AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Mark Forrest

Customer service is widely recognised as being the number one business priority with a proven link between customer satisfaction, retention and profitability. Indeed, Aberdeen Group recently reported that organisations that reached a 90 per cent plus customer satisfaction rate achieved an annual 6.1 per cent in service growth, 3.7 per cent growth in overall revenue and an 89 per cent level of customer retention.[1] With approximately 78 per cent of UK GDP derived from the services sector[2], customer service is becoming increasingly recognised as a strategic issue and, according to the Institute of Customer Service, if organisations do not include it in the boardroom then some of those businesses won’t be around in the longer term.

The growing importance of customer service

Tom Gorman, president of opXL, LLC and a field service expert believes that the goal of field service excellence is to respond quickly to customer needs, whatever they may be and it takes four criteria to meet this goal: Be on time; allow enough time to do the job; have the right skills; and bring the right equipment.

The most common customer complaint is when a technician does not resolve the issue first time. This may be due to not having the right part or tools, not having the right skills or not enough time to complete the job[3]. Considering 25 per cent of service calls require a follow-up visit, the result of not achieving a first-time fix can be detrimental. Indeed, Aberdeen Group report that companies not meeting a 50 per cent first-time fix rate and requiring a return visit reported revenues dropping by nearly 3 per cent.

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. 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. Aberdeen’s research found that the Best-in-Class (the top 20 per cent) performers had mean success ratios of 92 per cent for meeting response or project completion deadlines and 88 per cent for first-time fixes.

What matters most to customers?

According to Jo Causon from the Institute of Customer Service, there are five key areas which matter most to customers:

• Well trained and professional staff members who are genuinely empowered to do their jobs.... are the people that interact with customers professional and empathetic with emotional intelligence and business acumen?
• How easy is the organisation to do business with... does the business make it easy for me to interact with them across all channels?
• Product and service quality...Does the product or service do what is expected?
• Problem resolution.... how are any issues resolved? This is not just about the outcome but also includes the way the process is managed.
• And timeliness...care needs to be taken when managing customer expectations about the timescale in which products or services can be delivered. It is absolutely critical to match and manage customer expectations.[/unordered_list]

The strategic importance of the field service worker

The role of the field service operative has changed dramatically over recent years; shifting from one of operational necessity to strategic significance. Why this change? Because with the rise in use of automated booking systems, for example, and with the growing trend of machine to machine (M2M) capability allowing applications to provide preventative and predictive analytics, the field technician’s visit to the customer may be the first and only exposure a customer has to the company’s brand and service delivery.

Jo Causon, chief executive of the Institute of Customer Service:

“The biggest change we have seen in customer service, is the move from a transactional economy to the relationship economy where value lies in one-to-one interactions and service leaders prevail in the marketplace. A ‘personalised service for many’ and a dialogue approach, as opposed to the traditional monologue, is now desired. This power shift has come about, partly due to technology and the rise of social media, but also because you and I, as customers, want to be much more engaged in the customer experience.”

“Looking ahead, demand for staff who have desirable attitudes and attributes for customer service will increase. In particular, there will be a stronger focus on the importance of emotional intelligence as an enabler to deal with the wide variety of changing customer service relationships and interactions.[4]”

Social media given power to the consumer

How do you build relationships with so many, while personalising the interaction? This dialogue approach is a major management issue but one which can, in part, be addressed through the use of social media.

Social media channels have given power to the consumer like never before. We now take to Twitter and Facebook to communicate with organisations about our customer experience, with many of us expecting rapid responses to our queries and complaints. It is therefore vital that organisations not only have a social media presence but have clear messaging via social channels and teams empowered to conduct social media interactions with customers in a rapid and flexible way.

Who owns the customer experience?

According to the Institute of Customer Service, having somebody on the board who has overall responsibility for the customer experience is essential and that somebody needs to be the CEO. The customer service strategy is integral to the business strategy, and the board needs to lead on this.

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Managing a field service operation in today’s marketplace is not an easy feat and there are many barriers that need to be overcome and steps that need to be taken in order to execute a perfect workday. Trimble FSM's Mark Forrest explains how this can be achieved. 

With customer expectations at an all-time high, the pressure to deliver the best service performance has never been higher and it is a clear objective for any field service company that wants to remain competitive. However, budget constraints have led businesses having to achieve service excellence with fewer resources, resulting in meeting SLA Commitments, providing short appointment windows and ensuring the ‘first time fix’ that much harder to achieve.

When it comes to managing a field operation and achieving the perfect workday, it is often supposed that knowing each vehicle’s position would be at the heart of the solution. However, it isn’t where the vehicles are that’s important, its where the engineer or field service worker is and what they are doing that is of paramount concern, as ultimately they are the ones providing the service to the end customer.

So executing  a ‘perfect’ mobile workday may be a rarity as field service workers are regularly faced with obstacles often out of their control. For example, jobs may overrun as they turn out to be more complicated than first thought, emergency work may come in which changes the day’s schedule or traffic congestion and vehicle breakdown can cause delays or failure to meet an appointment. Additionally, with workers calling in sick, starting late or getting lost; all these factors can impact adversely on the productivity of the workforce. With much field-based work becoming increasingly mission-critical in terms of timing, skills and consequence more importantly than ever companies need to ensure that their field service is not derailed by unpredictable dynamics of the working day.

Achieve your perfect work schedule

In a recent survey by The Service Council, nearly half of organisations highlighted their interest in broader investments in field service in the next 12-24 months[1]. Developments in Work Management technologies, for field services, have come to the fore as solutions able to transform the way in which work is performed, through intelligent scheduling tools and advanced performance analytics. This capability provides the stepping stones needed to help organisations measure, manage and improve their operations through optimising resources, offering real-time visibility and monitoring and giving warning of tasks at risk or showing the impact of work allocation decisions.

Such capabilities helps to increase the profitability of service delivery as it allows the field service manager to schedule tasks to meet SLAs, produce efficient routes to reduce travel time, fuel costs and overtime and ensures work is only given to those with the right skills.

Many organisations schedule tasks based on a technician’s allocated territory, however selecting the most knowledgeable technician, or one who has the right tools or parts in their vehicle, is also crucial. 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. AberdeenGroup[2] found that intelligence is at the heart of scheduling with over half of organisations using service performance data to evaluate the effectiveness of scheduling criteria.

Self-learner tools help with intelligent scheduling. They incorporate an algorithm that quickly learns preferences for each mobile worker and will allocate tasks accordingly. This includes geography (which mobile workers normally service particular areas) and skill (learns what skills mobile workers have and to what degree they are qualified to do particular types of work).The first step to managing productivity requires field service managers to get the right people with the right skills with the right assets to the right place within a set time and the self-learner tool significantly helps in achieving this.

Optimise productivity to achieve quality of service through greater business intelligence

It is important to remember that technology is purely an enabler and measuring the effectiveness of technology is just as important as the initial install. It is the management information and performance management analysis and how this is used that is fundamental in meeting business targets. A survey by the Service Council confirmed that performance management and visibility was a major area of concern in field service. Reassuringly, developments in workforce management technology have begun to offer a solution to these concerns.

Performance Management Analytics (PMA) provides field service managers with the visibility to analyse the productivity of their fleet operations. For example, scheduling statistics for individual workers can be recorded from the start of the day and compared with the position at the end of the day. Based on actual location data, easily digestible performance reports can be generated and customised to showcase the key metrics of a field operation. These can range from if the quality of service has been met/failed, utilisation (total time vs. time spent on tasks), efficiency (actual vs. estimated task duration), total tasks completed, total fuel usage and total distance travelled.

By adopting PMA the field service manager is provided with the visibility to identify what is preventing the company from doing more jobs and able to identify gaps in the working day where mobile workers could be utilised elsewhere.

An additional capability of the technology is that it provides the field service manager with the ability to learn from day-to-day experiences. Data can be collected about the trends in the field, the type of jobs that overrun, the number of commitments met and the performance of individual and groups of service workers. If, for example, a service worker takes 40 minutes for a particular task whereas the average for others is two hours, then is that worker cutting corners or are they simply an outstanding employee? Conversely, if taking two hours as opposed to 40 minutes then do they need additional training?

Such integration not only ensures that all relevant stakeholders across different business units have the salient information they need to manage the daily performance of the organisation, but the performance analysis also helps feed into strategic business planning on targets, budgets and resourcing.

Ultimately, the capabilities provided by Work Management technologies overcomes the business challenges field service companies have been faced with for years. How do I know what is really happening in my field service operations? How do I know that what my workers say they are doing is true? How can I get more jobs done per day? What prevents me from doing more work? How good is the quality of service? How effectively are resources being met? Taking a holistic approach across field operations and obtaining visibility into the work in its entirety is essential and the business intelligence provided by Work Management technology achieves this, suggesting that the old adage of ‘you cannot manage what you cannot measure’ certainly rings true.

To find out how to achieve your perfect workday, demonstration videos are available, featuring Aubrey Fox, Work Management Product Manager for Trimble Field Service Management:

Performance Analytics - http://www.youtube.com/embed/bIjrXqG60KE

Scheduling and Optimisation - http://www.youtube.com/embed/cFO__9_IK-g

Big Data is a buzz word making its rounds across a variety of industries and the field service sector is no exception. Gartner defines Big Data as high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.

Over the last 10 years, field service organisations have become overwhelmed by the relentless flow of information coming in from multiple sources, in various formats and through an array of tools. For example, in a typical field service business data will be coming in from GPS and vehicle-tracking systems, telematics, fleet management and workforce management. Merging and organising this ‘Big Data’ is so difficult that, in most businesses, it ends up sitting unused in applications and databases. However, many are now beginning to realise its sleeping intelligence and that they need to tap in to it to help make more informed business decisions.

The major challenge they face is how to make sense of the massive amounts of data they collect daily and tame this flow in order to extract valuable insights to help hone day-to-day operations and make long-term strategic decisions.

Performance Management Analytics (PMA) has come to the fore as a solution able to tackle the Big Data challenge. PMA provides field service managers with the visibility to analyse the productivity of their field service operations. For instance, the tool can help reduce unauthorised stops, minimise excessive speeding and idling, increase the number of jobs performed daily, and improve response times.

The Big Data Opportunity for Field Service

The ability to make sense of data can make the difference between a business that is good enough and one that stands out from the pack. When a company figures out how to review historical data about itself, identify patterns, and compile metrics and statistics to determine which assets and employees are the most productive, it can use those insights for predictive analysis and better business decisions.

The reward is higher customer satisfaction and profits. In a study commissioned by Trimble, The Road Ahead: The Future of Field Service Delivery, 80% of managers surveyed cited customer satisfaction as their top priority. A 2012 Aberdeen report highlighted the importance of customer satisfaction, finding that organisations with ratings of 90% or higher successfully retained at least 90% of customers, while those with ratings of 50% or lower retained only 26%.

Big data can play a major role here. Field service organisations that have deployed GPS, fleet and workforce management technologies already have the tools that help make sense of the information and make decisions to improve customer satisfaction. To accomplish this effectively, field service organisations must set specific goals, such as reducing overtime through route optimisation and cutting fuel costs through GPS tracking and fleet management systems.

Capture and Analysis

So much information flows back into dispatch centres and offices of field services organisations that letting it go unused actually hurts the business. Distilled properly, information through GPS, telematics, fleet management and workforce management tools provide concrete, actionable details, giving managers and dispatchers real-time visibility into fleet activities.

Systems set up to capture in-day exceptions, for instance, can save a company thousands of pounds by catching bad driver habits such as fueling cars with premium instead of regular fuel, making unscheduled stops, and ignoring pre-set routes optimised for time and fuel-savings.

Fleet and workforce management systems give managers the ability to review a day’s work and measure performance results against company standards. By leveraging Performance Management Analytics (PMA) tools, managers can identify top performers, determine which schedules and routes produce the best results, and compare results from one vehicle or worker against the entire fleet.

Performance analysis can also help with job assignments, helping managers match the skills of field technicians to specific service calls. This increases the prospect of first-time case resolution. According to Aberdeen, 26% of field visits fail to resolve the problem, requiring follow-up visits, and frustrating customers.

Telematics solutions can capture a wealth of useful information, from mechanical and emissions to driver safety habits, all of which can be collected and organised into easily digestible reports. Analytics reports, for example, can leverage telematics to provide stakeholders with information in easy-to-read, relevant snapshots highlighting operational areas that need immediate attention.

The basis of telematics was originally location, but location is now merely an enabling tool for a plethora of complex business applications. Analytics now let customers see everything from the most profitable jobs to success rates in meeting appointment times.  We’re moving towards an era of ‘super information’ delivered by telematics which will see the impact of the technology surge.

Immediate and Long-term Benefits

With big data, knowledge leads to action. A field service manager who knows which drivers have bad habits is better equipped to evaluate those drivers, act to correct their behaviour and schedule training for individuals who need it. Up-to-date information on the health of vehicles leads to better maintenance, which in turn leads to safer vehicles, improved fuel consumption and less wear and tear.

Likewise, the ability to collect real-time information on traffic through GPS tracking empowers dispatchers to make decisions on the fly to change routes and avoid congestion. AVL (automatic vehicle location) and real-time information on the distance between customer stops leads to routing and schedule optimisation.

Those are the immediate benefits, but understanding big data also brings long-term advantages, as companies engage in strategic planning based on historical patterns and predictive analysis. Thanks to big data, organisations can conduct predictive analysis for more accurate planning. For example, for companies focusing on repair, using historical data about when a part is most likely to fail, enable them to do better planning for the future. This is called preventative maintenance, fixing or changing a part even before it fails. Furthermore, adjusting resources, modifying schedules, planning vehicle purchases and forecasting hiring needs become less about guessing and more about precise, well-researched planning. And that’s why field organisations need to take control of their information.

 

Manage the unexpected out of the mobile work day

With customer expectations at an all-time high in an increasingly competitive marketplace, the pressure for field service businesses to deliver best-in-class performance has never been higher. Providing excellent service delivery is a clear priority and for the mobile worker, their importance has shifted from one of operational necessity to strategic value.

With a number of obstacles to contend with out of the control of the technician, may it be traffic congestion or vehicle breakdown, there is never a ‘perfect’ mobile work day. But with work becoming increasingly mission-critical, companies need to ensure that their field service is not derailed by unpredictable dynamics of the working day. A technician is only as good as the tools he has to work with so the support of a solution to manage work efficiently and effectively is of the utmost importance to achieving service delivery excellence.

Trimble’s ‘Road Ahead’ report unveiled that customer satisfaction is ranked as the number one priority for field service businesses and 49 per cent of respondents agreed that the latest field-based technology would help them achieve their goals. Many operations directors see technology as an enabler with 41 per cent stating they will invest in workforce planning and investment and 44 per cent see planning and scheduling as the greatest opportunity for investment.

Investment in technology in the form of work management solutions provide far reaching benefits including:

• Increase productivity up to 30% with intelligent, in-day scheduling
• Improve dispatch efficiency by up to 60%
• Decrease drive time and mileage by up to20% per job
• Reduce overtime expenses by up to 70%

Take control of the unpredictable work day

Industries which run field service operations are often mission critical in what they do and require skilled staff to execute compliance focused work which is often variable and complex (location and task). The perfect mobile workday would start off with all employees reporting for work on time, there will be plenty of spare capacity for daily tasks, all vehicles will be operational, all recipients will be available and no drivers will come across any traffic delays or vehicle breakdowns. However this is rarely a reality and contending with these issues head on is the first step to maintaining a consistent and sustainable flow of productivity across field service operations.

The first step to managing productivity requires field service managers to get the right people with the right skills with the right assets to the right place within a set time. Performance management is vital and a modern work management solution can assist with this. It provides real-time job status of each mobile worker as well as alerts for proactively managing productivity. For example, if a job is in jeopardy of being missed due to such circumstances as a technician being caught in traffic, a vehicle breaks down or a customer emergency comes up, work management solutions automatically highlight this and can adjust schedules and reassign work to meet the new requirements.

Furthermore, managers must be able to look at the total number of jobs attended per day per technician as well as being able to view the utilisation of their technicians, ie: the amount of time spent on work as opposed to transit or idle time, to avoid falling into the trap of having more work than there are resources. Work management solutions provide the capabilities of comparing planned vs. actual work done per day/shift and communicate to mobile workers via a laptop or smart phone so they can view work details, provide current work status and receive work assignments without returning to the office.

Prioritise on-time performance and create a mission critical culture

The cost to businesses of missed or late appointments affect them more now than they used to, as customers increasingly expect more for less, happy to shop around for services and, with the growth of social media, are much more able and likely to share their experiences of poor customer service. This is largely down to global companies such as Amazon and Tesco having set new expectations for reliable, quick and cheap service delivery, such as providing one-hour delivery slots. This has lead many companies, especially those that need to carry out a more complex and skilled service, such as boiler installations or fixing electrical problems, struggling to seek new ways to keep up with demand whilst remaining profitable and competitive.

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. Research by Aberdeen group revealed 65% of incoming service requests require a field visit or a dispatch and nearly 26% of these dispatches fail to resolve the problem, requiring secondary or additional follow-up visits. AberdeenGroup also report that that 57 per cent of organisations say that their biggest customer complaint is that the technician does not resolve the issue first time. This may be due to not having the right part or tools, not having the right skills or not enough time to complete the job.[1]

Issues like this can be avoided if companies focus on ‘processing productivity’ by taking a bird’s eye view of the end-to-end process. They need to know what the problem is, who is qualified to solve it, notify them of the task, know where they are, when they will arrive and when the job is done. Taking these necessary steps to avoid a return visit, by making sure a qualified technician with the right tools and parts for the job is sent, will maintain productivity and ensure customer satisfaction. Aberdeen’s research found that Best-in-Class (the top 20%) performers had mean success ratios of 92% for meeting response or project completion deadlines, 88% for first-time fixes, and 83% for workforce utilisation.

The power of work management

Work Management solutions can greatly improve first time fix rates. Not only do they allocate the right worker, with the right skills, for the right job but back-end logistics like drive-time, route-booking, expected time of visit, and allotted time for the job are all analysed for efficiency, leaving staff with the information and time they need to do their jobs.

Furthermore, 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.

The information managers can take from the analysed data that the solution can provide is significant. For example, they can analyse the time it takes a certain technician to do a job compared to another. If the time difference varies significantly they can determine if one is cutting corners to complete a job or if he/she has found a better way to do it more efficiently.   This analysis helps with the challenge all businesses face in how to balance service and cost.

More and more extreme weather events are occurring around the globe and the UK in particular has experienced a strengthening in the severity of extreme weather over the past few years. In recent days we have seen terrible and tragic after-effects of severer weather in The Philippines and Sardinia. Only a few weeks ago we saw southern England brought to a standstill as hurricane-force winds and torrential rain battered the region with gusts of almost 100mph ripping up trees, causing flash flooding and leaving at least 220,000 homes without power.

The severity of extreme weather events varies.  Sometimes the damage is limited but in some cases, and indeed following today’s events, there is widespread damage such as flooded basements, broken gas lines, impassable roads and interruptions in cable and phone service.

There is a lot of pressure on field service organisations to respond to these disasters. Road-clearing crews and utility workers, for instance, get dispatched as soon as the situation permits. Plumbers, electricians, construction workers and HVAC technicians are sent to the scene to reconnect services and rebuild damaged structures.

Telematics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping, GPS and cellular communications have been playing an increasing role in guiding field service teams, tracking progress and assigning workers in the aftermath of extreme weather events where safety is a concern. As an increasing number of organisations take advantage of these technologies they are becoming more sophisticated, offering new ways to be efficient and responsive.

Field service technology for the unexpected

An increasing number of Field Service organisations are adopting next-generation workforce management solutions which leverage Fleet Management technology and GPS data to deliver real-time information about worker and vehicle locations and the progress of their work. It provides dynamic scheduling tools to optimise in-day and scheduled work, and performance analytics that help make on-the-spot resource deployment decisions as well as prepare for future events.

The technology provides dispatchers and managers full visibility into work in the field so they can better plan and track the work. Centralised consoles and dynamic GIS maps offer real-time visibility on crew locations. A dispatcher knows exactly when a worker(s) arrive at a job, how long they spend there, and when they leave. So when an assignment is completed, the dispatcher can send the crew to the next task in a smarter, more efficient way and, rather than sending a crew across town for the next assignment, the dispatcher looks on the digital map to see where the nearest job is. Shorter distances between jobs mean less time traveling and more time restoring service.

The technology also collects data on the experience and preferences of workers. If a field worker is more familiar than others with a certain area of town, it makes sense to send that worker to assignments there because the worker already knows back roads, shortcuts and the general lay of the land. In addition, next-generation workforce management solutions feature self-learning tools that “learn” workers’ preferences on geography and types of tasks, which helps fine-tune the assignment of workers to needed tasks. It also helps to reduce overtime costs, travel time and missed assignments.

As the workday progresses, managers and dispatchers receive a constant stream of information on GPS location coordinates and the amount of time spent on each assignment. If certain roads are impassable, dispatchers can plan alternative routes to avoid delays. Using fleet management, dispatchers can route drivers around roads shut by fallen trees or flooding. This helps optimise routing and worker productivity, while improving worker safety.

When workforce management is in use, an exception management tool takes note of when tasks are at risk of being missed and a customer may be in danger and not receiving critical service. Alerts are sent to dispatchers about such situations and other scheduling issues so that they can react and reassign field teams as needed.

Future planning

Beyond field situations, workforce management delivers analytics about the performance and responsiveness of each worker and team. Organisations compile the data into reports for review to spot trends and the need for improvements. For instance, if crews took too long to arrive, managers can better plan standby crews for future situations.

Use of analytical data helps improve productivity, making it possible to complete more jobs per day, and helps control costs. For field service organisations, squeezing more jobs into one day in the aftermath of a disaster accelerates the resumption of operations, which helps to minimise lost revenue and bring employees back to work more quickly. It also creates goodwill among customers, who often get frustrated when service restoration takes too long, especially after a storm or strong winds.

Workforce management increases accountability as well, by collecting accurate, reliable information on field operations and associated costs. Managers are better equipped to make the right decisions regarding resource deployment during emergencies and on a daily basis. Beyond that, organisations that base decisions on accurate, meaningful information that reveals historical patterns, trends and metrics can respond more effectively to not only day-to-day tasks but to the next storm, flood, heat wave or blizzard.

International examples

The municipal utility in Anderson, IN, USA has adopted Trimble Field Management, a GPS-based field services management technology. Before that, when ice storms, blizzards or thunderstorms pulled down power lines in Anderson, the utility department tracked its crews by making phone calls and writing their positions on a chalkboard. “When there were storms, the board looked like a chess game. Now, we know exactly where each vehicle is and can schedule repairs by a truck’s proximity to the outage,” says Jason Tuck, GIS consultant and former GIS Manager for Anderson Municipal Power & Light Division. “We can see our trucks real-time on a map and make faster and more confident decisions because we know their locations are more accurate.”

The public works department in Brookline, USA, can immediately respond to stranded crews by tracking their progress constantly. “Now if there’s a snowstorm and a truck breaks down, we know exactly where to find it and the driver,” says Mark Parece, the town’s fleet manager.

At White Mountain Oil & Propane, North Conway, NH, Trimble Fleet Management technology has proven invaluable in such cases. “Managers can receive off-hours service or emergency calls (when dispatch is closed), log in, and in a minute know exactly where the problem is and send help,” says Todd Miller, the company’s manager of administration. This can be lifesaving when power outages from an ice storm or blizzard leave the elderly or families stranded in freezing temperatures without heat.