IFS, the global enterprise applications company, announces the availability of new and enhanced capabilities in its customer engagement software enabling companies to respond to the challenges facing the traditional call center and transform their customer engagement. IFS is leading the way for service organizations to become knowledge and outcome centric throughout the entirety of the service experience.

Forward-thinking companies have become customer obsessed knowing that new business and customer retention rely on it. IFS’s customer experience applications are engineered to provide visibility and context for the customer, the contact center, and the service organization throughout the service cycle, through technology that is easy to deploy, configure, and use. This includes enriching work processes with automation and AI capabilities to ready companies for a future where self-service will be at the start of 85 percent of customer interactions by 2022, up from 48 percent in 2019.

The importance of engaging customers through a single, unified experience across every channel—voice, e-mail, chat and social—has never been greater. IFS believes companies overlook this area at their peril. Gartner notes:* “By 2022, 50 percent of large organizations will have still failed to unify engagement channels. This will result in the continuation of a disjointed and siloed customer experience that lacks context. 

highly configurable and integrated omnichannel hub to IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCEs

In this latest release, businesses can enjoy:

• A smooth transition from a telephony-based support center to a full omni-channel contact hub in a matter of days—complete with a customer service agent desktop
• A new customer engagement studio that allows companies to configure their own customer service desktop while eliminating the need for costly one-off customizations
• Simple integration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) and field service management (FSM) applications, agents are empowered to handle issues rapidly, driving front-office productivity by an average of over 40 percent

“As businesses use service offerings to power their way to growth in the new normal, the imperative has never been greater to focus on the customer experience,” said Marne Martin, President of IFS Service Management. “Businesses need a single view of a customer, yes, but they also need a complete service management solution that delivers on the service outcome that a customer expects in order to drive net promotor score, sustainability, and growth. This is where IFS is leading the way to deliver sustainable outcomes and knowledge-based service, which is the future for more and more service businesses.”

IFS’s latest investments in customer experience also include remote assistance and “On My Way” to provide a complete customer management solution for businesses looking to grow their service capability and transform their customer experience.

Over the past two years, IFS has seen strong growth in its service management business with more than 50 percent of revenues coming from its field service customer base in the first half of 2020. New license sales across its service management applications, including its recognized FSM offering, grew by more than 150 percent in first half 2020 compared to first half 2019.

 

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Further Reading:

• Learn more about IFS Customer Engagement @ www.ifs.com/customer-engagement/
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about IFS on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/ifs
• Find out more about IFS @ www.ifs.com
• Follow IFS on Twitter @ twitter.com/ifsuk

 

Salesforce has announced today the next generation of their FSM solution Salesforce Field Service. Which has been designed to equip field service organisations with the power of AI-powered tools to deliver trusted, mission-critical field service.

Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce Field Service includes new appointment scheduling and optimization capabilities as we see the fruits of last year’s acquisition of ClickSoftware bear fruit. The new release also introduces AI-driven guidance for dispatchers, asset performance insights and automated customer communications. In essence the launch comprises of an impressive suite of tools that each can play a significant role in helping field service organisations achieve the most fundamental and important aspect of service delivery – ensuring field service jobs are completed the first time, on time, every time.

When the pandemic first hit, many industries that send employees out to complete jobs in the field had to shut down entirely. But critical machinery still needs to be repaired—medical devices require servicing, air conditioning units need to be fixed and assembly line machines still malfunction. After getting over the initial shock of COVID-19, frontline workers got back to work and have been at it ever since.

 

"It is more crucial now than ever for field technicians to have the right information and tools to maximize equipment uptime and first-time fix rates..."

 

After an initial dip in March, Salesforce Field Service saw usage jump more than 50% between April and July 2020, and is actually now being used 20% more than at pre-COVID levels as companies and frontline workers scramble to clear the backlog of service requests created earlier this year.

It is more crucial now than ever for field technicians to have the right information and tools to maximize equipment uptime and first-time fix rates. This was the feedback that Salesforce heard loudly and clearly from their customers and they have reacted strongly to these industry requirements.

Leveraging the decades of industry expertise and innovation within their ranks, Salesforce have approached building their next-generation field service management product to help field service organisations overcome the challenges they face as we move towards recovery.

Some of these customers include:

GreenThumb (UK)

Greenthumb, conducts approximately 2.5 million lawn treatment visits to customers’ homes every year across the U.K. Just months after implementing Salesforce Field Service, Greenthumb started saving money—and the environment.

Smarter scheduling enabled their field crew to complete at least one extra job per worker per day, which generated more revenue. “By routing crews efficiently, we estimate it will save over £400,000 in annual fuel costs,” said Paul Edwards, Managing Director. “With no more need for paper work orders, we will cut paper requirement by three million sheets per year, which will rise as we gradually replace traditional mail with digital communications. In addition, working on a lightning-fast system has enabled our dispatchers to resolve customer inquiries an average of 45 seconds faster than before—going from seven clicks per case to just three.”

Best Buy (Canada)

Best Buy Canada is transforming how its 500-member support team helps clients with installations, repairs, and technical support. With the Geek Squad agents having access to the Salesforce Field service application on mobile, this helps provide greater visibility as clients receive real time updates of any schedule changes.

“With Salesforce Field Service, we will be able to optimize the efficiency of the team and improve the accuracy of when an agent is due to visit a client,” said Chris Sallans, Vice President, Retail Operations & Geek Squad. “There are now fewer manual processes for our Geek Squad agents, enabling them to spend more time helping clients resolve their technical issues.”

WBP Group (Australia)

WBP Group, one of Australia's largest, independent property valuation and advisory firms, needed to reshape how it operated to minimize contact between employees and customers in response to COVID-19. Service Cloud enabled the rapid launch of virtual valuations, creating a safe no-touch experience for customers and employees.

Salesforce Field Service has increased the efficiency of scheduling appointments for WBP and will be used in the future to manage valuations from end to end.

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Want to Know More? As part of our beyond the headlines series Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News, spoke with Salesforce’s Paul Whitelam about the new release to find out more. Read that exclusive interview here!

In this excerpt from the inaugural Field Service News Think Tanks Debrief Session Kieran Notter and Daniel Brabec reflects on the groups comments around the initial operational challenges of Covid-19

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The many conversations required for servitization to work: 

As we moved onto the final Think Tank of the three that we were reflecting on during this inaugural debrief session we touched on the longest and perhaps most important Think Tank that Field Service News has ever run. The focus of this session was to assess the impact of Covid-19 and to establish some first steps in building towards the recovery. 

Having put an initial question to the group for them to outline their initial responses to the lockdowns of the pandemic, it made sense for Kieran Notter, VP Global Customer Transformation to be the one that opened up the discussion during the debrief. 

During the actual Think Tank there were some excellent and well considered comments including Alec Pinto, Regional Service Manager DACH & High Growth Markets, Leica Biosystems comment:

“From an operative perspective, we couldn’t go out anymore. So we had to start getting used to the new regulations quickly. What was allowed in hospitals? How could we get our people into hospitals? Suddenly, we were putting our people in areas of risk, so managing that part of the operation and ensuring safety while letting our employees feel secure, that was a big challenge to overcome.”

As well as Rajat Kakar, Executive, IBM, Services EMEA comment: 

“We saw a massive shift in ways of businesses. As an example, companies who provided services for people to migrate from office buildings to homes were busy; they didn’t have enough people to bring the office equipment, set it up at people’s homes and set up home offices. Whereas, companies which were primarily working on standard services, IT services within the corporate environments, they saw a decline in business.”

Reflecting back on both these quotes and the discussion at large Notter said, "for me, it was, it was quite interesting listening to everybody view. We gave them a rough two minutes to try and give a view of what the current situation was about. But it was it was that important or passionate to them that two minutes was nigh on impossible.

"On Alec's points, there was much that he sad that couldn't all fit into one slide but some of the other bits that Alec said that really sort of made a difference. We know med-tech device companies, at least some of them, are really, really it's going to thrive through this pandemic, because it's their business, it's what they do. 

Then we have the other businesses that have done really bad because no one's using their products. There is no service has to be done and it's a very different environment. For someone like Alec, who was sort of in the middle, they were doing that that hospital work, where they had to stay open. It was even the confusion that if a technician went into a hospital to do some work in a schedule, you were asking do they need their quarantine for 14 days because they've been into a hospital? What are the rules behind it? What's the game plan?

Then there is the HR element that came into the conversation. How do we look after the technicians? What happens if they've got dependents at home who are vulnerable?  So that's the level of detail really and understanding of what the challenges are.

"When Rajat, spoke, he spoke about some great points, but one of the most interesting things I thought he raised was one of the simplest. He said, People come to work, the telephones are on their desk. You leave them at home that telephonic system isn't with them anymore. How can they run a call center if they have no telephone? It's just really really simple things like that, that no-one had planned for."

"I think one of the key pieces that we've seen that's come came out of this is around business continuity plans and the way that that companies are starting to reassess the way they approach their customers," adds Daniel Brabec VP Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax.

"We need to use this time to find ways to make and build relationships and any CSO that's looking at things from that perspective, I think, is is poised to thrive moving forward. They're acknowledging that we have a huge issue, but what are the ways that we can address it and not only adjust to the new normal but also come out of the stronger. A lot of that is focused on customer relationships and how they're going to actually approach service in the future."

 

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Having given an excellent presentation in the Field Service News Digital Symposium on the application of Artificial Intelligence in service triage, Mark Hessinger, Vice President, Global Customer Service, 3D Systems Corporation spoke with Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News at length about the Aquant solution that they had implemented.

The session was designed to shine a light on the many benefits that 3D Systems Corporation realised from implementing the Aquant AI tool. However, it was also a golden opportunity to explore the potential of 3D printing in the service supply chain - which the two discussed briefly towards the latter part of the conversation.

During his presentation, Hessinger outlined that companies are beginning to move away from seeing 3D printing as a tool for prototyping and moving towards using the technology more in production as well.

Given the recent pandemic where supply chains were put under massive pressure as borders came crashing down, could it be that we'll see a further shift towards 3D printing and use of spare parts within the manufacturing sector and beyond?  

 

"The thing about 3D printing is that it is not just making the same things differently. It enables you to do things a lot differently..."

 

"Yes, with what has happened throughout 2020, and supply chains being interrupted, we do see businesses especially manufacturing sites rethinking their supply chain, how they can do things and using 3D printing is going to really be something that these companies are looking at. 

"We are starting to see that feedback already. There was one of the large UK companies just came out with 30% of their new products have to be produced through additive manufacturing.

"Also, the thing about 3D printing is that it is not just making the same things differently. It enables you to do things a lot differently. That bracket I showed [during the presentation] combined 13 parts. Fuel nozzles can be created much more efficiently because you can create geometries that you could never do in traditional manufacturing. I think we're going to have the impact from both sides. Supply chains need to rethink how they build things, and engineering needs to continue to get creative on how they make things to have better quality."

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about Artificial Intelligence @ www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Artificial+intelligence
• Read more exclusive FSN news and features from the Aquant team @ www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Aquant
• Connect with Mark Hessinger on LinkedIN @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhessinger/
• Find out more about Aquant's AI-powered service triage @ www.aquant.io/
• Follow Aquant on Twitter @ twitter.com/Aquant_io

 

In this excerpt from the inaugural Field Service News Think Tanks Debrief Session, Daniel Brabec, Coen Jeukens and Kieran Notter of ServiceMax outline what they think is driving forwards the move to servitization amongst field service organisations.

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The many conversations required for servitization to work: 

While there is much discussion about the how of servitization it is also important to understand the why. This was something that came up in on of the Think Tanks covered within this debrief session. 

As Maarten Wijnheijmer, Global Aftermarket Sales Director, Howden commented during the Think Tank in question: 

“I think perhaps one of the most important points around servitization is that you cannot sell the concept to everyone immediately. Although an even more important point around servitization is that, if you want to keep it simple and practical, you don’t need to sell it to everyone immediately either. The trick is to start with customers that recognize the value, test the proposition with them and then scale-up.”

While in the same Think Tank Jan van Veen commented: 

“I think there are two things that need to be considered. One is the belief in the direction, the other is that you need to be able to innovate and try and explore and that you have resources available to do so.  

“Often within companies everything can be so short term oriented, if that is the attitude of top and middle management then innovations will never flourish because such projects are just a disturbance of what is really important which is hitting your monthly and quarterly numbers.”

"I think that buy-in across all the organisation is key," Commented Daniel Brabec, VP Global Transformation, ServiceMax during the debrief session. 

"You have to have all of the different players and a groups and have everyone bought in," Brabec continues. 

"If we think about basic change management skills, you have your project champions. You want to make sure you have champions essentially for servitization across the whole business. That's at the the field service engineer level, that's at the senior leadership executive level and that's obviously at the at the service leader level. I think the one thing that's hugely important is making sure that service has a seat at the executive table

"It's not being directed from any one individual, it's making sure it's a conversation across all areas of the organization and that everyone's bought in. I think one of the things that must think about with servitization is understanding the conversation must make sense for all these individuals. Making sure they understand what it is is actually going to change about the business. It is also focusing on those areas of customer intimacy, operational excellence and product leadership.

"It's understanding all of those pieces, and then the value that will be generated for each of their areas of the business," Brabec adds. 

 

"In answering what is driving the move to servitization, I would say a launching customer..."

- Coen Jeukens, ServiceMax

 

"I agree with, with Daniel's statement," comments Kieran Notter, VP Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax, 

"However, I would also add that there is there is a change now for for many businesses. It probably was a little bit earlier in the IT world, but now it's hitting the rest of the world as well is this change from having two CSOs. One being a Chief Service Officer and the other being a Chief Sales Officer, and obviously, the Chief Sales Officer was generally on that table before his service equivalent ever got there.

"But now there's a change where those two CSOs are disappearing, and you're ending up with a Chief Revenue Officer. By having a Chief Revenue Officer, now, all of a sudden, a company is focusing on where revenue comes from, and where it exists. If you are moving to a truly outcome based services, when you get to the element that you're no longer selling your product, you're actually selling as a service then that changes the whole profile. You know, if you're not selling the product, you don't need the Chief Sales Officer you're selling as a service. So you need someone to look after that revenue and understand that need and how that works between the product and the actual service that you provide," adds Notter

"I really think that Kieran and Daniel are correct from an internal Field Service Organization perspective," concurs Coen Jeukens, VP GLobal Customer Transformation, ServiceMax. 

"All these dynamics are important. in answering what is driving the move to servitization, I would say a launching customer. For instance, I think the most quoted servitization offering is power by the hour by Rolls Royce. However, Rolls Royce developed that service offering not because they thought it was such a good idea, but because the Royal Air Force said we want to have more predictable models. We want to buy it from you, so you develop it for us. So I think tapping into the mindset of the customer and see if you can find a launching customer. I think that is a very good addition to all the internal alignments just by the CEO, CFO or CSO"

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In this excerpt from the inaugural Field Service News Think Tanks Debrief Session, Kieran Notter discusses his experience when it comes to structuring a field service organisation to adapt a servitized approach... 

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The importance of aligning internal and external needs:

In the second of the Think Tanks discussed during this debrief session, the focus of the conversation was centred around the increasing drive towards servitization. 

One thing that came through in the Think Tank from all of the members, was the importance of executive-level buy in for a servitization project to even begin.

However, we also saw across the discussion the importance of buy-in from the bottom up as well. It really does need to be a company wide movement and adoption.

As Christo Roux commented during the Think Tank:

“In our organisation up until two years ago we had two different business units, based on two different technologies but our board reorganised and we now have three units with service being the third. Service now has a seat at the executive table and that has been the real game-changer. Now service has a very high profile, it is no longer that secondary part of the discussion which just gets added to the end of the product sale. Service is now an intrinsic part of the overall sales process. What we have found is that when you have that executive board level representation, focus and support, that does make a difference to how you can servitize.

For a long time, service has proven that in the lows of capital expenditure, service maintains the revenue stream. People always need to maintain their equipment and keep service running, so we were always a constant revenue stream at constant margins.

This was largely driven by a change in the CEO seat and a lot of credit for this shift in mindset has to go to the new CEO who had the understanding and the vision to bring service into the executive conversations.”

In that same Think Tank, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News commented: 

“Another company I have worked with has organised their services within business units so each and every business unit is responsible for developing their own service offerings. However, what I believe they also need is a platform to establish new sertivized offerings, a central competence group that is guiding the teams to what is possible.

“Having covered the establishment of such groups in the past I’ve seen them have a real impact. Such groups, I think, should keep strategy simple and make it practical. Keeping it simple means taking baby steps, but at least you are taking them and moving forward. Making it practical is to enable these business divisions to actually deliver the projects. They are not going to invent the wheel themselves – so you have to bring it to them.

“Another organisational question in this area, is whether service is best structured as a separate business with its own P&L or as part of the product teams?

“The challenge is that if service is joined up, the focus will mainly be on the new builds or implementations, because that is where the big money is. Service is usually many smaller orders as opposed to the one big hit of the product sale. The service side of the organisation has to fight for priority and capacity and a shared understanding of the value of the long-term service relationship may ensure the organisation will accept the required investments in this case. On the other hand, if a company splits the operations, the problem becomes the handover from new build to service and customer relationship management. Ultimately, both models have challenges, the key is to realise what is the ‘inside of the battle’ and to establish the common ground to work together for the greater good.”

 

Oldland's comments reflect something of a common dichotomy in the field service sector. On the one hand there is a new innovative organization within an organization. As a company seeks to build out this servitized or advanced services solutions, they are competing with not only product sales, but also the standard, traditional service approaches within their organisation as well.

Having had experience of such challenges as a service leader himself and also in his role with ServiceMax assisting over service organisations navigate their way towards a servitized business approach, Kieran Notter, VP Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax was well placed to help offer guidance for those on the call. 

"One thing I have learned through the relationships I've had with my own experiences when working in the service industry, and then again, working for a software company like ServiceMax, but mostly through things like the Think Tank is that is never  never clear yes on these answers," Notter began. 

"There's so many variables that come into play such as the vertical that you are operating in. You look at things like new businesses, such as solar panels, they've come into the marketplace and instead of taking an old fashioned approach where they merely sell the solar panel, they have been able to ease into a servitized approach where they sell the outcome - the energy."

 

"There needs to be an alignment in the business. If you move into a siloed business you're not going to help anybody, the customers or yourself..."

- Kieran Notter, ServiceMax

 

"So there is a totally different aspect if you're a new company, you have a little bit more freedom. Whereas in some of the more traditional industries, companies that we expect to talk to day in day out, it's realistically about establishing an understanding from the top level. I personally the key is aligning the goals that people need realised.

"I mentioned earlier about understanding whether the supply chain is service's friend or foe. If you think about the fundamental goals that are required by these two organizations, with the supply chain needing to reduce inventory and service wanting more inventory, so it can increase its first time fix rates.

"On outset, that sounds like an argument, so there needs to be an alignment in the business. If you move into a siloed business you're not going to help anybody, the customers or yourself. So there has to be some sort of alignment.  You'll find that that becomes possible maybe with some of these Tiger teams, where they can bring in people from each area and then they're freed up to do the 'free thinking' that isn't constrained by their their MDO's or their KPIs, or their compensation packages."

"It's about understanding what that is and then of course, there's always the other aspect which is when you come up with these great ideas and these visions, does your customer want to join in with that that vision? Are they acceptable to it or indeed, are they actually against it? Then if you find the ones that are acceptable to the idea, can you actually manage it? What infrastructure do you have to actually manage the offering that you're giving?"

"However, I think the world is dictating a newer approach. You know, when we heard from Coen and Daniel earlier and talking to all of the members of the Think Tank, we're looking at new initiatives, new intelligence, new ways of doing business."

 

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In this excerpt from the inaugural Field Service News Think Tanks Debrief Session, Coen Jeukens expands on how we must reframe the Service/Product conversation

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The many guises of servitization:

The question of how we must realign the relationship between service and product as we move towards a more service-centric economy has been discussed at length across the pages of www.fieldservicenews.com. We've been tackling this conversation with representatives of  various corners of the field service world, not only geographically but also from industry and from academia.

The consensus, that was also echoed in this Think Tank is that collectively we need to reframe what what these conversations around servitization mean. That is because there are now very many different interpretations of servitization, through-life-services, outcome -based-services and advanced services. 

At the very least companies need to be able to define their understandings of what servitization means to them, they need to then reframe that conversation internally first, so they can take it forward externally.

Speaking during the Think Tank Christo Roux, Director, Field & Workshop Services, Outotec commented: 

“We talk about bundling our offering. So in terms of servitization it has come down to long term service agreements which may include consignment stock, service level agreements, partial or full presence on site, 24 hour call services and so forth. 

“For us that is as far as we are going in terms of servitization. 

“But outcome-based services in our world is definitely a discussion being held, but the general consensus would suggest that it might have to be something that is separate to this initial approach.

“I don’t today see it as something we could integrate into our field service offering particularly easily - so we will still definitely go with our long term service agreements. Through these we have an expected revenue base and also a better resource loading capability and then we can supplement this with all the spot resources we can do as well.”

In the sameThink Tank Maarten Wijnheijmer, Global Aftermarket Sales Director, Howden commented: 

“Even if the official strategy is to prioritise aftermarket and at the top level that is the story, you also need to see what is happening two layers lower in the organisation, which is where the day to day decisions are made. Strategy doesn’t land on its own and it is not always understood by the top what is needed to implement their vision to generate more aftermarket business.”

Also sat in that Think Tank was Coen Jeukens, Vice President, Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax. 

"Again, this story is just like the previous comment," Jeukens reflected when discussing the Think Tank in the debriefing session. 

"It starts with the voice of the customer. I think that if we see that the customers are getting more mature and more demanding, we can see that apart from buying a product or buying the services, they simply want to have the output or the value of a product and I can really see that in Christo's comments here because it takes two. It takes the field service organization to make a conscious decisions, how far do we want to go in the maturity of our service offerings. However, of course that has to align with the maturity of the customers. Simply, it would be a waste of time if they would invest in servitization offerings, when the customers are not there to buy them."

"I think in every vertical in every market, every customer out there has their own dynamics in the market and service companies can really tap into that," Jeukens continues.

"Going back to the example of my previous employer, we started by looking at the voice of the customer, and we were selling safety and security systems. So that could be something simple as a camera system or a security camera system. Now the customer can buy a bunch of security cameras and they can maintain them themselves. We as the solution provider could buy or sell those cameras and we could sell associated maintenance contracts with them in this scenario what we would do is over the lifespan of the system is ensure that the customer receives the camera feeds

"However, we we saw that more and more customers were saying well that is not what we want. If you look at an airport for example there would be thousands of cameras. Just try to imagine the control desk where somebody is looking at thousands of camera feeds. It is unmanageable so that was not what the customer wanted.

"The customer wanted to have the insights. They only wanted to see the feeds of the cameras which need actionable items. So if you look at what customers really need, you can really start selling those new types of services. We had the privilege to have a number of customers who really valued that type of service."

 

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In a recent presentation for the Field Service News Digital Symposium, Mark Hessinger, Vice President, Global Customer Services, 3D Systems, Corporation, outlined the benefits his organisation had witnessed having implemented an Artificial Intelligence solution provided by Aquant.

One of the areas that Hessinger referenced during the presentation was the reduction in repeat visits and the increase in first-time fix rates. This, of course, will have a significant impact on the bottom line of the service P&L with the truck roll almost always being the most expensive line on the spreadsheet. As the adage goes, if you have to send an engineer on-site once then you are breaking even, even if you have to send an engineer twice, you're losing money. So this improvement, in and of itself, was a massive plus in the presentation.

However, given the backdrop of 2020 where the world has radically changed as a result of the reaction to Covid-19, the question was raised during the Q&A that followed Hessinger's presentation whether Aquant's AI-powered triage tool could be suitable to help facilitate zero-touch or remote assistance services as well?

Could the Aquant solution help provide a mechanism for service delivery for those customers who require a guided self-help approach to issue resolution?

"I'd say the tool is a building block to enable us to get there," Hessinger answered when the idea was put to him.

"We need it integrated with the other systems and information because it connects them to the knowledge management, to the information. We're currently doing a proof of concept to pull in some AR (augmented reality) technology as well. We believe integrating the AR technology can help guide someone first using the AI tool to go in the right direction and then guide them remotely on how to execute a repair. If you put both of these pieces together, I think the quantity of remote resolutions will go up dramatically," Hessinger added.

 

"Typically, your field service engineer builds a good relationship with the customer and becomes part of the face of the company right. We still want to have those touch-points, but we need to make sure we're doing them differently..."

 

This leads us to an interesting question - in a post-pandemic world just how much has the perception of value shifted in terms of remote service vs on-site service delivery?

Often it has felt that there's been a more perceived value to a site visit than remote services. As we mentioned earlier, it is an expensive line on the P&L compared to a remote service. This was one of the reasons that many felt that remote assistance technologies such as Augmented Reality have never quite taken off in the way that we might have imagined. However, that has changed massively in the last five months in the eyes of many customers.

Yet, for the savvy service organisation, the on-site service call is far more than a mere maintenance operation. It is an opportunity to engage with the customer, to showcase the expertise within the organisation, and ultimately to secure ongoing business and even open up new revenue streams.

So the question is, how do field service organisations use remote service within their service portfolio as an active engagement channel as many have mastered with the service call?

As Hessinger explains "Typically, your field service engineer builds a good relationship with the customer and becomes part of the face of the company right. We still want to have those touch-points, but we need to make sure we're doing them differently. If I can see you on video, I've made a better connection than if I sent you a text message.

"We need to leverage how do we continue to build those relationships. If we were with a customer three times a year, and now we can do things better, only one time a year, we need to make sure we still have a high touch with the customer to build that kind of rapport and relationship."

 

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about Artificial Intelligence @ www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Artificial+intelligence
• Read more exclusive FSN news and features from the Aquant team @ www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Aquant
• Connect with Mark Hessinger on LinkedIN @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/markhessinger/
• Find out more about Aquant's AI-powered service triage @ www.aquant.io/
• Follow Aquant on Twitter @ twitter.com/Aquant_io

 

Warranty claims is a $50 billion industry that organizations have overlooked during the digital transformation process. With little insight into how much money is wasted, two to four percent of a company’s revenues vanish into a black hole of fraud or discrepancies. Today, these expenditures are considered the cost of doing business for product manufacturers, but they don’t have to be.

To reign in unnecessary costs while also bringing data-driven processes to warranty claims (and beyond), Aquant created Intelligent Warranty Audit. The AI-driven product enables organizations to leverage large amounts of warranty data, reducing service costs through faster, more accurate claims processing.

Aquant’s AI-driven platform categorizes and prioritizes disparate data, helping warranty managers quickly process or reject high-risk claims. In addition, Aquant’s technology bridges the data gap that exists between the warranty management process and other departments across the organization. With this new digital thread, organizations can fill in a missing part of the transformation puzzle to bolster positive service outcomes and drive innovation in product engineering, sales, and marketing. 

AI-POWERED TECHNOLOGY ANALYZES HIDDEN WARRANTY DATA TO LOWER CLAIM COSTS AND IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

With Intelligent Warranty Audit, organizations will:

• Reduce warranty waste and processing times 
• Encourage service best practices among their network of providers to deliver exceptional customer experiences
• Drive a closed loop of innovation to feed intelligence back into the rest of the organization

“It’s time to liberate warranty departments from the inefficiencies of manual processes and bring them into the 21st century as a key component of digital transformations,” said Assaf Melochna, President and co-founder of Aquant. “Today, leaders accept a wide range of inconsistencies because it hasn’t been cost-effective for claims managers to scale the process. Intelligent Warranty Audit adds ROI by guiding claims managers through the cases that have the biggest impact on the bottom line while providing a clear framework on why a claim falls outside normal parameters.”

Intelligent Warranty Audit infuses teams with accuracy and speed thanks to AI and natural language processing. The technology analyzes data from multiple sources to quickly identify and alert warranty managers to high-risk claims for review by analyzing:

• Asset service history
• Service provider performance
• Customer behavioral trends
• Anomalies in cost, service, or other criteria 

“Enhanced digital tools such as AI are critical beyond simply improving day-to-day operations for warranty departments. Manufacturers and service organizations should view the warranty management process as another opportunity to deliver value to customers,” notes Aly Pinder, program director Service Innovation and Connected Products IDC. “When warranty management departments are included in larger transformation projects, that data becomes another key change agent in the move to deliver exceptional service in the new experience economy.”

 

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Further Reading:

• Learn more about Warranty + AI  @ www.aquant.io/events/idc-webinar/
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about Aquant on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/aquant
• Read more about Intelligent Warranty Audit @ www.aquant.io/platform/intelligent-warranty-audit/
• Learn more about Aquant @ www.aquant.io