Indeed, field service organizations have always been faced with the major challenge of keeping their customers’ machines up and running. And after years of being loss leaders, in recent times field service organizations have been expected to actually make a profit. This has made achieving traditional KPI’s even more important. If you’re an executive in field service, you are familiar with all of them: Improving first-time fix rates, reducing no problem found calls, reducing second visits, improving MTTR, and many more.
Interestingly, in addition, the most common concern that we hear from 95% of the field service executives we talk to is the loss of experienced technicians to retirement. How do you replace that know-how and expertise? How can you enable the more junior techs who replace them to perform as well? We talked about this in more detail in a post earlier this year.
Now COVID is here and all of these KPIs and challenges are still facing service organizations. They have not gone away. And the pandemic has added more. These are just some of them:
- Travel restrictions have FSE’s staying at home
- There can be more red tape when they do go on-site
- If there are confirmed cases on-site FSE’s cannot visit
- How do you leverage your experts now?
- Social distancing makes calls longer
We did some polling during our webinar and here is a table showing the results.
Obviously, there is an impact. And today, most service organizations are dealing with it by using collaborative tools such as AR, Desktop Sharing, and other “facetime-like” applications. All of these are aimed at keeping field service techs and support personnel physically away from their customers. But what these applications lack is the intelligence to solve problems. You still need a human expert somewhere to identify and solve problems. And the right human may not always be available right away.
So what about customer self-service? Half of the respondents in our polling indicated a desire to enable more customer self-service. During our webinar, Sasha Ilyukhin of Tetra Pak said “It’s the small issues causing the most downtime accumulated over the course of the year. This is where the hotspot is…”
According to this article, 67% of customers prefer self-service over speaking to a company representative.
RevTwo Navigator can enable your customers to solve their more common problems so they can keep your machines running. There are numerous benefits:
- Reduces the risks involved with site visits today, for both your service techs and your customers.
- Improves customer uptime
- Optimizes the use of your customers time
- Improves customer satisfaction
- Enables your experts to focus on the less common, more complicated service issues
And as a field service executive, it also avoids your worst-case scenario.