Virtual Selling Means Better Customers. Here’s How

ICwhatUC and Deloitte LLP in Canada (“Deloitte”) are pleased to announce an exclusive reseller agreement that will see both companies work together to support the Power and Utility Sector.

Now more than ever, customers are less concerned about how a problem is solved - they just want it solved. That opens up huge opportunities, especially in traditional industries like fieldwork. For decades, field work looked pretty much the same - someone would drive to your house to fix a problem. But the combination of fieldworkers demanding new technology and customers demanding faster service means field service companies need to think outside the box. 

For decades, customers wanted to talk to someone in-person, but that’s no longer the case. Where customers used to want the trust that comes with talking to someone face-to-face, now they want solutions to their problems as quickly as possible. On the flip side, field workers are eager to adopt new technology. With those two changes, an opportunity has emerged for field sales to go virtual. 

Nearly half of customers report changing service providers over personal data usage, is your business next?

We used to think that the field work industry couldn’t change - that solving at-home problems required an at-home visit - so the industry charged for those services. However, between bloated cost structures and customers getting tired of waiting days for service, we need to make things better. Routing efficiency used to be heralded as the solution to our problems, but the industry has gotten so complex and expensive that bragging about routing efficiency is the equivalent of bragging about good gas mileage after driving off a cliff. The industry has to be willing to make a big change if it’s going to survive. Bluntly: it has to find ways to cancel home visits. 

It’s time to bring software as a service (SaaS) mentality to fieldwork. Long seen by customers as irritating at best and accepted as a cost-center by companies, technology adoption in field service has opened the opportunity to create “as a Service” platforms within field work.

It’s hard to imagine the field work industry as a high-tech place when the most prominent visual we have is a large van or truck (likely with a ladder on top). The reality, though, is that field workers have a huge technology adoption curve - and even bigger technology needs. Between customer demands for increased speed, contactless service, and the desire to solve problems without having someone come into your home, field service is due for a huge technology revamp. Here are 5 mind blowing statistics that show just how ripe for change the field service industry really is.

 The idea of sharing photos, videos, and texts is more mainstream than ever. We upload nearly 100 million photos to Instagram a day and send about 16 million texts a minute. We use WhatsApp, Zoom, Facetime, Facebook Messenger, and a variety of other apps for convenience.  Photo sharing, video chats, and texting have permeated nearly every element of our personal lives, and now it’s starting to creep into our work lives. Using photo and video for work is now the norm - almost expected. This opens up a huge vulnerability, not only for customer data reasons but also for every individual’s right to privacy from their employer. 

In the world of office work, there’s always an ‘app for that’. Field workers, on the other hand, are left with almost nothing for them. Despite regularly being on the road to see clients, handling upselling and cross-selling, and often needing to connect into work after typical work hours, field workers have been forced to hack their way through software not built for the way they work.

As privacy continues to be in the spotlight - businesses need to think more critically about how they embed privacy by design.