The growth of mobile
It's not all that long ago that I can remember not owning a mobile phone and going to a street corner to make calls from a payphone. In only a couple of decades things have changed dramatically. Let's consider some statistics:
In 2019, 79% of UK adults own a smartphone. On average people in the UK spend 2 hours and 34 minutes online on their smartphones every day with 72% of mobile connections for 4G in 2019, up from 66% in 2018.
As the chart below (from Statista) shows the number of households owning a mobile has increased dramatically since 16% in 1996.
Looking at the global picture the number of smartphone users worldwide today is over three billion. This is forecast to further grow by several hundred million in the next few years. The smartphone penetration rate is still lower than 70 percent in some highly populated countries such as China and India so there is still room for growth. Again the chart below (from Statista) shows the trend.
5G opportunities
As we've written about elsewhere the adoption of 5G will bring about many benefits.
5G could present a range of outcomes for operators and their business models. It could help operators reverse declining revenues (infrastructure costs notwithstanding) by providing a wider range of their own video content and partnering to develop 5G industry applications. But equally, their decline could accelerate, resulting in further consolidation with mobile networks becoming a commodity service much like water.
A range of technologies are maturing that, when combined, could lead to autonomous telecoms networks – including virtualisation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, better telemetry, big data and analytics. Automation and self-organising networks have been growing in importance, particularly through IP and Ethernet networks and 4G/LTE networks. As automation is integrated with a wider set of disruptive technologies, it will get smarter and broaden across the entire telecoms network.
What mobile means for field service
It almost goes without saying that the adoption of mobile technologies can deliver positive customer experience and help to encourage operational excellence and efficiency in a field service business. Shorter response times to service requests by mobile technicians can help to ensure more jobs can be delivered. Using mobile technologies to support field workforce management helps promote innovation and improve operational efficiency.
Many of the organisations we work with have long adopted mobile technologies. Starting with tougbooks or ruggedised devices they are now using Android or iOS devices for their field technicians to receive work, complete jobs, capture information and keep updated in real-time during their working day.
For companies with a more mature approach to mobility, there are some roadmap areas still worth considering, including:
Secure mobile device management - It's surprisingly common to see mobile devices used by field technicians that aren't properly secure and using mobile device management. Evaluate the best options for your business and take action to ensure your customer data isn't exposed.
Integrated communications - There are many and varied routes for field technicians to communicate and we see a lot of organisations who haven't fully considered their strategy but allow things to grow organically, often through WhatApp or other informal channels. The challenge with this is that information is kept in silos and hard to access in future. Consider better integrated comms. that leverage your existing networks and can be searched as knowledge repositories.
Customer experience technologies - There are a range of powerful tools now available that allow you to deliver a better customer experience from your field service visits. On My Way allows your customers to see all the information they need to know about their service appointment including the location of the technician visiting their home or premises, in real-time via their desktop or mobile device. On My Way has been specifically designed for field service situations, which are different to other logistical business processes, such as deliveries, due to reduced predictability in job duration. Providing real-time updates to your customers on their service visit, including expected time of arrival, appointment details and much more is a great benefit. It lets you reduce calls into your contact centre and significantly improve your customer experience.
Merged Reality - A lot of field businesses are using technology to react more quickly and effectively to service visits. Merged Reality can put your experts directly in front of your customers or inexperienced technicians without having to make a visit. Remote experts can reach out and touch the equipment their colleague or customer is working on. Help is provided quickly and instinctively without the need for complex training or infrastructure. Find out more here.
Mobile artificial intelligence - We can see a not-too-distant world where field technicians will be better supported by autonomous mobile technologies and mobile virtual assistants. Great intelligence within mobile tools will have analysed the upcoming jobs for the technicians and automatically suggested the parts they need to order. They may have used chatbots to automatically keep the scheduling team up-to-date on changes during the day. They may have learned from every time the individual attended the site and made impactful changes to the time required to do the work, helping the technician to be efficient in work delivery. The arrival of even greater intelligence and AI combined with mobile work management tools could be really powerful.
What to do next
It's worth remembering that not every field business has fully embraced mobile and even amongst those who have there can still be some resistance particularly amongst an older generation who hasn't grown up with mobile. We've got some more blogs on this site about mobile technologies for field workers including:
Behavioural insights from mobile
10 things to avoid in upgrading your mobile work management solution
Mobile technology in times of emergency
The hurdles to achieving AR ROI In field service
Leadent Digital helps organisations to achieve transformational change. We love developing apps that transform customer experience and help you deliver a more frictionless service experience across all of your contact points and channels. Why not get in touch to tell us more about your current priorities?
