Mobile Service Applications

The recession is having an effect on all companies, with a significant effect on investment. An area of concern in the service industry for a number of years has been the low level of investment in technology solutions – never exceeding 15% of the total investment. As a result the recessionary impact of this strangling of funds was not felt as heavily in the service operations and quite often reductions were targeted at more senior posts with a degree of flattening within the service departments, but relatively little or no reduction in technology investments. However most of the investment has been to more effectively use or upgrade what is already in place and not in new systems. Companies with a strategy that includes service continue to demonstrate a greater ability to weather the recession.

In this article Steve Downton will examine the rapid assimilation of mobile solutions and how they are being used to re-engineer the management of service operations to deliver the core values of increased revenue, reduced cost and greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Managing a field service operation in today’s environment requires different skills and attributes of leadership and management than used to be required. The environment used to be less demanding and it was often possible to second-guess problems with the product, customer or engineer as the number of variations was relatively limited.

Mobilisation has been top of the agenda this year, for those considering how to improve the service operation. The Service Management journal commissioned research into some of the basic issues to examine general thinking on the subject and what has been put into practice. The research was designed to answer some of the questions most commonly asked by service managers and directors wanting to investigate the "noise" behind mobile solutions.