Artificial intelligence (AI), assistive technology, and cloud-based solutions are about to shake up field service management (FSM). And we have stats to prove it. The global field service management market is forecasted to more than triple by 2032, expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of between 14% and 19%.
Meanwhile, as found by Allied Market Research, much of the industry is still playing it safe, sticking to conservative methods. This means that early adopters of innovative technologies stand to benefit the most from this projected growth, getting ahead by improving their operational efficiency and customer experience (CX).
In this article, we’ll review the top emerging 2024 trends in the field service management industry and provide tips for their implementation. To start, let’s have a quick recap of the past evolution of field service management technology that brought us where we are and the main field service management trends for 2024.
The past evolution
Сloud computing, mobile connectivity, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have revolutionized field service management.
- Cloud computing has made data accessible 24/7 and allowed syncing it in real-time. Instead of requesting reports and waiting until they come through, managers can now have their subordinates upload documents to the cloud, where all authorized parties can view and edit them anytime, anywhere. And companies can make faster, data-driven decisions.
- Mobile connectivity allowed field teams to report any issues in real-time, getting instant feedback from their superiors or customers. Critical information exchange now takes minutes, not hours or days, which streamlines the work process and improves operational efficiency.
- IoT was another step forward, allowing connected devices to report issues and schedule maintenance automatically without involving humans. This greatly reduced downtime and improved service efficiency. An estimated 73% of field management companies have incorporated IoT into their operations.
AI and machine learning have also found their way into field service management. A study by Salesforce suggests that around 59% of field service providers might already be using some form of AI. While the transformative impact of this technology is still hard to gauge, it will surely reshape the industry landscape.
Top 2024 field service management trends
The top 2024 field service managementtrends can be broken down into technological (assistive technology, AI, and self-service apps) and paradigm-shifting (customer-centric solutions, predictive maintenance, mobile and remote first, process standardization, and knowledge management). So, keeping up with field service management trends is not merely about adopting progressive technology; it is just as much, or even more, about changing your approach.
Assistive technology
Assistive technology is an umbrella term for any gadgets used by field service workers to expand their skills and work more productively. Technically speaking, if an employee uses a smartphone to access the company’s knowledge base and send updates on the move, that counts as assistive technology.
However, this term is usually reserved for more advanced, industry-specific tools like:
- Smart glasses with augmented reality (AR): These wearable devices provide on-site field service technicians with an overlay of schematics or manuals directly onto the actual equipment. This can really step up the accuracy of repair or maintenance jobs while cutting down on training time.
- Voice-activated tools: With these, field technicians can retrieve documentation or fill in reports using only their voice without pausing their work. That means better efficiency and safety on the job.
Even though wearable assistive tech remains quite pricey, expect more field service companies to adopt it thanks to the time-saving and productivity-boosting perks it brings.
Self-service apps
The research by Zendesk suggests that as many as 75% of customers expect service providers to have some form of self-service, and 67% would rather use it than talk to a staff member. As self-service portals are becoming a standard in many industries, field service management can reap multiple benefits, including:
- Enhanced customer experience and loyalty: Through a self-service app, customers can schedule appointments by choosing from available time slots, track technician arrival time and project progress, and easily pay invoices. This convenience will foster their loyalty to the company.
- Improved productivity: When customers can fix minor issues with tutorials and FAQs, they are less likely to call a technician for help. Plus, more sophisticated apps can generate price estimates, saving the tech team from making trips just for this purpose. As a result, more employees can be reallocated to more challenging – and better-paying – tasks.
- Reduced overtime and costs: Transactions through self-service apps are much cheaper than in-person interactions. By cutting out unnecessary travel, they can save your team a lot of money and time.
Labor shortages and an increasingly customer-centric focus in the field service industry will likely push more companies to embrace self-service apps.
AI and automation
Another innovation designed to address labor shortages in field service is AI field service automation. Its most popular use is managing workflows: AI can easily generate and optimize employee schedules, considering their qualifications, job urgency, travel time, and other factors.
78% of top-performing field service enterprises have been found to use AI, while 83% of these use workflow automation.
However, AI in field service can do so much more than scheduling tasks, in particular:
- Data analysis: AI can instantly process large amounts of data, such as KPIs of multiple field crews over an extended period, and identify patterns that can help with decision-making.
- Predictive maintenance: Provided with real-time data from IoT sensors, AI can spot emerging issues and schedule maintenance without involving humans.
- Customer self-service: AI chatbots can efficiently handle routine customer requests, freeing the support team’s time for more complex issues.
- Automation of paperwork: AI can assist field teams by automatically generating reports. Similarly, AI tools can generate customer invoices, reducing clerical errors and saving time and effort.
As AI-based solutions become easily accessible and smarter by the day, more field service management enterprises will adopt them to improve their performance.
Predictive maintenance
The popular saying “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” is outdated. By doing predictive maintenance or fixing a piece of equipment before it breaks down, you can increase equipment uptime by 20% and slash maintenance costs by 10%. And that’s not all – predictive maintenance offers even more benefits, such as:
- Preventing breakdowns: Sudden equipment failures can be costly and extremely frustrating for customers as they have to pause their business operations. With predictive maintenance, there is a good chance to avoid these disasters.
- Reducing travel: When breakdowns happen, fixing them might need multiple visits to the site over several days or even weeks. With predictive maintenance, your team only needs to head out for scheduled check-ups.
- Workflow optimization: You can schedule predictive maintenance in advance or even do it remotely. With IoT sensors sending real-time data about potential issues, like overheating or vibration, and AI processing it all, humans might not even get involved at the diagnosis stage.
Customers highly appreciate predictive maintenance since it lowers downtime, repair costs, and the risk of unexpected equipment failure. By making it part of your process, you can boost customer loyalty and trust, let alone improve your overall performance.
Mobile and remote first
Even though the field service management industry has already embraced mobile connectivity, the idea of doing field service remotely might still come across as counterintuitive. However, it was exactly this progress of mobile tech that made remote service work possible. It can take many forms:
- Remote workforce: Independent contractors, freelancers, and gig workers make up a growing share of the field service workforce. Managing them might be challenging, but remote workers can plug labor shortages in the industry and improve productivity by being more flexible.
- Remote service: With cloud-based mobile-first solutions, technicians can reboot a machine or update its software remotely without traveling to the site. Similarly, they can get diagnostic information straight from the site without heading out.
- Remote inspections: This futuristic setup involves drones decked out with cameras flying in to inspect the site, controlled by technicians back in the office or any other location. This practice might become a money-saver for remote sites with high travel expenses.
Remote service mode can slash costs and ramp up productivity by reducing travel and wait times. Customers will likely see it as a positive development, too, as it prioritizes their convenience.
Customer-centric solutions
Customers expect top-notch service in virtually every industry, and field service is no exception. According to Salesforce, a whopping 94% of customers make their purchase decisions based on the quality of service they get. FSM businesses can use the following solutions to retain customers and earn their loyalty through:
- Customer empowerment: Customers like to feel in charge and have control over the process. That’s why they will appreciate tools and features that give them a choice or make the process more transparent. This can include time slot booking, GPS tracking, and project progress bars in a self-service app.
- Feedback mechanisms: Encourage your customers to leave feedback; that’s the fastest and most reliable way to know when your service slumps. For instance, a self-service app can ask users to rate the team’s work after each field visit.
- Knowledge sharing: Make sure that each new team taking on a particular customer knows their situation, demands, and past service interactions. One possible solution is a company-wide knowledge base that all employees can easily access from their smartphones.
The customer-centric approach begins with a deliberate choice to prioritize CX. Once that’s decided, you can develop particular solutions to optimize service delivery and put customers in charge where appropriate.
Process optimization and standardization
Each customer’s situation is unique, but that doesn’t mean that field service processes cannot be standardized and optimized. A single performance standard and KPIs will make service delivery consistent. Moreover, training new employees, monitoring performance, and making decisions will be easier.
With competition heating up, process optimization in field service management is a must. And it can be achieved through the following strategies:
- Smart scheduling: This strategy means assigning the best-fitting employee for the job and sending them on the fastest route 100% of the time. Smart scheduling and route optimization are often powered by AI and specialized software. According to a McKinsey study, smart scheduling can increase productivity across the board by 29% and reduce job delays by as much as 67%.
- Real-time data collection: By using smart sensors, mobile apps with GPS tracking, and cloud databases, FSM companies can collect live data on a wide range of KPIs like travel time, up- and downtime, repeat visit rates, and last-minute cancellations. This data can be used to optimize processes throughout the organization.
- Leveraging best practices with machine learning: Every large company has its best-performing field service teams. Machine learning makes it easier to identify patterns behind their stellar performance and develop an actionable plan to optimize the work of other teams.
Process optimization is closely linked to knowledge management, another rising trend in field service management. Before optimizing field service processes, you need to have a solid grip on them, and this is where knowledge management comes into play.
Knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing in FSM is a challenge as teams are geographically dispersed and work on a variety of tasks. However, effective knowledge management promises multiple benefits:
- Better employee preparedness: When a company encourages and makes it easy to share knowledge through technical means, such as cloud databases updated in real-time, each field service team arrives at the site fully prepared to handle a particular issue. They can check the notes and documents left by other teams to get the lowdown on the situation.
- Faster problem resolution: With a knowledge base at hand, technicians won’t have to pause their work and head back to the office for more information. Instead, they can consult manuals or their more experienced colleagues right there, on-site.
- Customer satisfaction: Most customers appreciate it when the team is aware of their particular situation and past interactions. They feel that the company truly cares about them, which builds their loyalty.
The trends shaping the future of FSM are just as prominent in other industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, and B2B and B2C services—all major customers of field services. To design a viable customer-centric strategy, we need to understand how our customers navigate this change.
Field service trends in action: Example from ElifTech
Wahoo Pools, a luxury pool manufacturer, already had a CRM system in place when it approached ElifTech. However, the company wanted more functionality and better results. So, ElifTech developed a CRM and ERP system that also served as a field service management tool for salespeople and construction workers on site.
The system included web and mobile applications (for smartphones and tablets) used by managers, construction workers, salespeople, warehouse workers, and even customers. Satisfying all these users meant that the solution would have to:
- Follow the principles of mobile and remote first
- Be customer-centric
- Promote process optimization and standardization
- Enable knowledge sharing
Thanks to the solution developed by ElifTech, the client’s field service workers could create proposals, convert approved proposals into active projects, and send invoices directly on-site.
Impact of 2024 trends on customer industries
As new technologies transform customer industries, they raise the bar for field service performance. An impressive 94% of client organizations expect field service to boost their productivity. Here’s what customers consider the top trends of 2024, depending on their sector.
Healthcare
Healthcare organizations lean into predictive maintenance as medical equipment must be operational when needed. Sometimes, it’s a matter of a patient’s life and death. On top of that, healthcare providers increasingly use AI for diagnostics and data management, mobile health apps to communicate with patients and staff, and remote health monitoring devices to improve patient care.
With regulations always evolving, healthcare organizations are under great pressure to standardize their processes to stay compliant. This technological complexity and high stakes should be considered when providing field service to these customers.
Manufacturing
Manufacturers increasingly embrace AI and automation to optimize production lines, reduce downtime, and improve quality by eliminating human error. A vital part of this process is remote monitoring devices and predictive maintenance, often powered by AI analytics.
To keep the momentum going, manufacturing companies invest in sophisticated knowledge management systems. And they expect their field service providers to be able to deploy and support these advanced technological solutions.
Services
Service companies actively implement a mobile-first approach as more and more users access their websites from smartphones and tablets. Adopting a customer-centric focus, they personalize their offerings and often use AI to automate routine interactions.
Self-service apps, chatbots, and cashless payments have already become a standard in this industry. When seeking services for themselves, these companies will expect their provider to have these features on board, too.
Manufacturing, service, and healthcare organizations may prioritize current trends differently, but they all adopt new technologies and approaches to keep up with market demands and customer expectations. This means field service companies must be equipped to deploy and maintain the sophisticated systems these sectors request and deliver a high-quality customer experience that will keep them coming back.
Strategies for implementing new trends
Implementing all of the 2024 trends at once can be an extremely costly and labor-intensive undertaking. The following strategies can ease this process:
Prioritize based on your company’s needs
Each field service management trend addresses a certain group of performance issues. For example, if you have too many customer complaints and too few repeat purchases, it makes sense to focus on customer-centric solutions and knowledge sharing. But if your headache is workforce shortages, prioritize automation, process optimization, and remote service solutions.
Choose a reliable vendor
Once you decide what kind of software you need and what problems it should solve, it’s time to commission it from a trusted field service app development company. Consider the vendor’s experience with the FSM industry and check out their client reviews. Ideally, you should contact their past customers to hear what kind of service and support they received. Make sure to confirm that the vendor offers comprehensive after-sales support and staff training.
Invest in staff training
Introducing a new system is pointless if your employees don’t understand why you’re doing it, let alone are against it.
Your first step should be communicating the need for change to employees. Next, they should go through a customized training program that the vendor will develop targeting your company’s unique needs. An effective program involves hands-on experiences, simulations, and real-world scenarios. Feedback channels should be set up so you could ask staff to share their experiences and monitor their post-training performance. This feedback will also help you fine-tune the training process.
Successfully implementing the top trends hinges on a few things: prioritizing their adoption to fit your company’s needs, choosing a trustworthy vendor, and investing in staff training. However, there are still more hurdles to clear.
Challenges and considerations
Some of the biggest hurdles FSM enterprises face as they embrace the latest tech trends include:
High initial cost
The cost of rolling out sophisticated assistive technology or AI-powered solutions might be a budget buster, especially for small companies. However, there is a way around it by exploring alternative financing options, such as a long-term lease or partnership with the development company.
Data security concerns
You might be worried about the safety of your and your customers' data when it’s stored and processed by AI and self-service apps. The solution is to use custom built rather than generic platforms, vet the vendor’s reputation, and implement robust cybersecurity protocols and regular audits.
System compatibility
Your new IoT devices and apps should blend seamlessly with the existing software. To ensure that, check if your vendor supports the integration of systems you’re already using.
Resistance to change
It’s natural for people to resist changes that come with field service management tFrends, but this can seriously complicate organization-wide transformations. To address this issue, you need efficient change management in place. “Sell” the upcoming transition to your employees as you would sell it to your customers, walking them through its benefits and the overall process.
Key takeaways
The FSM market is going through a large-scale transformation driven by technological breakthroughs like AI and wearable assistive technology. At the same time, it experiences a paradigm shift as organizations become more customer-centric, remote-first, and automated. In 2024, the impact of these trends will only get bigger.
To adapt and outshine the competition, FSM companies must follow field service management trends, embracing new technologies and prioritizing them according to their needs. This will bring about multiple challenges, such as choosing a reliable field service app development company, keeping data secure, and overcoming resistance to change. However, the companies that power through it will enjoy smoother operations, better productivity, stronger customer loyalty, and growing profits.
If you are ready to start your journey into the future of the FSM industry and increase the efficiency of your workflows, we are here to assist you. Contact ElifTech for a consultation on a field service app development that will keep your data safe and do exactly what you need it to do.