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Best Practices in Mobile Field Service: Aberdeen Group

By Dilip Thomas

Best-in-class companies have overcome countless challenges on their way to establishing strategic service operations. The service organizations at most of the product-centric companies have evolved from tactical cost centers to strategic profit centers, as top executives understand that an integrated and cost-effective post-sales service strategy is a mission-critical component of product lifecycle management and customer retention.

Such companies have increasingly deployed mobile field service solutions to boost worker productivity, customer satisfaction, performance, profitability and achieve competitive differentiation. In fact, mobile field service software and hardware sit atop the list of planned field service technology investments in the next 12 months for most companies that Aberdeen surveyed. At a micro level these companies are trying to hike capacities for work orders completed per day, improve billing cycle time and billing accuracy, minimize idle and misspent clock time, and build incremental service-based revenue streams.

Aberdeen has documented significant performance improvements attributable to mobile field service automation, such as 27% increase in worker productivity, 19% increase in customer retention, 17% increase in profitability, and 13% increase in service revenues.

However, it is critical to note that successful mobile field service deployment depends on more than just the technology choice. Leading companies have been successful in optimizing their service operations by addressing business processes, organizational structure, scope of information captured, and type of performance criteria measured, in addition to selecting the right technology solutions.

This report illustrates 16 best practices adopted by the best-in-class companies that have leveraged mobile field service solutions to impact three key areas of performance: bottom-line (e.g. worker productivity), top-line (e.g. service revenues), and cash flow (e.g. days sales outstanding).


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