The Gartner Magic Quadrant and Field Service

According to research company Gartner, a Magic Quadrant is “a graphical competitive positioning of four types of technology providers, in markets where growth is high and provider differentiation is distinct: Leaders execute well against their current vision and are well positioned for tomorrow.”

The tool helps leadership make strategic decisions about future investment. For Field Service Management (FSM) organizations, the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a great way to assess their strengths and weaknesses against competitors in order to make decisions that increase their market share.

The current Covid-19 pandemic has created a crossroads for the field service industry. Companies are beginning to understand that in order to remain sustainable in the new normal the pandemic will create, they must invest in technology that automates their processes, embrace data analytics, and incorporate real-time analysis to increase customer satisfaction and accuracy, among other benefits.

By 2025, Gartner reports that over 50 percent of field service management deployments will include mobile augmented-reality collaboration and knowledge-sharing tools, up from less than 10 percent in 2019. 

By the same year, over 50 percent of equipment manufacturers will offer outcome-based service contracts that rely on access to digital twin data, up from less than 20 percent in 2019. 

Additionally, algorithms and bots will schedule over two-thirds of field service work for field service providers dependent on automated schedule optimization, up from less than 25 percent in 2019. 

The investments that FSM operators can make in this new normal is in technology that operates across multiple communication channels. This way, dashboards, mobile devices, workplace and vendor management software, supply chain solutions, chatbots, and more can speak the same language among each other so that work performed becomes more accurate, timely, and predictive. 

Indeed, this synergy can help field service operators solve problems for customers before breakdowns take place, which protects the uptime of their customers and builds loyalty with the vendor at the same time. This added value to the full service that field service operators provide will help distinguish them from competitors. The companies that emerge successfully from the pandemic will be those that invested in devices, software, and systems that are enabled to solve problems before and after they take place.