Life is incomplete without problems. In some or the other way, we always want to solve them at the earliest. Sometimes we may succeed, other times we may not. Talking about the business, every enterprise has to face certain challenges. And talking about the service management industry, the tricky problem is to solve the customer problems in the best possible way. The whole idea of the service business is to fix the issues and address the customer concerns.

Let’s begin with the basics!

Every service organisation follows either reactive or proactive service management approach. The traditional or the reactive maintenance is all about taking an action on the occurrence of an issue. This works like the customer reaching out to your company when his asset or product has stopped working or damaged. Or we could say an equipment, machine or household or commercial appliance is not functioning as expected. In short, a failure or downtime has occurred. Then the request is placed to fix it. The job is dispatched to the technician and then he does the required work to get the asset running.

Reactive and Proactive Service Management

Let us consider the case of a car. It requires regular maintenance and servicing, failing to which you may have to bear the consequences. If a particular service period skips off your mind and the car gets stopped in the middle of the road, you’ll be calling a garage or the car company to get it repaired. This is the reactive approach. On the other side, if you’re reminded with alerts using the smart systems and inbuilt modern technology, then it would prevent any unfavourable conditions. This is what we call as proactive service management!    

Reactive techniques are about corrective measures. It follows the ‘Run-To-Failure’ concept. Proactive techniques are about protective measures. The former emphasises on solving the problem after it has happened whereas the latter approach accentuates that the problem should not occur. Of course, the business will run on a mix of both. But the modern field service companies are restructuring the existing methods to enhance service delivery and increase equipment uptime.

More about Proactive Service Management

Proactive service management more or less follows the above ideology. Rather than acting on problems, it focuses on keeping things running smoothly as far as possible. There is a major shift happening in the field service industry. It is directing the working procedure from reactive to proactive. With major introductions of advanced automation, IoT (Internet of Things), M2M (machine to machine) and other smart technologies, proactive service management is helping the field service industry to streamline things like never before.

The comprehensive field service management solution is playing an immense role in promoting the proactive approach. A majority of the field service organisations have either embraced or are in the process of replacing their old systems with the cloud-based field service software platforms. And this is doing all good to them. It forms a connected loop of technicians, back-office, assets and customers.

What are the advantages of employing proactive strategies?

In essence, proactive service management can benefit you big time. With the use of robust field service platform, an organisation can manage the workforce and the assets in an effective manner. The software applications have the advanced capabilities to schedule the jobs based on usage trends, equipment condition, previous history, manufacturing warranty and other conditions. It also utilises the collected data for intelligent predictive analysis. It promotes proactive service management by identifying root causes and fixing them beforehand.

The proactive service management utilises real-time data to organise the jobs. The company can set up predefined operational parameters, threshold values and configure workflows to trigger automated actions before things go wrong. The proactive strategies aim to thwart the issues offering an array of benefits like-

Be Active to Implement the Proactive!

Well, doing is better than saying. To make your field service business more effective and garner the profits, it’s time to redesign your plans. Be proactive and embrace this new wave of service management to manifest growth and productivity. For more actionable insights and tips, join this webinar by Mark Eves. If you need any further help, feel free to request a demo with iTouchVision.