Technology is constantly evolving, and innovation is permeating all aspects of our lives— both at work and in our personal lives. Innovation must also reach our businesses as in its absence, companies run the risk of being outcompeted.

The IoT is helping to simplify and improve many maintenance and field service tasks. It streamlines processes and automates responses, facilitating overall communication between the maintenance teams and the service suppliers. However, the presence of employees on-site is essential for both the resolution of problems and the execution of other work.

And since technicians are such a vital part of field service businesses, organizations must put in the effort to ensure the enhancement of their abilities.

While it’s vital for service organizations to find qualified candidates to fill various on-site and office positions, they struggle to find people who possess the right skills. Finding people with the right skills is also important because service jobs are no longer limited to fixing equipment. 

Hence, it's important for service professionals to understand and adapt to the latest technological tools that are associated with service work. 

Today’s service professionals need to—

-Explore all-new service processes linked to more complex assets.

-Collaborate or work as a team.

-Be able to relate to clients, with the expectation to improve their experience.

Here are some ways you, as an organization, can improve the value of your technicians—

Put in efforts to make it easier for them to do their job

Service jobs can have different requirements and characteristics in terms of capabilities and skills. It is important to be able to connect the easier tasks with the junior resources through smart job assignments. Yes, your field professionals climb the success ladder depending upon their experience and expertise, but with a little support from you, they will prove to be a great asset for your organization as well.

They must be given access to information

Your technicians must have access to tools that facilitate information access. By doing this, you can make every single technician self-sufficient and more productive while at work.

Implement workflows

Different workflows may be required for different tasks such as installation, repair, inspection, or preventive maintenance. These may even differ depending on the client. Instead of asking your technicians to memorize everything, it is better to have Maintenance management software that can help create smoother workflows, helping your field force immensely.

Draw meaningful insights from gathered data 

Because of the interactions between your staff and customers, as well as during the entire product life cycle, a huge amount of data gets generated. You can make better decisions for your company and staff by extracting this data and utilizing it. Another great thing about the maintenance management system software is that it also helps with data analytics.

Creating work orders

Starting from receiving a call from the customer, to handing over the invoice to them for the work done, every aspect of work order creation can be covered using maintenance work order software. With a streamlined work order in place, your technicians can do their work without hassles, and the management can save their precious time and focus on improving customer experience.

Offer your employees the best mobility possible

Gartner released 2018 their report on Critical Capabilities in Field Service Management. They forecast that by 2020, more than 75% of service businesses would have deployed mobile applications for uses beyond data collection. This is so that they can add capabilities to their mobile solutions that aid technicians in their daily work.

A good field service management software must come with mobile compatibility so that the field force can have every detail of their current project and the ones in the queue right at hand. 

Good software should be able to benefit you in the following ways in addition to offering analysis and integration capabilities.

-Field service management software is highly configurable so it can easily align with your business processes.

-It comes with an easy-to-use and simple interface so that all users can use it without any special training.

-Integration with other systems for management of reverse logistics, guarantees, subcontractors, contracts, etc. in addition to the creation of reports and invoices.

-It should offer offline support. Offline support enables users to use the software even in low reception areas. Any vital information can be stored locally and can be synced with the tool when the user is online again.

-It can be used even on the go so that technicians can have access to all vital information about the jobs at hand without having to contact people back in the office.

So, there are many effective ways to ensure technicians do better and effective jobs in the field. And we have seen above, that using good field service management software can efficiently help meet such requirements. But a good software program is not the one that costs the most or that your counterparts are using, it’s the one that best meets your requirements.