Automation will be a word you hear often in 2025. Automation will be the chief driving force behind gains in efficiency and productivity for enterprises in any service industry. Organizations have already right-sized their teams, trimmed budget excesses, deflated executive perks, and condensed margins. What’s left? How else can organizations wring out more profitability from their organizations? The answer is automation.
Organizations simply must find ways to boost productivity, streamline operations, and automate routine processes. This means blending AI capabilities in their core solutions with new workflows that eliminate extra steps, remove redundancies, and automatically perform checks and balances. Automation can eliminate many of the tedious daily tasks that hamper user efficiency.
Modern service management solutions automate administrative tasks, eliminating tedious form-fills, manual lookups, and user supervision of database maintenance. The use of automation will continue to expand in 2025, with more steps being auto-completed. Users will receive summaries of activities, calling out discrepancies and instances when data does not agree or fall within set parameters. Users will focus on the exceptions, letting the software manage the tasks that fall completely within expectations and preestablished boundaries.
For example, automation can help a service technician identify and order replacement parts for a service request. Rather than scrolling through pages and pages of possible parts, an intelligent parts solution can automate that tedious search, saving valuable time.
AI-driven automation is also extremely helpful in billing. The solution tracks the technician’s time on the job, parts used, and services sold. Upon resolution of the service request, the data is automatically sent to accounting for billing. The customer’s profile information, such as address, is verified, eliminating the discrepancies hindering payments and cash flow.
Call center agents, too, will benefit from automation. When a call from a customer is received, the account information, including purchases and service history, is automatically displayed on the agent’s dashboard, along with any pertinent information about the customer’s products, like recalls or warranty status.
Be sure to note, automation is not skipping steps or bypassing important safeguards. It isn’t cutting corners. Automation means letting your solution, often aided by artificial intelligence, do the work in the background. AI can compare and contrast data fields, search databases, complete forms, file, and store new data in logical formats, extract conclusions, identify trigger points, and use algorithms to find patterns to predict outcomes. Such “basics” can be strung together into workflows so more complex commands can be completed, like matching purchase orders and invoices and identifying which invoices should be paid this week, based on the invoice due date.
Automation is a low-risk method for improving productivity. Shaving minutes here and there from an employee’s routine may seem on the surface to yield small benefits. But the minutes add up quickly, compounding daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Watch for automation opportunities in 2025. Smart automation is essential to a highly productive workforce.
Read the complete Top Field Service Management Technology Trends for 2025 report here.
ServicePower : June 12, 2024
ServicePower