Field Service Management is in the Spotlight — Again
It’s easy to forget that not too long ago field service was mostly overlooked. It received little investment, and even less attention from the C-suite. Field service engineers were expected to be content with old, often manual processes, and even older technologies to do their jobs.
This was before the cloud and mobile forever changed how we live and work — and the field service industry is getting its due makeover.
While it might have taken longer for those changes to reach field service than other departments, once they arrived the effects were staggering. Field service engineers’ toolkits now include some of the coolest new technologies and gadgets from drones to augmented reality headsets and, of course, the Internet of Things. It’s not all flash, though. Field service leaders are driving revenue, profits and customer satisfaction scores like never before.
The latest evidence that field service has matured? Our inclusion on Forbes’ 2016 Cloud 100 list. The list, developed with Bessemer Venture Partners and judged from some 27 CEOs of public cloud companies such as Salesforce, Box, NetSuite, HubSpot and Zendesk, “recognizes cloud companies for the financial health and growth of their business alongside exceptional qualitative factors such as unprecedented customer adoption and satisfaction,” according to Forbes.
Field service management (FSM) has certainly grown up, joining some of the most disruptive enterprise technology companies in prominent categories such as cybersecurity, online payments and collaboration.
FSM’s importance to business growth is also on the rise. In fact, a recent report we conducted with Vanson Bourne found that 73 percent of surveyed field service and IT leaders say field service management has a positive impact on their organizations’ customer satisfaction – and that feeds directly into the bottom line.
While we obviously love seeing ServiceMax on this list, it’s even more rewarding to see this kind of validation for our industry and how far it has come. That is in no small part a reflection of the innovative people who work for our customers and partners — and who weren’t afraid to try something new that had the potential to change their businesses forever.
Share this: