How to increase your sales with service contracts

Service contracts are changing

More and more customers are opting to subscribe to a service package rather than buying individual services. At the same time, technology offers entirely new ways to monitor service equipment and predict when and how it needs to be serviced. With modern field service systems, you are equipped for the service tasks of the future and have a full overview of your service contracts

Prevention is better than aftercare. This also applies to the maintenance of air conditioners, heat pumps and any other equipment that may fail. A reactive approach is often expensive, cumbersome and often annoying. The benefit of predictive maintenance is exactly what the term implies – it prevents a device or system from failing or getting to a point where you need to call for help. Technology has boosted the market for service contracts. Sensor technology is on the rise. And many of our customers report that parts of their business are shifting from single orders to subscriptions. As a result, we are seeing increasing interest in our products for service contracts from companies involved in the maintenance of machinery and equipment, among other things.

Insight and overview of the customer’s units and his own business

At GSGroup, we’ve been developing solutions for over 30 years, including making repetitive service calls easy to schedule and manage, minimizing downtime and costs. This is where the service company becomes a proactive partner, helping to extend the service life of machinery and equipment and improve their performance.At the same time, field service software provides service companies with an overview of service units and useful knowledge, such as the service history of each unit at the customer’s site. For service organizations, the systems also provide an overview of resource consumption to perform tasks. This allows the system to estimate how many employees are needed based on the planned service tasks.

From preventive to predictive service

We are in a time called the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. Industrial revolutions are characterized by the fact that they bring about major changes in the economy, the labor market and society as a whole. Industry 4.0 forms the basis for what we at GSGroup call Service 4.0. This is about how companies can use new technologies to provide better service. The trend in this context is that in these years we are moving from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance. This means that field service systems will increasingly merge with sensors and the Internet of Things (IoT). Predictive maintenance uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics to predict service equipment failures. And order management systems can communicate with equipment via sensors that report on equipment health. As with cars, where maintenance intervals are based on both time and consumption, how and how often coffee machines in the cafeteria need to be serviced can vary. Here we go a step further and focus on the current state.

Remote maintenance based on sensors and artificial intelligence

Predictive maintenance allows us to take appropriate preventive measures to avoid equipment failures while reducing maintenance costs. Predictive maintenance also relies on predictive analytics, which uses historical data to match current usage and condition and make an assessment. Engineers can use IoT-enabled tools to proactively monitor the health of service equipment and generate alerts. This saves a lot of resources because a service check at a particular location no longer needs to be performed at a specific interval, but only when needed. Customers can opt for remote maintenance and self-repair at the outset or combine this with the involvement of a technician. Predectiv-Maintenance is of increasing importance to more and more service providers and their customers because it reduces downtime and lowers costs for both the service company and the customer. With the help of our Field service management: Handyman maintenance work can be planned in such a way that costs caused by a shutdown are kept to a minimum for a customer.