For better or worse, technology has taught us that we shouldn’t have to wait anymore. We can access the news instantly, wherever we are, on our mobile devices. We can watch a favorite movie on demand via Netflix or another streaming service. “One-click purchase” represents the amount of time it takes to buy. In fact, the ease and speed of e-commerce has gotten to the point that it’s practically a national holiday.
So why are we still being asked to wait at home between noon and 5:00 p.m. for a repairman to show up and figure out why our ice maker is out, why the cable refuses to pull up HBO, or why our exercise bike is on fire? Why hasn’t field service caught up to the rest of the world?
One answer is that the industry hasn’t adopted the kind of technology that will improve speed, accuracy and reliability. If field-service reps could communicate with the equipment they’re sent out to repair, they wouldn’t have to come in unprepared, assess the situation, and then begin repairs — all of which slows the whole process down and ensures that a five-hour window is often as accurate as it gets.
Enter the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). IoT promises that field-service reps will be able to talk to machines to quickly identify issues; AI promises to make reps aware of problems before they even appear. Let’s look at four areas AI and IoT will change the industry.
AI will use image recognition to streamline the service process, whether that’s break-fix, preventative maintenance, or installations. AI can help the technician identify parts for repair and order them, or record what parts were consumed as part of the work order and automatically put in an order to replenish them. This is a notoriously error-prone process right now. As field service is closely involved in fixing or replacing parts at the customer’s home or office, image recognition has huge potential to increase the field rep’s accuracy throughout the asset service lifecycle.
Businesses today want to be prescriptive about what their technicians do at every step of the work order — not just for compliance reasons, but for training and safety, too. It can be laborious for a company to stay current with new developments in the field. By using AI to analyze what technicians typically do for a certain type of work, for a certain type of customer, at a particular step, given a particular asset, AI can develop a set of best practices to guide future technicians through those same situations.
