Many utilities are moving away from paper service orders and equipping their field service technicians with electronic devices. Is your utility one of them?
Primary benefit
The primary motivation for automating field workers is the ability to transmit service orders electronically.
Electronic delivery of service orders expedites the process of getting information to the field, saving travel time to and from the office to pick up new service orders.
For more urgent service orders, electronic transmission eliminates the need to call the service technician and risking a garbled radio transmission or poor cell service. This enables your organization to improve customer service by providing accurate information to your field force in a timelier fashion.
Secondary benefit
An additional benefit of automating field service technicians is access to information. With the right technology in place, your field staff can access GIS maps or relevant information from your billing system.
For example, imagine one of your field service technicians being dispatched to re-read a meter due to a high bill complaint. The angry customer meets your service person at the meter, ranting and raving about his bill.
How disarming would it be for your field service technician to be able to show the customer a graph of their usage history to explain that this is their normal usage pattern?
