AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Kris Oldland

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kieran Notter, Director, Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax from GE Digital explore the findings of an exclusive independent research conducted by Field Service News and sponsored by ServiceMax from GE Digital.

In this, the third and final excerpt from the full one-hour long webcast, Oldland and Notter discuss how field service organisations can and are turning to the latest technologies including Augmented Reality, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things to ensure they keep attrition rates for their field service engineers low

Want to know more? The full webcast PLUS an exclusive report based on the findings of this research is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service practitioner you may qualify for a complimentary 'industry practitioner' subscription. Click here to apply now!

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks exclusively to Dan Sewell, COO of Espresso Service about how the implementation of dedicated FSM system has improved their service engineers workflows.

In this instalment of the interview, we look at the importance Espresso Service have placed on their engineers and the impact that implementing a dedicated Field Service Management solution, in this instance Tesseract Service Centre, an Asolvi product, has had on improving their workflows.

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In the Big Discussion, we will take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put three key questions to them to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This issue our topic is the what to expect in 2018 and our experts are Michael Blumberg, Blumberg Advisory, Bill Pollock, Strategies for GrowthSM and Jan Van Veen, moreMomentum

The first question we tackled was What is the biggest challenge facing field service companies in the next 12 months?

Now let's turn to the second question in the discussion...

What is the biggest opportunity facing field service companies in the next 12 months?

Bill Pollock: The biggest opportunity facing field service companies today is the ability to compete head-to-head with any of their main competitors – however large or small – through the implementation and/or upgrade to a Cloud-based Field Service Management (FSM) solution. Over the past several years, Cloud technology has normalized the playing field for both FSM solution providers and their customers, who are no longer encumbered by the cost and complexity of their legacy premise-based solutions and applications.

Advances in technology are also giving a boost to those field service companies that have embraced these new technologies. For example, the greatest opportunities over the next 12 months will most likely be realised by those companies that will have already implemented Augmented Reality (AR) and/or Merged Reality (MR) into their field service operations. However, the most likely dominant field service organisations will be the ones that have also taken steps to explore the benefits of moving to an Artificial Intelligence- (AI) and Machine Learning- (ML) driven field service solution.

The technology is already there for every field service company; however, only those that embrace – and implement – these technologies will actually be able to reap the benefits.

 

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Jan Van Veen:  When talking about the biggest opportunities, I think we need to look beyond 12 months. It is mission critical to act now on future success.

Most industries are somewhere around the top of the life cycle and are facing (first signs of) commoditization.

The big opportunity for them is to go through the next life cycle where the added value is about enhancing the use of technology. The new value propositions will be heavily driven by data, algorithms and intelligence. The value will be far beyond predictive maintenance and uptime of technology.

This is a domain in which young, rapidly growing data-driven companies are in their comfort zone. So, the opportunity here is moving up the food chain and increase relevance for clients. By failing to pursue these opportunities, the threat is being forced down in the food chain and seeing other players deliver the high value, whilst seeing your role being limited to manufacturing equipment, spare parts and, to some extent, delivering low skilled hands-on machines for maintenance.

For those companies who are not ready to focus on these opportunities, I think your top priority should be to build the missing foundation and make sure you are ready to pursue the opportunities soon.

 

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Michael Blumberg: The biggest opportunity facing field service companies in the next 12 months lies in pursuing strategies that will advance their journey along the path toward servitization.

The specific strategies vary from company to company based on where they are on their journey. For some companies, 2018 will be the year when they finally transition their field service operation from a cost centre to a profit centre. For others, the opportunity lies in monetizing service offerings and effectively marketing and selling service outcomes.

Still, others will have the opportunity to invest in digital technologies that enhance service quality, boost productivity, and create an uber-like experience for their customers.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kieran Notter, Director, Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax from GE Digital explore the findings of an exclusive independent research conducted by Field Service News and sponsored by ServiceMAx from GE Digital.

In this second excerpt from the full one-hour long webcast, Oldland and Notter discuss both what the must-have skills of the field service engineer are likely to be in the not too distant future taking into account the impact of industry mega-trends such as servitization, digitalisation and an incoming army of millennials.

Want to know more? The full webcast PLUS an exclusive report based on the findings of this research is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service practitioner you may qualify for a complimentary 'industry practitioner' subscription. Click here to apply now!

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FLS, Fast Lean Smart, a leader in field force appointment, schedule and route optimisation solutions, has recently announced the results of its annual customer satisfaction survey in the UK.

Jeremy Squire, FLS UK Managing Director comments “Outstanding customer satisfaction is what our customers strive to achieve from their field service operations and I believe we should be setting the right example”.

FLS customers include leaders in equipment maintenance, utilities/telecoms, healthcare, financial services/insurance claims, facilities management/property maintenance, engineering compliance inspections, retail home deliveries and more. In December 2017, FLS UK surveyed every live customer it supports directly with two key questions.

The first question was very direct “How do you rate the service you receive from FLS support? (1 - 10)”. The result was an average score of 9.3.The first question was very direct “How do you rate the service you receive from FLS support? (1 - 10)”. The result was an average score of 9.3.

The second was a Net Promotor Score (NPS) styled question “How likely is it that you would recommend FLS VISITOUR to a friend who has a similar scheduling requirement? (0 - 10)”

Using the standard formula for detractors (range 0-6), passives (7-8), promoters (9-10), there was no need for a complex calculation because every customer was a promoter for FLS VISITOUR scheduling solution, the NPS score was the maximum 100!

Best in class

Jeremy Squire reflects “I feel very proud of my team for the satisfaction they are delivering and the fact every customer would recommend us is possibly unique in this market. Our strategy will continue to focus on innovation and our customer on-going success using FLS scheduling software, and to build our business through recommendations.”

Jeremy concludes “This proves real-time scheduling and route optimisation solutions really can work well for a wide range of field service businesses, you’ve just got to choose the right technology and partner to work with”.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks exclusively to Dan Sewell, COO of Espresso Service about preventative maintenance.

Dan and the team at Espresso Service have embraced the Internet of Things and preventative maintenance with open arms and have already seen some fantastic benefits from doing so.

We look at what those benefits and improvements were as well as getting Dan's advice for any organisation looking to follow in their footsteps exploring what the best initial steps are for adopting such an approach.

This video series is sponsored by:

 

 

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One of the largest suppliers of equipment and consumables for the dental industry is all pearly white smiles after deciding to swap its predominantly manual service operation for an automated one: Tesseract.

Wrights Dental supplies both NHS and private dentists with everything from syringe tips and toothbrushes to dentists’ chairs, digital imaging scanners and suction systems. Much of its business revolves around the sale and installation of equipment, but in the last five years, a shift has occurred. Mark Pitts, Technical Services Manager for Wrights, explains,

“Now, the ongoing service and maintenance side of things is just as important as sales. This is because the industry has changed. Dentists are open longer hours, which means more service and support is required. As a result, we’ve had to expand our service teams and increase their skill sets, flexibility and working hours.”

Till now, Wrights has got by with SAP for billing and invoicing, and Microsoft Outlook for diary management. “This was fine for a small service team,” says Mark. “But as soon as we began growing our teams to meet the increased demand, we realised we needed something more substantial.”

One of the big things for us was spare parts management. Tesseract gives everyone in the company full visibility on what we have and whereThe biggest problem with Wrights’ existing service management system has been its manual nature. A particular issue for Wrights was the movement of spare parts. As demand and the level of customer expectation grew, Wrights’ commitment to delivering the first-time fix became ever more important. There were instances when engineers would turn up on site without the parts they needed to complete the job, largely because tracking stock manually is arduous and prone to error.

This led Wrights to Tesseract, a comprehensive service management system from leading solutions provider Asolvi. Mark Pitts says, “We came across Tesseract on LinkedIn and it was obvious pretty quick that there were a lot of things it could do straight away. One of the big things for us was spare parts management. Tesseract gives everyone in the company full visibility on what we have and where. Everything is live on the system, including the full-service history of the site. It’ll help make sure all our engineers have the parts and information they need when they arrive, improving the likelihood of a first-time fix.”

Another big benefit for Wrights is Tesseract’s Remote Customer Access (RCA) tool. Instead of phoning a helpdesk, Wrights’ customers can report issues directly through the system.

“This saves our customers time,” says Mark. “It also stops the information from getting diluted before it gets to us. A customer can report the issue directly rather than passing it to a receptionist to make a phone call, which can lead to misinterpretation. Also, the improved accuracy of the information helps us work out which jobs are emergencies and which aren’t.”

In general, Wrights expects to offer a higher standard of customer service via the Tesseract system. The automation and optimisation of scheduling and stock management will ensure four things: right engineer, right area, right tools, right time. In addition, Tesseract will reduce the number of customer queries Wrights receives because RCA lets customers see live information about billing, outstanding jobs and the terms of their contracts.

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A new study from IDC and LogMeIn has revealed that fast and effective support will be a competitive differentiator for companies looking to win-over digitally transformed customers and employees.

According to the study “Support Services as a Competitive Differentiator”, nearly 67% of consumers said that customer satisfaction was more important than price when doing business with a company, yet nearly 30% of companies still say that reducing the cost of support is more important than customer satisfaction.  With the rules of customer and employee engagement changing, this disconnect is setting companies up for a negative long-term impact.

Increasing Customer Expectations

Today’s connected world demands that support and service teams take a greater role in driving customer engagement and loyalty.  Digitalization, including the adoption of mainstream social platforms and the use of online forums, is acting as an accelerator on this shift.  This is turning customer support improvement into an urgent imperative and making business practices increasingly transparent.

According to the study, customers rank better communication and fast problem resolution among their top priorities for customer support.  While an overwhelming 89% of respondents believe that having a support agent they can communicate with is the most important aspect of a support experience, companies are challenged to meet this goal due to the various nuances of each user and individual devices.  In fact, almost one-third of respondents said that support took a long time to resolve their issue while 24% said the problem was never resolved.  With 64%, of consumers reporting that good support experience result in advocacy and additional purchases from the company and 60% reporting that they share bad experiences as well, residual impacts of customer support satisfaction have impacts far beyond a single engagement.

“Today’s digital disruption signals the need for a fresh support strategy.  Service teams are being called upon to fulfil a greater purpose and are in a prime position to create success stories that can lead to better brand awareness, improve sales conversions, and ultimately, repeat business,” said Jennifer Cooke, Research Director, IDC.  “As the research shows, the degree to which support is effective is now a competitive differentiator and companies need to approach it in a more proactive and predictive way or risk damaging relationships with customers, employees and partners.”

Expectations for Internal IT Are Also on the Rise

Negative support experience has a widespread impact on a company beyond just lost customers and revenue.  Internal IT teams are under similar pressures from their end-users.   In nearly all the topics surveyed, employee experiences and expectations of their internal IT teams matched those consumers have of customer support underscoring the importance of efficient support across the board.  In addition, faulty internal IT support is costing companies in productivity of employees.  When users don't receive effective support, 52% said that they waste time because they can't perform their jobs. In addition to not doing their jobs, 45% of the time they pull another colleague away from their own jobs and ask for help. The net impact is a dramatic decrease in productivity.

Developing an Effective Support Strategy

Companies are facing a variety of hurdles when it comes to developing a modern and effective support strategy.  These challenges range from decreasing or stagnant budgets for support tools (41%) and lack of executive support (20%) to inability to scale with current tools and technologies (42%). Even for those that have made some changes to their internal processes or invested in technologies (50% of respondents), only 25% have been able to drive strong relationships due to the lack of adaptability and intelligence capabilities.

The survey did find that technologies like remote support are helping alleviate some of the pain customers associate with support today.  Nearly 75% of organisations reported using remote support solutions within their environment and 85% of end users saying these technologies helped resolve their issues more quickly than other methods of support.  As companies look to continue to mature their support organisations, they will need to look adopt these technologies as well as ones that will enable emerging artificial intelligence and automation to help meet the needs of changing users, devices and geographic locations.

“Customer service inextricably linked with the overall success of a company,” said Dave Campbell, Vice President, Customer Engagement and Support at LogMeIn.  “This becomes even more apparent when discussing customer support specifically.  In today’s competitive landscape, support organisations are being viewed two ways – as a competitive advantage or a detriment to success.  As a result, finding the right balance of people, process and technology will be key for companies to mature their support strategy to a point where it will create long term loyalty, customer advocacy, and business growth.”

Methodology

In August 2017, IDC conducted two surveys to better understand how existing support technologies were meeting the needs of a changing user base. One survey focused on the end-user experience, and the other survey examined enterprise and service provider support programs and the tools they used, with the goal of assessing the current state of support, identifying areas of success, and uncovering areas that needed improvement. The 1,400 survey respondents were from a broad mix of industries, company sizes, professional roles, and geographic regions.

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In the Big Discussion, we will take one topic, bring together three leading experts on that topic and put three key questions to them to help us better understand its potential impact on the field service sector...

This issue our topic is the what to expect in 2018 and our experts are Michael Blumberg, Blumberg Advisory, Bill Pollock, Strategies for GrowthSM and Jan Van Veen, moreMomentum

So let's tackle the first question...

What is the biggest challenge facing field service companies in the next 12 months?

Bill Pollock: The biggest challenge facing field service companies in the next 12 months will be keeping up with customer expectations for service delivery as they continually raise the bar with respect to performance. This is not necessarily a “new” challenge – it actually has been one of the main challenges for field service companies year-after-year. However, the current environment of constantly improving technology and its availability through both the traditional, “tried-and-true” FSM solution providers plus the introduction of several new technology-based solution vendors makes this challenge particularly daunting for many field service managers.

Selecting which technology to implement is not the only challenge, however; field service companies must also be able to choose the right solution vendor to help them design, implement and support their newly acquired technology. Some of the most challenging questions may be, “If we’re already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for our CRM solution, should we also use Microsoft Field Service?”; similarly, “If we’re already using Salesforce for our sales and marketing management, should we also use their Field Service Lightning solution?” Other questions may include, “Should we use one of the traditional FSM solution providers, such as Astea, ClickSoftware, IFS/Metrix, ServicePower, etc., or one of the newer providers?”; or “Should we use a UK-based solution provider, such as Fast Lean Smart, or Kirona, etc., rather than an off-shore-based provider?”

The choices are many – and no less challenging than they have been in the past!

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Jan Van Veen:  Most manufacturing companies and their service units struggle to innovate and change quick enough.

Technology is developing at an increasing pace; adoption of new technology has never been so rapid. In the digital era, we can expect competition from new entrants like innovative data- and algorithm-driven businesses.

So, the name of the game now is ‘Adapt and Thrive’ (or ‘Stagnate and Die’). The winners of the next decades will be those who can maintain a high speed of business innovation and change, and can cope with a high level of uncertainty and unpredictability.

What is holding most manufacturing companies back is;

• Slow change, whether it’s small change or bigger change
• Stuck in business-as-usual: innovations are predominantly incremental improvements of the status quo
• Lack of influence: individuals at all levels and in various departments see the threats, opportunities and the lack of progress, which frustrates them

I believe that one of the biggest challenges right now is to increase momentum for rapid and fluent change from the inside, and empowering employees at all levels to take ownership.

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Michael Blumberg:  In the short term, field service companies must also find ways to balance service quality and productivity with their financial goals and objectives (think costs and profits), all while striving to maintain exceptional levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

This objective holds true for any 12-month period under consideration whether the year is 2018, 2008, or 2028.

The challenge lies in developing and implementing a winning strategy based on current financial and operating constraints that each company faces.

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