Artificial intelligence has been a trending topic of conversation across almost every global industry.

As businesses look for opportunities to cut costs and increase productivity, many are looking toward AI as a magic bullet to revolutionize operations, both in the office and out in the field.

While in reality, field service companies will need to look to a tech partner to take advantage of AI in a way that also protects data security, it’s still important to understand at a basic level how AI has the possibility of transforming field service operations.

TRANSFORMING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS

Customer experience is one of the most important aspects of field service work. No matter the type of services your business provides, a sizable portion of revenue probably comes from repeat and referral business. This is especially true for field service businesses, which are built on word-of-mouth recommendations and their technological equivalent — digital reviews. Positive customer satisfaction is key to gaining those reviews and recommendations. 

Especially as more and more people move their purchasing activities online, your future customers are relying on other people’s recommendations to influence who they trust to complete services in their homes and businesses. AI can be used as a tool to help improve your online presence and other areas of your business that directly influence customer satisfaction.

With AI-powered chatbots, for example, you can more efficiently triage requests from customers, even providing initial responses without manual intervention from anyone on your team. It’s possible that AI could also help predict proactive and preventive maintenance down the road using customer data and information from service histories — preventing the severity of future work while increasing your pipeline of regular maintenance work.

As services requiring a technician are often costly and disruptive to a customer’s day-to-day life, it’s not uncommon for a customer to react negatively to the need for service, even if the service itself is adequate. That’s why it’s extra important to have a solid customer service plan in place to mitigate dissatisfaction where you can. While a knee-jerk response might be to think about integrating more chatbots into your communication channels, AI can also be used to better equip your field-based team members with the tools they need to handle customer situations while out in the field.

For example, businesses could work with tech partners to leverage generative pre-trained transformers, or GPTs, as a type of internal learning center. From there, technicians could access manuals, instructions, data or even safety guidelines for more hazardous jobs and use the information to approach every job in a very targeted way. While this may still not please a customer who is unhappy with their upcoming bill, it does ensure each technician has the tools they need to ensure a job can be completed quickly, efficiently and to a high-quality standard. 

BACKEND OPERATIONS

Often we’re seeing different industries look toward AI as a means to streamline repetitive tasks, reduce errors and cut down manual labor, all in the name of critical benefits like cost savings and increased productivity. When we look at a field service company’s back office team, this has the potential to help in a lot of areas.

Take resource allocation as an example. In the same way AI could be used as a tool to help predict maintenance, it could be used to help improve customer service. There are some opportunities to use those same predictive analytics to forecast resources needed before requests for work are actually received. By understanding peak times of service, common service requests and historical service logs, AI could eventually help you understand when you’ll need certain supplies, equipment or even labor on hand to meet demand. This can also help inform your procurement strategy, ensuring you’re managing inventory according to your available cash flow in a way that makes sense. 

There is also a huge potential for AI to help businesses make sense of heaps of data. Across field service industries, we’re finding a growing demand from companies to better understand what their data is telling them. Two main drivers are pushing this need: a desire to operate more efficiently and customers demanding more proof of service, transparency and accountability from their contracts.

Even a smaller company manages data across customer service logs, inventory, scheduling, equipment maintenance and financial management. To bring all of this information together in a way that provides meaningful insights into patterns, trends and explanations is no small feat. AI can help by sifting through massive amounts of data very quickly. 

There is a caveat here. Many AI tools are public, which runs the risk of content replication, data breach or misuse. As such, sensitive data — company or customer data — should not be input into a public AI tool. AI should only be used for analytics if it is properly set up to process your data in a private, secure format. 

SAVING COSTS

There’s always a concern around profitability in field services. Inflation has increased expenses, shrinking already tight profit margins. Even as some industries price up, there’s an inherent risk of customers feeling priced out of services, especially as the general population experiences decreasing per capita disposable income. So it’s important to look to technology as a form of labor-saving equipment. Anywhere you can create efficiencies, improve response times and shave costs can help protect profit margins.

When looking specifically at AI, think about how it can make your employees’ jobs easier, giving them more time to scale output. If it can be used to streamline customer inquiries and support, analyze customer data or support your sales outreach, that all translates to money and resources saved down the road. Even something as seemingly simple as using AI to summarize notes from a meeting can save valuable time. 

A DIGITAL WORLD

While the topic of AI feels new and shiny, in actuality, a digital transformation has been going on in service-related industries for many years. It’s important to remember that AI isn’t the only tool available to help make your business more efficient. AI uses intelligence to analyze data and make informed decisions. But there have been tools in the market using advanced intelligence, turning intelligence into actions and creating workforce efficiencies for many years: 

Scheduling and route planning — Software tools can already use predefined rules to create optimized schedules based on historical data and incoming requests. From this, route optimization can ensure multiple technicians are routed to their scheduled appointments with the most efficient drive and service time, increasing customer satisfaction while reducing windshield time and resource waste. 

Resource allocation and job costing — Software tools can already manage inventory, track supplies and forecast for future procurement needs. There are tools that specialize in job costing to help provide actual visibility into the profitability of each contract, so companies can prioritize labor and resources accordingly. Dynamic scheduling can also help control labor costs, while highlighting jobs at risk of additional resources, like overtime labor. 

Customer experience — Software tools leverage customer relationship management systems to manage, track and nurture leads and customers throughout your sales process. Combining CRMs with tools like integrated AI-powered chatbots and centralized hubs to manage customer communications and interactions — no matter if that interaction is an email, webchat or phone call — can ensure a seamless customer experience while also working to gain you new business. 

Data-driven insights — Software tools often include out-of-the-box reporting and analytic tools to help provide visibility into your business and make sense of it. This type of analysis also happens within the software itself, rather than opening proprietary information to public AI channels. 

Workflow optimization — One of the key benefits of using a software tool to digitally transform your business is that they are often built in industry-specific formats. Different software can cater to the unique needs of each, working to automate industry-specific tasks and workflows for greater efficiency. Depending on the scope of the software, these can include the bare minimum tasks you need to run your business — things like scheduling, managing employee time off, reporting, mobile accessibility, route optimization — to all-encompassing software that is designed to handle even more aspects of your company, such as financial management, human resources, sales, marketing and more. 

While it will be exciting to see how AI helps shape this landscape further, the truth is that there is a digital transformation already well underway within field services. The trick to success is adopting proven technology now, so your business can scale and grow as future innovations make even more possible.