January 2023

AI in Field Service Management: Top 5 Benefits

Picture of Matt Braun Author: Matt Braun

Matt Braun leads the Solutions Consulting team at Tourmo. He helps Tourmo customers better understand their challenges and uncover creative, efficient solutions to improve their operations. He guides them through the benefits provided by mobility workflow automation, AI-powered tools and reports, and the value of data science. Matt’s focus on clear, actionable, and effective information is foundational to all prescribed solutions. Matt came to Tourmo after 15 years as Sr. Director of Performance Improvement at First Student –– an organization operating a fleet of more than 40,000 vehicles. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administrations from the University of Cincinnati and a Masters of Business Administration from Thomas More College. Matt and his wife live in the Cincinnati area where Matt coaches most of the sports of their 2 sons and daughter.

Workforce Management

In this article, we'll talk about AI in field service management. We will list several benefits of using this technology, before introducing Tourmo AI’s benefits.

AI in Field Service Management: Top 5 Benefits

Field service management is undergoing significant changes due to market shifts brought on by the introduction of cutting-edge technologies, shifts in the labor market, and economic hardships. As a result, finding qualified workers for field service jobs in various industries, including sales, maintenance and repair, shipping and delivery, and others, has become more difficult.

Technology is helping to reduce the challenges associated with a limited workforce. Thanks to next-generation technologies with advanced data processing that boost productivity and efficiency, the support given to mobile workers while they are out in the field is improving.

This article will discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the field management industry. Then, we will list several of the top benefits of using this innovative technology before introducing the advantages of using Tourmo's AI-powered Workforce Solution.

AI in Field Service Management: Top Benefits

Field service management is being rapidly transformed by artificial intelligence technology. This technology is helping businesses reinvent how they oversee and manage field service workers by using advanced technology to automate repetitive tasks, respond to scheduling and routing issues, enhance mobile services, improve communication, and much more.

For your consideration, we have listed the top benefits of AI technology in field service management below:

1. Streamlined Tasks

When the field service management industry uses AI technology, it benefits from reducing human resource demand by streamlining and condensing time-consuming and tedious tasks that previously required manual oversight and management.

One example is improving how a business collects meter readings from machinery and removing or minimizing the requirement for a field service technician to obtain that information physically. Data readings can be remotely gathered, analyzed, and organized automatically when AI technology is combined with automation.

AI-powered technologies are also transforming how companies organize and analyze massive amounts of data. For example, AI technology can analyze historical data and make the right decisions in real-time to ensure that the proper personnel, components, and equipment are used when providing services. Further, scheduling can be fully automated, routing and re-routing issues can be resolved, and analysis and workforce visibility can be significantly increased.

2. Improved Resource Utilization

With its ability to analyze vast amounts of historical company data, AI technology can help companies understand the resources they currently have on hand and accurately forecast (predict) the number of resources required to deliver services in the future.

Artificial intelligence can improve headcount forecasting, predict maintenance schedules more accurately, and identify other potential service issues that could disrupt regular operations. This technology also has the advantages of being highly accurate, time-efficient, and cost-effective.

Artificial intelligence

3. Advanced Routing

Location intelligence, a form of AI technology, is a powerful tool for optimizing service routing, re-routing, and predicting potential disruptions to service routing. This technology can save a field service management company time and money while dramatically improving the customer experience.

Customers will benefit from more accurate service arrival time estimates and more time-efficient and accurate services, ensuring that the correct personnel, components, and equipment are available to the right destinations.

4. Improved Customer Service

AI technology is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage in a market where businesses like Uber and Amazon provide services more quickly to customers while raising the bar for service expectations. Using this technology, a business can improve customer communications while also enhancing the entire customer experience.

Field service management can help elevate customer service to the next level by combining quick service turnaround times with AI-powered technologies that are available to communicate and inform customers worldwide and 24/7.

5. Predictive Maintenance

Artificial intelligence technology has the capacity to predict problems with company assets well in advance of the need to send out a service engineer. When compared to other maintenance models, such as preventive maintenance, the predictive model of maintenance can reduce the amount of manual service intervention required, downtime, and resources used. It also enables more precise and targeted maintenance.

Automated AI technology can also help allocate the appropriate work order based on the service required, the required experience level, the location, and more.

Tourmo’s Mobile Workforce Solution

Tourmo's Workforce Operations solution can automate every process in your organization for complete visibility, resulting in increased engagement, reliability, satisfaction, and cost savings.

Our fleet operations software is designed to be easily integrated with your existing software and hardware solutions and can assist you in gaining 360-degree visibility into your operations and communicating the right information to the right people in real-time so that action can be taken and measured.

Napa pilot Readout

Our mobile workforce solution can track whether work is completed as planned, notify clients when something changes, and take action via automated workflows. Tourmo makes it easy to identify and manage issues like delays at client sites, unplanned stops, route deviations, and out-of-sequence deliveries, with features that include:

Accurate event data, normalization, contextualization, and advanced route reasoning to remove inaccuracies
Real-time monitoring of job progress and delivery estimates
Real-time ETA
Automated Progress Updates
Activity/Inactivity Monitoring

Advanced Field Service Management with Tourmo AI

The technology of the future is based on artificial intelligence, and its potential to transform the field service sector is upending multiple industries digitally. Companies that choose not to adopt advanced technologies, like AI, will not perform or compete as well in the upcoming digital age.

Tourmo AI can help you if you need to improve your company's process structure to make it more productive and efficient or if you need to streamline service management tasks and improve existing solutions with automated AI technology.