Everyone Has A “Cable Guy” Story – The Evolution of Field Service

The benefit impacts Oracle Cloud & emerging technologies are contributing towards the evolution of Field Service

Oracle Field Service, IoT, and Service Cloud

Whether you’ve seen the movie, The Cable Guy, or not, everyone has a, “Cable Guy” story.  You know, the time where you took off work to wait your 4-hour window just to have the service cancel or be late.  Or worse, they come out to fix your slow internet service and your connection performs worse resulting in 2 additional service visits you now need to accommodate.

Perhaps these types of service issues are dated and may have improved with service providers having better technology, but consumers are still experiencing inferior customer service with issues that have only evolved based on our massive demand for connectivity.  At a minimum, hopefully your providers have updated their processes to alleviate scheduling issues with active-text or email alerts and scheduling updates.  But what more can be expected with today’s modern digital platforms?

Before we jump into the latest in Field Service technology advances and their benefits, let’s discuss the changing face of the Field Service role itself.   

…but consumers are still experiencing inferior customer service with issues that have only evolved based on our massive demand for connectivity. 

---

Evolving Field Service Roles

The combination of advanced technology and the Covid-effect have impacted the landscape of field service like most industries.  While other industries may be seeing a decline, ReportLinker has predicted a 11% compound annual growth rate increase in the market size from 2020-2025 for field service management. For perspective, below is a short list of notable field service roles seeing significant disruption, including some key drivers affecting these changes. 

Sample of Field Service Roles With Significant Change	Drivers Affecting Change
Cable, Internet, Telecommunications Engineers & Technicians – Commercial	Municipalities adding broadband as a basic service to its citizens
Cable, Internet, Telecommunications Engineers & Technicians – Residential	Residential consumers need more bandwidth to accommodate an increase of streaming from remote learning, work, and gaming
Cleaning & Sanitization Services	Schools, hospitals, places of worship, and public places need regularly sanitized operations to stay in business
Construction – Residential	Consumers are remodeling homes and conducting home improvement projects to accommodate personal office spaces and gyms that include installations of windows, door, flooring, etc.
Home Inspection & Appraisers	Changing landscape with people moving out of cities and into the suburbs, mountains or vacation areas has created a shift in market areas
Patient Care Specialists	Covid has created more urgent need for Respiratory Therapists, X-ray Technicians, and Care Providers with different skillsets
Utilities	The growth of Smart Cities and expansion of IOT in utilities requires different skills and more technical field agents
General Delivery Services	Increased demand in essentials – Think grocery, restaurants, supplies, liquor, etc.

A decline in some field service roles has certainly occurred due to the pandemic but created demand in other areas.  One might think increased automation and a more digital world would decrease service calls; however, these modernizations have allowed companies to grow at-scale to keep agents busy.  With IOT technology literally everywhere, there is a need for more agents with different skillsets.  

Before we get into the benefits of new functionality, what are some of the new Customer and Field Service capabilities that businesses should be thinking of?

New Service Capabilities Relevant To Businesses Today

Scheduling & Routing:

• Can the technician send out a survey to the customer to get a Covid-19 health update from the household?
• Does the scheduling system offer notifications based on the user’s preference such as email, text, or phone call?
• Are there links for the customer to accept, reject or change an appointment?
• Do we offer both push and pull routing?
• Do we have workflow rules and automation for prioritized routing
• Do we have Automated Call Distributor (ACD)
• Does our system show real-time traffic and street-level routing?
• Can we find, “Where is My Technician”?
• Can we broadcast work orders?

Emerging Technologies

• Is there an option or a plan to reduce truck rolls with virtual reality support?
• Can we manage IoT assets from your smart phone?

Knowledge

• Do we offer guided resolution?
• Is knowledge embedded where it is needed?
• Do we have good language and translation support tools to be able to scale globally?
• Do we have advanced search options like deep search, natural language search, and federated search?

Now let’s take a look at some of the benefits from the advances Oracle is making related to these roles.

Expected Benefits	Oracle Cloud Enabler
Delight Customers	Getting it right the first time in the most efficient manner, with saved costs to the business and customer; via workflows, and a dynamic agent platform that improves customer satisfaction.
Reduce Truck Roll Costs	Fewer Trips with standardized processes to ensure first-time resolutions.
Increase Efficiencies with Workflow Optimization & Guided Resolution	Use guided resolution to efficiently walk agents step-by-step through solutions. Reduce scheduling headaches with the optimized scheduling engine. Benefit from real-time traffic and street-level routing for efficiencies.
Consistent Content	Know the communication of your messaging is both consistent in the field & in the office and also accessible across all devices with collaboration tools and a sophisticated knowledge base.
Integrate, Connect, and Extend	Easily integrate data to your front-end and back-end systems natively, with connectors, or via REST APIs. Connect to your IoT devices to track your assets or easily make connections to Oracle Analytical Cloud Service BI or Oracle Integration Cloud.
Increase Productivity with Mobility	Allow agents to access and manage all service processes while mobile including inventory, team collaboration, billing, and invoicing.
Predictive Maintenance	Allow IoT signals to notify your service department of potential failures and automate service requests and routing to fix things before they break. Let your field service agents see these assets while mobile.

As the prevalence of Virtual Reality and Internet of Things permeates our lives, not only do industries have to keep their customer service technology updated, they have to have systems agile enough to recognize and accommodate the benefits from these emerging technologies. Oracle CX Cloud is leading the charge to ensure this happens.

Call to action

Check out some of the resources and video links I’ve provided below to learn more. You can always request a personalized demo from the Oracle website if you are looking for something more customized to your use case. (Scroll down to the bottom of page and select, “Request a Demo”.

Helpful Links:

• View a Demo – Asset-based Field Service Demo
• Customer Connect Events: Everything You Need to Know About B2C Service Updates – Webinar recording on Oracle’s Customer Connect Community site. The community is free to join if you’re not already part of the community.
• Oracle Help Center: Documentation & New Release Readiness for Field Service
• Videos on Oracle Help Center include videos and feature-specific tutorials.

---

If your business is still absorbing too many costs due to poor field service management or your customers are still frustrated by poor customer service, then perhaps this time it really isn’t the “Cable Guys” fault . Maybe it is time to look at your process and systems to see what changes can be made to make a positive change for you and your customers.

---

No proprietary information has been shared. This post and this blog are solely the opinion of the author.

Source for increase in field service https://www.reportlinker.com/p04784297/Field-Service-Management-Market-by-Solution-Service-Deployment-Type-User-Type-Industry-Vertical-and-Region-Global-Forecast-to.html?utm_source=GNW