Implementing a comprehensive mobile infrastructure is no different than any other innovations in the world of telecommunications: If cable operators don’t do it - and in a savvy way - competitors will and thereby gain a competitive advantage.
Aly Pinder, a senior research analyst at the Aberdeen Group, released research - which was commissioned by Trimble - that suggests the nature of the new world. The first point is operators who think that the end goal is to hit a four- or even two-hour window are missing the point.
Put simply: Woody Allen was wrong. The comedian once said that 80% of success is just showing up. That no longer is true for field force personnel. The new metric is “speed to resolution.” Subscribers aren’t satisfied with the appearance of a technician within a promised time period. That’s table stakes. They want their problem solved.
The good news for field force technicians is that the mobile devices add a tremendous amount of solving-problem capabilities. In addition, new and ever-expanding mobile device capabilities can capture information electronically that formerly left the organization when the employee did.
Operators must realize that things have fundamentally changed. “In the past a lot of the interaction between the technician and the rest of organization was carried in people’s memory and stored on paper,” Pinder said. “Exchanging it was based on meeting by the water cooler [or similar informal ways .... Through mobility integration with CRM, ERP and other systems, organizations don’t have to hope that a link is made. Mobile apps can input and capture the data.”
The advantage of a savvy use of mobility is not just getting jobs done more quickly. It’s also a way to increase sales. It is a similar case of formalizing what formerly happened by chance. Trevor Milsom, the global strategy marketing manager for Trimble Field Service Management, said that in the past cable technicians noted upsell opportunities and perhaps told the marketing folks - or perhaps forgot.
Milsom sees automating the process as a big advantage. Not only will the company become aware of such opportunities, but also assign them to folks capable of turning them into actual sales. “Most techs don’t have the right skills to make the jump to a sales person’s role,” he said. “The tech ... can collect information with the mobile device and, when the job is closed down, distribute it for further followup.”
Many of the issues that impact organizations with large field forces tend to be the same. Trucks are trucks, and technicians are technicians. That isn’t always the case, however. Milsom said cable operations differ from some others in that their test gear is designed to capture data from equipment being tested. It therefore has serial, USB or other ports built in. This capability is more common on Windows-based devices. For that reason, he said, the industry's use of iOS and Android has trailed other industries’. It is playing catchup in this regard.
Along with the need to grow into the new operating systems, folks who design cable’s field force management systems must pay attention to the emergence of HTML5. The goal of the new markup language is to enable a far greater number of things to be done in the browser and thereby reduce reliance on proprietary apps.
This is an important step because HTLM5 agilely adjusts to the screen size and related configuration of the host device. In the proprietary app world, such configurations must be done on an individual bases by developers. That is increasingly difficult as the number of devices used proliferates.
The drawback of HTML5 is that it requires Internet access. This is something that cable operators should think about when planning their mobile futures. It is, however, a greater problem for field forces that spend more time in remote areas, such as oil pipeline crews. Cable field forces spend the lion’s share of their time in places that have connectivity.
The precise structure of how information is transferred between the field techs and the organization will change over time. The most important thing to recognize, however, is that the need for that exchange will grow. “There will be more intense interactive needs,” Milsom said. “It will not just be directions to get to the job. There will things such as schematics of boxes, the ability to collaborate in the field and social interactions to improve the first-time fix rate.”
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