The recent exclusive survey, Predicting the service landscape in 2010, set out to canvass the opinions of service managers as to where the service industry is heading. We asked you to imagine the benefits that a crystal ball could bring to your business, allowing you to plan ahead with confidence and prepare for the challenges to come.

While nobody can ultimately predict the future with 100% accuracy, the web-based survey threw up some fascinating results of how the service managers of today see the service industry of tomorrow developing. The respondents to the survey ranged fairly evenly across the full spectrum of industry sectors, with well over half employing as many as 100 field engineers.

Perhaps not surprisingly in a survey directed at the service sector, over half of the respondents when asked what proportion of their organisation’s total revenues would be driven by services in 2010, responded that it would be significantly more than today. This was followed by 35% who felt the figure would qualify as ‘somewhat more’, with just under 10% effectively standing still with revenues remaining unchanged.

In terms of the most important drivers of this services revenue growth going forward, there was a fairly even spread of 27% believing it would come from serving new customers and 27% from generating more service revenues from existing customers. But in an industry that can never stand still, almost 40% felt it would be vital for their future survival to be delivering new service offerings.

Service is rightly perceived as a defining factor in making an organisation stand out from the opposition in an increasingly competitive marketplace, with by far the majority of respondents predicting services to be a more important source of competitive differentiation for their organisation by 2010. A mere 5% felt it was of equal or less importance. And with customers demanding increasingly higher levels of service, 48% of managers also felt that service level agreements could only get much more demanding and complex, with only 6% predicting they would stay the same or somehow become less demanding.

Automated scheduling systems may be a relatively mature technology now, having been with us for several years, but the survey would appear to show that some service organisations have still to fully embrace the technology, with over 40% of managers indicating that fully automated scheduling would be ‘much more important’ to them by 2010.

The trend of service operations multi-skilling their workforce to drive up productivity looks set to continue, with 70% of managers saying the ability of staff to perform multiple functions will become increasingly important. Equally, keeping hold of staff will also be increasingly difficult, with over 60% of service managers saying that they anticipate engineer recruitment and retention will be ‘much more’ or ‘somewhat more’ difficult than today.

An increasingly mobile service operation also means that handheld wireless devices are going to become increasingly integral to the service strategy of many organisations, and as much as 42% indicated that their handheld usage would be much more important than today, with only 21% saying they would remain the same.

Back in 2006, figures from the research group Aberdeen showed that two thirds of service organisations were using location-based services to help manage their service teams. These included such technologies as global positioning systems (GPS), geographical information systems (GIS) and automatic vehicle location (AVL).

It’s perhaps an indication of just how embedded these services have become in the average service organisation’s modus operandi that the results to our question of how important their use will be to service strategy by 2010 met with a fairly even spread of responses. 28% felt they would be much more important than today but, conversely, 28% also felt they wouldn’t. Overall, though, their importance is set to increase, with 22% citing them as becoming ‘somewhat more important’ and 21% ticking ‘slightly more important’.

It may seem like the WEEE and RoHS directives have been with us for some time now, but it looks like the whole area of regulation will continue to give service managers sleepless nights in the future, with 87% saying legislation would be more important to their service strategies come 2010. Only 13% felt there would be no change in this area.

This was also reflected in how managers felt their service operation would be affected by the ‘green’ agenda, with a whopping 88% saying it’s impact could only increase in the future. But surprisingly, there was still 12% who felt there would be no change in its affect on their organisation.

What will always be changing is the nature of field service work, and the survey made it abundantly clear that service managers are aware that they have an ongoing task in identifying the ever-changing training needs of their staff to provide them with the skills to adapt and to tackle new tasks. Reflecting this, when asked what would be the single most important investment they could make to prepare their service organisation for 2010, many of the responses focused on staff issues.

For instance, one respondent highlighted: ‘Further investment in training, both technical and personal development, plus developing a culture/ethos around the company’s values to ensure people enjoy coming to work.’ Which is all good news for those in the industry. Another manager suggested there was no issue around basic field operatives, but investment was vital in higher-level staff. He commented: ‘Investing in getting the best people with innovative ideas will be the single most important investment. There’s no problem recruiting and maintaining basic engineers, but you need managers and developers with vision and the desire and skills to implement new services and processes.’

The survey makes it clear that managers realise they face real challenges in preparing their service operation for the future. Although a close secondary preoccupation was with technology and systems, the results showed that managers believe the right staff are vital to the success of their service operation and, consequently, the profitability of their organisations. Exciting times lie ahead for the field service community.