules are the most common bottlenecks in the path to delivering the best field service experience, or as we call it - the 'first time fix'. With technician productivity lying at the center of this, disparate installations and scheduling misalignment are huge challenges along the way. At the end of the day, the above scenario leads to a very high average loss of earning potential due to poor scheduling.
There is a need to address issues of service interruptions through the means of prediction and proactive response to enhance customer experience. However, that’s easier said than done especially in the absence of connected or networked hardware installations.
Challenges that don't let you exceed your customer expectations
The geographical spread of installations
Performance tracking for each of these installations
Predictive maintenance for all installations
Dedicating technicians for a wide geography
These field service challenges exist together in the system in synchronization and demand traceability. Therefore, there is a need for organizations to resort to ‘Connected Field Services’ so that they can be empowered with the right tools and systems that transform the customer experience with the way field service is being offered. These connected aspects help the business gain enhanced visibility into the performance of their product/service, ensuring maximum customer satisfaction.
Why Connected Field Services?
Connecting every aspect of a business is digital transformation in true sense. With customers at the epicentre of the functioning of a business, a proactive and predictive service model is the best approach.
With Connected Field Service, business organizations can seamlessly enable a service model that takes care of disparate installations within wide geography and ticks off all the right boxes for scheduling alignment.
Through the combination of IoT diagnostics, sensors, workforce, scheduling, and asset tracking on the same platform, businesses can now optimize their field services to the best of their capabilities.
First time fix: Go proactive or go home
With IoT connected devices in place, proactive alerts about the performance of installation can help businesses reduce the downtime and swiftly act upon issues way before the customer notices them. With prompts about an anomaly in the data, automated workflows can be initiated as soon as some sort of issue is detected way before they disrupt the customer’s peace of mind.
Service technicians are scheduled for their regular maintenance calls well in advance where they can accelerate the repair time with a ‘first time fix’ approach. They are aware of the user-case and have access to a pre-visit review of service history they are allotted to, ensuring that the problem is resolved right away. The right technician at the right time, in the right place, can bring down overall maintenance costs.
The value proposition for Connected field services also lies in the fact that businesses can now better justify their upselling and cross-selling opportunities with adequate operational data.
Connected Field services empower and mobilize service engineers to optimize their performance on the job with better scheduling and preparation for efficient troubleshooting. With the use of IoT enabled installations fortified by Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms, they can further delight the customer.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service provides you the advantage of scheduling optimization for Field Service engineers/technicians based on location, time, and the required skill set for the job with a standardized approach. Since customers do not expect surprises in services, a connected field service approach can help reduce variability emerging from unscheduled breakdowns and time to repair, helping you move the business ahead of the traditional hit-and-trial field service appointments.
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