Executive Summary

Field Service Customer Engagement

ISG Research defines Field Service Customer Engagement as tools that facilitate interactions and communication between businesses and customers throughout the field service process. This concept encompasses the entire customer journey, from the initial request for service to post-service follow-ups, with a focus on enhancing communication, transparency and overall customer satisfaction.

Field Service Customer Engagement systems are customer-centric tools that enhance the on-site service experience. These systems prioritize proactive communication, real-time updates and remote troubleshooting and fully integrate with core field service management (FSM) software but are distinct from tools that manage the mobile workforce or parts and assets. They focus on physical, on-site interactions unique to field service environments.

The history of customer engagement within field service management has evolved significantly over the decades, shifting from a predominantly reactive approach to one that is increasingly proactive and customer-centric. In the early stages of FSM, customer interactions were primarily limited to the initial service request and the communication of appointments. Engagement was largely one-dimensional, reliant on phone calls or in-person visits for information exchange, often resulting in delays and a lack of transparency for customers and service providers.

The advent of mobile technology made real-time communication between technicians and customers feasible, leading to the development of sophisticated engagement features like self-service portals, SMS notifications and live tracking of service requests. Today's field service management frameworks prioritize seamless, multi-channel experiences that encourage active customer involvement throughout the service lifecycle. By 2029, remote sensing and IoT tools will be part of standard field service management products to reduce the number of on-site visits and customer calls to service centers.

Enterprises need systems that facilitate real-time communication between technicians and customers, ensuring that service updates, appointment reminders and troubleshooting assistance are readily accessible. Data analytics capabilities are essential for understanding customer preferences and behaviors, enabling organizations to tailor their engagement strategies and proactively address needs. Ultimately, enterprises seek solutions that streamline operations, help build lasting relationships and maximize loyalty in a competitive market.

When evaluating field service management tools specifically for customer engagement purposes, enterprises should prioritize features that facilitate seamless communication and enhance the customer experience throughout the service lifecycle. First, evaluate the tool's ability to integrate multiple communication channels to provide customers with options to connect with service teams. The platform should offer self-service capabilities, allowing customers to track service requests, access relevant information and provide feedback. Data analytics features are critical to understanding customer preferences and behaviors, enabling organizations to tailor engagement strategies accordingly.

In addition, enterprises should consider ease of use and accessibility for customers and technicians. This will ensure that the software fosters a positive experience, encouraging quick adoption.

Another important function is the ability to gather customer feedback and link it to technician performance, scheduling accuracy and other process inputs that affect the experience. The stakes for field service interactions are much higher than for contact center interactions, so the need to understand customer perceptions is much more acute. Some FSM platforms contain features for surveying customer responses and assessing the results.

When purchasing field service customer engagement systems, enterprises should consider the platform's ability to integrate seamlessly with existing tools and workflows, ensuring a unified approach to customer interactions across multiple channels. Additionally, organizations should evaluate the system's scalability and flexibility to adapt to changing business needs and customer demands, as well as its user-friendliness to encourage quick adoption among staff and customers.

Field service technology is available both as part of broad-based customer experience management tools and as standalone platforms or those built for a particular vertical industry. As a result, the presence or absence of customer engagement tools like those described above can function as a differentiator for software providers in this space. It can also help a business buyer tie the different forms of service relationships together into a holistic approach to the customer experience.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Field Service: Customer Engagement evaluates software providers and products in key areas, including support for mobile applications, mobile workforce management, scheduling and dispatch optimization, work order and asset management, customer engagement and experience, automation and AI integration, data and analytics, knowledge management, predictive maintenance and proactive service.

This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of field service customer engagement as we define it: Comarch, CSG. FSM Global, IBM, IFS, Infor, Kapture CX, Microsoft, Nomadia, Oracle, OverIT, Praxedo, PTC, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, ServicePower, ServiceTitan, Simpro and Syncron.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, ISG Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. We have designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirements in any enterprise. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to rating software providers in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an enterprise.

The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Field Service Customer Engagement is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for field service customer engagement software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. An effective product and customer experience with a provider can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

In this Buyers Guide, ISG Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership/Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of Capability, we applied the ISG Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for field service customer engagement to an enterprise’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of field service customer engagement technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its full performance potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of software providers that does not represent a best fit for your enterprise.

ISG Research believes that an objective review of software providers and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of field service customer engagement software and applications. An enterprise’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating field service customer engagement systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Software Providers: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a software provider are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your enterprise’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or software provider assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an enterprise may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one provider or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of software providers and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories

The research finds ServiceNow atop the list, followed by Salesforce and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. ServiceNow, Salesforce and Oracle have done so in all categories.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places software providers into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies providers’ overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of software providers in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: IBM, IFS, Infor, Oracle, PTC, Salesforce, SAP and ServiceNow.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of software providers in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: Kapture CX and Microsoft.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of software providers in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Nomadia and ServiceTitan.

Merit: The categorization of software providers in Merit (lower left) represents those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The providers rated Merit are: Comarch, CSG, FSM Global, OverIT, Praxedo, ServicePower, Simpro and Syncron.

We warn that close provider placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every enterprise or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how enterprises handle field service customer engagement, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one software provider’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular enterprise’s needs.

We advise enterprises to assess and evaluate software providers based on organizational requirements and use this research as a supplement to internal evaluation of a provider and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an enterprise’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an enterprise’s requirements but how the provider operates. As more software providers orient to a complete product experience, evaluations will be more robust.

The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, of the overall rating using the specific underlying weighted category performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (15%), Capability (30%), Reliability (10%), Adaptability (10%) and Manageability (15%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall ratings in this research. ServiceNow, Salesforce and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders.

Customer Experience

The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entire life cycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. Technology providers that have chief customer officers are more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring this commitment is made abundantly clear on the website and in the buying process and customer journey.

The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth, using the specific underlying weighted category performance as it relates to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The software providers that evaluated the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are ServiceNow, Salesforce and Oracle. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.

Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide sufficient customer case studies to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience and an enterprise’s journey. The selection of a software provider means a continuous investment by the enterprise, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.

Appendix: Software Provider Inclusion

For inclusion in the ISG Buyers Guide™ for Field Service Customer Engagement in 2025, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $20 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, have more than 50 employees and have at least 25 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.

To qualify for inclusion in the specific Field Service Buyers Guides, software providers must include support for proactive communication, real-time updates and remote troubleshooting. Tools for customer engagement must be fully integrated with core FSM processes such as scheduling, dispatching and asset management. Tools evaluated must focus on physical, on-site interactions that are unique to field service environments. Features evaluated include self-service (including appointment management and portals), real-time notifications and communications, post-service feedback management and control of customer data and SLAs.

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.

All software providers that offer relevant field service customer engagement products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.

Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.

Products Evaluated

Providers of Promise

We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”