Best Buy recently announced it had laid off 650 of its Geek Squad field service techs, only to hire 500 more a few days later. That’s not exactly the most cost-efficient business practice, and it’s precisely the scenario OnForce, which pairs contract technicians with companies looking for them, says it wants to help companies avoid.
Retailers like Best Buy make up a sizable chunk of OnForce’s customer base. And those kinds of companies experience spikes and drops in demand for service techs throughout the year — high in the winter, low in the summer — meaning fluctuations in the number of service staff they need, or at least a lot of downtime sometimes, and a tough workload other teams.
That brings up an interesting question for field service operations: Is it smarter to keep a technician staff in-house and accept the peaks and valleys in demand, or to sub-contract out work to a third party?
To Bill Lucchini, the COO for technician outsourcing company OnForce, it’s simply too too much trouble to keep an in-house staff in flux.
“The value proposition we offer businesses is geographic coverage, skill set diversity, and the ability to handle spikes in demand,” Lucchini says. “Companies like Best Buy have two times, or more, demand in January than they do in the summer. OnForce helps them deal with the workforce problems associated with that.”
Controlling for Quality
OnForce has a database of over 100,000 technicians in all sorts of fields, which companies can contract out on a one-off or ongoing basis. Its biggest customers are indeed big companies, including Comcast and AT&T, although most of its customer base is made up of mid-market companies. With so many technicians on call, maintaining a level of quality becomes a complicated process.
Before any tech is accepted into OnForce’s network, they go through an evaluation process that involves filling out a profile, providing any certifications they have, and validating those certifications and doing a phone screening. Imagine doing that for 100,000 techs.
“That’s all before they even become active on our platform,” Lucchini says. “It’s definitely high-volume work.”
OnForce says it tracks 28 metrics for every work order its techs perform — from things like time, budget performance, speed of returning deliverables, and satisfaction — which are compared against other techs, creating an ever-changing ranking structure within its workforce.
Requesting, and Accepting, Orders
Most techs receive work orders through OnForce’s mobile app, where they can either accept it at the asking time and price, make a counter-offer, or decline the order.
This point is important, as labor-outsourcing companies like OnForce have come under attack for undercutting local competition on pricing. Lucchini says OnForce doesn’t set the labor rates; rather the company requesting the work does. It’s up to the technician to decide whether or not to accept the job.
“We stress to the techs that these are work opportunities — don’t take the job if you don’t want to,” Lucchini says. “If the work order is too high, techs and buyers can negotiate. If a tech does take the job and does great work, then that’s the market saying, ‘This is what the job is worth.’ We have a system that tries to allow the market to find the right balance.”
That free-market sort of approach to pricing can, at times, ruffle feathers — after all, with so many technicians in the database and so many work orders, OnForce can often be in a position to drive the service contractor market in an area.
“We’re trying to enable this quality-to-cost ratio that you can’t achieve anywhere else and just totally change the way field service works,” Lucchini says. “I think it’s been too inefficient for far too long, and we’re trying to fix that.”
More: The Good and Bad of Service Tech Outsourcing.
Click here to download a free whitepaper, “Five Steps to Make Field Service Profitable.”
Onforce started it…but workmarket.com is the lead in the space.
The lead is that they dont assure the techs gets paid, so should be called free work market
Up until the end of 2010, OnForce claimed to have around 13,000 techs, or “Pros” as the company calls them. Sometime within the past couple of years at least one OnForce employee claimed the number of “Pros” to be around 30,000. So within one year they now have over 100,000?
Did Mr. Weiss do any fact checking to confirm this number or was it just quoted from someone at OnForce and published as fact?
Yes, there may be 100,000 techs in the database, but that doesn’t mean they have 100,000 techs. I should know. I was one of them.
I know such a large number sounds impressive from a marketing standpoint, but it isn’t accurate. I challenge Mr. Weiss and Bill Lucchini to prove that number is real. I believe the actual number of active “Pros” on the OnForce platform is considerably less. In fact, I just blogged about it myself, and I am confident that my research on this was a lot more thorough than that of Mr. Weiss, and the figure is a lot more accurate.
To his credit, Mr. Weiss is accurate when he wrote “”…after all, with so many technicians in the database and so many work orders, OnForce can often be in a position to drive the service contractor market in an area”. Considering the potential influence OnForce has over its own marketplace, that is an understatement.
Rick Savoia
The Force Field Podcast for IT service Professionals
http://www.theforcefield.net/podcast
This article still has not been redacted, so the numbers are just for marketing purposes. This is basically an ad, and Mr Weiss writes ad copy. Ok got it.
If a tech does take the job and does great work, then that’s the market saying, ‘This is what the job is worth.’ We have a system that tries to allow the market to find the right balance.”
This is false. What it says is that technicians that worked for years in a thankless industry had few options other than working for the same types of companies that decided to go with scab labor instead of paying pensions and medical benefits.
People don’t accept these jobs based on fair market wages they accept them because they have families to feed and bills to pay.
Field nation is atleast impartial to buyer and professional. Even tech service today is ahead of the onforce curve. Their phone “interview” is a joke. And the tests they make mandatory are equally laughable. If praise for onforce is meant to be aimed at their ability to squeeze technicians for cheap labor then huzzah for onforce. After extensive billing and payment skimming I no longer do business with them. Its one thing to be cheap but its another all together to hit techs over the head with a million little payment penalties. Nickling and diming people who are already under paid for decades of experience. In areas with lower populations these types of companies have decimated the entire telecom field by flooding it with cheap unskilled labor for pennies on the dollar. For instance company A needs a cable run. Standard is 125 – 150 per drop with certification. They add fixed rates for cable, jacks and connectors. Onforce prices 40$ for the first hour 30$ the second hour. if the run takes 3 hours thru conduit at a mall. Tough. You blindly accepted the job with no option for a site survey. At the fixed rates the customer gets the cheapest quality cable, jacks and connectors.and a run that reflects the pay. Or 40$ to do a site survey for a location. being assured that if the client accepts you will get the work. But what happens is a 3,000$ multi run with patch pannels jhooks with all certifiable materials and install is then pieced out at the undercut rate once they have the survey to sub it out. This happened several times because i took the follow up jobs to Test for faults, reterminate the crap patch panels and jacks on the sites i surveyed. Even if your not on the side of the people doing the work. You have to admit the end customer is the one that gets the shaft.