What are Field Services and Field Service Management?

A field service involves delivering the services directly to the customer’s location, most commonly known by the name “field”. To keep it simple, the customers can avail the services by sitting at their home or office.

Field service typically gives more power to the field workers as they are solely responsible for managing the customer’s equipment and providing the best customer service. However, the field service industry is not just limited to this definition; it’s a huge term.

To make it easy, we have come up with an article on what are field services and how field service management solutions help business owners to manage the entire business.

What is Field Service?

Field service refers to any service conducted by field workers or contractors by visiting a customer’s site. The common services include installation, repairing, and even maintaining equipment.

Many leading businesses like plumbing, HVAC, home cleaning, gardening, electric services, roof cleaning, snow removal, and even landscaping provide field-based services to their clients of the field service organization.

Benefits of Field Service Management

Field service management (FSM) helps businesses keep track of all field service operations, such as orders, vehicle tracking, monitoring technician’s activities, service technicians on call or through a mobile app, inventory, work schedules, and dispatching, billing, increase productivity and other administrative tasks.

The primary goal of FSM systems is to provide customers with prompt, job site satisfactory better service while managing costs in real-time scenarios. If your equipment is repaired, serviced well, and even works as per the customer expectations and increases customer loyalty, we can say that it is an impressive field service management system.

If the field service has improved uptime and works as per planning, it becomes quite easy for businesses and field service managers to achieve better FSM solutions and customer satisfaction. You can consider it as one of the important benefits of field management system. The organization’s need is proper execution and proper monitoring of the field service management and scheduling tools.

Different Types of Activities Included in Field Service

Let us now focus on the list of activities that are primarily involved in field services.

1. Equipment Installation

   Installation is the first and most important activity that usually occurs in field services. With the help of this activity, a field service technician or field service team visits the customer’s location and installs the equipment.

   Once the technician installs equipment, the demonstration is provided to the customers to show them how to operate it.

   It becomes the sole responsibility of the service technician to ensure that the equipment is correctly installed and fully operational from the start.

2. Maintaining the Equipment

   Fixing equipment in the case of breakdown is the foremost authority of field service companies.

   One of the best recommendations is to conduct pre-planned activities to perform equipment management before it breaks. The primary reason behind such a case is that it leads to excessive downtime.

   An appropriate process to inspect the equipment and replace the failed parts or not work is the best example. Field services maintenance activities can be divided into three categories:

   • Corrective
   • Preventive
   • Proactive

     Field service technicians visit the customer site to repair the equipment once they receive a case. Some even use smart drone technology with non-destructive testing features if inspections are in hazardous industrial locations, for example.

     Dispatchers capture and analyze the access data collected from the equipment. It is also known by the name “Monitoring.”

     The service techs identify the faults and disruptions of the equipment. They make notes of every metric.

3. Providing Guidance

   Here, by considering the safety and other measures, the field technicians provide the best advice to the customer about equipment usage.

   In short, we can say that the field service teams help customers to generate more service revenue based on the purchased product by the customers.

4. Customer Service

   The primary aim of any field service technician is to provide the best customer service by delivering exceptional services contracts related to equipment maintenance, scheduling service orders, service history. general repair, and even testing strategies.

   Having better communication skills of field service practitioners with coworkers and customers, managers, external/internal clients, general contractors is a plus point for field techs. It basically leads to enhancing customer relationships for a long-term future.

What are the Key Challenges in Field Services?

Let’s now highlight some of the essential key challenges involved in field services.

1. Developing Approachable Support and Maintenance Offers

   Nowadays, customers are completely dependent on their active suppliers to achieve specific business outcomes on a large scale. In simple words, it replaces the traditional hardware system and equipment business models to enhance the customer-supplier relationship.

   However, manufacturers sustain their products with a warranty and added services free of field service costs to their customers. Therefore, the effective services attached to the service level agreements or products like support and maintenance are made available but low at an initial level.

   The manufacturer’s primary aim is to move their customers from “free to fee” service efficiency and create new clients to generate more revenue in mobile technology.

2. Miscommunication Between The Office and The Client’s Location

   Obviously, whenever the field worker is at the client’s location and wants to communicate with the service manager working in the office or company property, it might face many issues. The primary reason is miscommunication that occurs between them.

   Such issues lead to mix-ups, miscommunication, and frustration for your customer and your company.

3. Customer Process Optimization using Internet of Things (IoT)

   In collaboration with field services, the Internet of Things and machine learning allow business owners to deal with new opportunities to enhance the customer experience and better outcomes on a large scale.

   With embedded sensors in connected products, the data are collected regarding the product. Therefore, the organizations can easily track the equipment performance in the customer’s working scenario based on such data.

4. Service Delivery Optimization

   Every field service organization’s main goal is to minimize service delivery costs to enhance employee productivity.

   Reducing the cost of on-site labor, spare parts, tracking job work, less human error, logistics, and essential metrics need to be taken care of for better results. In fact, field service management business owners need to leverage the right people in their team for the job and deal with several complexities to streamline their field operations and asset management.

   In addition, business owners need to work very smartly with their resources to gain better customer satisfaction, efficiency, retention, and bigger profits for more service contracts.

Why Does Your Business Need Field Service Management Software?

Field service management (FSM) software plays a vital role in business as it:

• Field service software provides business owners with a Secure SDLC approach to manage scheduling dispatch orders for your field service technicians to complete the task.
• Provides an inspiring mobile field service management software solution to opt for various orders dispatching concepts to cover up the daily task regularly.
• Helps the service providers, employees, and business managers to deal with field service automation to achieve great field service management business outcomes.
• Field service software allows business owners to deal with easy-to-use work order management, mobile workforce management, and inventory management by using a mobile device to enhance the customer service experience on a large scale.

The field service management software typically helps essential healthcare and even home care industries deliver the best possible field service management solution.

Conclusion

Field services operations are a key enabler for both the field service company and field workers or technicians. It provides convenience to them to maintain work orders, data entry, tracking job status, time tracking, and, most importantly, getting rid of paper-based solutions.

Field service management (FSM) software maintains robust customer relationship management within your organization to deal with features like job scheduling, job dispatching, invoicing, and even resource asset management with ease. I hope this blog answers your question about what is field service management and gives a complete idea.

When it comes to talking about field service management software, FieldCamp is one of the best field service scheduling software designed explicitly for small, mid-size, and even large-scale companies to provide a perfect field service delivery solution. In addition, this field service scheduling solution automates and streamlines your business operations with just a few clicks. So, start your FREE trial today and know how this software benefits your business.