Remote Monitoring Success Drives Adoption

Not many people get demonstrative discussing statistics from a remote devices survey, but Bill Pollock is 20 years deep into tracking customer service improvement methods and a new, profitable emerging trend enhances his already effusive nature. What Pollock sees is rapid adoption of remote devices and remote monitoring to enhance field services and – "the real dealbreaker" – enhanced customer service and profitability as a result.

Pollock is the President of Strategies for Growth – a services consulting firm – that is the official research analyst firm for The Service Council, a consortium of field service experts and a featured company at the upcoming 8th Annual remote Device Monitoring Summit in July. Pollock recently finished a study on what was driving the market of remote diagnostics and remote monitoring and his research will be the basis for The Service Council’s John Carroll’s presentation at the event, titled, "The Remote Services Evolution Lessons Learned and the Future."

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The survey, conducted from March 15 to April 11, was so fresh that Pollock had to crunch some numbers the night before his interview. Overall, 37 percent of the 213 respondents, from field service companies small and large, were currently using remote diagnostics – a significant increase for Pollock. The first number that got Pollock going, though, was that 43 percent of those field service organizations already using remote applications were planning "build new or enhance their existing remote applications."

Part I Full Interview

"What this says to me very clearly is that there may be some skeptics out there wondering, ‘should we be moving forward with this or not?’" Pollock said. "However, once you cross that line, people are saying, ‘this is something we need to do, this helps reduce internal costs and improves customer satisfaction.’ They become firm believers."

And a good portion – 25 percent – of those who haven’t tested the remote devices waters plan to implement some form in the coming 12 months. In Pollock’s estimation, this will push market penetration close to half.

"There’s already a large presence of remote monitoring and applications usage and it’s absolutely growing," Pollock said.

The trend is headed by larger companies – over 1,000 employees – of which 60 percent currently employee remote diagnostics. Only 21 percent of businesses under 500 employees currently use remote monitoring. Still, only 3-5 years ago, remote devices were "just above their infancy for the mainstream" and exclusively used by large businesses. And the study shows that within a year, a third of smaller businesses will have adopted remote monitoring. A robust 75 percent of large organizations will go the remote route by this time next year.

Part II Full Interview

"The trends are strong on both ends," Pollock said. "When you can grow a market from one-fifth to one third in just twelve months, [it’s significant]. … I’m encouraged about the numbers for the smaller service organizations. They have been really closing that gap."

Which Pollock attributes to several factors an explosion of to suit different companies price points and, cloud-based technology and seeing early adopters’ success with improved customer satisfaction and profit margin.

But Pollock’s enthusiasm reached another level when he hit "the real dealbreaker" – 52 percent of companies using remote applications are attaining profit margins of 30 percent or greater. Only 40 percent among those not in the remote applications market are achieving similar profit margins. There was also a statistically significant up tick in customer satisfaction between companies using and companies not incorporating remote diagnostics.

"Sometimes you have to give up a little bit of the profitability to increase the customer satisfaction, but outside of the initial investment it’s making the profit margins even greater," Pollock said.