Recent Service Council research reveals that the current pandemic is causing field service leaders to re-focus their efforts on examining and streamlining the service delivery processes in their organizations. Many of our customers and prospects are echoing that sentiment. They – and we – believe a renewed emphasis is required on fundamental service practices, such as:
- Agility – enabling technicians and technical support staff to respond and resolve customer problems quickly, with minimal – or even zero – on-site time.
- Safety – ensuring the field technicians, the customers, the back-office staff, and all relevant stakeholders are properly protected and as safe as possible from illness and accidents.
- Speed – empowering field service staff to minimize on-site time with customers by providing them with relevant and accurate digital documentation and technical support, in real time.
- Supply Chain – minimizing return visits by identifying the most likely parts needed in remote triage efforts before dispatching a technician, and by properly planning inventory stock levels and placements.
Service leaders want to be able to deliver consistent, high-quality service regardless of which technician, which technical support person, or which call center agent provides the service. Yes, it’s true that many technicians and customer support people develop strongly positive relationships with the customers they serve, that’s great for the customer, the employee, and the service company. But it doesn’t mean the service should be less positive, less productive, less friendly if the usual technician or support person is on holiday or vacation, is out sick, or has moved on to a new position. Customers expect the same quality, professional service regardless of who delivers it. It’s service management’s job to ensure that service delivery is unswerving.
Service Council research also shows that nearly two-thirds of field service technicians spend an hour or more each day on paperwork. While data gathering and reporting is essential and indeed, very valuable, the amount of paperwork time required in many service organizations is an inhibitor, not an enabler, of service efficiency and productivity.
Appify can help address each of these challenges, and more.
Flexibility, connectivity, and deployment speed empower service companies to tailor data access, service processes, workflows, and data gathering to each organization’s unique needs.
“Drag and Drop Building Blocks” can be used to create unique applications that are specific to a required process, or series of processes. The resulting applications can then be easily connected to dozens of other business and IT data sources, such as an ERP system, a legacy service management system, a CRM system, and more. They can then be deployed in a matter of hours or days (not months) to any device in your network, and they can be accessed either online or offline.
The nimbleness and deployment speed inherent in Appify’s solutions can empower service organizations to quickly rise to the challenges imposed by the “new normal.” Rapid digital access to asset service history, asset configuration and revision level data, service manuals and bulletins, knowledge bases, videos, and more can help speed problem identification and resolution. Inspection and process checklists can assist in fast and accurate data capture and in making sure that proper safety steps are followed in preparing for and then delivering a service. Accurate, real-time, and instantly visible parts information can boost first-time-fix rates, minimize repeat visits, and may be helpful in empowering customers to replace a defective part themselves, thus avoiding an expensive dispatch. There’s little question that field service will evolve to meet the challenges of the new conditions in which we live. Technology solutions like Appify will be invaluable in moving that evolution in a positive direction.
