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Building a modern field service workforce

When it comes to building field workforces to meet today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, field service engineers now need to be more than just technically competent. Field service organizations look for field service technicians who not only possess the technical skills required for the job, but also the “soft skills” necessary to handle on-site relationships and communicate effectively with the customer.

In the recent past, the core requirement for field technicians was to possess sufficient technological skill, knowledge, and experience to complete as many work orders as possible. The ability to interact with customers was a bonus, not a necessity.

However, with customer experience now an essential key performance indicator, soft skills are becoming the most important characteristic of field service technicians. In fact, a study by Field Service News in late 2017 revealed over half (52%) of service organizations saw soft skills as the most crucial attribute they look for in potential field service recruits, and an additional 26% stated that while technological qualifications were still their number one requirement, people-focused skills were increasingly important also.

There are several factors behind this shift in importance to soft skills. While field service engineers are traditionally positioned as a trusted technical advisor, today there is an even greater need for them to be the positive face of the brand.

"In a world of increasing digitalization, the face-to-face interaction of a service call between customer and field service engineer offers an opportunity for customer engagement and brand experience that is disappearing..."

In a world of increasing digitalization, the face-to-face interaction of a service call between customer and field service engineer offers an opportunity for customer engagement and brand experience that is disappearing as brick-and-mortar operations are replaced by click-and-order equivalents. As such, the role of the field technician today includes brand ambassador.

As the role of “trusted technical advisor” expands to encompass brand building and advocacy, the field service engineer is now also the eyes and ears of other essential business functions. The transition previously discussed of the field service sector moving from a reactive break-fix approach to one centered around preventative maintenance also comes into play.

While the preventative maintenance approach yields many benefits for both customer and service provider alike, field service engineers are expected to guide customers through this transition as companies move away from hard-set service level agreements to a model where uptime is the central pillar of the service contract.

When it comes to overcoming an objection like, “We used to pay X for Y number of visits. Now there are fewer visits, so shouldn’t we be paying less for our service contract?” an informed field service engineer, armed with the right information, can be invaluable. Empowering a field service engineer with easily accessible data on the productivity of an asset in a clear, concise, and transparent manner is a significant benefit for any organization that wants to move toward predictive maintenance or to more advanced services that can yield even higher service revenue and profit margins.

Balancing outgoing Baby Boomers and incoming Millennials

As we’ve discussed, the changing demographics of the field workforce presents a dual challenge for today’s service organizations.

There is an urgent need to recruit and develop staff to replace the retiring members of the current workforce. There is also a need to adapt technologies and re-engineer processes to accommodate the different perspectives and approaches to work of both generations. One of the biggest challenges is the need to recruit, train, and develop incoming recruits quickly enough to meet the demand of replacing the retiring generation.

This problem is further compounded when factoring in the statistics around the two-year average time frame a Millennial worker is likely to spend in a role. 

This two-year time frame is a major driver for service organizations to reduce training times and onboard recruits quickly.

To tackle this challenge, many field service companies are adopting a two-pronged approach to their field service workforce.

A significant proportion of their field workforce possesses a broader knowledge base and skill-set supplemented by technology to ‘dial-in’ the experience and knowledge when on-site with the customer.

They then develop ‘super-technicians’—a role which sees a smaller pool of field service engineers gaining a much deeper level of knowledge and experience in a specific area—to make up the rest of their field workforce.

The rise of the blended workforce

The transition to a blended workforce (i.e. one that ‘blends’ internal resources with 3rd-party, or contingent, resources) is gaining traction, as evidenced by the statistics cited earlier that show the year-over-year increase of organizations using this approach.

Ultimately, the use of the contingent workforce sector can provide field service organizations the flexibility to meet variable demand while reducing their exposure to overhead costs.

By tapping into a third-party market of service engineers who already possess the required skillsets, 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 labor pool that meets around 80% of their daily repair and maintenance tasks.

"Customer expectations are higher than ever and the threshold for service excellence continues to increase..."

This is an excellent solution that allows companies to minimize risk exposure in failing to meet demand due to lack of technician availability, and also regarding the costs of training and development.

The blended workforce also provides many other benefits:

• • Skill diversity: Many companies benefit from widening their engineers’ skillsets 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 labor.
• • Business efficiency: By using contingent labor to ‘fill gaps’ in a service schedule, organizations can retain efficient service delivery and maximize core workforce utilization.
• • Geographical coverage: 3rd-party labor markets can offer service organizations the ability to enter into new territories without the
• traditional excessive overlay.
• • Customer satisfaction: A contingent labor 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 discussed, customer expectations are higher than ever and the threshold for service excellence continues to increase. While the blended workforce offers many benefits, there is still a potential risk that 3rd-party workforces may have a detrimental impact on the service standards that organizations worked hard to develop, that are part of the fabric of their brand and identity.

Can a third-party worker ever represent a brand as successfully as full-time staff?

The answer to this question is yes, as long as the approach is supported by a robust technology ecosystem designed to accommodate contingent workers in the same manner as it does internal staff. In the next part of this series, we will review why technology is vital to creating and managing a successfully blended workforce.

Want to know more? The full white paper relating to this white paper is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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Data usage note: By accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.