Top 2 Major Trends in Field Service in 2022

While many of us are still getting used to being at in-person industry events again, and all of the travel it takes to attend, it’s been great seeing clients and partners face to face.  Obviously, the themes we’ve seen have varied based on who is hosting the event, but we’ve picked up on two overall trends for field service, and thought we would share some insight on them.

Field Service Trends

1. The Great Resignation and Gamification

A fairly well-established trend at this point, we’ve heard a lot about field service organizations losing their best people, either from retirement or to competition.

Having a technology focus, and configuring that technology to address this issue, seems to be the way the majority of field service organizations are dealing with talent shortages.

At a recent Field Service USA event, Dan Bergner, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Youreka, gave a great talk about knowledge streaming and upskilling to combat employee hiring and retainment issues. Some highlights from that talk include:

• Gamification for everything from onboarding to training, to onsite tasks helps make things less tedious and more engaging for employees.
• Make things as easy as possible in the field, so your field service workers can worry less about paperwork, and more about safety and making the customer happy.
  • Being able to capture information offline, while still on site, goes a long way towards achieving this.
• Keep employees by lowering their onsite risks, taking advantage of what technology has to offer, and giving them actionable, real-time information to make their lives easier.
  • If you have one or two senior field service workers, and the rest of your field service team is junior—being able to access information and help at any time is critical for first-time fix rates, employee retention, safety, and customer satisfaction.

2. Building Customer Loyalty for a Lifetime

Likewise, organizations adapting their sales, service, and overall solutions to target customer satisfaction and loyalty is another technology and configuration-heavy trend.

This comes down to collecting more customer data, and what you can do with that data.

We recently attended a session run by Salesforce GM and SVP of Field Service Management, Paul Whitelam, focused on making sure your customers are with you for the long haul. Highlights included:

• Your customers want every interaction they have with your business to be as easy and pleasurable as possible.
  • This means providing options for things like communication and scheduling, consistency, and the ability to resolve things themselves when possible.
• Appointments have to be on time and your customers need real-time updates if you don’t want them to feel inconvenienced.
• The more positive interactions customers have with your organization, the less effort they need to put in, and the more they feel that you value their time and business.

Getting to the point of making customers happy and loyal happens faster when you have the ability to provide the above, and information that allows you to personalize their experience.

Getting Your Organization Up to Date

If you’re looking to address either of the issues we outlined above, or want to discuss how your own organization measures up to modern field service benchmarks, contact us.

We also have free resources available if your organization uses ClickSoftware, and is facing the December 31, 2023, EOL deadline.