The battle to win the customer’s heart generally plays out between competitors’ sales departments. But you need more than that to continue to appeal to customers and keep them satisfied. Field operations very often play a crucial role in this. Poor intervention or too slow a response can drive a customer straight into the arms of the competition.

The pressure on field operations is growing every year.

High time to get a feel for how they are handling this, though our strategic partner Zebra Technologies, a supplier of robust mobile technology. They surveyed more than 400 professional field operations employees about their challenges and strategic objectives and how technology could help them in this. The results speak for themselves:

• Among the greatest challenges most often mentioned for field sales reps are: response times (44%), staying within budget (42%) and implementing and integrating new technologies (39%)
• Indeed, all those surveyed see the use of technology increasing spectacularly in the coming years. 45% are already using remote monitoring and reporting, which is set to rise to 95% by 2026! We can see similar growth figures in advanced or predictive analytics (from 37% now to 91% in 2026), machine learning (from 34% to 89%), augmented reality (from 27% to 84%) and even driverless vehicles (from 21% to 75%)
• The use of robust mobile devices is set to burst through even faster: within 2 to 3 years, 90% of respondents are set to be using robust tablets with no keyboard and robust smartphones in their field operations duties.
• Finally: the use of mobile technology is genuinely bearing fruit: 54% of those who had implemented mobile solutions had noticed increased productive. 43% saw increased accuracy, and 39% reported improved availability of equipment.

Mobile and other technologies can therefore play a major role in handling the increased pressure, as this white paper from Zebra Technologies shows. Read the full document here.