7 Ways to Improve Field Service with IoT Asset Visibility

Before the arrival of IoT-enabled asset monitoring, field service technicians would struggle with delays from unidentified malfunctions or inaccurate diagnosis resulting in high intervention bills, unnecessary truck rolls, and a bad customer service reputation.

Businesses introducing new Applications based on connected assets as part of their IoT strategy are incentivized by the opportunity to boost efficiency and reduce the costs of their field service organization. But what is the readiness level of your field service in real life, and how can you push to a higher level of ROI maturity?

IoT asset visibility can drastically improve field service efficiency if you manage these 7 key indicators of your field service success.

1. Avoid Truck Rolls

Giving customer service departments a real-time view of the actual state of assets, asset alarms, and asset environmental conditions is extremely powerful. This can be complemented by the execution of diagnostics tests to assess further and confirm the asset's health. The cheapest truck roll is not having a truck roll at all. Remote problem resolution also minimizes health risks during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

2. Increase First-Time-Right Repairs

Before the field service intervention, execute diagnostic tests based on digital twin asset data to identify the root cause of an issue. This ensures that field technicians have the right spare parts with them, increasing the first time right repair and avoiding follow-up technician visits.

3. Decrease Repair Time & Increase Interventions Per Day

Knowing the root cause helps to solve the problem faster. Giving a field service technician access to historical asset data while onsite helps diagnose and resolve faster problems. Increasing the first-time repair rate and decreasing the average repair time naturally leads to higher productivity and the ability to schedule more interventions daily.

4. Avoid an Overload of Senior Field Service Technicians

More and more experienced field service technicians are retiring with an aging population, and their work needs to be taken over by either more junior colleagues or outsourced personnel. Having the appropriate level of preprocessing of IoT data and root cause analysis can help lower the threshold to get problems resolved and reduce the number of tickets and interventions requiring a visit from the (more expensive) ‘expert team.’

5. Improve SLA Compliance and Increase Customer Satisfaction

Real-time IoT asset visibility helps increase the predictability of field service interventions and the number of interventions that can be done in time, compliant with the customer SLA and increasing overall customer satisfaction and customer service reputation.

6. Evolve From Time-Based to Condition-Based Maintenance

Current field service interventions are still mainly planned according to a fixed schedule of minor or major maintenance interventions. Data on actual usage and performance of assets allows doing this more economically based on actual usage data.

7. Transform From Break-and-Fix to Outcome-Based Service Contracts

The traditional approach of the one-off sale of assets comes with an associated break-and-fix tactic where the customer is charged for the required field service interventions. From a customer perspective, any breakdown of equipment or interruption can lead to unplanned downtime and revenue loss. Hence, the world is moving to outcome-based service contracts with an associated guaranteed performance level. Real-time asset visibility with condition-based and predictive maintenance are key components in this servitization of business models.

Asset Visibility

In brief, IoT asset visibility helps businesses to reach a new level of field service maturity. Asset visibility empowers domain experts to manage their asset portfolio better, improve interventions, or avoid them altogether. Service departments and call center agents can play a key role and initiate asset telemetry diagnosis before field service needs to be involved. Field service engineers and technicians will grow in more interesting roles based on improved asset insights and better intervention planning. Thus, IoT asset visibility will help to increase profitability, will improve customer service, and bring a significant boost to field service operations efficiency.‍