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Technicians Doing Admin Work? The Managers’ Blind Spot that’s Costing Field Service Companies Millions of Dollars Every Year
I found a fascinating insight buried in a Field Service survey from 2020 [1].
250 industry professionals—technicians and executives alike, from small to enterprise-size businesses—were polled to do a “pulse check” on the industry.
The very last question was:
“How much time does each field technician spend on managing/administering work orders vs actually performing the work?”
And this is what I found fascinating:
About 33 percent of the managers said their techs spend 15-30 minutes on admin work per day while 19 percent of the technicians themselves answered in the same 15-30 minute range.
So, techs doing “a little bit” of admin work were almost half of what managers thought.
Furthermore:
About 7 percent of the managers said their techs spend more than 2 hours on admin work while almost 16 percent of the techs themselves answered in the same 2-hour range.
So, techs doing A LOT of admin work were more than twice what managers thought.
This means that executives looking into productivity numbers are up for an unpleasant surprise:
“I thought my guys were only spending ‘this’ much on admin work, but they’re spending THAT much per day?!”
This disconnect between what managers think versus what technicians actually do means that many of them are over-optimistic when it comes to their technicians’ productivity.
And in an industry where TIME literally is money, this disconnect is probably creating a big gap between revenue forecasts versus actual revenue…
And causing a big profit leak in their business.
The Rise of Remote Technician Support
Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been running a Remote Technician Support pilot program with an industry giant with the goal of reducing the number of hours their techs spend doing admin work. In this article, I’m going to share with you our experience running this team, the lessons learned, and what the future holds for this innovation.
Remote Co-pilots For Technicians In The Field
Here’s a list of the added benefits that a Remote Tech Support team can have on your business:
➤ Makes Senior Techs Even More Productive and Profitable to the Business
Having “super techs” fixing units themselves is surely a good use of their time because they can do it fast and do a good job every time. But having them support other technicians remotely is an even better use of their time. Why limit their productivity to five service calls a day, in person, when they can be of help on 15 calls a day, remotely?
Not only would it spare those senior techs from being on their knees every day but it also levels the competencies across your team.
➤ Increases First-Time Fix Rates and Improves Customer Experience
While you’re only dispatching one technician to a site, you’ve got the brainpower and experience of a whole team behind them. A Remote Tech Support team should result in more first-time fixes, fewer truck rolls, and a more consistent customer experience.
➤ Differentiates Your Service Offering From The Competition
When you’re explaining your value proposition to your clients, one of the things you can confidently say is that they are getting multiple technicians for the price of one.
➤ Adds A New Revenue Stream To Your Business
Once you have a remote tech support team, you can also offer it to your clients for Level 1 and 2 fixes. This would make it more convenient for them and for you to solve simple issues without dispatching field technicians. Instead of having to roll a truck and have a technician spend a couple of hours there, your remote tech team can guide facility managers on doing those simple fixes.
➤ Gets Techs From Green to Productive Faster
Another side effect of having senior techs on remote support is that a 3-year technician can (almost) perform the work of a 30-year one. It bridges the skills gap in a very practical way. It gives newer techs more confidence when going on-site and provides them access to knowledge that only a senior tech would have.
The Potential for this Industry
While there’s a wide range of use-cases for a Remote Technician Support program, here are the two we’re currently developing:
1. Parts Ordering and Other Specialized Admin Work
This directly addresses the issue of having techs spend time doing admin work and offloading these tasks to a specialized remote team.
For one of our partners, we deployed four remote technicians in the Philippines—each of them with over ten years of experience—to support their U.S. counterparts remotely. They take most of the admin work off of the field technicians’ plate in a way that typical administrative staff wouldn’t be able to. They look at manuals, blueprints, search for parts in their inventory and across the web, and place orders.
By doing this, the field technician shaves off hours of admin work every day and becomes instantly more productive. If a certain tech was only able to complete three or four work orders (and do admin work for a couple of hours), maybe now he or she can complete a fifth work order.
This might seem like a small improvement but at scale, it really means that the business gets 20 percent of added service capacity without hiring more technicians.
For context, the remote tech support agents are working full time. That means saving field technicians 36 hours per day. Multiply it by the standard hourly rate of $100 and you’re potentially getting over $108,000 per month of extra revenue capacity that costs a fraction of that.
2. Beyond Admin Work: Diagnostics and Remote Troubleshooting
As the remote tech support infrastructure is in place, it will become clear that there are ways to further optimise technicians’ productivity.
Remote troubleshooting is a perfect way to leverage your “super techs”. The current state of technology is allowing truly mind-blowing interactions. A junior technician on-site and a senior technician hundreds of miles away just need an iPad to virtually work together, side by side.
The on-site tech can show his remote support agent what he is actually seeing, and the remote technician can “operate” as if it were with his or her own hands and show the junior technician exactly what to hold, what to twist, and how.
These kinds of interactions get technicians unstuck faster, increase first-time fix rates, achieve faster resolution time, and reduce the number of truck rolls needed to get the job done. Not only that, your Remote Support Technicians can diagnose and troubleshoot equipment ahead of dispatch, which helps in sending the right technician with the right parts for the right job every time.
Other Positive “Side Effects” of Remote Technicians Support
