As the global pandemic swept across the world, many, many things changed. The way we interacted with each other in some ways became more distant; in others, we felt closer to each other than we had ever been before.

Those of us based in offices invited the world into our homes through tools such as Zoom, Skype and Got To Meeting. Switchboard recordings notified us that we might hear unusual noises like dogs or children during the call as contacts centres were moved in a surprisingly seamless manner onto kitchen tables across the land.

Yet, field service delivery is not such an easy role to transition to a world of lockdowns and isolation. Field service is by its very definition delivered off-site, in the field. However, with many field engineers being classed as essential workers, and with service and maintenance operations under intense pressure to keeping the world ticking over, while we all endured lockdown, innovative thinking was required to keep service operations moving as much as possible.

The result we saw was a massive swing in demand for the delivery of remote services. Before the pandemic, remote services were an option that remained primarily viewed as an offering of less value than the traditional on-site service call. Almost overnight, this switched. Suddenly, the requirements for remote service solutions were of paramount as companies desperately avoided breaking their own carefully erected bio-security measures.

Now, as we look towards building the recovery and establishing a new normal, many field service organisations are discussing a remote-first approach to service delivery. However, there are valid concerns that too much of a swing in the other direction could be akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In this exclusive White Paper, authored by Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland, we set out to weigh up the pros and cons of adopting a remote-first as default approach and ask is this the way we should approach service delivery in the new normal of our post-pandemic world?