Is there room for Field Services in the digital workplace?

The new generation of workers might have only heard about this: IT engineer arrives at the floor, presses a few keys in front of a black screen, and voilá! Problem fixed. Today, this almost never happens. To be fair, today we barely go to the office (if we go at all). So, is there any room for field support in today’s workplace environment? 

A few trends may immediately come to mind:  

• According to a Gartner survey, clients expect 57% of their workforce to work remotely, and 63% will adopt a hybrid model 
• Workplace devices are increasingly being replaced or disposed  
• Proactive & predictive support, in combination with chatbots, AI, and analytics, are taking over the support role, preventing issues in your machine even before they happen

Nevertheless, employee experience can still benefit from person-to-person interactions. Whether it has to do with the assurance given by a technical expert looking at your machine, or if it’s a hardware issue that cannot be solved remotely, Person-to-Person (P2P) support still contributes to the employee experience, especially now that it’s being “disguised” under new formats – an evolution from your good ol’ IT engineer visiting you at your desk.  

Think “Genius Bar” 

Many of us have visited an Apple Store to be warmly welcomed by a smiling team dressed in blue shirts – all of them properly trained to do demos, showcase products, advise on what product fits your needs best, and, when needing technical support, to get it while you wait with your latte macchiato.  

Now imagine taking this concept to your building. In fact, many companies have now adopted this model and, by doing it, have significantly raised the bar for what’s expected from IT support (points to the IT team, therefore, to the CIO). In our experience, customers using Getronics’ Solution Café have increased user satisfaction to 98% and NPS scores by 20%. It’s not rocket science – it’s pure human interaction. 

Working from home & P2P support 

Of course, office-based jobs are no longer the norm. And they won’t be in the future. Nevertheless, support from an onsite engineer is still required sometimes and companies need to rely on a partner that can provide this – even for John out in the countryside of the UK, or Herbert, down in his Dutch farm (real people, we swear).  

To  meet this growing need, IT leaders are now required to seek providers that can add a level of flexibility to the scope of their field services and ensure they can reach the user, wherever they are. This is easier said than done, considering a large part of the workforce is leaving the big cities to go “back home” as commuting becomes less and less necessary.  

DIGITAL WORKPLACE WHITEPAPER

In this whitepaper, written by Nitin Bhudia, Head of Service Management & Engineering, we’ll be exploring some of the biggest game-changers for the digital workplace, together with use cases and real-life applications to better enable your digital workers.

An Uber-like service 

Waiting for IT support as you were waiting for your pizza delivery? When your laptop mic is not working and you are really needed in that conference call, it can become very stressful to sit and wait.  

For field services to stay relevant in this new-normal, an Uber-like app can be an easy fix to that issue. Getronics’ Field Services app enables end-users to track the location of their IT support engineer. Even more, it allows them to rate them and provide feedback, so we can continue to improve on the quality of our services and for the CIO to measure on delivery and satisfaction. 

Augmented Engineers 

But what if Herbert’s farm is very far? By using AR, users themselves can become the engineer’s hands and feet, seeing what Herbert sees and guiding them through the process of getting his hardware installed or the problem in his machine or server fixed. It sounds like the future, but it’s really not. In fact, we’ve been doing this for years. 

In the end, it’s not about technology but about the user experience and his or her ability to continue being productive. It’s now been proven that remote working is not hindering productivity; however, a broken laptop will. So let us fix it for you. 

Field Services in today’s Digital Workplace  

Getronics Field & Onsite Services capabilities are part of our Digital Workplace offering, where user incidents are prevented by using analytics, and where interactions with our Service Desk are highly automated with chatbots, automated workflows, self-learning knowledge bases, and more. 

Getronics will always seek to address an incident proactively and remotely to prevent downtime and maintain employee productivity. BUT, if an engineer has to visit your employees, Getronics has this capability themselves and can carry and end-to-end responsibility for any issue or request your employees may have – in the office or at home. And thanks to our Global Workspace Alliance, we do this in 185 countries around the world. 

Contact our experts to learn more.