How AI and automation are bringing more sustainability to field service

The team at ICwhatUC is excited to share that we’ve been selected to participate in this year’s Google for Startups Accelerator Canada cohort, alongside a small group of promising Canadian Seed to Series A tech startups. 

ICwhatUC announced this week that they have been selected as one of the top 100 energy and mobility startups of 2021 by Start Up Energy Transition.

From trucks to equipment to insurance, field work is a pricey business to get into. However, technology is opening up opportunities to lower fixed costs in ways that used to be impossible. In one national field work company’s case, it led to 6-figure savings per day. 

Leveraging remote technology like secure video is a helpful way to sell more and land higher quality customers. But as technology makes lives more convenient, employees are also demanding that it make their work safer. So while technology is often considered a sales tool, it has six risk reduction benefits field work companies should be aware of.

Over half (53%) of field service companies are concerned about replacing their workforce as people retire. For decades, knowledge was gained in siloed environments due to many field workers going to sites alone. Now as many experienced technicians think about retirement, young newcomers are ready to learn but fear being left out in the cold. Thankfully though, as challenging as the transition will be, new technology is enabling it more than ever.

There is big data in field work. It’s not digital bits and bytes flying through cyberspace, though. It’s the conversations you have with customers, the notes about a job you think to yourself, or the observations you make in a virtual check up call. This data can not only help you find better clients, but also uncover efficiencies you never thought possible. 

The fieldwork industry can be a slog sometimes. You get booked on an assignment and show up to someone’s house, half the time not knowing what to expect. Too often, it’s only after you show up do you realize what tools you need - resulting in yet another visit. This kind of back and forth amounts to field workers spending half their days on the road, but getting little done. 

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.