AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Kris Oldland

Moving the field service division from being a cost centre to a profit centre is a shift that many companies are trying to undertake and something most service management experts suggest wherever possible.

There are fantastic opportunities for establishing revenue streams from your field service engineers but remember you employed them for their technical skills not their outstanding flair for sales. In fact, the likelihood is that many members of your mobile workforce may not be natural salesman and may find these additional requirements outside of their comfort zone.

To help you encourage your field service engineers to be more comfortable with the added expectation of becoming revenue generators Field Service News looks at five tips that you can role out to your field service engineers to help them grow and nurture their inner salesman.

Remember that the field service engineer is the expert

Field service engineers are knights in shining armour. Invariably they have been dispatched to fix a problem in your customers’ lives. Whether it be in the working environment or the home environment, your field service engineers are the experts that will get your customers’ back on track. As such they are given trusted advisor status from the moment they arrive on site.

Perhaps the most important and often hardest thing for a salesman to achieve is to gain the trust of their prospective clients. The field service engineer with their status as trusted advisor has broken down this first barrier immediately and is therefore in a great position to sell additional services or products.

Field service engineers who may not feel comfortable selling in a direct face to face environment (which can certainly be daunting for the inexperienced) should be reminded of their ‘trusted advisor’ status and be encouraged to draw confidence from this elevated position. In sales, confidence is absolutely everything.

Honesty is ALWAYS the best policy

Okay so your field service engineer is aware of the power of his position as a trusted advisor and is a super confident natural salesman.

Great, this gives him a perfect opportunity for that first time sale but as any good sales organisation will attest, whilst the first sales is important it is repeat business from your customer base that is absolutely vital to future proof your business.

Therefore it is essential that your field service engineer doesn’t taint the image of trusted advisor and only uses his position to sell your client products or services that are of genuine value to them.

Your clients are not stupid and if they are sold something that they didn’t necessarily need or at a price that is out of kilter with standard market rates, more often than not they won’t bother phoning you up to complain, they’ll simply take their business elsewhere.

However, if your field service engineer provides your clients with solutions to problems they need on a fair and honest basis, you will find that repeat sales will remain steady for years and years.

Don’t try to be a SALESMAN

If we were to ask you to describe a salesman how many of you would say loud tie, cocky attitude, and with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cheesy lines? (Looking just like the chap at the top of this feature perhaps?)

Well, for a start remember not all salesmen are estate agents or second hand car dealers.

In fact you’ll probably find that those estate agents or second hand car dealers that fit into this stereotype of the ‘classic’ salesman are amongst the poorest performing in their respective field.

Whilst there are a number of sales techniques whether it be SPIN, AIDCA, DIPIDA or any of other acronym out there, the simple fact remains that the best sales people play to their strengths and are just themselves.

Sales needn’t be any more complicated than understanding your customers’ problem and offering them a solution. Your field service engineers should be better placed than any salesman to achieve this and don’t need to try to be something they’re not.

Educate your field service engineers on all your products

Your company may operate a number of related or even disparate solutions and your field service engineers are perfectly placed to cross sell if they have a broader understanding of your full product set beyond their own area of expertise.

Field service engineers are the greatest conduit that you have to your customers.

They are right there, talking to customers face to face, with a unique opportunity to gain insight into their needs. Whilst their primary role is to remedy a problem, and their secondary role may be a direct sale, a potential third role could be to be to open up cross selling opportunities into other areas of the business.

For example whilst recently having a field service engineer visit me to fix an issue with my phone line, I got into a conversation about broadband speeds.

The field service engineer was knowledgeable and gave me some good advice about moving to fibre optic internet (as well as other options for improving my broadband). He also worked for a rival company to my current broadband provider.

If he had been able to arrange an appointment for me to get fibre optic broadband installed I probably would have scheduled something there and then. If he had been able to arrange a call with a member of his company’s broadband sales team I would probably have agreed to a call and would have been a very warm prospect.

As it was he did neither and the likelihood is I will now remain with my existing provider and upgrade my service, because it is the easier option for me and I like most consumers will opt for the solution that requires the least hassle.

Yet had the field service engineer had the tools and incentive he could have sold me into another service his company provide as he had the knowledge and opportunity.

Give them the tools to succeed.

Which leads us into our final point, if you want to your field service engineers to become revenue generators, you need to give them the tools they need to achieve this. Fortunately the technology is all there waiting for you.

Key needs will include form creation and signature capture, access to ordering systems and of course payment collection. All of these can be found as apps that sit on smart devices operating on both Android and Apple’s iOS and can sit on a plethora of devices .

However, perhaps the most important consideration is to establish a transparent means of communication and interaction across all divisions of the company.

Whether this is a sophisticated cloud based end-to-end software solution or a simpler processed based solution that makes use of your existing assets, if you are expecting your field service engineers to become revenue generators you need to give them the tools to succeed.

 

 

Having become a regular member of the Deloitte Fast Track 500 Telogis have become a firmly established leading provider in the US. Field Service News caught up with Sergio Barata, the man tasked with leading the charge into the United Kingdom.

FSN: You have been involved with Telogis since they launched in the UK. Firstly could you tell us a bit about your own background and also the approach you took when introducing what was a successful US product to the UK market?

SB: I moved to the UK just over ten years ago when first working for a mobile start-up and have worked in the LBS (location based services) space ever since. 

Initially starting in pure Geo Spatial technology, I find myself now immersed in the sector. I joined Telogis back in 2008, having just come from another US based software company where I had spent time localising and refocusing their key capabilities for the UK.  On joining Telogis, I had some specific views on how we should launch the company here – the leadership team understood and bought into the fact that we would have to localise correctly if we were to launch in such a competitive environment.

We initially started with our GeoBase product, thinking that if we could correctly localise and licence this within the UK as we have done in the US, we would have a strong platform to build upon. Once the underlying technology was in place, we could introduce the rest of our SaaS solution which is all built around this.

Since the early days Telogis has grown rapidly both in the UK and wider.  When I started at Telogis we had around 120 people in the whole organisation, now we have nearly 500. In the UK we have just moved into our new facility, which will allow us to continue to grow substantially.

FSN: With Telogis only being founded in 2001, you are in relative terms still a young company within the field service industry. Do you think this gives you an advantage in being able to build a cloud based solution from the ground up rather than having to adapt a legacy solution?

SB: We launched as a SaaS company, which in 2001 was quite a brave thing to do. Browser adoption, both as a way of working and technologically still wasn’t quite there - but that quickly shifted. The vision our founders had clearly worked. Around 2005/6 all our competitors had essentially become organisations supporting their customers in the field - not black boxes but servers with their software running on them, so their ability to innovate was hampered. Being cloud-based has meant we didn’t have these issues.

The other critical decision we made was not to develop our own hardware and to remain hardware agnostic. This has meant that our R&D budgets have been focused on the data, the software and our platform, which we are now selling as a strategic approach.

I think not having an incumbent legacy, adopting the hardware agnostic approach and choosing to be SaaS from day one has allowed us to remain innovative and scalable, which has been a key part of our success to date.

FSN: You recently wrote an article for Field Service News in which you talked about the platform approach, something we are hearing more and more of within the industry. Do you think this model, i.e. working with one provider for multiple solutions is likely to be the future for field service software?

SB: We certainly see the benefits of it!

When we meet customers we find many burdened with costly overheads and challenges of integration, even to the extent that they are not meeting the ROIs and initial business case. The costs that it takes to get systems to talk to each other can be significant.

There are also other elements: different companies have different commercial models - our telematics is a subscription model, making it straightforward to cost and manage. Other systems often have capital expenditure costs upfront and deploying different systems and suppliers efficiently can be very challenging.

We think starting with one part of a solution and then integrating other elements is the right approach. We never advocate the ‘big bang’ approach to implementing a complete solution - it’s not commercially or even technically feasible to embrace a whole system at once. Our strategy is based around ‘lets put one piece of the solution in and then work with you on building a longer term strategy and at the end you will come out with a holistic approach.’

The other question we address is the integration of our systems - the telematics, the routing and scheduling - with the customers’ systems that they have already deployed. We have some interesting platform tools, middleware/application programme interfaces that are essentially self-help modules that we can offer our customers to help this integration.

 These may be scripted alerting, customised reporting on driver stats or just workflow management that actually allows them to translate data between our solutions and their other systems. Integration can become seamless – there are even situations where they don’t even need to log into our system, they are just communicating with the cloud and getting the data straight out of it.

Look out for the next part of this exclusive interview coming soon...

Want to know more about Telogis? Check out their page in the Field Service News Online Directory here

The late Steve Downton was widely regarded as one of the service industries truly great thinkers. His forward outlook on how the industry can and must evolve has helped shape many best in class service organisations over the years and we are pleased to be able to offer you the opportunity to download this excellent white paper commissioned by Exel Computer Systems and written by Steve.

The paper explores exactly why fully integrated solutions can now be seen as the only effective way forward for those companies who are aspiring to achieve best in the class levels of service. It examines how the companies recognised for delivering service excellence are achieving success through taking full advantage of the technology available and utilising it to create effective and streamlined processes, taking full advantage of the ability to widen the individuals knowledge base and capabilities through a fully integrated approach.

The paper looks at the importance of the fully empowered customer, who have the power at their fingertips to assess not only your company but your customers as well. In todays environment it is essential to be seen as being efficient and effective. Customers’ expect a joined-up experience and offer little understanding if they meet with poor processes which ultimately lead to a poor customer experience.

However, integrated service delivery puts us on the cusp of a completely new way of doing business that actually provides value for the customer and the service provider alike. The paper highlights the importance of breaking down the siloes that are the legacy of outdated, old-style thinking and building clear transparency across the core operations of a business such as service, logistics and call centre.

When this is achieved and the service operation is fully integrated with the other elements of the organisation, a company can become ‘super charged’ in terms of reducing effort (cost/time) whilst simultaneously improving the service experience for customers and staff alike.

As the paper continues Steve outlines how such an integrated approach cannot only bring benefits in the present but can shape an organisation to become future-proofed for further evolution as service standards continue to develop, adapt and grow. The paper also explore the advance of mobile solutions, the key factors to understand when making the move towards a mobile mid-set and again looks to the future and the incoming generation of staff to whom mobile computing is nothing more than standard.

On the whole the white paper provides an intelligent, balanced and forward looking perspective on why field service companies should be looking to integrated solutions. Nothing less than you would expect from one of the industries sharpest minds.

Download your copy of this excellent white paper for free here

 

 

When building, developing or establishing a service business there are numerous factors that need to be considered. However, the most fundamental strategy to ensure service excellence is delivered remains one of the simplest. The customer needs to be at the heart of all your endeavours. This fact was at the top of the agenda during a recent webinar that was hosted by the Aberdeen group and Trimble FSM.

During the session some very interesting points were made by Aberdeen Analyst Aly Pinder during a Q&A session. Indeed Pinder asserts that best-in-class businesses are united in putting the customer at the centre of their field service operations.

Whilst field service has always been an undertaking with the customer at its centre, across the industry globally we are currently seeing a renewed focus on improving the customer experience. Simultaneously field service technologies become more and more refined enabling vast improvements in managing and monitoring how service is delivered.

Furthermore communicating these improvements to the customer base is another factor in building a reputation for such service excellence.

In PInders words  “Providing better customer reporting is essential and it is important to relay the data that you’re collecting back to the customer, allowing them to effectively be an advocate and partner of your business.”

In fact Pinder provided a neat example of this highlighting those companies that are now applying predictive or preventative maintenance. Such companies have a fantastic story of delivering such advanced customer service through adopting such a proactive approach, and the customer really should be made aware of it. A satisfied customer, who feels reassured that they are in competent hands with their service organisation is fantastic ambassador with the potential to help drive higher levels of engagement between the two parties moving forward.

Another interesting point that Pinder makes is that within the mobile workforce there are different skill sets, beyond those that we would consider essential to the field engineer’s role, that are exploitable. For example some of your field engineers may be particularly effective salesmen with a natural gregarious demeanour, an obvious asset. Yet not all field engineers may be so comfortable to don a salesman’s hat. However, there are other opportunities beyond direct selling. Field technicians are in touch with the customer and those less suited to sales can add value bringing in customer data from the field.

Some companies have moved towards incentivising their field staff, although Pinder advises stepping carefully down this path.

Pinder comments: “This is not necessarily the right thing to do for every company as you need to understand the skill set of your technicians and understand which technicians could be good sellers and which aren’t…” 

However he also identifies the benefits of this route also adding:

“For those organisations that understand the skill sets of their technicians, incentivise technicians that are really good at selling and incentivise those that aren’t good at selling at bringing that data back in and passing that along to the sales and marketing team.”

Perhaps the biggest issue in the shift from cost centre to profit centre that Pinder identified was the devaluing of the service experience.

There are many different elements of a field service organisation that can deeply affect the customer experience and both sales and marketing can have a major impact. Often, sales representatives will bundle service in for free as part of the overall sale. Pinder believes this is a dangerous path to follow.

“When a sale is given away for free your ability to deliver that ‘exceptional service experience’ is greatly devalued. Therefore, ensuring your sales organisation understands the value of service internally and that they can communicate that to your end customers is important.”  Pinder commented.

One additional area that perhaps doesn’t get the credit that it deserves for its impact on the final impact on customer experience is engineering and design. Pinder also identified this as a two way street.

“Best-in-class organisations pull in data from technicians, give that back to engineering and design and have those teams create products that fulfil customer needs. The technician incorporates the insight provided by customers to create a product or new service that is tailored to customer needs.”

Whilst best-in-class companies push the boundaries of service excellence, at the other end of the scale there are three common issues that Aberdeen have identified that field service companies are not meeting which result in dissatisfied customers. These were:

The technician did not resolve the issue first time, The wait for the appointment was too long, The technician didn’t show up for the appointment at all

Companies can address these fundamental problems and improve the customer experience they deliver simply by making sure the technician to be sent to the appointment has the correct skills set and tools for the job and ensuring communication with the customer around appointment times is accurate and reliable.

Discussing this Mark Forrest, general manager of Trimble Field Service Management commented:

“Achieving customer satisfaction in today’s marketplace is tough. On-time performance is the Holy Grail – problems must be solved the first time, and solved effectively. As a result, more and more organisations are beginning to realise the value of ‘intelligent scheduling’ - incorporating technician knowledge, parts availability, and capacity into their scheduling processes to ensure that the technician arriving on site is actually the person who can resolve the customer’s issue first time.”

He continued: “Businesses can address the challenge of making better in-day decisions by utilising a work management self-learning tool. To avoid large data set-up exercises of skill sets and work areas, a self-learning tool supports the assignment of work orders to the field technicians by remembering who has the right skills and their usual work areas. The user also has the ability to enquire what has been learnt by the system and correct it.”

A full recording of the webinar can be downloaded here 

Find out more about Trimble including video, news and features in our directory listing here.

To download the full report please visit www.trimble.com/fsm  

 

Click Software continue to build their reputation as a stand-out provider of field service solutions to the telecommunications industry having won the contract to supply one of Italy’s largest mobile telecom operators WIND Telecomunicazioni Spa, with a new field service solution to enable greater mobile workforce management.

The solution will replace the Italian telecoms companies existing workforce management system and is being implemented by WIND to enable the company to build a more efficient mobile workforce by utilizing ClickSoftware’s assisted scheduling engine. The Italian telecoms company is hoping that by further improve the levels of service they are able to provide they will be able to firmly cement their position as leader within their sector.

Nicola Grassi, Chief Technology Officer at WIND commented:

“We have always been committed to fortifying the fundamentals that strengthen our core activities and that are able to increase the flexibility and efficiency of our operational services. Customer satisfaction is crucial to our business and we needed a solution that was reliable, easy to implement and develop, with a measureable amount of results,”

“We believe that we can meet such challenges working with ClickSoftware” he added.

With almost 1,000 field engineers, WIND’s dispatchers will now be able to capitalize on the benefits that a modern field service system such as the one ClickSoftware provide which incorporates powerful optimisation capabilities as well as delivering reliable, precise information directly to the smartphones of the field technicians out in the field. An added benefit of the solution is that the field management team at WIND now have the ability to gain visibility into all aspects of the business, especially in times of emergency.

 Commenting on the implementation Dr. Moshe Ben Bassat, Founder and CEO of ClickSoftware stated:

“WIND understands the strategic importance of customer experience, and ClickSoftware will help meet its service goals”

 “Our objective is to always help customers use their resources in the most efficient way while meeting its targets for customer satisfaction. With so many engineers in the field, ClickSoftware will make a considerable impact on both the reliability of information shared and time saved in completing jobs.” He concluded.

 

Find out more about ClickSoftware including features, news and video in the FIeld Service News directory here

Nick Frank, a specialist service management consultant with Noventum Service Management continues his series of case studies outlining best practices in field service...

Previous case studies showed some of the steps companies can take to understand the value of service to their business. Companies have deep dived into their customer’s journey, gained insight into what the customer’s perceive as value, as well as determined what their own corporate strategy is to make money. Secure in this understanding they are ready to implement their GO To market strategy. And the first step is to develop and deploy service propositions that speak to the customer.

What is he talking about you may be asking yourself?  Go look at your website or those of your competitors and see how the services propositions are described. I looked at a company I used to work for and found what is typical for many. Descriptions of what they do!

If you are an engineer or product guy, it kind of makes sense, because its what we do! But think from the customer’s perspective. Managers are interested in outcomes. In most commercial organisations this is how they are paid and what they do.

So if you are really a customer led organisation should you not also focus on the outcomes? This is what Yokogawa did. In our previous blog we talked about how they developed a clear view of the value their customer’s perceived they could offer. Well they took this view and designed their propositions around it.

They literally tried to design service propositions that would speak to their customers.

So if you look at their vigiplant (http://www.yokogawa.com/vps/vps-index-en.htm) service offering, you will notice that the language they use to describe their portfolio has a very marked customer orientation. They group their services in terms of outcomes:

• Opportunity Identification Services
• Solution Implementation Services
• Lifecycle Effectiveness Services[/unordered_list]

They try to use a language that describes the value. In other words they talk of ‘Production Excellence’, rather than how it is might be delivered through ’Software Products’.

Now this is quite a different approach and one that took me a long time to really appreciate. That the words we use are a reflection of our own values. So if we look at how companies describe their services, what we see is their true culture and attitudes towards their customers and clients.

At Noventum we call this ‘Service Thinking’. To learn more about this and how to successfully deliver service propositions that really speak to your customers, why not look at this case study on Service Thinking (http://www.noventum.eu/cases/believe-in-service-thinking)

Nick Frank is a service specialist with Noventum Service Management

Read part one of Nick's series here

Read part two of Nick's series here

Read part three of Nick's series here

Time critical logistics provider Bespoke Distribution Aviation (BDA) have made a flying start to 2014 with a focus on their wider international distribution service, and the recruitment of a new European Managing Director to spearhead the operation.

The company who are based at Coventry Airport is going through a period of extended growth, which has seen the significant expansion of its night Air and Road operations with increased levels of distribution business over the past six months.

The newly appointed European Managing Director Kevin Turner, who is responsible for leading the continued growth of the logistics provider ,brings with him 25 years’ of experience in the Same Day and Next Day delivery markets.

With expertise in European Air and Road express services as well as Warehousing Solutions, the appointment of Turner aims to further strengthen the BDA team as they aspire to continue building their  international footprint across the next 12 months.

With a network of airport based hubs throughout the UK, Ireland and mainland Europe, BDA already operate an extensive end-to-end supply chain which allows for pan-European, time critical daily deliveries.

Turner will be based in the company’s Maastricht Air-Hub in The Netherlands, with the intention of developing the company’s overseas market presence. His  experience, having previously worked in European and UK distribution, logistics warehousing and air freight, will be a key advantage as he spearheads BDA’s strategy of increasing market share and growth across both European and International markets.

Turner commented:

“BDA has a great structure in place to allow it to grow its capacity throughout its UK, Ireland and European divisions. The company’s service offering is unique and tailored to every customer and this is why it is an international market leader for bespoke distribution services and supply chain solutions. The company has plans to increase its market presence further and I am excited to become an integral part of this.”

The appointment arrives at a particularly exciting time for BDA. The company are currently undergoing a period of unprecedented  growth with the purchase German Airline and In-night freight specialist NightExpress last year, as well as moving into new geographical markets and also a move into the B2C sector as a result of a new partnership with an established  e-commerce organisation.

BDA operate nightly cargo flights, which are then supplemented by daily road express linehaul routes, between its Coventry hub, Dublin, and Frankfurt in Germany. With flights five nights a week allowing them to offer a guarantee for overnight and early morning delivery for time-critical cargo. As a result they are particularly strong in sectors such as hi-tech IT and printing, materials handling equipment, automotive industries, medical equipment and agricultural machinery as well as more recently, direct selling e-commerce businesses.

BDA sales director, Steve Court stated:

“Last year was a fantastic year, during which we further established our infrastructure and platform for growth, and we are looking forward to continued growth and success in 2014.  He continued: “We’re growing all the time and with Kevin heading up our European division, we will continue to offer an unrivalled service throughout Europe and add value to the supply chain markets. We are prepared for a very exciting year ahead.”

 

 

 

Welcome to the second edition of our Field Service News podcast. This month we are joined by ServiceMax's Vice President of Global Customer Transformation, Dave Hart who has an incredible background in the field service industry having worked his way up from field service engineer through to European Vice President of Service before joining ServiceMax where he is able to give his clients the benefit of 30 years worth of experience.

Tapping into that experience we talk to Dave about some of the key challenges he faced throughout his career as well as taking the opportunity to get some excellent advice from a man who has 'been there and done it' when it comes to developing successful field service teams.

Download the full podcast now for free to hear Dave's advice on:

 

• How best to approach choosing a new service management solution
• Deciding whether optimised scheduling is the right move for your company
• Getting the buy-in from your mobile workforce after implementing a new system.
• What challenges need to be addressed when moving from cost centre to profit centre
• What technologies you should be looking to as the future of field service

 

To hear the full interview and see how Dave responds to these questions plus many more click the link below and complete the very brief registration to download the podcast for free!

 

 

Note: this is a joint promotion between Field Service News and Service Max Europe. By downloading this podcast you are consenting to the T&C's of our privacy policy available here. 

 

 

FeedHenry, who are a next-generation provider of cloud based mobile enterprise applications have recently announced a technology partnership with AirWatch which could prove to be significant for the field service industry.

AirWatch themselves are one of the leading Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) providers with a solid track record within the industry, whilst the relatively young Feed Henry have already established a strong reputation after a number of successful projects involving the creation of mobile enterprise applications, including developing a large number of apps for different elements of the network rail group which saw the transportation giant improve field service efficiency dramatically.

Working together the two companies will provide a joint solution, which will enable the simple and rapid creation of mobile enterprise applications which will be able to be immediately deployed and managed within the AirWatch app catalogue.

AirWatch CEO John Marshall commented;

“IT organisations often need to develop, deploy and maintain mobile applications quickly and securely to accelerate business opportunities and promote employee productivity,”

“FeedHenry’s platform integration with AirWatch provides enterprises the ability to secure their mobile devices and to simplify app development with connectivity to backend systems through RESTful APIs in the cloud.”

By integrating with AirWatch, Feed Henry’s Mobile Application Platform enables companies to develop, integrate and secure mobile enterprise applications as well as content on mobile devices, whilst giving IT departments the ability to manage policies and provide access controls at the enterprise level.

Feed Henry CEO Cathal McGloin comments:

“The integration of our next generation Mobile Application Platform with AirWatch’s EMM solution now gives enterprises secure device management, along with the ability to develop, host and manage native, hybrid and HTML5 applications,”

“Most mobile enterprise deployments have been focused on the development of one off, tactical applications for specific groups of employees or customers. Increasingly however, organisations are looking towards more advanced mobilisation of a broader set of assets and back-end data sets. We believe that agile, cloud-based mobile application platforms, alongside MDM solutions, will play an important role in this enablement.”

The benefits that Feed Henry can offer to AirWatch users include simplifying and securing the connectivity of apps with any enterprise systems through Feed Henry’s ‘mobile backend as-a-service’ and accelerating development cycles and go to market by deploying apps to the device server-side code to the cloud – whether it is public, private or hybrid with just one push.

Developers can also now publish apps and make them AirWatch enabled seamlessly whilst being able to push app updates to all enrolled devices on the AirWatch MDM platform and enterprises are able to monitor and tack all newly created apps via the AirWatch console.

Find out more about mobile enterprise application and field service software providers including case studies, videos and other resources in our online directory here.