Cost and quality form a very delicate balance in the field service sector. However, the time for evolved thinking has arrived in an era of transformed business practices. The days of cost vs. quality are behind us, thankfully – reason, technology. 

IoT is changing the dynamics here, helping organizations find ways to improve profitability, quality of services, and customer relationships. Let’s explore how through this article.  

Factors Reducing Costs

Let’s first understand some of the general factors that reduce the cost of field services:

  1. Proactive resolution of customer issues
  2. Addressing frustrations around context and communication of customer service requests
  3. Efficient utilization of technicians  
  4. Reduced service time 
  5. Reduced volume of technician visits

Easier said than done? We’ll examine the best ways to achieve the above objectives:

Truck Roll Costs

A report from the Technology Service Industry Association suggests that the actual cost of a typical truck roll is upwards of $ 1000 for every technician dispatch.  

A truck roll refers to a situation where a technician is dispatched to a service point for installation, repair, maintenance, and other related field service needs.  These dispatches incur a lot of cost per event owing to labor, vehicle, and opportunity costs. 

Augmented Reality remote visual support is designed to tackle exactly that, with the provision of recording and monitoring important data. Using this platform, you can connect with the customers and guide them from a remote locale, effectively through pointers and other collaborative techniques. As customers can be assisted remotely, the need for technician dispatch reduces to a great extent. 

The Interface between Contact Centre Agents & Field Technicians 

Until the recent past, it was the field service technicians who had the only know-how concerning field service policies, customer track records, product details, etc. Augmented Reality now enables the contact centre agents to acquire the essential knowledge on these through easy to access shared knowledge databases. In effect, this again contributes to reduced technician dispatch as the customer service agents can resolve the issue without having to wait on the expertise of a technician. 

Automated Workflow

There’s always work in the service industry, thanks to the many requests that come flooding in, 24×7, every day of the week. And if you are someone who is a part of the industry, you would be well aware that these requests could never be handled the way it has been till now. The need for a change seems imminent. 

Augmented Reality changes the entirety of customer service. It combines the use of connected devices with a tremendously effective knowledge-base and generates automated customer service requests. It can hold a database of records that can be pulled back instantly, diagnose errors accurately (even before its possible occurrence), and keep the technicians abreast of the exact details related to an issue. This helps in immediate troubleshooting, thereby enhancing the First-Time-Resolvency – saving time and labor cost in the process. 

Up Their Ante 

Technician dispatches are a very time-consuming affair. And when the forces are eventually dispatched, they are not able to spend time profitably owing to the many unnecessary complexities involved in their daily tasks (say, knowledge gap).  

With visual guidance and automation, technicians could accomplish more, customers could be happier, and the operational expenses could be kept in check. And as already seen, the technology can optimize technician dispatches by automated assignments of tasks to the right technician based on customer track record, service location, skills, priority, and availability. These databases can also be used to analyze the service record of each technician, their strengths and weaknesses, and the areas in which they must be trained. 

Introducing ServeVis

That’s why we introduced ServeVis. A one-stop solution for field services powered by Augmented Reality & AI. From automating service workflow to remotely resolving issues through Visual Assistance, ServeVis executes field services faster and more effectively. With our visual assistance platform, expert help is always available at the user’s fingertips through mobile and AR glasses, with just an SMS.

Contact us for a free demo