ThinkTank Reflections: Remote service, has not only taken root, but it is increasingly becoming the inevitable future of field service...
ThinkTank Reflections: Remote service, has not only taken root, but it is increasingly becoming the inevitable future of field service...
As we have worked through a wide-ranging series of content to establish the fundamental changes to the field service sector since the pandemic, one ever-present topic in discussions has been the rise of remote service delivery amongst field service organizations.
While there may still be questions about how much can be achieved across different industry verticals via remote service tools, the reality is that remote service is now forming at least some part of the service portfolio for most organizations.
This topic came to the fore in a recent Field Service News ThinkTank session where we were seeking to understand better the shifts our industry must go through to adapt in a post-pandemic world.
“When it comes to remote support, we need to think of this in the context of the customer journey,” stated Tom DeVroy, Senior Advisory Solution Consultant at ServiceNow.
“Customers don’t mind talking to somebody in a contact centre or technical support as long as they feel there’s a progression towards resolving their issue.
“If it’s a break-fix issue or a self-maintainer that’s trying to get through some a complicated maintenance procedure, as long as the customer can see that progress is being made towards the resolution, then they tend to remain happy to engage,” DeVroy added.
“So, for me, the applicability of remote support is directly associated with the issue or asset that’s being worked on.
“In some instances and industries, remote can work fantastically, but in others, where the resolution is more complex, there’s only so far that remote support can take you before you have to have somebody who knows more than the person on the other end of the phone,” he continues.
“However, if that remote service element is part of the customer journey, where you are trying to triage that problem with the customer, and the customer thinks you’re making progress towards that end goal, whether or not you can actually resolve the customer’s issue, or whether you eventually have to dispatch a field service engineer, then I think there’s a lot of value to add there in terms of the total customer journey but also in terms of your service efficiency,” DeVroy concluded.
The point DeVroy makes is valid; understanding the customer journey can allow us to know where remote service may fit within our service portfolio. However, our understanding of what can be achieved with remote experts has grown exponentially since the pandemic.
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"One challenge we see with the upfront build of virtual or augmented reality tools, customer self-help etc., is that all of these new technologies assume a level of data integrity..." - Gyner Ozgul, President & COO, Smart Care Equipment Services
“Some time back, I saw an organization do a complete remote install with a team in Portugal guiding a local tech crew in Brazil. I’ve also seen something similar with a Swedish company doing a zero-touch green site install during the height of lockdown. The first was in heavy manufacturing, and the second was in industrial waste management.
“In both instances everything was done with the expertise based in a remote location and local hands on site, with technical skills to follow the instructions, but not the subject matter expertise required to do the installation, so that was ‘dialled in’.”
However, while the tools available for remote service have now reached a level of maturity where they are robust enough to get us through the challenges of lockdowns, they remain reliant on good data being fed into them for them to accelerate service efficiency.
“One challenge we see with the upfront build of virtual or augmented reality tools, customer self-help etc., is that all of these new technologies assume a level of data integrity,” commented Gyner Ozgul, President & COO, Smart Care Equipment Services.
“The biggest challenge we’re having is the data governance of getting a technician to do everything perfectly in a work order to feed the level of data insights that is required – that is the first problem to solve,” Ozgul continued.
"As service providers, we have to do way more before we send out an engineer..." - Bradley McBain, Managing Director, MBA Engineering
“Often, with technicians typically, even though they’re technicians, they’re not necessarily in favor of technology, and so you have an adoption challenge, and then you have a data governance challenge,” he added.
“It’s a bit different in our industry; we’re talking about industrial lasers, the technicians, you need to be able to do everything software applications, mechanics, optics etc,” replied Bradley McBain, Managing Director, MBA Engineering.
“It can take two years to train someone to do pretty much everything and, in our sector, we don’t have specialists as such where we know if the issue is a mechanical fault, then we send in the mechanical expert, so our technicians are generalists in that sense, which again means a lot of dedicated training.
“In addition to this, the feedback we get from the users of the lasers was pretty poor, and that’s not changing; if anything, those using the equipment as becoming less and less skilled, so we can’t rely on what they’re telling us as part of an accurate diagnosis,” McBain continued.
For MBA Engineering, this is a crucial reason why the move to more effective remote diagnostics in their sector is vital.
“At the same time, as everything becomes leaner, while at the same time people want more pay, there is a real stretch on the team that is maintaining the assets. So as service providers, we have to do way more before we send out an engineer,” McBain explained.
All members of the Field Service Think Tanks are speaking from their own personal opinions which are not necessarily reflective of the organisations they work for.
Want to know more? Read the full 12 page Executive Briefing report now for more great insights…
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