By: Rhodo Odysseos, Product/Solution Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent, and Jess Verbruggen, Motive Integrated Marketing Assistant, Alcatel-Lucent
Traditionally, communications service providers (CSPs) have treated the field service aspect of their organization as a cost center. Field technicians engaged in maintenance activities were simply a part of the cost of doing business. More recently, the communications industry in general and the field service arena in particular, has been disrupted by immense changes in the customer profile, service expectations, and behaviors.
Field service is often the only face of the company that a customer will ever see, so it’s not a surprise that CSPs are striving to make a positive impact on customers in this realm. Achieving full potential in field service saves CSPs a lot of time and money. Productivity and efficiency reviews targeted at field service operations, done correctly, can reinforce other areas of the business by increasing customer satisfaction and improving safety and quality.
Field service has traditionally worked as follows. Something breaks or needs to be installed. The customer notifies the CSP. Dispatch schedules a field service technician. The technician arrives, resolves the issue, then moves on to the next job. While many CSPs have perfected the process of efficiently scheduling technicians, it does not negate the fact that there has been a disruption in a consumer’s life or an organization’s productivity, and they are likely unhappy as a result.
The CSP is starting from a disadvantaged position and must turn the situation around by providing exceptional field service – or risk losing customers, profits, and opportunities. Inefficient field service increases the amount of time the customer is stuck with a non-performing asset, thereby increasing the amount of time that the customer is not generating revenue from that asset, as well as increasing the amount of time that the customer must spend appeasing his/her own customers. All of this eventually leads to lower renewal rates and, ultimately, CSP customer loss.
So, what does it take to achieve field service excellence? For Alcatel-Lucent, an optimized field service solution empowers lower-cost service methods. This includes remote service, self-service, and fixes by phone or mail from the contact center. An optimized approach incorporates several essential elements, including: automation, mobility, and consolidation and collaboration.
Automation:
Communications service providers need the ability to automate and remotely manage broadband access network operations at three key stages of the customer lifecycle:
- Service activation
- Troubleshooting and support
- Proactive maintenance
This approach will enable CSPs to accelerate time-to-market, reduce operating expenses, and maximize their capital investments. The ultimate prize, of course, is long-term customer loyalty.
Mobility:
“Best-in-Class organizations prioritize the investment in mobile tools to provide technicians with better access to information in the field. The need to resolve customer issues quickly and efficiently has led to the best firms equipping the field with the right tools to find information in a complex world.”[1]
CSPs must decide which corporate systems should be available via mobile device at a customer site in order to most effectively resolve potential issues. On the scheduling/dispatch side, CSPs need to have the GPS aspect of their mobile strategy figured out up front so they can make location-specific scheduling and routing decisions from Day 1 of go-live.
Consolidation and Collaboration:
Maintaining separate dispatch systems or processes for different areas of business is expensive and inefficient. With a single common service management platform, CSPs can comprehensively define, publish and execute advanced service activation, troubleshooting and management logic across the service delivery ecosystem.
If you’re still on the fence about leveraging field service as a revenue growth driver, consider this:
Alcatel-Lucent’s solutions allow customers to receive a convenient, more personal experience while also allowing executives more visibility into the organization. With our solutions, field agents are more empowered to deliver great service while completing more jobs per day.
Above all, Alcatel-Lucent’s field service management solutions get the right field service technician to the right place at the right time – with the right service parts, tools, and information – to get the job done right.
[1] Aberdeen Group. Service Lifecycle Excellence: Resolution at the Heart of Service. July 2014.
http://www.aberdeen.com/research/9358/rr-service-lifecycle-excellence/content.aspx
