White Paper

The Top 5
Challenges For
Field Service

Coresystems AG
www.coresystems.net
 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

Content
#1: Managing the Workforce 4

#2: Customer Demand 5

#3: Inadvertently Giving Away Free Services 5

#4: Lost Revenue When Contracts Expire 6

#5: Unwillingness to Change 7

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 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

Modern business demands an excellent service whether you deal with consumers or
B2B and this applies to every industry. When it comes to field service, this could be
said to be an even more demanding sector as you’re often dealing with customers who
are in a rush to get engineers in and out so that they can go about their daily business.
When running a field service business, it’s not always that simple though. Field work-
ers calling in sick can adversely affect all of the day’s jobs and it can be difficult to
manage staff who are scattered around different locations. Paperwork too is difficult
to keep track of and ensure that it doesn’t get lost, as it’s transported from one depot
to another and scheduling and coordinating engineers to work productively can be
something of a headache.
With this in mind, here at Coresystems we’ve used our long-serving industry exper-
tise to come up with the biggest challenges faced by field service business, and what
you can do to solve them.

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 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

#1: Managing the Workforce

Source: servicecouncil.com
One of the biggest challenges faced is in managing a mobile workforce. Given that
technology has progressed so much in recent years, with many of us now owning a
tablet and smartphone, you’d think that it would have become easier and it has, but it
remains a difficult process to manage efficiently for many companies.
According to research from The Service Council, 40% of 225 organizations asked said
that “field service workforce management was the top challenge hindering improved
field service performance.”
The research highlighted that most of those organizations providing field service con-
sidered HR-centric themes to be of the most important, with 67% of those asked
overall stating that they would like to see improved training. This wasn’t limited to
field or contact service staff either, many of the respondents would have liked to have
seen more training also put in place for managers.

% Field Service
80 Workforce
72% 69% Management
70
62% Priorities 2013
60
Source: servicecouncil.com
50
43%
40 Small
35% 34%
30 28% 31% (< 50 field agents)
23% Mid
20 (50-500)
10
Large
0 (500+)
Training Retention Engagement

Across the board, field service businesses are looking to make their organizations
more employee-centric, looking to implement further training, encourage staff reten-
tion and engagement and attract top talent. With this in mind, when looking to em-
ploy staff, it’s important for field service businesses to let the employee know what’s
in it for them.
A good field service business will offer:
− Modern technological tools to improve communication and productivity in the
field.
− Opportunities for further training for all staff.
− A good unified communications system in the call center aimed at ensuring
that customers are dealt with promptly and that call center staff can access in
real time.
− Computerized paperwork and scheduling so that call center and field staff can
respond quickly to rush jobs.

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 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

Technology is a key enabler to great communications which supports staff and allows
them to carry out their jobs both effectively and efficiently. When it comes to train-
ing, many organizations now deliver staff courses on an e-learning basis, so that the
company intranet can be used to store and track training using an LMS. This also
allows staff to learn in their own time and often, on any device. As the lines between
work and home become increasingly blurred, many staff prefer to carry out training
during the evenings, or even when commuting and e-learning systems enable this.
An employee-centric organization is one that gives its staff the power to collaborate
through technological resources and improve their knowledge whilst having the tools
Source: howstuffworks.com to deliver effective customer service and in turn, satisfaction.

Source: mindflash.com

#2: Customer Demand

Over the last decade we’ve seen a fundamental shift occur between consumers and
businesses, with the former now having more power to demand better products and
customer service. This has mostly come about predominantly thanks to social media
– customers now have an outlet to vent frustration when it comes to how a company
is treating them and what’s more, they do, often and usually embarrassingly for the
company. It’s easy for a business to find themselves on the wrong end of a ‘social me-
dia fail’ when it has made an error when dealing with a customer.
Today’s customer expects service to extend beyond the sale of a product and when it
comes to field service, they expect a technician to appear on time, get the job done
with minimal fuss and leave without making a mess. This is true of both consumers
and business customers, with the latter moving away now from the break-fix model
into SLAs (Service Level Agreements).
Effective field service is a key driver of customer loyalty which in turn drives continu-
ous revenue. Field service managers are therefore under a lot of pressure to get things
right and this is very difficult without the correct technology in place. With this in
mind, field service businesses should utilize mobility solutions to ensure that real
time information can be used to better communicate and collaborate with field ser-
vice staff and customers.

#3: Inadvertently Giving Away Free Services

Keeping track of warranties or the details of individual service contracts is vital to
understanding which services customers are entitled to under contract and which are
not covered. These clauses tend to be buried deep in a proprietary management sys-
tem which means that this data must somehow be extracted and sorted into a system
which is easily accessible to both call center and field staff.
In the past, this might have been done manually and the data sorted into a spread-
sheet or database. This was of course very time-consuming and demanded a certain
level of technological skill. However, it was also very likely to result in errors in the
data and in turn this was passed down the line so that errors were made at an opera-
tional level too.

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 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

In order for data to be used effectively in a field service business, it’s necessary to cap-
ture critical product information in the first instance, as well as warranty and service
information.
This includes:
− Product ID, serial number, lot number and quantity
− Customer and distributor contact information
− Purchase date, shipping and address details
− The product’s physical location and address
− Warranty coverage and service information
Now, technology allows this process to be carried out much more easily and it’s often
not even necessary to employ data scientists to extract it. Modern back-office systems
can be integrated or you can use a field service management system which can be set
up so that your field staff can enter information on site, in real time. These can be
configured to suit your business and can be fully integrated with existing systems to
ensure that all bases are covered.
The ease with which this can be done ensures that your business functions at its most
productive and efficient, whilst ensuring that costly mistakes are avoided.

#4: Lost Revenue When Contracts Expire

Often by the time warranties or contracts expire, it’s too late for you to take advan-
tage of the fact and offer extended service contracts just because you haven’t been
notified in time. This in turn means that your organization is losing revenue and cus-
tomers because you haven’t had the information to act. This can be overcome by get-
ting and processing as much data as possible at the point of order, as discussed above.
Once you’ve done this, then you can maintain an accurate overview of customer ser-
vice contracts so that you can set up proactive notifications for when the contract or
warranty is due to expire. You can then schedule call center staff to contact these cus-
tomers to offer an extended service contract before the old agreement runs out. In
turn this will of course improve revenues, ensure that the customer doesn’t suffer any
gap in service and thus increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Bearing in mind that service contracts can be worth up to 15% of the original product
purchase price, it’s something that every field service organization should consider.

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 White Paper: The Top 5 Challenges For Field Service

#5: Unwillingness to Change

Studies have found that whilst 88% of field service directors say that the strategic use
of technology to drive improved productivity is vital, fewer than one in five of those
asked in a survey said that they have achieved “the field service utopia of fully auto-
mated scheduling, dispatch and mobility systems to deliver real-time visibility of field
service operations.”
The research found that often, businesses held back from updating systems due to a
need to integrate legacy systems and it’s this that’s “preventing many organizations
(sic) from realizing the full potential of technology to increase workforce efficiency, a
Source: trimble.com
crucial factor in achieving service excellence.”
There’s no doubt that the technological advances that we’ve seen in recent years are
having a profound effect on many industries and field service is no exception. It’s of-
ten much more difficult for businesses to ‘bolt-on’ additional technology to legacy
systems and many these should considering new projects aimed at reducing capital
expenditures whilst improving agility.
Technologies which can help with this include:
− Big data technologies – such as business intelligence dashboards to capture
data, sort it and present it in an easily digestible form such as data visualizations
to help staff make instant decisions in real time.
− The cloud – SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions offer a means for field staff to
connect to the intranet anywhere they have an internet connection and many
field service applications will now be hosted in the cloud. The pay on demand na-
ture of many cloud solutions mean that companies can reduce capital expenditure
for software and hardware when using the cloud to host the company’s IT infra-
structure (IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service).
− Unified communications – these provide an integrated solution for call center
staff to be able to access records pulled from telephone, email, IM and social me-
dia for improved customer service.
− Mobility – the smartphone revolution is well upon us and those businesses that
are not onboard will lose out. Using mobile apps that are connected to the depot,
field staff can now check stock availability on the go, check appointments, capture
onsite signatures and much more.
It really can’t be emphasized enough how central a role technology plays in the mod-
ern field service business. Whilst upgrading can be costly, legacy systems tend to be
more expensive to maintain on almost every level. Software licensing models have
changed, as have the nature of service agreements and the cloud offers a cost-effec-
tive means to have an entire IT setup without the need for huge premises. HR also has
a large role to play and research shows that many field businesses are now concentrat-
ing on attracting and retaining top talent across the board. However, in order to real-
ly make employees happy, it’s necessary to give them the tools to do their jobs well,
implement further training and communicate effectively with customers. Those field
service businesses that get this right are the ones which are more likely to emerge as
industry leaders in coming years.

About Coresystems
Coresystems is a leading provider of mobile and cloud-based field service and
workforce management software for mid-sized and large enterprises’ field service
organizations. Since Coresystems’ founding in 2006, more than 190,000 users
across the world have utilized Coresystems’ innovative, real-time field service
management software to improve their business and field service processes. Core-
Coresystems systems has also pioneered “crowd service” – which allows customers to leverage
CH: +41 56 500 22 44 an Uber-like platform to find available field service technicians in real-time. Core-
DE: +49 761 887 95 777 systems is headquartered in Switzerland with international offices in San Francis-
USA: +1 (415) 887-1944 co, Miami, Berlin, Freiburg, Shanghai, São Paulo and London.
www.coresystems.net

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