Organizations consider AI as a technology driver to scale their business and optimize processes.
Lately, AI has been characterized by great advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), speech recognition, Virtual agents, and generative AI. These technologies enjoy unprecedented attention as their potential benefits have taken almost every industry by storm.
According to the report The State of AI in 2022, by McKinsey & Company, “the average number of AI capabilities that organizations use, such as natural-language generation, has doubled—from 1.9 in 2018 to 3.8 in 2022”.
AI adoption is now more than two times higher than in 2017 and its capability is generally embedded in product or business processes in at least one function or business unit.
Service optimization resulted as the most popular use case of AI
How come?
The answer is pretty intuitive if we think about the highly-valuable benefits Service organizations can gain from AI technologies. For instance, AI optimizes field operations and augments workers during their daily tasks, which then increases overall customer experience and productivity.
To be more specific, we shed a light on the benefits service technicians can get from AI adoption, since this segment experiences incremental enhancements worth addressing.
Service Technicians are usually referred to as blue-collar workers, and mostly work in non-office settings such as construction sites or production lines. They usually face significant challenges in their field operations and manage sophisticated machines.
Nearly 8 out of 10 high-performing field service teams use AI, particularly they use chatbots (78%), process workflow automation (83%), and automated digital transcription (80%). Hence it is undoubted that Artificial Intelligence can nowadays empower service organizations, improving productivity and customer experience and their workers by streamlining operational processes.
Service technicians can take advantage of the latest development in AI tools, namely natural language generation, speech recognition, deep learning models, and many more in multiple ways.
Here we list some:
01 Streamlined Workflows
As AI is adopted in organizational technologies, it can allow to set up of highly efficient knowledge or data management systems. This way, service technicians would be empowered by tools that simplify their work in many ways.
Some software applications use AI to sift through tons of organizational documents, such as manuals, to extract the required information and to trigger workers to proper action during their daily tasks: AI can approach Question and Answer(Q&A) through voice-recognition, enabling workers to ask questions and find proper answers right away.
AI tools can eliminate bottlenecks by helping organizations analyze large data at faster rates, and let workers take care of their hands-on tasks.
02 Faster Troubleshooting
AI encompasses security, maintenance, and risk assessment, all in one because its technology, such as virtual agents or chatbots, can provide workers with real-time assistance even when it comes to tackling issues.
Machines can break or do not work properly. Blue-collar workers would be the ones sent to the field to troubleshoot the problems.
Thanks to algorithm advancements of AI tools, no pitfall would be kept unfixed. For instance, some organizations use virtual agents, to organize their whole troubleshooting knowledge, by uploading reports, articles, notes, or any other documents that provide examples of the problem resolution encountered in the past.
By easily accessing their organization problem-solving knowledge, technicians would narrow down the possible solutions to any issue quickly. This way, organizations can minimize the negative impact of issues, improve their repair efficiency, and increase employee and customer satisfaction.
03 Always Be Equipped
Given the variety of machines and tools service technicians are supposed to manage, one major benefit they can get from AI is to never run out of any proper parts and tools to get tasks done.
AI capabilities include equipment management, which results in a substantial benefit for organisation especially for field operations. In the case of service organizations, technicians can use AI assistants to order spare parts to maintain or repair the machines. Some virtual agents enable parts requests directly from their software applications, making it very easy to be always equipped.
More generally, AI tools can provide workers with an automated and fast way to monitor and track inventory, sales, orders, and deliveries. The automation of inventory management supports the organization to save costs and time.
04 Fulfill each task competently and efficiently
Technicians are generally expected to be fully prepared, to know everything about the history of the problem and any previous work done on-site, as well as all the necessary steps and tools.
Yet, keeping such a big information load to complete tasks results in highly intricate and technicians might require some more instructions, to get the job done.
By automation-enabled workflows, service technicians can take advantage of prebuilt solutions, recommendations, or fast answer extraction to get each task efficiently done.
For instance, virtual assistants help service technicians find the solutions they need from the company knowledge base using natural language processing (NLP). They can process voice requests and provide workers support.
This way, blue-collars are enabled to get the required set of information they need to handle any machine or component, and consequently act in the proper way to work tasks out.
Key Drivers For Service Organizations
The adoption of AI's latest developments benefits everyone, from field operations up to the top layers of the service organization. From the firms´ perspective, the major benefit of AI adoption are:
Preserve Organizational Knowledge From Seniors Retiring
Service organizations generally face the concern of an overall aging workforce. Seniors, namely, are veteran employees who bring the most organizational knowledge due to their experience in the company's history. As they retire, the organization inevitably faces a loss of tribal knowledge.
New emerging AI tools dedicated to knowledge management can tackle this issue and close the generational gap by ensuring knowledge sharing between senior technicians and novice employees.
Increase Productivity
High-performing organizations can increase productivity and save costs by equipping their teams with the right technology. In addition, job satisfaction is a major benefit of service management.
AI capabilities can serve as game-changers in terms of productivity by substantially enabling the entire organization with schedule optimization and the management of unexpected situations.
Knowron: Your Efficient Virtual Assistant
Knowron is a product that integrates all the benefits mentioned above into one digital assistant. It consists of a control platform and a mobile application that offers 24/7 support to blue-collar workers and their managers.
For instance, let's say you are a wind service technician, and you need to fix a damaged wind tower generator. However, you cannot remember how to manage this sophisticated component of the tower. Wouldn't it be helpful to receive quick instructions before climbing a 95-metres tower (which is as tall as the Statue of Liberty)?
Knowron uses Natural Language Processing to extract reliable answers directly from organizational documents. Organizations can upload their documents onto the platform, where they will be safely stored and analyzed.
Employees can then use the digital assistant to search for all the relevant information they need to complete their tasks. They can ask their questions by speaking or typing, and the system will provide available answers in just a few seconds. These answers may include threads of instructions, checklists, or recommendations on how to manage a specific machine.
