AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Paul Whitelam

ClickSoftware’s Paul Whitelam wonders if crowdsourcing could be the solution to fluctuating demands on a workforce that field service companies have been waiting for...

Service organisations have long relied on third parties to augment their core workforce to manage fluctuating demand, emergency work, and expansion to new regions.

The Service Council reported that 76% of service organisations have used a third party for service delivery and to augment their regular workforce.

By 2020, Gartner predicts 40% of service work will be delivered by contractors.

This increasing reliance on an external workforce appears to run parallel with some anxiety about talent shortages. The Service Council reported 70% of service organisations expect a talent shortage in the next 5-10 years. Many already struggle with hiring.

While contractors have supplied support to service organisations for a long time, there is growing interest in tapping into the gig economy and free agents to build an ad hoc workforce.

Rapidly scaling your field service workforce is a challenge under any circumstance, but a blended workforce can deliver many benefits. Let’s explore the pros and cons of outsourcing service work, and compare how crowdsourcing and contractors can play a role.

The Case for Outsourced Service

Variable demand persistently vexes anyone charged with scheduling a service workforce and forecasting the level of resources needed to do the expected and unexpected work.

Seasonal differences and large stand-alone projects are common reasons for temporarily increased demand, along with emergency and disaster relief work.

 

When expanding to new geographic areas, a contracted workforce enables a service organisation to quickly increase available coverage without the delay of needing to recruit, hire, and train a completely new core team. This separation from the core workforce can also provide a convenient way to pilot new technology or procedures before adopting them across the entire business.

Adding specialised skills to your roster is another massive benefit of outsourced service. A contracted workforce allows for new types of work to be done without the entire team requiring retraining.

Blended Workforce Challenges

Adding contractors to your workforce introduces challenges. Most stem from a lack of visibility into what happens once a job is assigned and accepted.

The service engineer is often the only face-to-face interaction a customer will have with a company, and serves as an ambassador capable of upholding or undermining the brand.

To blend your internal and external workforce successfully, the right processes and technology are essential. Your service organisation needs the ability to locate third-party resources, appropriately gauge their availability and skill level, track job status, and provide the support and information needed to deliver service in a manner consistent with business policies and SLAs, and customer expectations.

Some contractors will resist the adoption of new tools and processes when it forces change, but most will ultimately adopt your preferred solutions once they understand the value.

 

In a recent study from Michael Blumberg, KPIs for The Blended Workforce In the Gig Economy, his consultancy found that nearly 70% of field service organisations used a freelancer management system of some kind for staffing purposes.

Managing Contractors and Crowdsourcing in the Gig Economy

According to Intuit, the gig economy now makes up 34% of the US labor workforce. With new tools, devices, and skills, imagine how many thousands more will choose to work remotely as a part of this budding freelance economy in the coming years.

Millennials, as a subset of the working population, have already upended what had long been accepted as a standard employee-employer relationship. They are tech-savvy, adaptable, and value career advancement and mobility over longterm employment. Many are more comfortable with freelance and temporary employment and provide much of the supply to meet the demand for a more flexible workforce.

Making the most of your blended workforce will require not just better technology, but also a shift in mindset. While visibility into what’s happening is paramount to managing an internal or external workforce, service organisations will also need to consider how to best measure the performance of contracted workers and keep them engaged and enthusiastic about their work.

 

The most sophisticated service organisations have gained and maintained a competitive advantage through maximising productivity and optimising customer experience. A blended workforce should be able to extend the same level of efficiency and customer focus to its outermost layers.

Customer satisfaction and loyalty should be the ultimate goal for any business. With the right plan and solutions in place, any permanent or ad hoc worker should be able to provide the seamless experience your customers want and deserve.

 

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Whether useful or not, hundreds of  smartwatches, glasses, health trackers, and even smart jewelry have hit the market in the past several years.

There are connected lights that dim when a users peaks into their smartwatch. Motorcycle helmets with heads-up displays alerting riders they’re driving too fast. Temperature tracking pacifiers that alert parents to sudden changes.

There’s even a washing machine that turns on when a service dog barks at it. Woof, indeed.

But in service, wearables have been slow to catch on.

Yet opportunities for leveraging these devices to improve field service management outcomes most certainly exist. While fitness trackers and consumer watches seem to be dominating current markets, research has shown that the broader point-of-sales category is experiencing double digit growth.

 

In the following paragraphs, we uncover three ways wearables could improve service for organisations willing to make the technology investment.

Route Optimisation and Safety

Route optimisation, and improved route efficiency can both bolster service profits. Naturally, keeping techs safe on the road is also a no-brainer.

Wearables provide a path to improving both.

An array of mobile and wearable technology are making route mapping, hands-free communication, and field-based driving more efficient every year.

Organisations implementing connected car technology for optimised route mapping are currently realising major cost savings. For example, the UPS ORION route mapping overhaul has projected annual reductions of 100 million miles driven and fuel savings of 10 million gallons per year for the organisation. No small feat, if scaled correctly. But route optimization is just the first step.

If empowered with smartwatches, tech safety and route efficiency could be improved through handsfree communication and route updates delivered via these devices, in real time.

How?

Many service techs currently must field calls via smartphones while on the road (if it’s legal while driving in their state). This requires them to take one hand off the wheel, furthering distraction.

Many also get driving directions from this same device.

If equipped with smartwatches capable of delivering directions and calls via voice technology, techs could focus more attention on driving.

Real-Time Calls & Logging Service Details via Voiceactivated Wearables

An obvious reality in most service roles is the need to work with your hands. If a call comes in, or job details must be logged, the tech has to stop the work they are performing in order to take a call, or jot down some notes.

Wearables could prove useful in keeping techs focused on the task at hand, while still taking calls, or logging service details via voice-activated technology. Many smartwatches and wearables come with voice-activated features baked right into their framework.

 

This means common note-taking applications, text messages, email, or phone calls can be used via voice-activation.

The tech simply speaks the service details into their notes, sends an email, or makes a call without ever moving away from the service task at hand.

Giving Techs Access to Remote Knowledge While in the Field

High first-time fix rates and speedy service resolutions are essential to customer satisfaction   and profit margins. But all too often, techs arrive to job sites with the wrong parts, a lack of knowledge about the customer service request, or face a service scenario they cannot resolve.

The bridge to better service is giving techs all the resources they need, in order to fix customer jobs on the first visit. Aberdeen reports that nearly 75% of best-in-class service organisations provide techs with access to remote experts while in the field.

Wearables could be the golden ticket to connecting field techs to remote experts.

 

How?

Wearable glasses technology allows field techs to stream live video feeds from service sites directly back to headquarters or an expert, in real-time. This means experts can guide techs through challenging scenarios, without needing to be on-site for every job. This opens up a world of possibilities for remote training, logging on-site service problems, and field worker safety.

Plus, Gartner predicts smart glasses could save the field service industry $1 billion per year. We couldn’t agree more.

For more news, trends, updates and advice, head to the ClickSoftware blog homepage https://www. clicksoftware.com/blog/

 

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Paul Whitelam, VP Product Marketing, ClickSoftware, outlines five key technologies he believes will soon be shaping our industry...

The field service industry continued its rapid transformation in 2016, with emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and predictive analytics increasingly changing how field service suppliers manage their workforce.

Service-centric businesses are constantly looking for new ways to meet customers’ growing demand for convenient and communicative customer service.

2017 is likely to bring continued change and innovation, with new technologies reshaping service operations and delivery. It’s a great time to examine what’s in store for the industry this year, and what field service leaders might want to have on their radar. Here are five technologies set to improve the field service industry in 2017:

1) Machine learning and AI

Machine learning (when algorithms evolve and improve over time) and artificial intelligence (AI) also drove new changes in 2016.

With the ability to better process, interpret, and learn from data, more services suppliers can be predictive instead of reactive, and will be able to automate the tasks that don’t need human input. Increasingly sophisticated forecasting driven by machine learning will drive efficiency increases and cost savings.

2) Reaping the rewards of new realities

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) were a major force last year. Even though virtual and augmented reality are predominantly used in games such as Pokémon Go and The Lab, both are being adopted more widely in a workplace context to enhance employee productivity and customer experiences.

In 2017, an increasing number of field service engineers will start to see VR and AR initiatives being introduced to support their training and day-to-day work.

 

As experienced engineers age out of the workforce and businesses try to maximise existing resources, VR and AR will increasingly play a role in enabling training, remote coaching, and viewing more information on each task via wearables.

3) Connected customers

As our recent research showed, customer expectations are growing rapidly around the world. The demand for fast, friendly and high quality service that also fits with customers’ busy and varying schedules is becoming the norm. And, aware of the mobile-led technologies that now exist to support a higher level of service delivery, field service customers are voicing demand for engineer location tracking and up-to-the-minute communications.

This communication between the customers and engineers will give customers the ability to share photos, preferences and job information with technicians before their visit, sharing important information that will expedite the service delivery. Customers will also be able to share their customer experience with their provider after the visit, offering feedback that can inform future service decisions.

Field service suppliers that do not start to think seriously about modernizing their operations in 2017 in this way will see an impact on their ability to compete.

4) A smarter field service

A device is labelled ‘smart’ if it can connect to other devices through the Internet of Things.

This year, smart will become smarter and advancements in machine learning will create new opportunities for the field service industry.

There will be improved inter-connectivity of smart devices, which will enable field service engineers to use their smart devices to contact more experienced engineers when they need guidance.

 

This will improve engineers’ knowledge and skills, and also deliver better customer experiences through increased ‘first-time-fix’ resolutions.

Smart technology will also accelerate preventative maintenance, alerting the customer and technician when there is an issue with a piece of equipment before the customer needs to make the call.

Usage patterns and failures are therefore easier to recognise and plan for, minimising interruptions and failures when a device is connected through smart technology.

5) Autonomous vehicles will drive innovation

Autonomous vehicles are already being trialled in some parts of the world, but 2017 will be the year when the business masses start to investigate their potential in the context of business gain.

This goes a step beyond assisted driving, which is already allowing field service engineers to predict traffic and avoid routes that will slow down their journey. Autonomous vehicles can also reduce the number of multiple visits from engineers by delivering the necessary tools to the engineer onsite, or providing the required tools to the customer if the machine can be self-fixed.

 

In short, self-driving cars or drones could present a field service industry game changer and as autonomous vehicle technology improves—and in-country legislation relating to their use is put in place —discussions around the benefits these offer to industry suppliers will gather pace amidst the race to innovate.

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