In the first of four exclusive essays for service leaders authored by Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland, we explore what the wide adoption of remote service will mean for service delivery in the near future?  

We must accept that now that the glass wall that held back the widespread adoption of remote service delivery has been broken, remote service will become the dominant means of delivering service as a default approach.

This is, of course, a movement that has been a long, long time coming.

In 2015, speaking at Field Service Europe, I somewhat boldly told the audience in attendance that within the next decade, we would need to completely rethink how we approach maintenance and repair in our industry. My perspective at that point was based on three key criteria.

Firstly, we would face an ageing workforce crisis that would mean that we would no longer be able to approach service operations as we always had due to workforce shortages among field service technicians and engineers. ‘The status quo,’ I stated, ‘is broken, and we need to address this today to overcome the problems we will face tomorrow.’

Secondly, the technology I claimed was already emerging that would allow us to ‘completely rethink our approach to service operations.’

As I stated at the time, while comparisons are currently being made between the personal computing revolution and the more recent mobile and cloud revolutions, what is coming next is on an entirely different level. As the IoT and Augmented Reality technologies mature, we will see a very different set of models and approaches to service delivery.

‘While computing, mobile and cloud all allowed us to work more efficiently within the same parameters we had always worked within, these new technologies will simply turn everything on its head. Our industry will shift, hugely to a proactive nature as a result of these technologies and that will mean huge changes in the very fundamentals of what service operations are.’

The final point I made during this presentation was that the early indicators of the rise of servitization would only continue to gain more traction within the coming decade.

‘Servitization,’ I claimed, ‘will become increasingly prevalent, simply because it makes sense. It makes sense for the service provider who will see an increase in profit margins and it makes sense for their customers who will see risk moving from them to the service provider, which allows them in turn to focus greater efforts on their core business.’

Some ten years on, I must humbly say that these statements seem remarkably prescient. However, the truth is that while we were indeed on the path towards that vision for the future of field service I outlined, until the pandemic, we were making slower progress than I, and many other leading analysts in our sector, had assumed.