As someone who has worked in the field of installation and repair for 10 years, I’m fascinated by what the future holds. My expertise is in telecommunications but many of the concepts apply to installation and repair companies in general.

Everyone is affected by installation and repair services, whether it’s your cable service, home security system, the power lines outside of your house, your HVAC company, or your solar installation company, to name a few. The list is extensive!

So, what does the future hold for the world of installation and repair? Let’s start with customers who don’t want their service (any service!) to go down and if it does go down, they want an immediate fix.

Customer needs will dictate the future of installation and repair. There is a huge opportunity to use technology to repair issues at customer locations, either remotely or in person, before a problem manifests itself. Already automation is being used in telecommunications to predict failures and resolve them proactively. Gone are the days when a technician must search for a network failure on site. The technology exists to point him/her to the exact location of the failure, thereby speeding up the time to repair. Some industries are even using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help technicians troubleshoot in real time on location.

And what about the contact center? The potential for automation is huge in this space whether it assists with troubleshooting failures remotely to avoid sending a technician to the customer’s location, using robotics to complete routine tasks, having bots answer simple, routine questions, or using ML to determine the next best action in solution selling. Humans in the call center now have the capacity to work on complex customer issues, leaving automation to handle simple, routine questions. Finally, there’s the potential to offer a seamless customer journey across multiple channels.

So, it’s reasonable to ask about the role of humans in the future of installation and repair. Research shows that customers still want that human connection. It’s therefore important to ensure that employee connections with customers, when they occur, are engaging and informative. The industry needs to hire employees who have excellent people skills and are willing to engage with customers as they resolve issues. They also need to plan to coach more tenured employees on how to engage with customers. Nothing has changed: hire for attitude and train for skills. Coaching skills are now paramount for leaders as they seek to help employees develop the behaviors that will deliver that outstanding customer experience.

There’s much talk about AI replacing humans. I look at it as AI complementing the work of humans. AI is good at identifying trends from large databases very quickly leading to proactive problem-solving and identifying the next best action, to name a few. It is important to note that AI can tell us what’s wrong but not necessarily how to fix it.

Automation represents the future but it’s not human. It does not have the creativity or empathy of humans, nor does it have the emotional intelligence or the same ability to reason as humans. The bottom line: automation cannot replace human intelligence, at least not yet.

What are your thoughts? More to come.

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