For those of you who haven’t seen the first two posts in our research on field technicians (by field technicians), it might help to review those posts prior to this one.

Post 1: An Introduction
Post 2: Improving a Day in the Life

In today’s post, we’ll feature on the primary likes and dislikes tied to daily field service work. A lot of this is related to investments that field technicians would like their organizations to make in order to improve their daily lives (Post 2 of the series). Lets start with the likes.

Technicians: Give Us More

Field technicians want to be in front of customers. Solving customer problems and working with customers to find solutions are the best parts of their day. They would rather be in front of customers than in front of a pile of paperwork or administrative tasks. (Note: Technicians were asked to pick their top two responses)

This bodes well for organizations that are looking to leverage their field technicians as front-line ambassadors focused on improving relationships with customers. The customer management skill set is one that is in higher demand from organizations who believe that they can train for electrical, mechanical, or software-oriented skill requirements.

Its interesting to see that 1 out of 5 field technicians also appreciate the opportunity to learn about new tools and technologies. This is consistent across all experience levels in field service, even among those who have been in the industry for more than 20 years. Overall, most technicians (62%) are satisfied with the technology demands of their work and are receptive to learning more. Only 19% are dissatisfied with the level of reliance on technology to get work done.

Technicians: Give Us Less

Acceptance of technology is greater if the tools can eliminate the major pain points in a technician’s day-to-day. As iterated in the previous post, technology tools that create additional administrative steps aren’t appreciated.

Technicians are most impressed with technology tools and other process changes that eliminate administrative time, reduce paperwork, and make it easier to find necessary information. It is important to note, that only 31% believe that they spend too much time on paperwork, which raises the level of frustration with administrative steps, whether manual or automated. In terms of improved information lookup, technicians would like better access to the type of content thats usually found in service manuals or in parts catalogs. (More on this in our next post). Technicians would also like for better and simpler access to customer history and other customer-related information that can be leveraged to support problem solving. Finally, there is greater receptivity to on-demand training information.

When analyzing the major dislikes of field service technicians, we also see unique trends based on years of experience. For instance:

• Those technicians with 20 or more years of experience are more likely to dislike being tracked by GPS or other means.
• Those technicians with 10-20 years of experience dislike the pressure to work faster or the pressure to sell in the daily activities.
• Those technicians with less than 10 years of experience dislike the feeling of isolation and the lack of collaborative opportunities. They are also less patient with long company meetings and demand greater accountability from back-office support services when called upon for assistance.

All of the talk of administrative and paperwork improvements leads us to our discussion on technology. I will dive into this topic tomorrow before I wrap this series of posts at the end of the week. Summary findings from all of these posts will me made available in our Field Service 2016: The Technician’s Perspective report, to be published on Mar 31. If interested in attaining a copy of the report, please feel free to submit your contact details.