Top 8 Field Service Management Challenges

Building field service success is often associated with expensive investments in people and infrastructure. Traditionally, service technicians require extensive training investments—both as they begin their career and as they advance into greater responsibilities—so they can competently tackle complex problems that customers can’t solve themselves. Beyond skills, overall headcount and availability are another primary concern. In addition to natural attrition within the industry, field service managers need to factor in an expertise paradox. As your technicians grow their skillset throughout their career, the closer they are to retirement and permanently exiting the workforce.

The service team is also more than just field service itself. While field service managers may have a focused responsibility, the landscape is—or should be—much more collaborative. Field techs—those who operate at the point of service—aren’t alone in the service process. Technicians, dispatchers, customer service agents, warehouse and parts inventory personnel, service fleet managers, remote service technicians, and even the customer all play a role in the larger service ecosystem. This enterprise collaboration model supporting connected service is an attribute of the most successful service organizations—but is far from today’s norm.

Macro-level shifts in customer expectations have also changed the industry. In most markets, sales used to be a fixed event, and once the customer made a purchase, they were highly dependent on either the manufacturer, or third-party service, to ensure continued successful operation. But the rules have changed. Today, many products fall into a subscription or outcome-based model. Instead of just purchasing a machine, customers may purchase the output that machine is committed to providing. Subscriptions may include automatic replacements and upgrades throughout the life of the contract. Even when products are sold in a traditional sense, there are value-added packages and competitive differentiators. That is combined with an internet-fueled, on-demand mindset, where customers (and their customers) expect things to arrive immediately and operate without error. If something goes awry, they expect the problem to be immediately solved. These shifts have placed a much greater emphasis on service—particularly field service—to maintain a healthy customer lifecycle.

The challenges that field service managers face stem directly from these realities. Technicians require initial and ongoing training—which is expensive. Maintaining a roster of technicians in the face of retirement and attrition adds to that cost. And building out your technician team or replacing retirees and those exiting the organization requires even more training investments. Service is a team sport—but not many organizations fully take advantage of this dynamic. Meanwhile, the role of service in overall business success has increased proportionally to customers’ expectations (and commitments made). Add onto all of these factors the reality that service budgets aren’t keeping pace to reflect these demands, and service managers essentially have to figure out how to do more with less. It’s easy to understand why many service organizations are feeling intense pressure to thrive.

Fortunately, best-in-class service leaders have charted a course that others can follow. Organizations that leverage digital technologies like IoT and deploy service optimization solutions achieve heightened levels of productivity and efficiency, but implementing those solutions can be a difficult process. These initiatives' success depends on a variety of factors, such as program ownership, change management, and deployment strategy. When implemented correctly, though, these solutions enable teams to maximize results at their current headcount without taking on additional costs.

Each organization faces different pressures, and their respective service responses will look unique. Start by identifying and dissecting how each of the eight field service management challenges are impacting you, and only then evaluate the digital transformation solutions (e.g., service lifecycle management (SLM), IoT, machine connectivity, PLM, etc.) that will best address them. We’ve documented eight of the most often-cited field service challenges and provided the approach that leading service organizations are employing to solve them.

Organizations should be able to manage and monitor work orders from end-to-end and debrief to meet customers’ high expectations for timely and efficient service. However, managing multiple work orders simultaneously requires precise coordination between various teams, and this can be difficult to achieve without robust, accurate systems in place to keep track of resource allocation. Reliable machine and product connectivity can unlock a seamless flow of data and facilitate real-time communication and collaboration across the entire team. By ensuring that no task falls through the cracks, service leaders can feel confident that customer needs are being met efficiently and accurately. Designing in native connectivity may feel like a non-starter for many organizations, but fortunately there are highly effective alternatives.

Dispatchers are under a lot of pressure to achieve high productivity to ensure the best outcomes for customers and technicians alike. Customers left waiting for service or field technicians waiting on-call are both indicators of serious field service management challenges. How do the best in the game keep this from happening? Strong job scheduling functionality allows them to improve technician utilization with shift management, maps, personalized views, and live notifications. They also use digital tools for monitoring and optimizing schedules, so their dispatchers can reduce travel time and ensure that the right technician is assigned to the right job. They also use automated scheduling tools to adapt to real-time changes, minimizing downtime and responding promptly to urgent service requests.

Customers expect timely service updates and resolutions. But a lack of visibility and ability to respond means that service teams are stymied by:

• Delayed issue resolution: Without live data or access to remote experts, it’s difficult for field technicians to promptly report issues or seek guidance.

• Inefficient resource allocation: Real-time updates are crucial to make sure technicians arrive at the site with the knowledge and tools they need to fix the problem correctly the first time.

• Inaccurate job status reporting: Without instant communication, the status of ongoing jobs may not be accurately reported, leading to poor management of field service activities.

The solutions, much like the problems, are grounded in data. Real-time visibility and monitoring. Active notification. Automated responses to drive immediate action. Predictive service. The absence of real-time data communication increases the risk of failing to meet customer expectations, resulting in dissatisfaction and the potential loss of business. In the long term, historical data can be used to determine optimal maintenance schedules and more advanced predictive analytics. Ultimately, the more assets you connect and collect live data from, the more information you can harness—providing you with real-time, accurate analytics and a positive impact on your service metrics.

Many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) offer field service support to their customers, which involves sending a technician to a customer site to repair, maintain, or install equipment. However, these visits are not always efficient—often, it takes technicians multiple visits to solve a problem that could have been easily solved by the customer. Various factors can affect field service efficiency, such as:

• Inaccurate instructions: Traditional paper-based instructions can become quickly outdated, making field service efficiency difficult. They also are difficult to update, and lack any additional context to help translate 2D instructions to the physical machine that needs repair.

• Inefficient service dispatches: It can be difficult to diagnose a machine failure remotely without the right tools or live data, resulting in unnecessary truck rolls and poor technician utilization.

• Poor parts management: With constant pressure to keep inventory costs low, it can be difficult to ensure the correct parts are available and easily accessible when a customer needs them. Without a robust service parts management strategy, technicians can show up to customer sites with the wrong materials, resulting in prolonged downtime and missed SLAs.

It’s imperative for field service organizations to eliminate blind dispatches and improve first-time fix rates, both to reduce costly truck rolls and improve customer satisfaction. When technicians have the right tools for success, they can enable remote diagnostics, optimize service management, and even provide in-context digital work instructions to shorten the mean time to repair.

First-time fix rate—the percentage of time a technician can fix an issue the first time, without additional expertise, information, or parts—is a critical metric for evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of field service operations. A high first-time fix rate can keep service costs low by reducing truck rolls and boosting customer satisfaction. After all, if an issue is not resolved on the first service visit, a technician will have to visit 1.6 additional times on average. Improving this vital metric not only enhances operational efficiency but also strengthens customer trust and loyalty, as timely and effective resolutions are critical to maintaining high levels of satisfaction. Many organizations seek to improve their first-time fix rates, but they often lack the diagnostics they need to truly resolve service issues before they require a costly truck roll or result in downtime. Tools like machine learning, AI, and industrial connectivity can predict customer issues before they escalate, allowing service technicians to use real-time data to fix them successfully the first time—sometimes before the customer even notices a problem.

An aging workforce presents significant challenges for field service management. Experienced technicians retire, taking with them years of invaluable knowledge and skills—and replacing these seasoned professionals is not only costly but also time-consuming. To mitigate this strain on resources and morale, organizations need to focus on knowledge transfer and invest in training new technicians to ensure seamless transitions and maintain high service standards.

As industrial organizations become more customer-centric, there is a new focus on customer satisfaction. A satisfied customer will exhibit long-term loyalty, while dissatisfied customers will seek out other options in the ever-growing industrial market. To retain customers and stay competitive, service organizations must prioritize timely, efficient service experiences that consistently meet or exceed expectations. As service organizations master solving the previous challenges, they can take the challenge of heightened customer expectations and turn it on its head. If you consistently solve problems faster the first time (and can sometimes do so before customers know there’s a problem)—you’ll go from being at the front-line of a souring customer relationship to becoming a strategic partner in their success. Many organizations that have solved these challenges not only have enviously high customer satisfaction metrics—they offer add-on services to help their customers’ plans and execute improvement to grow their companies. While that is a long journey that requires addressing previous field service management challenges, it is a service game changer that separates the best from the rest.

As experts retire, they often take their knowledge with them, which makes capturing and sharing it even more paramount. However, training new technicians to bridge that gap can be a challenge. The learning curve is steep, and without effective, ongoing training programs, knowledge gaps can quickly lead to operational inefficiencies and reduced service quality. Equipping service techs with the digital tools they need to retain that critical knowledge can ensure that new generations have the insights and skills necessary for maintaining service excellence.

Leveraging technology such as augmented reality (AR) can enhance training programs, allowing new technicians to learn alongside a “digital mentor” that provides in-context visual instructions for employees to leverage while they’re working. By fostering a culture of continuous learning, organizations can better adapt to workforce changes and preserve critical expertise.

Service techs don’t always have the tools for collaboration available, so they’re often conditioned to figure things out themselves—and don’t see collaboration as the first avenue to help. If they don’t have the tools they need, collaboration is a sure-fire way to get the necessary information to solve the problem at hand and exceed customer expectations. A robust enterprise collaboration model, enabled by the digital tools that keep technicians connected, can help address common field service challenges by:

• Allowing team members to collaborate in real time with remote assistance tools, breaking down geographical barriers and promoting a more dynamic exchange of ideas.

• Offering clear guidance for repairs and streamlined upskilling using in-context digital work instructions, which leverage data pulled from CAD and PLM systems to ensure accuracy.

• Encouraging communication with customers to provide live asset monitoring and utilization, predictive maintenance, and performance metrics to that technicians have clear visibility before starting a job.

• Giving customers self-service abilities, ultimately enabling them to use in-context work instructions and remote assistance to solve their problems independently rather than dispatching a service technician.

• Ensuring the right parts are available at the right time with parts management, which gives service technicians the tools they need to solve a problem on the first try.

Connecting service technicians to digital work instructions, live asset utilization data, and remote support improves their productivity and quality, and focusing on collaboration gives them clear visibility before starting a job—ensuring it’s done efficiently and correctly on the first try.

Field service has changed immensely, and the pace of change seems to only accelerate. Challenges that didn’t exist 20 years ago are now critical problems to solve. But at the same time, there are new tools in the toolbox—connected worker solutions—that can help organizations solve today’s problems and be in a much better place to adapt to the pressures of tomorrow. By embracing these innovations and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, organizations can not only overcome current challenges but also position themselves as leaders in the rapidly evolving field service landscape. Organizations that embrace innovation and utilize an enterprise collaboration model to address these challenges will establish a robust competitive advantage, ultimately shaping the future of field service.