AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Marina Stedman

Marina Stedman, Director Global Field Marketing, ClickSoftware, takes a look at the technology shaping the next phase of field service evolution...

The term Internet of Things (IoT), describes the inter-networking of physical and smart devices, items such as vehicles and buildings and even technology services. Connected interoperability across many devices, applications and infrastructure presents an opportunity for the field service industry to raise the bar on two key areas of field service: operational costs and customer satisfaction.

Operational Costs:

Increased connectivity within a field service operation fosters a predictive model for addressing possible equipment, infrastructure, machine or device failures. The ability to diagnose and address issues and undertake preventive maintenance is essential to saving time (and money) on service calls, cutting the number of service requests made and improving the first-time-fix rate.

Take a building’s HVAC system for example. With today’s increasingly unpredictable weather, warm one day and freezing the next, IoT sensors can monitor temperatures and simultaneously use historical service and on-line data to predict maintenance requirements, failure rates and climate trends. This data can be used to manage service and operational tasks, for example making sure a system is serviced before parts fail and before the first freeze occurs, cutting the risk of breakdown and reducing the need for field service intervention.

Customer Satisfaction

Cost, asset management and effective communication are key components to achieving the ultimate goal: ensuring customer satisfaction.

Customers are unhappy when they have to wait a long time for a service visit, wait in all day for an engineer to arrive or make multiple calls to find out the status of their job. If multiple service visits are needed before a problem can be fixed because the information required for a first time fix is not available, both customer satisfaction and business profitability are impacted.

IoT sensors in devices or infrastructure, linked to real-time scheduling and dispatch solutions can detect potential service outages and make sure that issues are fixed before they become critical. For instance, IoT sensors in a food vendor’s freezers could identify a potential fault and notify the manufacturer that it’s due for a service before the freezer breaks and the food spoils. The manufacturer can quickly schedule an engineer to visit and rectify the issue before the freezer breaks down, saving time and money for everyone.

The IoT technology that we envisaged only five years ago bears no resemblance to what can be done today and it won’t be long before machines will automate decisions and launch actions without human intervention.

3D Printing

3D printers use Computer Aided Design plans to mould thin layers of melted plastic, aluminium, and powders together to form shapes. They started off making simple things like models and toys, but today’s devices have the sophistication and capability to form replacement parts. Why is it then, that few, if any field service organisations currently fulfil field-based replacement part requirements with 3D printed spares?

Maybe they don’t feel that the technology is safe and reliable enough at the moment? This won’t always be the case - here are two things to think about for the future:

Speeding Spare Parts Fulfilment

Apart from people costs, spare parts management is one of the biggest areas of cost for a field service organisation. Anticipating parts demand is challenging, even with the most sophisticated field service software solutions and the rarer the part, the less likely a field service engineer will have it available on-site when needed. 3D printing will make it as cheap to produce single items as it is to produce thousands and introduces the possibility of directly manufacturing finished components on site - reducing inventory costs and speeding up job completion.

Improving First-time Fix Rate

Not having their problem resolved in one visit is a constant source of irritation to field service customers and research has found a direct correlation between first-time fix rates and customer satisfaction. (*Aberdeen Group Fixing First Time Fix) .

As lack of parts to fix the problem is the main reason field technicians visit a customer site twice, field-based 3D printing facilities could enable parts to be printed on-demand, improving first-time fix rate and positively impacting customer satisfaction ratings.

Imagine the Future

IoT sensors in devices send messages to fulfilment and dispatch when a part is at risk of failing.

A 3D printer creates the part and the job is automatically scheduled. The service engineer fixes the problem before the customer is aware of the issue and without any disruption to business or personal life. Sounds like science fiction, it won’t be a few years from now.

Looking for more tips, trends, and future field service technology advice? Check out the Technology section of Field Service Matters.

 

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Marina Stedman, Director of Global Field Marketing for ClickSoftware takes a look at the recent new EU legislation and what it means for field service organisations operating within the region...

After an employee court case in September 2015, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled[i] that time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time.

This is because the workers are at the employer’s disposal for the time of the journeys, are acting under their employer’s instructions and cannot use that time freely to pursue their own interests. This obviously has huge implications from a field service perspective, especially related to the number of hours that can be worked and on rest time which are both part of the Working Time Directive (WTD). While some vagueness remains around the changes, they are expected to be implemented by 2019.

To help our customers navigate the new legislation, we knew needed to get under the skin of the incoming changes, so we decided to survey over 300 senior business leaders across Europe to see what they thought.

WTD and what it means for business 

Our ‘EU Travel to Work’ Research conducted with Bilendi (one of the top digital service providers for the market research industry in Europe) found that over a third (36%) of UK businesses will not be ready when the latest WTD regulation comes into force. France followed closely, with 48% of respondents claiming they will not be completely ready.

Additionally, more than one in 10 companies are not actually aware of the ruling. Just Germany (69%) and Italy (72%) are confident they will be completely ready.

Unsurprisingly, the report found that businesses expect the new ruling to have a significant impact; 60% plan to change the way they operate. So what does this mean from a field service perspective?

We found that nearly seven in ten (68%) businesses will or may have to change the way they schedule resources in the field.

In real terms this means:

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• Thirty percent will need to cut the number of jobs that any field service engineer can complete in one day and expect to pay staff more for overtime
• Nearly one in five companies (19%) will need to hire more employees to complete field based work – this is highest in Italy (39%) and Germany (41%)
• Nearly half of respondents (47%) will need to implement new systems and tools to manage the new rules[/unordered_list]

Understandably, cost is highlighted as the biggest concern around the new law, according to 29% of respondents. Awareness and understanding will also impact compliance with one in five businesses (19%) concerned about unknowingly breaking the rules.

Transforming lives in the field

What will these changes mean for field service workers?

The new WTD ruling is expected to positively impact the lives of workers in the field. Three in 10 businesses (30%) anticipate having to reduce the number of jobs a field service employee can do in a day. At the same time, the same level of employers are bracing themselves to have to pay more overtime to these employees to factor in the cost of travel. How will businesses cope with this change? Just under one in five (19%) businesses expect to take on more staff to be able to cope with the demand for field based work at its current level.

The challenge for organisations who have field workers will be introducing systems and processes that balance their commitment to employee well-being in terms of mandatory breaks and rest periods during a now extended working day and week, with cost and productivity within the rules that have been set.

 

Containing the cost of service delivery without sacrificing quality will be critical for service-centric businesses. By their very nature, most field service workers are mobile, with many starting and finishing their working day from home, rather than a fixed office, with travel time taking up a large part of their working day.

At ClickSoftware we’ll be working with customers to help them adapt existing practices to ensure they continue to operate in multiple countries across Europe, competitively and sustainably.

An opportunity for innovation?

The majority of European business leaders (75%) think that the new law is set to benefit field service staff.

Already, we’ve seen how digital connectedness and smart mobile devices have transformed the industry. WTD could in fact accelerate adoption of these new enabling technologies as field service companies across Europe look at new ways of improving employee productivity and efficiency out in the field, while remaining compliant. Indeed, our report shows nearly half of our respondents (47%) will need to implement new systems and tools when the latest WTD regulation comes into effect.

 

In terms of top concerns from an industry perspective, 25% of companies in the manufacturing industry, 20% in utilities and 15% in telecommunications said that their current systems and processes would not be able to manage. In addition, half of manufacturers, 31% of utility suppliers and 33% of telecommunications providers put this in their top two concerns.

It is clear from the research that the majority of European companies that employ field service staff who work from home are going to have to make changes to their business processes and their systems regardless of which country of industry sector they are in.

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Marina Stedman, Director of Global Field Marketing for ClickSoftware offers an overview of one of the key highlights of the recent Field Service Forum held in Amsterdam earlier this summer...

Introduction:

The “Delivering Global Growth with Local Operations” theme of the 3rd annual Copperberg Field Service Forum held in Amsterdam on 8th and 9th June was topical, based on the sometimes conflicting demands of meeting customers’ rising expectations of service delivery while maintaining long-term operational viability.

The event brought field service professionals, operational managers and industry experts together to network, discuss and benchmark experiences and ideas.

Round Table Discussion - How can automation and mobility optimise scheduling, dispatch and communications with mobile field workers while also enhancing the customer experience?

The ClickSoftware hosted round table session discussing the challenges and best practices for optimised scheduling and mobility provided one such opportunity.

Delegates joining this round table debate included a global FMGC manufacturer, a global engineering components manufacturer, a European agricultural dealership, a supplier of integrated food processing solutions and a regional telecommunications provider.

A number of topics were discussed with a summary of the top points below:

The five top challenges faced by field service suppliers today:

1. Managing the field teams – Knowing where technicians are, what skills they have and how to optimise resources
2. Best practices - Keeping up with and adopting them
3. Customisation and Integration - Finding a system that can be customised to meet specific requirements
4. Optimisation - How to optimise the scheduling of resources
5. Customer service – How to keep customers up-to-date on the engineer’s arrival time and the status of their job plus managing overall customer satisfaction

How to best manage Field Teams:

1. Can they be brand ambassadors and sales people? Field engineers are the face of the supplier to the customer so how do you encourage and train engineers to upsell more services when they are on site? One view was that people skills are more important in organisations that deal with consumers.
2. Can location-based tracking be introduced in Europe? There are many regulations on how and what employee data can be tracked and used.  How can the new technologies that track engineers’ whereabouts and enable better customer communication be introduced?
3. Effective job completion: In industries with “Long Cycle” work that can take a week or more, scheduling the right engineers with the right skills and the right parts is more important than knowing where an engineer is.

Best Practices:

Round table attendees were interested in the Field Service Engagement Journey which shows how mapping an organisations’ “degree of optimisation”, “field service sophistication” and “customer lifetime value” illustrates where that organisation is on its journey to field service maturity.

Attendees were initially very optimistic about where they were on this journey but then realised during the conversation that they were mostly at the first “Getting Visibility” or second “Containing Costs” stages and had a long way to go to reach the ultimate stage of “Disruption, Differentiation and Delight”.

Optimisation - Managing costs and Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Many services businesses are expensive to run because they can only meet SLAs by including redundancy or overlap within their field teams.

It was, however felt that costs could be contained/reduced in many ways (e.g.by optimising routes taken and making the best choices for allocation and scheduling of resources against SLAs).

One attendee said that failed visits (where the engineer calls and the customer is not in) were the main cause of high costs in his business, accounting for 62% of visits. Another delegate said that each no-show cost £60 due to wasted time and the cost of repeat visits.

 

Another attendee pointed out that mobility holds the key to optimised scheduling –the field team can be notified of any changes in real-time e.g. traffic situations, no-shows, cancellations and problem visits.

For many B2B businesses, up-time is their customers’ number one priority.  They need their equipment, vehicles, machines etc. to be fixed as soon as possible or they start to incur costs.  It is vital that field engineers with the right skills and the right parts get there fast.

Everyone wanted to give customers a more exact time slot of when an engineer would arrive but they could only do this if they could use technology such as predictive analytics based on historical data to analyse how long each type of job typically takes and to plan accordingly.

Everyone agreed that one of their biggest challenges was how to get an asset and an engineer with the right skills on site at the same time to fix a breakdown.

Customer service:

Attendees definitely felt that providing more information and more timely information to the customer made a difference to the relationship with them.  Keeping the customer informed meant many fewer no-shows and higher rates of first time service delivery.  While products are becoming a commodity in many industries, service is still an area of differentiation.

Key message from the round table discussion - people see field service as a way to differentiate themselves against their competitors but many are only at the beginning of the journey.

 

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Powerful, flexible and scalable cloud computing technology is opening up multiple new opportunities for businesses to improve customer service, develop better ways for customers to -serve themselves and introduce new technologies more quickly and easily.  However, the ready availability of business applications via the cloud has also raised the issue of data security and how to keep information about people and the businesses they work in, secure and private at every level.

In Part One  we looked at how cloud is an enabler for field service organisations and in Part Two how technology is facilitating enhanced centralised control and better people management and communications.

In this third and final instalment of our coverage of the recent debate on “Cloud and Mobility: The next frontier for Field Service Management”  which was organised by ClickSoftware, we’ll consider in more detail the most important ways in which technology can improve overall customer service and how organisations should deal with the issues of security and privacy.

The debate was chaired by Forrester’s senior analyst, Paul Miller, with a panel including: Tim Faulkner, Senior Vice President at ClickSoftware; Dr Carsten Sorensen, Associate Professor in Digital Innovation at the London School of Economics; Katelyn Burrill, Product Marketing Manager at ClickSoftware; and Phil Wainewright, Chair at Euro Cloud UK.

Self-serving customers

One popular trend for improving overall levels of customer service, is to offer new technologies to customers that allow them to “self-serve”, the idea being that customers have a faster and more tailored experience which costs the business less to deliver.  But where is the competitive advantage and business vale of providing customer service in this way, if everything is being done by the customer themselves and the suppliers have no opportunities to engage directly with their customers?

One particularly interesting example to consider here is the case of energy smart meters.  Smart meters monitor energy consumption in real-time and automatically send electronic meter readings to providers. While the devices improve operations for utilities companies, providing real-time usage data that helps them to forecast demand and also help their customers to minimise energy usage and save money, once smart meters are installed, the suppliers never need to visit houses and offices to take meter readings.

“In the smart meter world, the biggest challenge that utilities suppliers worry about is how to roll out the smart meters,” says Tim Faulkner. “But finding new ways to maintain customer loyalty and revenue should also be looked at as a high priority activity because technicians are going to be in the customers’ homes far less frequently. The energy vendors will install the smart meter and not be back for maybe five years. Their opportunity to impress the brand upon the customer and sell more services or products is much less reduced.”

 

“You have to find things people want and talk to them about it when you’re there,” explains the LSE's Dr Carsten Sorensen. “We go to fix or install stuff. If you look at utilities companies, they’re not silly. Once they do arrive, it’s all about upselling.”

However, Phil Wainwright, of Euro Cloud UK, argues that physical presence is only a very small aspect of the opportunities available to business to interact with customers.

“A huge part of a good brand experience and competitive advantage in the modern world is minimising the amount of frustrating interaction the customer has with individuals not equipped to deal with their problems. It’s all about delivering competitive advantage by delivering good quality customer service through any medium.”

Human interaction

So what happens when we reach that stage where, in many or most cases, the customer is in charge of managing the services themselves, through mobile apps, smart meters and similar associated technologies?  In a situation where devices pass information directly back to a central location, there is less interaction. If most of the information that vendors have comes from customers, where does the competitive advantage come from and where do suppliers offer value if everything is done by the users or their devices?

“Why do you need people?” asks Sorensen. “You need them to build the services and interact. We are social animals. We need to find clever ways to interact with each other. Plus, once we have smart things embedded in our walls, in our shower heads and everywhere, we’ll need more help to understand and maintain them!”

 

The other clear opportunity for field services organisations rolling out smart devices and mobile apps is from utilisation of the considerable amounts of highly valuable data being generated. So how might they start do to clever things with this data? One obviously practical and impactful use of data is in getting a better understanding of each individual customer’s behaviour – what they are using, how they use it, when they use it for example.

“The other is being able to predict what kind of approach you’ll need to take to address any issue based on job type and history of that job with that customer,” Faulkner explains. “Building in this kind of predictive analysis for parts is a direction that ClickSoftware is taking now in our R&D team. There’s a mix there. You can automate it and/or provide decision-making capability. And you also need to use human beings who have personal experience and can understand the context and add value. Because an automated decision can sometimes be a wrong one.”

Data privacy

Finally, when dealing with apps or smart devices in homes that are collecting a lot of data, there is the issue of privacy and data security to be addressed. What happens, for example, with the data being collected by companies that can effectively tell where you are and where you’ve been, when you are in or out, what you are doing and what you might like to do?

As Paul Miller, Senior Analyst at Forrester, points out, even while the likelihood of that data being abused is very low, “the customer has a nagging doubt that bad people or Big Brother will do something with the data. How will a field service organisation respond to that?”

Gauging the best response is largely down to having a good understanding of the trade-off customers are willing to make between privacy and convenience. “Companies need to work out their push-pull line,” says Sorensen, “as it becomes increasingly complex and risky to manage all that data.”

The bottom line is that data privacy is a huge focus, for governments, legislators and brands alike. Plus, in addition to looking at privacy from a consumer perspective, it’s also insightful to consider the ways in which field service software providers deal with issues of data privacy from the point of view of their business customers.

“Until the advent of the cloud, vendors always provided systems in a company’s premises and the data is therefore only accessible within that company” says Faulkner. When the project is in live operation, we’ll get insight into how it’s being used. The cloud gives us the opportunity to see and share best practice across many customers, and look at what value there is in providing an additional service or function as well as to advise customers on what they should do to become best in class.”

 

Many of ClickSoftware’s customers are household brand names and they take issues of data security and customer privacy very seriously and work through it diligently as Faulkner explains. “They have specialist teams that work on security topics, and they have big legal teams. It’s about education, about trust that the brand has transparency.”

It really matters to consumers and to businesses what data people have on them and what they use it for.  Companies need to work out their push-pull approach.  No-one wants to be called at four in the morning with an upsell proposition when they are on holiday on the other side of the world!

What's often discussed in the media is that everyone should have a social contract with their suppliers.  It's not just 'we give you X and you pay us Y', it's a back and forth negotiation which should be based on situation and context.  As individuals we can be hypocritical in terms of data privacy, when it works for us and we get a reward, we're all for it but when something goes wrong, we claim that we didn’t agree to the terms.

The field service professionals can be a key part of the evolution.  They are there, speaking to the customer and can provide real feedback on what the customer does and doesn’t need, what went well and what topics of discussion, goods and services the customer liked and engaged with.  Empowering the people on the ground to decide how they interact and feedback will go a long way towards assuaging any concerns about how personal and business data is being used.

Training engineers to use personal interactions as an opportunity to be brand ambassadors, looking for upsell and feedback opportunities is what all field service companies should be aiming for.

Through discussions with both academic and industry experts, this debate looked at how cloud and mobility will impact the field service industry and help businesses achieve their goals both now and in the future. The three-part series covered why cloud is an enabler for field service businesses, how technology is allowing central control and improving employee management and, with this final part of the series, looking at how technology can improve customer service and the issue of privacy.

 

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This content originally featured on fieldservicenews.com

Field service management is a key part of the customer experience. Meeting the engineers or technicians despatched to their house is often the end-user’s first and only human engagement with the company. Cloud and mobility technology is helping to improve the flexibility and collaboration between central control systems and individual fieldworkers, ensuring customers experience the best possible service and field service professionals become brand ambassadors, as well as technical problem solvers.

In Part One of this three part series on  the next Frontier for Field Service Management, our panel considered the fundamental importance of the power and scalability of cloud computing and the ways in which it is revolutionising field service management. In Part Two they  discuss the importance of striking a balance between central control and individual initiative.

The debate was hosted by ClickSoftware and chaired by Forrester’s senior analyst, Paul Miller. Joining him were Tim Faulkner, Senior Vice President at ClickSoftware; Dr Carsten Sorensen, Associate Professor in Digital Innovation at London School of Economics; Katelyn Burrill, Product Marketing Manager at ClickSoftware; and Phil Wainewright, Chair at Euro Cloud UK.

Central control and individual collaboration

In order to provide the quality and consistent levels of service that today’s customers demand, businesses still need to retain a degree of control centrally.

“You need to deliver on promises and provide a consistent level of service and quality that the customer wants,” explained Tim Faulkner.  “You also need to allow for improvisation and tools that allow the technician to make decisions on whether or not to replace a part there and then or call a buddy to help.”

The cloud is both an enabler and a leveller, according to Faulkner. “It’s bringing down barriers to adopting field service solutions that were there before, enabling large corporations to deploy different methods and enabling smaller companies to adopt the same applications.”

 

Faulkner explains how ingenious adoptions of new cloud and mobile technologies allows FSM companies to better utilise their existing workforce, putting both technology and a greater decision-making autonomy in the hands of individuals.

It is exactly this enabling ability of cloud technology that helps networks or companies co-ordinate more widely distributed, flexible and fast-response supply chains, according to the LSE's Dr. Carsten Sorensen.

“The 21^st century is about helping individuals and companies alike to adapt to emerging needs, to react immediately when something goes wrong or identify where there is room for improvement,” says Sorensen. He thinks that the cloud is fundamentally transforming the way organisations do business.

The reality for FSM businesses is that workers out in the field are becoming increasingly digitally enabled with mobile devices of their own (and supplied by their employers) of various kinds. And those organisations that are able to capitalise on this new way of communicating, swiftly and wisely, are set to benefit.

The UK police -  how the operate like Uber

Perhaps one of the best examples of advanced users of field service technology in the UK to date is the police service.[quote float="right"]One of the best examples of advanced users of field service technology in the UK to date is the police service.

 

“The police don’t talk about mobile technology,” Sorensen explains. “For decades they’ve talked about mobile data. The whole point is instead of having a very localised arrangement – where somebody calls a police station and they dispatch on a two-way radio system that somebody should go somewhere -  now they operate, in principle, like Uber. They did ten years ago and they still do now.

“Ordinary police officers have a queue of incidents and they choose one like a customer in a taxi rank. Whenever you try to solve one problem, you may have other problems and you need to balance what everyone is aware of. Fundamentally, you can transfer the way work is done.”

So are there lessons to be drawn from this police model for businesses to learn from?

“With most large companies, you have to spend hours on the phone to get in touch with a human being,” adds Sorensen. “For a lot of companies, their competitive advantage will come from having a civilised human being to talk to you.”

The police case study is particularly interesting to ClickSoftware's Katelyn Burrill, because issues around automating, picking and choosing jobs are things that she deals with a lot with her customers.

“Automating that process is one of the huge benefits that companies achieve,” says Burrill. “It’s managing the change that these field workers go through when a new technology is implemented. If they don’t understand the benefits and just see it as Big Brother managing their day all of a sudden, they won’t manage the technology to the best of its ability.”

The lesson here is that field workers often have their own ways of operating that have worked well enough for them for many years, so it's vital that they don’t think that their own discretion and autonomy is somehow being removed from them.

“That’s how projects fail,” says Burrill. “When organisations don’t sell it into them in a strategic manner. They [the field workers] need to be part of the process to organise how you’ll go about changing and what’s acceptable to change.”

After all, the people out there in the field are often a lot smarter about what’s really happening and what needs to happen than the people in head office, who might not understand the bigger picture and certainly can’t see it in real-time.

“Let’s not forget that the field service workforce is already using smart technologies, already sending photos and videos on their smartphones to ask: how do we get this done?” notes Phil Wainewright, Chair of Euro Cloud UK.

“You need to build a more collaborative infrastructure that takes advantage of how things really work on the ground.”

In part three of the debate we move on to consider ways in which technology can improve customer service and we address issues like privacy and security.

 

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Best practices, customer insights and recommendations distilled from 20 years of experience are included in the new book written by Mike Karlskind, Stephen Smith, & Alec Berry of ClickSoftware 

 

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Want to get a signed copy? Field Service News readers can pre-order a signed copy now! Register for your copy  @ http://bit.ly/1W6u3Fb 

 

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Over the last 20 years, ClickSoftware’s customers have managed billions of successful service engagements, and have seen firsthand just how hard service delivery can be.

Our new book Service is Hard: Turning Common Field Service Challenges into Customer Engagement Opportunities, contains insights, best practices and recommendations from experts, thought leaders, and analysts, representing hundreds of person-years of experience.

This book addresses eight of the toughest challenges in achieving consistently exceptional service, from best practices for customer experience to managing spare part consumption in the field.

The book’s chapters collect insights from leading service companies, implementers, industry experts, and software developers and provide recommendations on steps to take to successfully address each challenge.

They are:

1. Holding the customer’s hand – why customers expect superior service
2. Aligning conflicting stakeholder interests
3. Metrics for measuring field service management
4. Integrating field service management and legacy systems
5. Managing in-day schedule disruptions
6. Integrating parts into field service management
7. Achieving mobile application adoption
8. Turning the Internet of Things vision into value

 

The Customer Service Imperative

Global economic growth over the past century, driven by the manufacturing and selling of products, has created two groups of unsung heroes whose work is mainly out in the field: technical professionals who install, maintain and repair products; and service-based people who provide services such as home-based health care.

Both groups have typically been viewed as operational cost centres to be contained and optimised. The more recent realisation is that these service heroes are the driving force for effective customer engagement, the brand ambassadors who present the employer’s face to the customer.

 

These companies—from the smallest service contractor to the largest global enterprise—see superior service as a primary competitive differentiator and growth engine.

This shift in thinking recognises important truths about business today.

Customers want (and can mainly get) what they want, when they want it.

You no longer compete only against others who do what you do, or sell what you sell. You compete with every experience that your customer has with every company that provides your customer any type of service.

A Business and Technology Perspective

The nature of assets, equipment, tools, and knowledge used by service-led businesses addressing different vertical markets is unique.

Regulators, competitors, geography, customers and the supply of qualified service professionals are some of the varied characters of these service operations’ external influences, while internal influences include available capital, corporate history, reporting structure and executive strategy. Regardless of type of business or industry, Excel spreadsheets and legacy tools historically used for field service management (FSM) have facilitated only tactical and reactive approaches to the field service challenge.

 

While these tools allowed individual managers or dispatchers supporting a small part of a business or service to make decisions that suited a granular part of the business, achieving total operational awareness was not possible, much less efficiency and effectiveness. Today’s FSM solutions need to support an approach that can consistently deliver against the defined strategy, meet regulatory requirements and deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction while addressing the variability of each business and industry of operation.

Embracing the challenge is only step one.

Customer service excellence is a journey rather than a destination, a cliché that is as true as ever in the context of transforming service.

As noted in our book’s title, “Service is Hard” - it is challenging to implement business changes to improve service delivery and enhance the customer experience at the same time. Our advice: keep your eyes on the prize.

Building world class operations is not easy, otherwise every business would already have done it. Focusing on the top 8 challenges with the right team, the right mindset and the right technology solutions makes excellence in field service operation possible for any organisation.

 

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Want to know more? Field Service News readers can pre-order a signed copy of this book now! Register for your copy @ http://bit.ly/1W6u3Fb

 

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The global field service market is estimated to jump from $1.58 billion last year to more than $3.5 billion by 2019, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. This three-part series will look at how cloud is an enabler for field service organisations, how technology is allowing central control and improving people management, rounding off with a look at how technology can improve customer service and the issue of privacy.

The series has emerged following a recent panel debate with experts and academics, hosted by ClickSoftware and chaired by Forrester’s senior analyst, Paul Miller. The panel included: Tim Faulkner, Senior Vice President at ClickSoftware, Dr Carsten Sorensen, Associate Professor in Digital Innovation at London School of Economics, Katelyn Burrill, Product Marketing Manager at ClickSoftware, and Phil Wainewright, Chair at Euro Cloud UK.

The cloud as an enabler and the automation landscape

 Paul Miller opened the debate: “We're here to talk about cloud and field service. A lot of the visible manifestations are out in the field, for instance the device the engineer is holding when they walk into your house is probably accessing applications and data held in the cloud – but do we really need the cloud for all that? Why is the cloud important?”

“We all get excited about new technology,” Phil Wainewright responds. “What's changed now is the Internet and that's brought two things – digital connectedness and extremely powerful and not so powerful smart devices. There are more computers in the world today than there are people; cheap devices, with the ability to be connected to each other and to the computing power of the cloud, are falling right into the hands of individuals. The final ingredient is the hugely elastic scalable power of the cloud. You can pool it into a vast cauldron of big data and pop out analytics and use the information to develop more efficient processes.”

 

“For ClickSoftware it's a different model and it brings down barriers to adopting field service solutions that were there before,” said Tim Faulkner. “Any company with its own IT department probably had a traditional approach of evaluating a solution, looking at the integrations needed, buying the hardware, setting it up and making that capex investment – as an organisation, you bank on seeing returns as you ramp up and roll out.”

Faulkner continued, “That's not easy for a small organisation to do though. Cloud is a leveller and enables small organisations to adopt the same applications. For large corporations it helps them to deploy different methods. Maybe not the big waterfall approach, but a more agile incremental way in shorter timeframes. Cloud is definitely an enabler for that, opening new opportunities for business units within larger corporations. Last year, in Europe, the adoption of our cloud-based solutions surpassed my forecasts at the beginning of the year – we expected 25% of new customers and it ended up being closer to 50%!”

Miller interjects: “Allowing smaller companies to adopt the same solution as their biggest competitors?”

“Using cloud based field service technology allows flexibility and speed,” said Dr Carsten Sorensen.  “If you look at manufacturing, in the old days you'd have a siloed approach – by the time you got to the last person to sign for a new component, they'd realise it couldn't be made within the constraints and they'd have to go back and start again.

Dr Sorensen continued, “We need to understand all of the constraints straight away. One of the key things in business is to allow individuals to make rapid decisions while at the same time making sure they don’t make bad decisions for the company. In the past, these individuals had information in a handbook or on their computer back at the office or depot. In the 21^st century, individuals, wherever they are, need to make the right choices and the infrastructure needs to be in their hands to make those informed decisions. We haven’t really worked out how to utilise this yet.”

 

“Business infrastructure is an important angle,” said Wainewright. “The way businesses are organised needs to be changed to take advantage of the new technologies.”

Sorensen jumped in at this point: “They need to balance ERP systems that automate the process that tells people what to do at what stage. It makes it possible to have flexible communication. The challenge is for big companies to manage this to facilitate processes but also enable discussions and flexibility. The more lightweight infrastructure you have the better it is for flexibility. Cloud technology makes it more lightweight.”

Rounding off the first part of the debate Miller asked Katelyn Burrell how organisations are changing how they deal with their own customers, with cloud playing a big part of that. “When prospects come to ClickSoftware looking for a cloud solution from you, is that recognition part of the solution? Are they thinking about the broader strategic shift?”

“They are absolutely thinking about the broader strategic shift,” said Burrell. “We started nearly 20 years’ ago with on premise solutions only, we're experts at that. It has to be a transformative project where all stakeholders are involved up-front. What the cloud has done now is enabled more experimentation within the organisation, possibly without the involvement of IT. A business unit might come to us and say they want to make this transformation and need help selling to the executives. The cloud has enabled them to do a pilot project before going on a bigger scale.

What's really driving it for our customers is that their products and services are becoming more commoditised, and how they deliver their services is a key differentiator. They need to improve their customer experience, but also keep their operations and costs in check, servicing the needs of the business and the customer.”

Look out for Part Two of the debate, when the focus switches to central control and people management, and how development of the devices available allows greater oversight and communications with workers out in the field.

 

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Marina Stedman, ClickSoftware brings us the concluding part of her feature looking at the multi-faceted challenges field service managers and supervisors face and a key philosophy in how to best serve customers...

In my last article for Field Service News, I outlined how our philosophy centres around helping service organisations answer five questions – the five Ws of field service, in order to best serve their customers and touched on the first of these Who does what.

Now let’s take a look at the remaining four Ws and why they are important for field service organisations.

W#2: With What?

Our second “W” is all about the tools. What tools are needed to complete the required actions?

Sending out field technicians qualified to fix a specific issue still can’t help if they don’t have the tools needed.

Not all mobile systems are created equal. A scheduling system that can send out an alert to a field supervisor that a field technician has been double-booked isn’t much help if it also doesn’t provide the tools to deal with that issue.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers analysis on mobile deployments, implementing the right mobile tools and approach to field operations improves productivity 20 to 30 percent.

 

It also was found to decrease the time needed for field operations between 5 and 7 percent, which translated into saving millions of dollars each year.

We’ve already established that a mobile tool has to provide the functionality for a field supervisor to complete back-end and field tasks - all the “What”s of the field supervisor’s job. However, to achieve the kinds of operational improvements and cost savings possible, the right mobile tool has to meet two more criteria:

• Scope and speed to provide real time data. A field supervisor can only complete managerial and paperwork tasks remotely if they have reliable, up-to-the-minute data.The opposite is also true. They can only control field operations from the office if they can see what’s happening in the field.Accurate, real time information gives the field supervisor visibility into what’s happening on the ground. They can see that a field technician isn’t where the schedule says he should be and they can contact that field technician immediately. There are no more blind spots.
• Easy to learn; easy to use. One of the biggest reasons new software rollouts fail is lack of adoption by the end users. Much has been written about the consumerisation of B2B applications, and with good reason.Both field supervisors and technicians need their mobile apps to just work, or they won’t use them. Or at least, won’t use them well enough for the company to realise the expected benefits of having a mobile system.

W#3 and #4: When and Where?

These questions are the golden eggs of mobile because the right answers are “Whenever” and “Wherever.” Information or decisions needed in any given moment can be accessed or made in that moment. A speedy, full-function mobile app releases the field supervisor’s bottleneck in two ways:

1. The distinction between “field” and “office” tasks becomes obliterated. Location no longer restricts what the field supervisor can do
2. Because location no longer constricts the field supervisor, the field supervisor is no longer the bottleneck preventing other people from completing their tasks efficiently.

That holiday request? Once approved by the field supervisor on their mobile device, the system is updated in real time so the schedulers back at the office are aware of the change in capacity for that day.

An emergency service request comes into the office. The mobile field supervisor sees it, and can assign it to an available technician already nearby.

Now the customer gets same day service, and your company gets maximum utilisation out of a field technician who is kept fully scheduled during the day.

W#5: for Whom?

There are numerous stakeholders relying on field supervisors being able to stay on top of all their tasks and demands but for a service organisation, the most important “Who” is always the customer.

And who is the lynchpin between the field supervisor and the customer – the field technician.

By erasing the boundary between office and field tasks, the field supervisor gains time to spend on the most critical task: mentoring the field technicians. Whether it’s more time side by side with a field technician on a call, or being available to answer questions via text, chat or video camera, a field supervisor can better serve technicians once freed from the desk.

 

When the field supervisor has more time to train and mentor the field technicians, you get happier, more qualified people. As their skills grow, they can complete more complex tasks and finish simple tasks faster, so you’re increasing your field utilisation potential without major increases in labour costs or staffing. Best of all, your field supervisors can spend more time mentoring field technicians without falling behind on the operational and managerial tasks the back-end stakeholders rely on.

Fast pace and high pressure make mobile the release valve

Applying the Five Ws of customer service for field supervisors means using mobile to empower them to carry out all their responsibilities regardless of location.

They need the ability to monitor and act in real time. When field supervisors don’t have to choose between sitting at a desk or being in the field, they can more efficiently carry out their roles by allocating their time and energy where it provides the highest return: mentoring and assisting field technicians to deliver enterprise -quality customer service.

 

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