by Zinier

The rapid growth of the fiber-to-the-premises market can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, the opportunities for each player are enormous. With demand outpacing supply, if you can scale quickly and maintain high quality, the potential rewards are enormous. On the down side, there’s that pesky word “if.” Scaling to meet demand while also meeting all your key performance metrics – high productivity, low costs, excellent customer service, and so forth – is easier said than done.

Your field service operation plays a critical role in your ability to pull off this tall order. Let’s look at some of the key challenges and then explore some of the ways that the right field service provider will help you tackle all of them.

Challenge #1: Drive higher revenues

Your ability to increase revenues and sustained growth is likely hampered by several factors:

  • Reduced revenue velocity resulting from the lag between orders and installations
  • High pre-install cancel (PIC) due to long lead times and missed appointments
  • Limited visibility into cross-sell and upsell opportunities within your customer base

 

Challenge #2: Keep costs down

As your business scales, it’s easy to fall into common traps that can drive up your costs:

  • Limited visibility into truck and warehouse stock
  • Missed SLAs on mission critical assets that lead to penalties or fines
  • Inefficient routing resulting in higher mileage costs and lower appointment density
  • Inconsistent work quality from contract labor driving an increase in site revisits

 

Challenge #3: Maintain high caliber of customer experience: 

The quality of your customer experience will often falter when you don’t give it the attention it requires:

  • Disjointed customer experience when your CRM doesn’t integrate with the day-to-day field experience
  • Limited ability to manage appointment slots that fit customer schedules, resulting in unacceptably wide appointment windows

 

Challenge #4: Sustaining exceptional employee productivity

Productivity often suffers as a result of these common issues:

  • High attrition and limited availability of skilled labor
  • Difficulty managing a mix of contract and in-house labor
  • Lack of real-time visibility into field activity for both coordinators and customers
  • Tedious paper and pen processes that drag out the time for even basic field tasks

 

The good news is that the right field service solution – one designed with the needs of the fiber-to-the-premises market in mind – can alleviate and even eliminate all of these challenges. Here are three things to look for in a field service partner:Platform Approach: The ideal solution will combine the rapid deployment of ready-to-go applications with the unlimited flexibility of a platform that ensures your solution can be quickly and easily enhanced for whatever the future holds in store. A robust platform also means that you’ll be able to seamlessly integrate with your existing technology stack.

Configurability: When you can customize applications to match your business needs – now and whenever (and however) they evolve down the road – you’ll benefit from increased velocity in implementation.

End-to-End Workflows: Using workflows as the foundation for your field service solution yields a number of benefits, including holistic visibility and automation that drives efficiency throughout your organization.

The ideal platform will also let  you decide how to begin your journey toward a more robust field service solution. For example, Zinier provides an FTTP Accelerator Package that includes everything you need to get started. Our no-code and low-code tooling environment makes it easy to update field execution workflows in real time whenever you need to make changes. And our configurable AI tools can be incorporated later to automate many of the tasks that take up too much time for your back office and field operations that are already stretched too thin.

With the right platform, you can say goodbye to those challenges and say hello to a turbocharged field service operation that’s ready to capture the new opportunities of the FTTP market.

 

Want to learn more about Zinier and scaling your FTTP deployment? Join them later this month in London at Connected Britain, the UK’s leading digital economy event

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