Building Apps for Field Service Reps

Unlock Revenue, New Opportunities, & Efficiency Gains with Apps for Field Services

Field service reps are the frontline of your business—delivering repairs, conducting inspections, and providing service where your customers need it most. But legacy systems and manual processes are slowing them down. In this expert conversation, LaunchPad Lab President & Partner Ryan Francis joins Stefanie Kulberg to explore how building apps for field service businesses is redefining how field teams work—and how businesses scale.

You’ll learn:

• What a field service app is and why it’s essential for in-the-field teams
• How bespoke apps streamline routing, data collection, quoting, and payments
• Where AI can automate insights, surface upsell opportunities, and eliminate friction
• Why off-the-shelf tools fall short for growing teams with proprietary processes
• What business value you can expect from a tailored solution

Whether you’re leading a field team, selling Salesforce solutions, or modernizing ops, this conversation delivers actionable insights to elevate service quality and drive growth.

Watch the full talk and see how your field operations can go from functional to exceptional. You can read additional insights from the talk, too!

Read the Transcript:

STEFANIE KULBERG: Hi, everyone. I’m Stefanie Kulberg, and I am here today with Ryan Francis, the President and Partner at Launchpad Lab. We are here to break down and discuss field service applications. So, just to kick things off, I’d like to ask my very first question to you, Ryan, which is, what is a field service application?

RYAN FRANCIS: A field service app is an application used by field service technicians in the field. So, what is a field service person? What is a field service technician?
Anyone who is performing some type of service out of the building, out of their house, or out of their office. So, imagine a technician who is going to residences to provide HVAC repairs. That would be a service technician who would need a field service app.

STEFANIE KULBERG: If I can just jump in for a second here, there’s a similar use case that we’ve talked about in the past, and I would love to get your insights here in terms of sharing your thoughts on a field sales application?

RYAN FRANCIS: There’s a tangential use case called field sales app. A field sales app is really the same idea, but used by salespeople who are out in the field. A lot of times, these can have overlap. You have service people who need who are, helping to sell, and you have sales people who are often helping to service. So there can be a lot of overlap between these two use cases.

STEFANIE KULBERG: What makes this type of application unique, and what are the requirements that you would say are necessary in order to make sure that this type of application is successful?

RYAN FRANCIS: At the core of what this field service app is is a mobile app that typically needs to work offline so that an individual who is in potentially low Wi Fi or low cell reception areas can provide a service such as repairing equipment, doing inspections. And when they’re on-site, they’re gonna be as they’re doing their service or their inspection, they’re gonna be collecting data and, ultimately, helping to process the transaction with the customer.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Will you take a second just dig in a little bit deeper in terms of the specific use cases? You mentioned a few different examples of the different types of field service reps. Tell me a little bit more about that.

RYAN FRANCIS: I’ll give you a couple of examples. Imagine an HVAC company who has a hundred field service technicians in the field. These field service people need to know where to go on a given day, which customers they need to know their routes for getting there. So they could see, like, okay.

RYAN FRANCIS: My first appointment’s at nine AM in this ZIP code. My second appointment is at eleven AM in this other ZIP code. I can see my route from getting to from point a to point b to point c to point d. Right?

RYAN FRANCIS: As that field service technician gets to their appointment, they need to see some information about why am I here? What is this appointment for? What is the past history of this customer?

RYAN FRANCIS: As they go in, they need to be able to take pictures, upload data, and input information about what they’re seeing and hearing while they’re there. And they also need to be able to purchase the product. Let’s say the customer needs a new part for their air conditioner. The field service person will need to build out a quote in the app and allow the customer to pay via credit card, via a terminal swipe on their credit card in the mobile app. There might also be, like, an invoice process that they would take the customer through, as far as the customer getting some type of an invoice emailed to them.

STEFANIE KULBERG: You mentioned earlier the notion of this app having to be bespoke. We talk about this a lot in terms of business value. So what’s the business value behind this?

RYAN FRANCIS: The field service app is critical because field service people are often not the most tech-savvy. These could be people who are really great at a certain trade. They’re not necessarily great at user interfaces and apps. So creating a bespoke app gives you an opportunity to create something that’s really easy for your field service people to use, and that ensures that they follow a certain standard, a certain proprietary process that you’ve created to ensure data comes in in a consistent manner, to ensure they consistently provide the same level of service to each customer. That consistency is the big thing, which is how you ensure that through a digital app, you’re creating guardrails for how your business operates in the field.

RYAN FRANCIS: You’re also ensuring that data comes back to your business in a consistent format that you can report on, that you can gain insights from, and that you can ultimately better service your customers around.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Definitely. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s all about elevating something and making sure that people are satisfied and they’re getting the service that they need. We’ve all been there where you get something, someone shows up, and it doesn’t work out great, and it’s a total hassle. Looking into the pain points that companies are having, I’d ask you, just Ryan, that specific question if you could walk through and detail the pain points that would justify the investment for something that’s more bespoke and tailored for the field service use case?

RYAN FRANCIS: There are a few pain points that I’ve seen with our clients that have ultimately created a field service app. The first is gonna be the data collection. I’ve seen that for businesses that don’t have a great field service app, they often have a manual process for collecting data from their field service people. The field service technician will go out.

RYAN FRANCIS: They’ll do they’ll write, they’ll use their notepad and take down some notes and talk to the customer, and then they’ll call in and say, here’s what I discovered while I was there. Here’s what the customer had. And then there’s an internal operations person who basically processes that, writes it all down, and ensures that there’s a good follow-up process from there. Because oftentimes, there’s more action needed to finalize servicing the account.

RYAN FRANCIS: Data consistency, data quality, even just making sure there was data collected while the person is on-site. It’s amazing how, without an app and a process, that can be all over the place for businesses. The second major challenge is when you have a field service app that’s not a great one or is like an off-the-shelf one that doesn’t quite do what you want. What that can result in is a lot of training time to help these field service people understand how to use the technology.

RYAN FRANCIS: Like I mentioned, they are not the most tech-savvy. So if the UX is pretty clunky, if it doesn’t really make a lot of intuitive sense, or you’ve had to sort of bastardize it to customize it to to sorta get your process into it, what ends up happening is you spend a lot of time training people in dealing with incorrect usage of the app, which can result in poor experiences for your customer, can result in poor data collection, can even result in errors when processing orders or processing quotes.

STEFANIE KULBERG: If I can just interject for one second here, what I’m hearing and it’s just kind of resonating with me is that a lot of these pains can be resolved when you strategically just map what you’d wanna build in terms of an app. So that way it’s intuitive, easy for the person to use, and that way you get the data that you need. That way, your customer’s interesting use case to consider when you look at the scenario, especially when you’ve got a not-so-tech-savvy audience that you’re targeting that needs to use something that has to be super intuitive.

STEFANIE KULBERG: The problems that it can introduce by having something that doesn’t have the level of utility and functionality that they need to do what they do best. Walk me through what it would be like in the better state that, you know, we’ve talked about amongst ourselves, so that way other people can sort of hear that and realize the benefit.

RYAN FRANCIS: Let’s imagine an app that’s been designed specifically for your organization, the type of service you’re providing, and the type of people that you have on staff. What you what you’re able to do with that bespoke technology is you’re able to make a UX that perfectly reflects the process that you want delivered when someone is on-site.

RYAN FRANCIS: It allows for them to do things like, as they’re there, they can be on the lookout for business opportunities. I’ll just go back to that HVAC repair example. Let’s say you have a technician on-site, customers, boiler stopped working, they’re out there to repair it. While they’re on-site, they start to catalog the different appliances that the customer has.

RYAN FRANCIS: They have an air conditioning unit. The air conditioning unit looks like it’s twenty years old. They have a water boiler that is also really old. They start to ask the customer, “Hey, when was the last time you’ve had this air conditioner looked at?
Oh, would you like me to take a look while I’m here? This will be an additional twenty-dollar upcharge. I can take a look.” Or perhaps they schedule another appointment to come out.

RYAN FRANCIS: But this process of having the app actually ask the technician what other appliances are in this house. It could be that simple. And then as the technician writes out their response, AI can take that information and turn it into structured data in your CRM.

STEFANIE KULBERG: There it is. The magic word, AI. Tell me more about that, how you can use AI in this process to make things a little bit more flawless, seamless, and get the experience and the results that the business and the rep in the field need, and ultimately make sure that the customer gets what they need.

RYAN FRANCIS: We can also use AI to automatically spin up opportunities in your CRM for anything, any problems that the customer mentions.

STEFANIE KULBERG: It’s pretty cool to hear how AI and the combination of building something can really be game-changing for an organization and the people and its customers that it’s serving, using AI and this application as a problem solver.

RYAN FRANCIS: And that’s really what at the end of the day, what you want these people to be doing. You want them to be hunting for problems with customers. What pain, what problems do these customers have at the facility or at the place that they’re visiting?

RYAN FRANCIS: Let’s be on the hunt for that, and let’s have the app automatically take note and record those as opportunities back in your CRM. This is the kind of thing that can drive significant revenue boost to businesses.

STEFANIE KULBERG: You talk revenue driving, and I gotta imagine a few people’s ears just perked up. Let’s take a second here and look at the business value here, the business side of the house, and when and why, for field service reps, a business would want to consider and look at doing something that’s more tailored versus buying something that’s off the shelf.

RYAN FRANCIS: One of the big factors is the number of field service people that you have. The more field service people that you have, the more it could be beneficial to move towards a bespoke application. The reason for this is the more people that you have, the more any type of value gained through going bespoke adds value to your overall business. So, for example, imagine you have a feature that you want to build into the app that you believe will drive one new opportunity a week.

RYAN FRANCIS: Let’s imagine you have an ambient listening AI feature in the app. So as the technicians on-site, the app is recording and listening to conversation as it’s happening and automatically taking notes. And then you have AI analyze those notes to identify potential opportunities, so looking for problems. And those opportunities get created in the CRM.

RYAN FRANCIS: You believe that the experience of having an ambient listening opportunity hunter will drive one new opportunity per field service person per week. If you have two people only in your whole organization, building that feature, while it’ll take the same amount of energy as if you had two hundred people, will only add two new leads per week. But if you have two hundred people, you’ll still have to spend the same amount of money to build the feature, but that could result in two hundred new leads per week. Right?

RYAN FRANCIS: So you think about the business impact of that and the value that that’s gonna bring. The cost is the same to build that feature. Huge order of magnitude, multiple orders of magnitude more for the business that has more service personnel to realize that value from. Number of people and also how fast you’re growing, so the number of people now and in the future, is the first big factor for why go bespoke.

RYAN FRANCIS: The second big factor is just, like, how unique your process is. If you, as a business, have an opinion, a strong opinion about what good service looks like, and that opinion is not reflected in off the shelf offerings, it may make sense to build your own proprietary field service app that allows you to have more control and ownership of the experience that your field people are getting when they’re using your application. I think those are the two biggest factors, just quantity of people and, you know, I think those are the two biggest factors, just quantity of people and to the extent that there is a out of the box offering that really fits your needs or whether or not your needs are require more custom development.

STEFANIE KULBERG: Cool. What trends are you seeing that are happening out there in this space? And in looking at those trends, are there any opportunities that a business can use to help themselves gain a competitive edge?

RYAN FRANCIS: I think AI is the big one. Right? You can have AI going to work on behalf of your people. You have people in the field who they’re busy. They’re trying to go from one appointment to the next. They wanna get through as many appointments as possible to maximize revenue to the business. AI can help streamline each step of their process. It can help streamline them getting up to speed on the account.

RYAN FRANCIS: So they get to the location and rather than digging through mounds of information, they can quickly see a summary of here’s the situation with the customer, here’s their history, and it’s all AI summarized for you. As you get into the appointment and you’re taking pictures, you’re looking at what’s going on, the AI is analyzing these pictures, and automatically suggesting parts that might be a good fit.

RYAN FRANCIS: The AI might also allow the field technician to simply record themselves explaining what they’re seeing, and the AI then does the rest as far as turning those into notes that are stored in the CRM or in your system. So you can imagine how AI can really be like this personal assistant to the field service person before, during, and after any visit with a customer.

STEFANIE KULBERG: At the end of the day, that’s the name of the game. Well, thank you, Ryan, for taking the time to chat. Hope everyone listening found this conversation useful. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out. Thank you so much.