In the final instalment of this series Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks to Shilen Khimani, HSO about how the various areas discussed in this video series can be brought together to put a cohesive argument for investment in upgrading or replacing your field service management systems to your board.

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As part of our series run in partnership with Localz exploring how field service companies can hardness the 'grown-up gig economy' we outline the benefits of a blended field workforce that marries internal and third party.

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The Benefits of the Blended Workforce in Field Service

The notion of a blended workforce (i.e. one that ‘blends’ internal resources with 3rd-party, or gig-economy workers) is one which is increasing in popularity, as field service organisations seek the benefits of a flexible labour force that can allow them to meet customer demands whilst reducing unnecessary financial risk.

Early adopters of such an approach have found that the use the gig economy can provide an excellent solution when it comes to meeting variable demand, responding quickly and effectively to their customer service requirements and simultaneously reducing their exposure to overhead costs.

By tapping into a third-party market of service engineers who already possess the required skill-sets, and leveraging technologies such as IoT, knowledge banks and Augmented Reality (AR) to ‘dial-in’ the job-specific expertise when needed, field service companies can tap into a contingent labour pool that meets around 80% of their daily repair and maintenance tasks.

The blended workforce also provides many other benefits:

• Skill diversity: Many companies benefit from widening their engineers’ skill sets to develop and establish new service offerings.
• Flexibility to scale with seasonal or variable demand: organizations that face significant swings in demand across varying seasons, like those in the HVAC sector, can scale up or down quickly with contingent labour.
• Business efficiency: By using contingent labour to ‘fill gaps’ in a service schedule, organizations can retain efficient service delivery and maximize core workforce utilization.
• Geographical coverage: 3rd-party labour markets can offer service organizations the ability to enter into new territories without the traditional excessive overlay.
• Customer satisfaction: A contingent labour force can enable service organizations to react and remedy issues in a timelier manner, particularly in peak seasons when the internal workforce is stretched thin.

There are potential problems, however.

As previously mentioned, customer expectations are higher than ever and the threshold for service excellence continues to increase.

Therefore, and underlying level of technology that allows the field service representative, whether they be internal or third party workers is crucial to ensure that the customer experience remains consistent and in line with their expectations. One of the most crucial aspects of this is the customer communication channels used - particularly on the day of service.

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Field service teams are in flux. The existing drain to the workforce brought on by a deluge of retiring Baby Boomers combined with an unsteady economy is creating unprecedented service and performance challenges. In this series of excerpts from a new White Paper published by Aquant, we explore how Artificial Intelligence can pave the way to overcoming these challenges for field service organisations...

Even in an uncertain environment, there are cost-effective ways to ensure continuity of service. Adopting AI-driven field service technology will allow your service organization to pivot quickly and help erase the skills gap.

By capturing untapped tribal knowledge and making that insight accessible across your workforce, the technology will empower less tenured employees with the wisdom of your experts. The results are quicker, more comprehensive training for new hires, increased job satisfaction, and ultimately, a better customer experience.

Where to Find the Next-Generation of Field Service Professionals

Service teams are in a labor crunch.

According to 2018 global research by Manpower Group, skilled trade positions, particularly technicians and engineering roles, are the hardest to fill. This didn’t happen overnight. The Service Council detailed the coming storm in the labor market in 2015 research, noting that “70% of service organisations indicate they will become burdened by a retiring workforce over the next five to ten years.”

We are in the midst of that talent shortage and organisations are scrambling to fill openings, with more than 70,000 service technician jobs listed across the country. Baby Boomers, who make up a significant majority of the workforce in the service industry, are now retiring. In the next ten years about 10,000 Boomers a day (across all industries) hit retirement age.

That’s a lot of farewell parties.

Analysts and economists have been sounding the alarm bells for years about the coming crisis, but many companies have struggled to pivot quickly. While Millennials now make up the largest portion of the workforce overall, the service industry has struggled to attract and retain the digital generation, due in part to housing shifts from the suburbs to the city, and the large number of millennials who hold bachelor’s degrees compared to a generation ago.

While the majority of customer call centre and field service jobs don’t require a college degree, the jobs do offer many qualities that young talent are seeking, such as room for advancement and a sense of purpose. In order to recruit and retain young employees, an emphasis on professional development is crucial.

Don't Let You're Field Service Expertise Leave with Your Retiring Technicians:

In addition to contributing to the labor crunch, retiring boomers are exacerbating the knowledge gap in service. Unlike other industries where institutional knowledge is indexed, best practices documented, and lunch and learns held monthly with pizza, technicians often work solo or have limited interactions with other team members.

In lieu of imparting tips and tricks, technicians often keep knowledge of a myriad of parts, fickle machines, and client quirks tucked away in their head or scribbled down on paper work orders that fill desk drawers and glove compartments.

There’s also an employment tenure gap between generations, which is causing more turnover overall. 2016 research found the overall average employee tenure across all industries and age groups to be 4.2 years.

Millennials average roughly 3 years and Gen X average tenure is 6.5 years. Boomers have an average tenure of 10 years, but most are at or close to retirement age.

Even if you could hire more Millennials, the knowledge drain is forecasted to continue as the pace of churn quickens. 

Indeed, the challenges around finding balance within the field workforce is becoming increasingly difficult as we navigate this demographic shift.

However, it is not impossible and emerging tools such as Artificial Intelligence can really come to the fore in overcoming these challenges, which we shall begin to explore in the next feature within this series. 

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In a recent edition of the Field Service Podcast, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland was joined by Field Nation CEO, Mynul Khan as the two discussed how field service organisations are turning to the gig economy and other third-party labour pools to balance their workforce needs. 

The original interview was part of an interview for a documentary that Field Service News have produced in partnership with Field Nation looking at how field service organisations can harness the power of the 'blended workforce' in this manner.

However, the full interview contained a lot of additional insight from a man that has been a pioneer in bringing the technology that underpins the blended workforce to our sector. As such, we asked Mynul if we could publish the full interview on the Field Service Podcast. The above is an excerpt from this episode. 

You can find the full podcast and our entire back catalogue here

The New Requirements of Field Service Management

There have been many crucial developments within the field service sector within the last few years. One of the most important of these, from Mynul Khan is sitting is how many field service organisations are now pushing their service offerings out to a wider reach of geographic areas. 

"These are different types of service offerings, which require different types of skill sets," reflected Khan. 

"This translates to having a different type of workforce that can provide the type of service needed that is more on demand, that is more agile and more nimble. Companies that are under pressure from industry to expand in different geographies and with different types of services are therefore having to adopt this more on-demand workforce model.

In parallel, we are also seeing that product based companies, so the OEMs or retailers, are also pushing more services and more solutions. The reason for this is fairly obvious - there is not much margin in selling hardware. So we are seeing large OEMs, VARs, and retailers developing their own service and solutions arm." 

"There is an increasing trend to go beyond the traditional layers of service-centric revenue and to move towards a more servitized, or outcome focused approach within modern service offerings..."

Indeed, this is something that we are seeing more and more of as the trend continues.

Those companies now who don't explore the routes to developing their own field service operations to deliver such offerings, which deliver not only high margin revenue but also recurring revenue, are in danger of missing the boat and getting left behind. 

Of course, this is just one mega-trend within a rapidly changing landscape of field service management.

There is an increasing trend to go beyond the traditional layers of service-centric revenue and to move towards a more servitized, or outcome focused approach within modern service offerings. At the same time automation is changing the way we think about field service, just as it is changing many other industry sectors. 

The role of technology within this change, is an important one that cannot be understated. 

"Technology and automation is playing an absolutely pivotal role," Khan comments. 

"Another mega trend that has emerged is that all hardware is becoming IoT enabled hardware. This connectivity means that we can remote monitor and remotely trouble shoot the problem that the device is having. On top of this we are also seeing the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms which are being used in preventative maintenance.

"All of this is coming together to really drive the cost of service down for field service companies and enables faster repair time and ore uptime for the customer. Even for a company like Field Nation, we are deploying mMachine Learning algorithms for better matching of workers to the service ticket," Khan added.  

Want to know more? Check out our full documentary on the 'Rise of the Blended Workforce.'

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Want to know more? There is a full documentary that dives deeper into this whole topic, which is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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In the first part of our series run in partnership with Localz exploring how field service companies can hardness the 'grown-up gig economy' we outline why the field service sector needs to embrace the gig economy...

Would You Like to Know More? There is a Field Service News white paper on this topic available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscriber. Click the button below to access it now! 

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The growing pool of field service gig workers

The pressure on field service companies is perhaps greater than it ever has been. As we, as a society embrace an everything now culture, where on-demand is the new norm, time has become perhaps the single greatest commodity of all.

Companies like Deliveroo, Uber and Amazon have changed the benchmark when it comes to what is possible - both in terms of operational efficiency and customer convenience. This has led to a surge in customer expectations.

We now demand the services we use are intuitive, convenient and affordable. 

And while this was a phenomena that emerged within the Business to Consumer (B2C) world, it is one that has seeped into the Business to Business (B2B) realm as well as lines between the two continually become blurred.

The reality of course, that field service is a complex beast with many, many moving parts. It is obviously, harder to get a skilled engineer to a job than it is to get a taxi driver. There are simply less of them available, especially if you only have the limited pool of your own internal resources. Yet, the customer cares little for the reasons why you cannot meet their demands.Only that you can’t.

It is of course, an unfair expectation, some may even go as far as to call it unrealistic even, but in the world of the experience economy, where service standards and rapid responses are becoming increasingly linked with our top-line revenue streams, it is one that we as service providers have to face up to. It is one we have to adapt to. What makes this more challenging is the simultaneous increase in internal expectations of field service delivery.

"Beyond the headlines of millennials on bikes, there is an increasingly mature pool of experienced gig-economy workers who are ready and able to fill in the gaps in your existing field workforce..."

With the rise of digital transformation projects, improvements can be made across the whole service delivery cycle. Indeed, technology is undoubtedly an enabler in allowing field service organisations streamline their processes.

However, while modern field service management systems can help drive efficiencies in all manner of aspects of field service, the fact remains that field service is by its very definition an inherently people centric sector.

We have yet to be able to replace the most dexterous tool at our disposal, a pair of human hands, with industrial automation - and it is unlikely we ever will.

And so it is to the gig-economy, savvy field service companies are turning. Beyond the headlines of millennials on bikes, there is an increasingly mature pool of experienced gig-economy workers who are ready and able to fill in the gaps in your existing field workforce.

They are not a replacement for your existing team but an addition. With freelancer and internal employee working side by side in what is termed the blended workforce.

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The concluding part of a series of video excerpts from Field Service News, in partnership with Field Nation we will be breaking down the challenges of building a modern field service workforce...

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In a recent episode of the Field Service Podcast, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News was joined by Danny Wieder, Field Service Consultant with HSO to discuss the topic of Health and Safety in the field service environment and how technology casn play a critical role in ensuring we meet the standards we require.  

The original interview was part of an interview for a documentary that Field Service News have produced in partnership with HSO which puts together a case that field service managers and directors can take to their board to secure investment in the tools required to effectively deliver service in the modern age. 

Not wanting to waste any of the excellent insight that Wieder, who has a 15 year pedigree in implementing field service software and systems, provided during the interview we also asked the team at HSO if we could put the full unedited interview onto our podcast channel. They kindly agreed and the above is an excerpt from that episode of the field service podcast. 

You can find the full podcast alongside all of the other episodes here

Technology is essential for Field Service engineer safety

The importance of health and safety in any workforce is an absolute given.

In field service however, it is perhaps an even more challenging task than in many other industries. Not only are our engineers often working in hazardous environments, but the are also working in isolation. 

Technology is there to help however and embedded within the field service technology stack, and even within many FSM solutions, there are multiple tools to help ensure your field service engineers and technicians are working in the safest possible manner achievable. It is little wonder then that building an argument for investment in such systems is often built up around ensuring health and safety standards are met. 

"In a lone worker scenario you have the capability to avert a potential safety issue by identifying and reacting to it..."

"I would say technology can really help to make sure field service engineers and can also help companies make sure they excercise their duty of care towards their employees," explained Wieder during the interview. 

"Let's take geo-fencing for example which has recently been introduced to Microsoft Field Service. It monitors the GPS position of an engineer and can issue an automatic alert to the contact centre if the engineer has been on site for too long. So in a lone worker scenario you have the capability to avert a potential safety issue by identify8ing and reacting to it. 

"Another are is perhaps risk assessments. These have been around for a while but are often paper driven or sometimes companies are using something like Excel. The obvious issue with this it is this is not particularly easy to use. Today's modern mobile software can be configured so an engineer not only gets the risk assessment, but in fact they have to complete it before they can progrees to the call details. This is a real benefit.

"On top of this, the questionnaires now can be tailored so the content of the questions is different, depending on the work type. This makes them more relevant, perhaps more concise and I think all things being considered this is a massive improvement to the tool kits we have to keep our engineers safe," Wieder added. 

The safety of our workers, both in the field and in the office is of absolute paramount importance - if the technology is available to help us improve in this area - surely we are beholden to implement it? 

Want to know more? Check out our full documentary on the 'Three Core Arguments to Gain Investment in Your Field Service Management Systems'

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