How AI Can Boost Your Field Service Delivery Business

Field service management can benefit beyond imagination from artificial intelligence. What is AI and how can it help businesses to grow?

SwissCognitive Guest Blogger: Joy Gomez, Founder and CEO at Field Promax

Artificial intelligence (AI) is radically changing how we deal with the world. From healthcare to manufacturing, it has become a key component of our future. Similarly, service business leaders are also leveraging this cutting-edge technology to their benefit. According to a study conducted by Gartner, more than 25% of the leading field service companies have reported that they have introduced AI-powered systems or machine learning tools to their projects for the next 12-18 months timeline. This has become exceptionally advantageous in terms of streamlining tasks and organizing resources in real time. AI has also become increasingly popular with regard to tasks such as optimizing routing, automating scheduling, enhancing preventive maintenance processes, improving internal communication, and so on.

Despite the foreseeable benefits of artificial intelligence, several field service companies are still in two minds when it comes to introducing AI in business processes. This is, perhaps, fuelled by a common misconception that this emerging technology has no use in small-scale business operations. However, this could not be any further from the truth. You would be fascinated to learn how resourceful artificial intelligence could be for small service delivery businesses, enhancing even the seemingly trivial operations that an organization go through on a daily basis. This enhancement can further boost field service management, contributing significantly to the overall growth of the company.

So, if you run a small or midsize service delivery business and are looking for effective growth ideas, you have reached the right place. Go through the article and learn how AI can boost your service business in terms of efficiency, productivity, and most importantly, profitability.

1. Simplifying Business Tasks

As AI continues to become more commonplace in service business operations, program automation will continue to simplify your day-to-day tasks. As a result, it will effectively reduce employee workload, enabling them to focus on more important tasks at hand. For example, AI could be a crucial resource to automate scheduling and dispatching. This takes off a huge burden and simplifies the work of field executives/managers/ business owners, leaving them more time and scope to focus on other aspects of the business.

2. Optimizing Resource

The most crucial aspect of maintaining profitability in the service business is effective resource optimization. And artificial intelligence can be your biggest help in this regard. In order to deliver best-in-class field service, field service technicians need to figure out a lot of things before they even reach the job site. For example, diagnostics, historical data, an estimated equipment list, timeframe, and so on. This is exactly what AI-powered systems can do for a service business. Imagine, if technicians arrive at the job site already prepared with all this information, how much more effectively can they deal with the problem at hand? Not just will it increase overall efficiency, but it will also reduce total labour hours and overall cost. Besides, it will save the hassle of carrying unnecessary equipment to the job site, freeing them up for other assignments. Moreover, it will invariably increase first-time success rates for every work order, helping improve customer satisfaction.

3. Improving Field Service Mobility

For most small and mid-sized field service delivery organizations, mobility is one of the biggest challenges. Field service mobility enables enhanced coordination between the field technicians and the back-end executives/managers, thus playing a vital role in helping companies execute fieldwork seamlessly. Using AI allows back-end staff to communicate with field technicians in real-time. This instant, seamless communication allows for better coordination and in turn, better field service delivery with fewer errors.

4. Enhancing Employee Productivity

When you take care of your business manually, it leaves ample room for manual error as well. In the field service industry, the complex nature of work and employee communication may lead to even more errors and mismanagement. However, there is practically no chance for errors when it comes to AI-driven systems. With artificial intelligence, businesses can effectively increase efficiency by eliminating the scope for human error, while helping the field staff to deliver service more efficiently.

5. Improving Customer Service

The benefits of AI are not limited to employee efficiency in the field alone. Rather. It can be pivotal in improving your customer service as well. Conversational AI chatbots are significantly gaining popularity in this regard. With this efficient digital tool, businesses can maintain prompt, effective, and consistent customer service quality. With artificial intelligence developing with each passing day, soon businesses can expect emerged versions of AI assistants to help in customer communications while lowering operational costs.

Final Thoughts

Considering the boundless advantages of artificial intelligence in the service industry, it is only a matter of time before it becomes an inevitable part of field service management. However, at this point, it is yet to become commonplace. Small businesses, in particular, are still reluctant to take the risk. This makes AI the perfect competitive advantage to leverage right now.

Contrary to popular belief, this is not going to break the bank or require a major overhaul of your standard business processes. Neither do you need to train all your employees with some advanced technological crash courses. You can simply take advantage of AI as simply as by signing up for a smart field service management software solution. This clever piece of cutting-edge technology nowadays comes with AI-powered tools to automate your processes and even help you with preventive maintenance. It would, therefore, just cost you a subscription fee to harness the power of this fascinating emerging technology.

In the future, artificial intelligence will eventually become smarter, and possibly, faster. From the current developments, it is easy to anticipate what other benefits hold in store for field service delivery businesses, such as more accurate predictions of systems failures, long before they take place. However, there is practically no need to wait that long and gauge the possible impacts of AI on your business. Start today, and you will be leading the pack when the crowd eventually decides to join the party.

About the Author:

Joy Gomez’s world is made up of codes. It is the central element that drives his universe. He is a self-taught, process-driven programmer with a creative bent of mind. Since he was an engineering student, he dreamt of creating something unique. To satiate his creative appetite, he took to coding. Blessed with abundant support and generous scholarships from his employers, he simultaneously worked full-time and pursued his dream. His passion and high productivity helped him in his journey as well. Finally, he created Field Promax to follow his drive of coding and streamlining processes; and do more of what he knows best—coding.