In this new article for Field Service News, IDC's Aly Pinder discusses why the future of field service enterprises depends on getting the change in management right.

With a new year comes new beginnings and new changes. Often our business lives resemble our personal lives, especially in this current moment where the lines between the two are quite blurred. But for the field service organization, where work from home options are not an easy pivot, change isn't always a welcomed concept. Decades of expertise from front-line technicians can often breed a tried-and-true mindset around best practices and ways of getting the job done.

However, even the field team is finding that they have had to become more nimble, agile, and open to a next normal. In IDC's COVID-19 IMPACT ON IT SPENDING survey, 36.8% of manufacturers stated product and service installation would be converted to a contact-less experience. The ability to service assets, equipment, and products remotely or at least with limited time physically on site is a major shift for many service organizations and field service teams where getting hands on the machine for as long as it takes to fix the issue has been the norm.

As customer expectations evolve to expect contact-less experiences while also receiving quality service, the field service organization will need to transform. However, in an IDC research survey of manufacturers, only 34.0% of sampled organizations stated a strategic approach to change management with senior leadership having invested resources to ensure transformation was successful. The rest of manufacturers had some resources in place for change management but nothing strategic or at an enterprise-wide level. This comes at a time of accelerated digital transformation for many organizations while disruption is impacting the way service is delivered, how customers interact with organizations, and where employees work. These divergent factors, of rapid change with limited strategic communication, can lead to field service teams feeling left out of the future of the business. The field service team, front-line technicians, dispatchers, schedulers, third-party contractors, and partners must be a part of any change from the beginning to ensure expedient success and minimal negative impact to customers. To achieve accelerated digital transformation in field service without the discord, manufacturers and service organizations should consider the following:

• Solicit insight directly from your technicians with regard to gaps in the technology solutions currently used and relation to their productivity. Digital investments for many organizations are implemented from the top down or from the IT team. Not many organizations have the front-line team spearhead technological initiatives. It shouldn’t be a surprise, field technicians by in large are remote and must be primarily focused on completing work orders. Time to test or pilot new technologies isn’t in their job description. However, this fact mustn't lead to the field team being bypassed all together. Field technicians know what tools they need, what knowledge would help them be more productive, and what types of capabilities would enhance their interactions with customers. If field service technicians believe changes in technology or processes area being made with them in mind and with their input, the transformation will result in less friction.
• Educate the field team on the value of digital transformation. Too often, technicians are the last to know about technology hardware and software changes. They are expected to just blindly go along with the latest tools and its inherent value to increased productivity. But this approach can lead to resentment as these technicians have gotten the job done prior to any changes in technology. Also, some enhancements can seem like digital automation just to track technicians more closely to be punitive or restrict creativity in work. Communicating the value of technology changes to productivity, the customer experience, and business goals will provide the field team with buy-in to support initiatives.
• Understand field service team member's desired working environment and interest in digital technology. Not all technicians are the same. Some enjoy going out and dealing directly with customers, and others just want to fix an equipment failure but not have to interact with others. Both profiles are valuable to the field support team. In a constrained talent market, manufacturers and service organizations can’t afford to turn anyone away. By identifying which technicians are willing to work in direct contact with customers and which don’t, service leadership can create dedicated teams that build on individual strengths. Furthermore, with the emergence of a profit- or customer-centric view of field service, many service organizations look to transform the field service job to be less about completing as many jobs in a given day to instead empower technicians to become advisors. This change also is not for all technicians. Assessing which technicians want to work directly with customers to drive value-add experiences and which just want to just solve problems, service leaders can segment the workforce for specific jobs.

Change management is not easy even in the best environments where teams are in constant contact with direct communication with leadership and each other. Field service organizations have an even tougher time as technicians are removed from direct lines of communication with those making decisions, and inherent to their job is a feeling of isolation. As a result, service leadership must approach new digital initiatives and change differently for the field team taking a strategic approach to education, communication, and deployment. Failure to take change management as a serious challenge can result in delayed rollouts, attrition, or degraded service quality.

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Further Reading:

• Read more articles by Aly Pinder @ www.fieldservicenews.com/alypinder
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Connect with Aly Pinder on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/aly-pinder-jr
• Find out more about IDC Insights @ www.idc.com
• Read more about Covid-19 in Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/covid-19
• Follow Aly Pinder on Twitter @ twitter.com/Pinderjr
  
  

IDC's Aly Pinder discusses what the next stage of field service could be and what technology can help ride the uncertainty.

 

The service world, like our daily personal lives, have been greatly impacted by the past few months. Supply chains have been strained. Financial markets have seen dramatic swings in valuation. Lives have been personally changed forever. The field service operation has had to deal with all these aspects of the crisis and more.

Technology Pivoting in Service

But now that we, in some cases, can say we are past the first or second phase of this pandemic, what will be our 'next' normal? I say 'next', as I believe it would be a bit naive to think we will just have one 'new' normal as things continue to evolve at a rapid pace. From my perspective, the next normal will be a determination by service leaders and organizations as to a longer-term strategy for the next two plus years which incorporates risk assessments for future global disruptions and customer impacts and what technology and processes changes are needed.

Short-term many manufacturers and service organizations conducted stress tests and operational adjustments to ensure mission critical assets and equipment were prioritized and customers who had essential status could be provided the appropriate level of service to meet customer needs. But longer term, service leaders will need to rationalize the pre-pandemic momentum, interest, and hype around some of the technologies at the forefront of digital transformation taking field service from a manual, paper-based set of processes to the autonomous and augmented technician of the future?

IDC believes, based on some compelling data we are refreshing every two weeks, that IT spend on projects will take a bit of a dip in the coming quarters. However, some projects and investments will actually accelerate to meet the next normal that manufacturers and service organizations will face in the last part of this year and into the early part of next. For manufacturers, technologies around remote access, mobility, and enterprise social will see the biggest increase in demand.

 

"The expectation that every field technician has a tablet or smart glasses is a bit premature..."

 

This should come as no real shock to most of us, the ability to resolve issues remotely, on a mobile device, or glean knowledge through shared collaboration are a key component to keeping technicians out of harm's way or avoid missing an SLA because a customer's site cannot be accessed as a result of new protocols.

Remote access

In recent IDC Manufacturing Insight's research, just about one-third of equipment are considered IoT-connected today and therefore have a unique IP address and software within them to enable service and product performance information to be communicated over a wireless network. This percentage was only expected to rise to just under half of all equipment in three years. In order to meet the needs of remote monitoring, connectivity, and resolution investments will need to be made to accelerate these numbers of connected assets. In a post-COVID-19 world access to products and assets for the field service team will become a critical differentiator with regard to critical assets and 99%+ uptime goals.

Mobility

This may seem like a trivial investment for many readers of technology publications but a number of large, mid-size, and small organizations still work in a world of paper or manual processes. The expectation that every field technician has a tablet or smart glasses is a bit premature. But the need to have real or near-real time data at one's finger tips to make split second decisions will be an opportunity for service organizations over the coming months and quarters. Inefficient and manual processes and the delays they lead to won't be tolerated by customers that expect to move to 100% or higher levels of production as soon as businesses can re-open.

Enterprise collaboration

Collaboration isn’t only a technology for office workers that have had the privilege of a near-seamless transition to work from home. Field technicians will need to be able to share best practices and content with their peers, customers, and the back office in ways they hadn't before. From a talent and knowledge management perspective, junior field service technicians will need to be productive quickly to meet service demand and collaborative tools can aid in democratizing knowledge.

It is easy to say we are entering a period of a new or next normal. What is hard is to forecast how dramatically this disruption will impact IT investments for service; it is clear there will be a reaction. But in the wake of this current pandemic and preparation for global events of the future, manufacturers and service organizations must ensure they can maintain a level of quality service their customers demand even when access, data, or physical technicians isn't available. The optimist in me believes we will come out of this with a new-found strategy around technology to support our daily lives and our work lives. And field service won't be separate from this next normal. Stay safe and healthy.

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Further Reading:

• Read more articles by Aly Pinder @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/alypinder
• Connect with Aly Pinder on LinkedIn here
• Find out more about IDC Insights @ https://www.idc.com/
• Read more about Covid-19 in service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Read about the IDC Insights 2020 Manufacturing report @ https://www.idc.com/prodserv/insights/#manufacturing
  
  

The eternal hunt for field service excellence has recently been bolstered by the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence as a major tool in the arsenal of the field service organisation writes Aly Pinder...

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the next big challenge for service organizations and manufacturers. How can wemake sense of the data we now have access to? From executives to the front-line field service technician, the ability to turn data into actionable insights will become the measuring stick for sustained success.

 

Leverage

To take this leap from data points to insights, organizations are ramping up quickly to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure volumes data (flow, sensor, vibration, temperature, or other data) can be mined quickly, accurately, and autonomously. When asked in a recent IDC survey, manufacturers listed Big Data and AI as a 4.06-level of importance (on a 1-5 scale, 1-not at all important,5-very important) regarding technologies integral to their service innovation journey.

The increase in importance should come as little shock to most as technology become ubiquitous in our daily lives, however what is interesting is the impact AI is having on service broadly and field service specifically.

As organizations evolve service business models to be less reactive and more proactive or predictive, the ability to leverage real-time data across a complex network of inputs is becoming critical for this transition.

Being reactive or break / fix merely requires a customer or an operator to call the service desk and report an issue. But in order to truly be predictive or prescriptive with service prior to a failure, organizations must leverage performance data to allocate resources, trigger a service event, and schedule the service to be delivered.

Organizations are looking to AI to explore field service excellence in some of the following ways:

• Better service planning and execution – How often have we talked about the “rights” of field service; right part, right tech, right skills, right time, right resolution. As much as we’ve commented on this and attempted to reach this utopia, many organizations still miss. AI connects the dots between each of the inputs across field service execution to provide the intelligence necessary to make the correct decisions, each time.
  
  
• Customer experience optimization – Even at a global scale, manufacturers and service organizations are finding they need to personalize service experiences for their customers. AI is enabling organizations to segment customers and deliver the level of support desired. Not every customer wants the closest technician, some just want to see the tech they’ve built a relationship with over the years. AI can and should be used to identify customer needs along with how best to resolve an issue. Should you resolve an issue remotely, or send a field service technician, or notify the customer directly with a customer support agent to walk them through the fix?
  
  
• Self-healing and suggestive preventative maintenance – As service organizations embrace servitization or product as a service models, they will need to deliver uptime and outcomes. Analyzing asset performance data and anomalies at scale provides the bridge to these new autonomous field service business models. But AI also provides the reporting capability to support the dashboards and details which will validate these premium services. Without capturing data points and rationalizing the service being delivered, customers may not understand why they are paying for service when they don’t actually see a failure occur.
  
  

More and more products and equipment are being connected every day which in turn is leading to volumes of data that needs to be managed. Passively managing data will be a waste of these IoT investments. Furthermore, AI can accelerate service business model transformation which has been talked about for years if not decades.

I look forward to seeing how field service organizations take advantage of AI to take this leap and meet customer expectations for an enhanced service experience.

IDC’s Aly Pinder explores one of the most crucial conundrums facing field service organisations today - how to ensure knowledge transfer is seamless across the organisation...

At some point we will finally reach the moment when all the seasoned field service engineers retire. I know, we have been foretelling this for years and in my case more than a decade. Despite this seemingly ever-present anxiety around replacing a retiring field workforce, many manufacturers and service organizations still list knowledge loss as a top challenge yet to be successfully addressed.

IDC Manufacturing Insights’ 2019 Product and Service Innovation Survey highlighted one of the top drivers for manufacturer’s service lifecycle management efforts is a need to capture and make accessible service knowledge and best practices. Building a culture of shared intelligence and accessibility of service knowledge, nearly half of organizations (42.7%) sampled in this study plan to leverage mobile devices for the purpose of increased collaboration amongst technicians.

These investments and prioritization demonstrate how much risk is inherent with having an entire workforce which often goes out on its own for an extended period of time, rarely coming back into a centralized location, and is one of the closest resources interacting directly with customers. The scary part is the value technicians to the customer experience is becoming more not less critical for manufacturers and service organizations.

In advance of losing field workers, I recommend you consider a few things:

• Identify your workforce that is planning to retire in the near future. Do you survey your technicians, at least annually, to ask them when they plan to retire? Assuming your technicians will retire at the retirement age of your respective country is quite risky. Reaching out to your technicians to identify when they plan to retire allows the organization to identify the level and urgency of the risk, plan for the loss, and even proactively strategize to either retain or hire more aggressively in advance of the loss.
• Get creative with technician retention. Organizations should establish a program that enables technicians to be able to work as a centralized expert. This is where gamification and incentives can be used to create a bench of technicians that are willing to stay with the company, accelerate the rate of capturing best practices, and recognize the value of the decades of experience which is held in the brains of the technician. Organizations would be wise to establish a role which based on identify qualifications or attainment of a certain expertise level can extend the viability of a seasoned technician staying on the team.
• Show your newer workforce a career path which is rewarding and valued. Many organizations struggle with creating tangible and exciting career paths for the workforce. Career paths are difficult to detail as there  are so many variables, both for the employee and the organization. This is an even bigger challenge with a largely remote workforce at many service organizations. However, the ability to communicate a future for the field technician is a critical step in addressing the workforce skills gap which should go hand in hand with trying to retain more seasoned technicians. This practice will help create a culture that values the service technician experience and show the workforce where they will fit in the broader strategy of the organization.

Talking about the retiring field force mustn’t be the end of the story that we tell each other, organizations must act now. Technology is one of the ways to capture and make accessible service knowledge, but manufacturers and service organizations need to identify their respective risk and build a strategy around addressing the loss of critical service knowledge.

Collaboration and shared purpose will enable organizations to get in front of this pending wave of retiring workers.

IDC’s Aly Pinder tackles one of the core challenges of modern field service as the Internet of Things potentially brings new vulnerabilities to the perennial cyber security channels...

According to research from IDC 30% of manufacturers will soon provide personalized dashboards for customers by 2023 which could lead to a new era of customer satisfaction: customer collaboration. Aly Pinder explores the potential of this evolution. 

What role does the customer play in their own service experience? If we were to think back a few years or decades the answer would be minimal. Historically, the service organization or manufacturer held the keys to a customer’s happiness and satisfaction.

Show up, preferably on time, with the answer to resolve the issue was the main goal. If the issue were resolved the customer was happy and vice versa. But as most of the world is now accustomed to on-demand experiences and collaborative interactions with peers, manufacturers, and technology platforms this model is changing. IDC predicts that resulting from demand for hyper-customized customer experiences, 30% of manufacturers will provide personalized dashboards for customers to schedule service, learn about products, and collaborate by 2023. Customers now can create their own experiences and in turn their level of satisfaction with their expected outcomes.

This isn’t to say that the manufacturer is completely absolved of responsibility to have knowledgeable technicians, reliable products, and efficient processes to support a quality service experience, but a good service experience is evolving and has become inclusive of customers, partners, and other stakeholders. Customers can and will continue to play a bigger role in the experiences they create for themselves and the impact they will have on quality service. From their level of engagement to the access they allow manufacturers to use the data that is created customers will only become more relevant for the future of service excellence. Below are a few ways I see customers impacting the service experience in 2019 and beyond.

Customers are invested in your success but have options
Engaging customers in their own experiences with service is not only a way to balance risk and the cost of service, but ensuring customers have a reason to stay with you. Competition for service has never been higher, no longer is the manufacturer the sole provider of service for a customer. Third parties are nothing new, but they have become more viable in their ability to deliver quality, timely service on a variety of products and equipment types. Therefore, manufacturers must innovate the ways in which they build bonds with customers going beyond the suggestion that “you bought it from us, so you must sign a service contract”.

"Customers can and will continue to play a bigger role in the experiences they create for themselves..."

A personalized dashboard which integrates with suggested new services or products, creates a community of user-driven content, and boosts the customer’s performance in KPI that matter to them is one way to create longer lasting customer partnerships.

Expectations change and manufacturers need to evolve at faster pace
Not much is more frustrating than providing feedback in a survey and seemingly having that information go into a blackhole not used by the those who administered the survey. Customers are very willing to give manufacturers feedback as we have seen an influx of customer advisory forums, social interactions, and other channels of insight. But too often this is used as a marketing tool and not as a path to tailor future products, service, and experiences because of this intelligence.

As customers provide manufacturers with insight into what they value and how they want to be interacted with, it is imperative that this information leads to improvements as this is the customer taking the time to involve themselves in their own service experience.

Connected products must enable intelligence and customized experiences
The number of connected products and devices will only continue to grow, but unfortunately, we still lag well behind the promise of this future. Data from connected products too often is just stored in the cloud used by just a few when the ability for this insight to trigger new and valuable experiences is plentiful.

Customers through their usage and behaviour data have provided manufacturers and service organizations with a treasure trove of insights that must be leveraged to enhance on-going experiences.

Customers shouldn’t just be an open wallet or an email address. As much as customers of the future are a wealth of data points they also have a growing willingness to be a part of the experiences that are delivered to them. Not engaging them in a true partnership of shared experiences, shared benefits, and shared goals is a missed opportunity that won’t be sustainable in our shared futures.

Aly Pinder is Program Director at IDC.

Aly Pinder looks at three ways in which manufacturers must consider leveraging augmented service tools...

The way we work, learn, and communicate have all taken a drastic turn from just a couple decades ago. When was the last time you saw a teenager or even a current college student read a physical newspaper, write a note in a notebook or on piece of paper, or look up a definition in a dictionary (not an online one)?

I imagine like me, you probably can’t remember the last time. This transformation has wide ranging implications, the least of which is the collapse of the encyclopedia industry. But this is not another article on why millennials need to be coddled, or how Gen Z is bad for the economy.

I don’t think any generation, ones before or after me, are the problem. But the way in which their behaviours impact the world around us must be addressed and used to help us all evolve.

 

"Manufacturers must take a few steps to turn knowledge into a shared resource  and not just a repository of work instructions..."

 

This is where manufacturers and service leaders come in. For manufacturers, the implications of a changing economy and digital world are even more real as it is becoming more apparent that to fill a growing gap in labor the tools, training, incentives, and motivations of work will need to be transformed as well. Not only do manufacturers need to do more for the customer, it increasingly is coming from more junior workers who need to get up to speed fast.

This convergence is where I believe augmented service tools can play a big role in democratizing knowledge across a varied set of employees and levels of tenure. But to get there, manufacturers must take a few steps to turn knowledge into a shared resource  and not just a repository of work instructions. 

With this in mind there are three things I believe manufacturers should consider.

 

Peer-to-Peer vs. Top Down.

Are you more likely to listen to your boss or your colleague?

The answer may be a bit different depending on whether you work in an office or out in the field. Many manufacturers I’ve spoken with talk about the level of engagement they find when they empower their field teams to work together to share best practices, whether in a newsletter, during beginning of day meetings, or via a video. Insights are more powerful when they come from a peer that is going through the same challenges you are.

Therefore, I believe user-generated content from field service technicians will help speed the adoption of video training tools and knowledge sharing.

But it is up to the manufacturer and service leadership to provide the tools, security, and platform for this technology to work and be accessible to the right people.

 

Amplify Investments in Innovation and Collaboration.

It is probably not prudent to predict industrial manufacturers or an oil & gas company to rival Google or Apple as the next great innovative companies of this generation.

However, there is a lot of innovation happening today within manufacturers that doesn’t often get reported to the outside public. If manufacturers want to draw the talent of the future they must not only have the tools the next wave of workers want to use, but they must also highlight in recruiting and marketing materials the innovative technologies that are used daily to get work done. This may help differentiate from the throng of manufacturers that are trying to procure talent. And why not promote innovation to those you want to bring in as employees in the same ways you woo customers.

 

AR / VR should play a role in the field.

I am not as bullish as my peers regarding the future pervasiveness of Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) tools in field service. I do, however, think there are several use cases and environments where this technology makes sense.

 

"What it most important though, is that manufacturers evaluate their infrastructure, environment, and workforce capability to maximise the value of this technology..."

 

What it most important though, is that manufacturers evaluate their infrastructure, environment, and workforce capability to maximise the value of this technology. AR and VR tools do have the ability to help bridge the gap between an ageing workforce that may need to move to a back-office role and a less tenured technician who needs real-time assistance while on a job.

The talent pool or lack thereof is forcing manufacturers to re-think how they recruit, where they recruit, and what tools they need to navigate this environment.

As much as we have all discussed this topic for years and almost a decade now, manufacturers must take this moment to understand the worker of the future. It is imperative that manufactures provide the tools to augment their work environment to bring them in and keep them on the team.

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Aly Pinder is Program Director for IDC

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Aly Pinder outlines how the growing trend for connected products is set to revolutionise the way we approach service...

What is the value of a connected product or asset? Some might argue, connected products allow a manufacturer to capture a wealth of product data which can be used to make better products in the future.

Others might state, connected products open a window into customer usage data which can help manufacturers and sales teams target customers more effectively driving increased revenues.

These are two important use cases and show some of the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected products.

But I think there is an even more impactful area of value from the ability to connect to products – field service.

Now you may be thinking, of course, it’s all of field service, as you peruse the articles of Field Service News. But even if I am preaching to the choir, the impact that connected products can have on the ability for manufacturers to transform the way they deliver field service and customer support is not necessarily a given.

However, as more products and assets are connected I believe there is a real opportunity to see great leaps in field service and the transformation of the way manufacturers interact with the end customer.

Three opportunities, in particular, jump out as big wins for the future of field service as a result of data captured from connected products and equipment:

 

Finally, predict and not react

The journey from reactive field service to proactive and predictive persists for many manufacturers. I don’t think this is necessarily a battle which will ever reach a state of 100% predictive service, and nor should it.

But I do think there is a great opportunity to take the volumes of data being captured in real-time to make smarter decisions in field service which can lead to a different balance of reactive, proactive, and predictive support.

Also, data gleaned from connected products can help make reactive service calls more valuable and efficient as a technician should have the answers to the issue without having to guess or lean on gut-feel.

 

Service without a truck roll.

As noted in recent IDC research, by 2020, 50% of global OEMs with connected service offerings will have incorporated augmented service execution and/or remote management thus improving service margins by up to 30%.

The ability to resolve issues remotely or to utilize a centralized expert to help a customer solve a problem can be transformative for field service. This type of model could help service leaders allocate their seasoned technicians to the most complex problems as opposed to just an issue within their geographic footprint.

Connected products enable a manufacturer to know what is wrong in advance of a response and ensure the right response is the one scheduled for a scarce set of resources.

 

Focus on the value of the human interaction.

When we think about the negatives associated with the rise of the machines (i.e., Terminator), we often miss something.

This should be an opportunity not a threat.

Connected products which ‘talk’ to each other provides an opening for field technicians to focus on the humans while they are on site as opposed to spending time looking for information, turning wrenches, or filling out paperwork.

Obviously, this will mean manufacturers and service leaders will need to train their technicians on a new set of skills and activities. But as the workforce and economies evolve, the skill of interaction will be in more demand and provide more value in the customer relationship.

And manufacturers which leverage connected product data to have their field teams focus on the customer will succeed.

The promise and value gained from connected products is more than just additional data points.

As manufacturers look to transform their organizations and teams, connected products should be the catalyst for a journey of new ways of delivering value to customers and not the end result of a technology investment.

Field service should be the aspect of the business which sees the biggest gains from connected products and equipment.

The possibilities are endless, and I look forward to seeing where manufacturers take this technology as it extends beyond IT and engineering to the field.

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Aly Pinder is Program Director - Service Innovation & Connected Products, IDC Manufacturing Insights

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Aberdeen’s Aly Pinder asks are we smarter than we were in the past, or do we just have better access to data?

When was the last time you asked someone for directions, or used a phone book, or waited for the day’s forecast on the morning news?

Well, that last one is probably something you still do out of habit, but the others are things which have left our consciousness as we can just “Google it” from our smart phones. The emergence of technology and the IoT has flooded the service leader with more data than ever before. Machines talk to machines, technicians collaborate with each other via mobile devices while in the field, and customers interact with the service team in real-time owning their experience.

But with all this access to information and data comes a few challenges. How much is too much data? How can we turn this data into actionable insights? Who needs to know what and when?

These are all questions that the Best-in-Class service leader is tackling right now. As seen in Aberdeen Group’s recent State of Service Management in 2016: Empower the Data-Driven CSO (March 2016) research, one of the top goals for service leadership was improving the quality and relevance of data for the service team. This is a top 3 goal, only trailing the need to improve customer retention and drive service profitability.

Happy customers, profits, and then data quality in that order shows how the impact of data is rising on the agenda of the senior service leader today. But how do we get to a place where data is useful?

Is the answer to our data problem more technology?

Top performers recognise that ensuring the service team has actionable data is a journey and not something that can be solved with one-off investments. It takes a strategy, leadership, and resolve. Connecting the field team to insights helped these organisations resolve issues faster, deliver more value to the customer conversation, and make the field team better at their jobs!

 

All these are great, and the Best-in-Class have some lessons for the rest of us:

Empower the service team with the data they need to make decisions, more isn’t always better.

Top performers ensure the field team has customized data views which provide only the pertinent information for technician for the specific task they are working on. Having the data necessary to solve complex issues at the time of service is integral to ensuring resolution can occur on a first visit, technicians are efficient, and the customer can be back up and running with minimal downtime.

Give the field team the mobile tools to have access to insights.

The field workforce is rapidly changing. We have been fearing the aging workforce for some time now, and it is finally here. But the Best-in-Class ensure that as technicians leave the business, their knowledge does not. They are able to capture best practices and expertise, and store these insights in an accessible location which can be tapped into via mobility in the field.

Leverage machine, customer, and technician data to identify the future of service excellence.

The IoT means different things to different people and industries. But the value isn’t just in the fact that we more devices are connected. The value of the IoT is in connecting the service chain to resolution, value creation, and collaboration. Smart machines and products open up a whole new world of possibilities as savvy organisations can take this data and better understand how to optimise assets performance, build better machines, deliver more targeted services to customers, and ensure technicians know the answer to the problem before they even get on site in front of the machine.

The proliferation of data in this era of the empowered customer can be a challenge for many organisations. Too much data leads to delayed action or inaction altogether. Top performing organisations have invested in technology and their internal processes to ensure they can turn all of the valuable data being captured every minute into actionable insights which drive value.

Top performers were able to take improved data capabilities and turn that into outperformance in key metrics such as customer retention, SLA compliance, and worker productivity.

Don’t be left behind looking at a phone book or reading a map. Tap into real-time data to make the decisions which will lead you into the future of service excellence.

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