Improving Field Service Efficiency and Customer Satisfaction with a Connected Workforce
What is field service efficiency and why is it important?
For any service organization, solving their customers’ problems as quickly as possible, with a minimum of disruption and cost is job one. And service efficiency is how that job is measured and improved upon. Service leaders achieve field service efficiency by ensuring maximum machine uptime for their customers. This can look like empowering technicians to complete service correctly the first time, or even enabling customers with self-service capabilities. Field service efficiency impacts key business outcomes for the service provider. Meeting SLAs improves customer satisfaction, which leads to recurring revenue and other key benefits. Organizations looking to improve their overall field service efficiency should focus on the following key priorities:
Enabling customer self-service
In cases where the customer wants to complete a simple repair or routine maintenance without waiting for a service technician to arrive, self-service solutions can increase their machine uptime. Service organizations that provide those solutions enhance their customer relationships and increase their overall customer satisfaction score.
Decrease travel and delivery time
Decreasing travel and delivery time is critical for field service efficiency. The longer customers are waiting to use their equipment again, the higher chance customer satisfaction is negatively impacted. Service organizations can reduce travel, save associated costs, and reduce their CO2 emissions by improving the accuracy and efficiency of work done in the field.
Enhanced service collaboration
When technicians arrive quickly and complete a repair correctly the first time, the customer can start using their equipment that much faster. This starts by enabling technicians to collaborate with data. If customers allow OEMs to track the performance of their assets, technicians are better informed to solve the problem efficiently when they arrive on site. Enabling technicians themselves with collaboration tools is also critical. Workers in the field can reach an expert remotely for assistance, improving service efficiency for even the most complicated problems.
Improved technician performance
Empowering technicians with resources that keep them engaged, accelerate training, and improve their comprehension is critical. This can look like transforming existing instructions and in-person training experiences with innovative workforce tools. High performing technicians represent your business by providing more efficient service for your customers.
What are the challenges faced by OEMs in the manufacturing industry?
The importance of efficiency isn’t lost on OEMs who provide service—but they’re all too familiar with the challenges impeding it. Because they see the same challenges on their own factory floors and out in the field, OEMs are uniquely positioned to both enable frontline workers and customers with better connected tools and instructions.
Labor shortage
As experts retire, manufacturers are dealing with a labor shortage that leaves some of their most important roles unfilled. Adding to that challenge is the smaller pool of new workers to hire, and high turnover in the existing workforce. With all these challenges combined, the worker shortage impacts productivity, reduces the number of available technicians, and increases customer wait times.
Widening skills gap
Combined with the labor shortage, the manufacturing skills gap is making it difficult to find people with the skills required for the job. Traditional classroom training methods aren’t as effective in teaching new hires, nor are they efficient enough to get workers into production where they’re urgently needed. And without a way to capture and scale expert knowledge, upskilling and reskilling workers is both time consuming and costly.
Multilingual environments
In multilingual environments, sharing knowledge through paper-based materials can impose an information bottleneck. Manufacturers must print and distribute instructions in all required languages, which makes for even more waste and inefficiencies when instructions must be updated and redistributed.
Legacy equipment
Since manufacturers rely on up-to-date instructions to help their workforce be as efficient and effective as possible, working with legacy equipment and capturing actionable insights from those machines can be a roadblock without the right tools. As instructions become outdated and knowledgeable experts retire, legacy equipment becomes more difficult to run and maintain.
Increasingly complex processes and machines
While aging equipment poses a challenge to service OEMs, product and process innovation can also prove to be a problem. As experts retire and manufacturers struggle to capture institutional knowledge, product and process complexity is a constant challenge. Often, information changes and additional configurations emerge faster than trainees can get up to speed. And even for skilled technicians, the rapidly growing number of new products and variants—each with their own unique service requirements—makes it difficult to keep pace.
What are key performance indicators (KPIs) in field service efficiency?
Service providers rely on their workforce to boost key performance indicators in field service efficiency—but quality of service is only as high as the quality of work instructions provided to technicians.
First-time fix rate
Service providers measure first-time fix rate (FTFR) by “the percentage of time a technician is able to fix the issue the first time, without additional expertise, information, or parts.” As a KPI for field service efficiency, FTFR is critical to customer satisfaction and a service provider’s business reputation.
Customer satisfaction score
Service providers can calculate their customer satisfaction score by dividing the number of satisfied customers by the total number of customers, then multiplying it by 100. Meeting SLAs, ensuring uptime, and providing timely and accurate service all contribute to a high customer satisfaction score, which indicates efficient technicians and quality service to prospective customers.
Field service utilization
Manufacturers can measure field service utilization by dividing the time spent in the field by total hours worked. With this information, they can optimize field service utilization to improve efficiency over time.
Transforming service with connected worker technologies
Improving field service efficiency requires a customer-centric approach. For Harpak-ULMA, a leader in packaging solutions, optimizing field service efficiency and improving customer self-service were top goals. But with the challenges posed by the labor shortage, skills gap, and high turnover, it takes an innovative solution to empower the workforce to be efficient as possible. In Harpak-ULMA's case, implementing a combination of augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies helps connect the workforce with people, products, and processes—and ultimately enables them to be more efficient in the process.
Augmented reality training and work instructions
Before using AR, Harpak-ULMA's in-person training and paper-based work instructions created inefficiencies. In-person training experiences can be easily forgotten, forcing service technicians to rely on their memory or interrupt an expert for assistance during a repair or maintenance. And paper-based work instructions are long and quickly outdated, further delaying the user. By embracing AR-enabled training experiences and detailed, in-context 3D work instructions, Harpak-ULMA now leverages expert knowledge to maximize the impact of its workforce.
Field technician efficiency
With fewer technicians in the field due to the labor shortage, there’s a heightened pressure to provide quality service while working efficiently. Without a way to access machine insights and leverage them to improve service, the entire process takes that much longer—and it might even result in unplanned downtime for the customer. With a combination of performance data from the IoT, AR instructions, and AI-enhanced inspection, Harpak-ULMA empowers its technicians to improve efficiency with fewer resources.
Customer self-service
The longer customers wait for a service technician to arrive for repairs or maintenance, the longer they have to manage without the equipment in need of service. Equipped with AI-enhanced AR instructions, Harpak-ULMA enabled its customers to complete self-service. Not only does customer self-service improve technician utilization in a tight labor market, but the improved uptime also increases customer satisfaction scores.
Conclusion
Providing quality service in less time might seem like an unaffordable luxury in the age of the labor shortage, the skills gap, and increasing product and process complexity. But industry leaders like Harpak-ULMA show the importance—and the payoff—of empowering technicians and customers with innovative solutions to transform field service efficiency. To learn more about Harpak-ULMA's journey transforming technician training and improving customer self-service with AR, AI, and IoT, read the OEM’s full case study.