AUTHOR ARCHIVES: Nick Frank

Nick Frank, Managing partner at Si2 Partners explores an important topic in the face of an ageing workforce crisis - how to make your brand an attractive prospect for the growing Millennial workforce...

Today, brands pervade our lives – be it food, clothes, shoes or phones - and drive the value of companies, particularly on the stock market.

The brand value of Samsung Electronics (ranked No.6 on Interbrand’s “Best Global Brands 2017”) is $56.2 billion – while for Small Medium Enterprises, their sales turnover and assets generally create their value. In either case, the value of your employer brand has an impact on many areas, including your ability to deliver growth opportunities, to hire the right talent, as well retention.

Understanding the new workforce in this regard will be critical for your Talent Management efforts – Sarah Gibbons wrote “I’m a millennial, and I embody a lot of the clichéd things you’ve heard about the generation: the frivolous wanderlust, the tattoos, the addiction to Instagram, and one pretty powerful behavioural trend – the insistence on ethical substance and integrity from brands, or in other words, choosing to make mostly idealistic purchase decisions. Without a socially conscious framework, your brand means nothing to me or many of my millennial cohort, and without capturing the millennial market, you’ll never amass the army of brand advocates you need to partake of the nearly $200 billion in millennial-driven sales each year”.

Unlike many of their Consumer driven organisations like Coca-Cola, many Manufacturing Service companies being technical driven do not focus on this critical area so this article aims to provide some assistance in what to consider.

However what is an employer brand?

It is the internal and external perception of your company. It is often not a single ‘something’ that drives the perception. For example, the belief you have in the Apple brand starts with the shop you visit and the service they provide. The decision to purchase a wonderfully designed product is only reinforced when it works well, and by the reception and quality of the phone. If something does not work, you take note of how Apple deals with maintenance or the return policy. This end-to-end experience drives a belief in you and it is the belief that drives your behaviour - a positive belief will have you returning to buy more Apple products.

It is critical that you develop and communicate workplace expectations internally - what is acceptable and what is notIn the same way, a person experiences how a company responds to and leads their employees.

This will be communicated to others and of course, will influence whether people are retained or if they will look elsewhere for a brand they want to work for.

So, what can you do to build a strong employer brand? There are many actions that can be taken to grow or strengthen your employer brand, and the energy exerted will be driven by how seriously you wish to be taken and how important your employer brand is to the delivery of business opportunities.

Our goal here is not to overload you with the many actions that can help, but to share what I consider to be the critical few – 3 simple things you can do irrespective of the size of your organisation.

First, it is critical that you develop and communicate workplace expectations internally - what is acceptable and what is not. In developing the expectations, try to reflect the organisation you want to be and the people you wish to hire and retain. For example, as a software company, you will inevitably hire younger generations.

When a leader is seen as driving the right behaviours, share their success, its impact on team morale and the impact on the organisation’s growthHaving flexible work hours and dress codes will help you, as these are important attributes today! However, frankly, these are the easy wins – expectations around leadership style and development of the team will carry far more weight and will be shared amongst top talent more than the hygiene factors.

The second step is to reinforce and redirect workforce behaviours. When a leader is seen as driving the right behaviours, share their success, its impact on team morale and the impact on the organisation’s growth. Equally, when a leader does not drive the right behaviour, they need to be told and redirected to what is expected. If this leader is permitted to continue with their unacceptable behaviour, it will undermine your employer brand building efforts.

The most important contributor to your employer brand is for the leadership team to view it as equally important as product brand value. In the great brands I have worked for, I can remember very clearly the good and great leaders who absolutely represented the brands they led.

They made me proud to work there, valued my contributions, reminded me of my obligations to the employer brand in what they said, but most importantly in what they did.

Value your employer brand as much as your company/product brand. Set expectations, hold people to these expectations, and always walk the talk.The real employer brand is defined in the moment when an employee issue raises itself in the workplace. Is the company compassionate, caring or mechanistic in its HR actions? The rest of the workforce watch, as this will define exactly the company they work for.

In summary, value your employer brand as much as your company/product brand. Set expectations, hold people to these expectations, and always walk the talk.

Companies, as well as people, define themselves every day by what they say and, more importantly, do. There’s no doubt - great employer brands built with this in mind will attract and retain top talent.

For more information on ‘Building your Employer Brand’, contact Dag Gronevik or Nick Frank at info@si2partners.com or call +44 208 144 6452.

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Nick Frank & Dag Gronevik of Si2 Partners explore the importance of face to face contact in management and ask if more business leaders should consider moving away from traditional training methodologies towards more free-flowing, dialogue based means of communication within their teams...

Winston Churchill stated ‘Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war’ This great leader understood that people can be influenced in two ways: either their minds have been opened or their heart broken. Opening minds requires talk, exchange of views and reflection. The ‘fear’ alternative of forcing conformity through hierarchies is in the long term destructive.

As a leader, what’s your style? Jaw Jaw or War War?

In today’s world this is a serious issue, as business leaders struggle to keep up with the technology whirlwind that is engulfing every aspect of our lives.

Leaders need to figure out how they adapt to the changing environment around them and in particular how their organisations and people can evolve.

Traditionalists tell their people they must change, offering incentives, assuming that people know exactly what is expected of them. Most people recognise that in world of the millennial and the internet, this approach is becoming less effective. Human beings are a contrary lot and cannot be told how to THINK. But how they THINK can be influenced by what we SAY and what we DO.

As Churchill knew, the way to change is to talk without fear of conflict.

In our own experience as business leaders, we have always placed a strong focus on communication, and in particular on meeting our people eye-ball to eye-ball. In hindsight the easy part is to meet, but how to turn this into true engagement?

In management speak, leaders turn to techniques such as ‘Off-Site’ meetings, ‘work shops’ or 1 on 1’s.

However, having worked as business leaders ourselves and now providing expert support to others, it is clear that to be successful, leaders must transfer control and responsibility to the team to find the solution for themselves.

 

Bluntly put, it means stop using PowerPoint material and similar to control direction (& remember details) and instead, start to think on your feet to develop free flowing yet structured debates. This is an approach many business leaders do not feel comfortable with, but it is critical if you want to engage people to change.

We call this slightly chaotic yet structured approach to group problem solving the ‘Boot Camp’. It is where a cross section of different individuals come together as a team to solve complex problems where the solution is not clear to all. It’s not meant to be a comfortable cosy environment, but one where everyone is challenged to find solutions under time pressure.

But how to achieve this outcome? There are at least five key areas to focus on:

[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1. Problem Definition and Outcomes: It may sound an obvious starting point, but clearly defining the problem, the business context and the expected outcome, is key to bringing smart people together to solve problems. In our experience don’t be afraid to take your time in this process, as it is the start of aligning your teams thinking and language behind a common challenge. Be very grounded in your approach so people find it relevant to their roles. A good way to think about the context is to define what is working in the business, and then what is not working. Break the problem into 4-5 related discussions about real tangible issues your team faces. In our experiences, the more tangible you make the discussion through use cases and everyday examples, the more you will channel the energy of your team towards the outcome you desire.
2. Generate Energy and Curiosity: This is where preparation really pays off. From the way you prime and prepare the participants, to the environment in which you work, all will help you engage interest and action. Most important is to remember that energy comes from people who talk and are active in the debate. Avoid lengthy detailed power points, in fact try to do without. Not using supporting material requires far more detailed preparation, but the result is an environment where the conversation, discussion and decision making, seem to effortlessly move towards your objectives.

3. Debate and Create: It’s when people are talking that they can create solutions together. Plan out the types of discussions and debate, which will move the participants towards your goal. Create opportunities where people can engage with each other. Bring in external perspectives to challenge thinking and the current paradigm. Invite input from customers or suppliers to build focus and urgency. Above all do not be afraid to alter the agenda as you move through the process.

   As long as you have a very clear view on the outcomes you expect, you can flex the conversation to suit the circumstances and the energy of the participants.

4.  Create Allies: It’s important to remember that building relationships will magnify the leaders impact on the business. Avoid the ‘yes, but’ syndrome and emphasise the positive. It is the alliances and relationships that are built that are critical to your success. No one person can change an organisation. Getting to the key influencers through creating a critical mass of thinking is vital.

5. Articulate Results: Great conversation will come to little, unless it is captured and channelled into actions. It is extremely powerful when the participants articulate the outcomes and present to senior management team. This brings focus to the collaboration, as well as a bit of edge to your event.[/ordered_list]

If you would like to know more about the Boot Camp process that helps you create engagement and commitment to tough business problems, please contact Nick Frank or Dag Gronevik through info@Si2partners.com

 

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Nick Frank, Founder of Si2 partners outlines some fundamental steps that field service organisations can take to ensure their field service technicians hit the holy grail status of ‘trusted advisor'

In Field Service we have heard a lot about the undoubted benefits of developing the Trusted Advisor skill set, but very little on how leaders can achieve this goal. It is about time we looked at this journey from the perspective of the service technician, what kind of behaviours we expect of them and the support that they need.

In my experience, there are four key elements that enable a service professional to develop into a Trusted Advisor.

1. Fix yourself first!

The key to providing excellent customer care is to first know you! What you are good at, where you struggle and how you generally interact with others. Know this and you can start to develop some of the behaviours and capabilities needed to be a Trusted Advisor. Most important is to learn to be customer centred. In any interaction with your customers, a good rule of thumb is that the communication should be 2/3 the customer and 1/3 yourself. The customer must be allowed to explain their situation and expected outcomes.

The service provider should focus on questions that clarify the situation, take the actions required to address the concerns or issues, or explain the benefits of what has been done.

However, just being customer centred is not good enough. We have to know ourselves well enough to keep our emotions in check to stay assertive and solution focussed through the customer interaction.

2. Understand the business goals

The key reason for developing the Trusted Advisor skill set is to support our companies growth. This is not about being nice!! It’s about building a relationship where customers are open to a conversation on maximising value from their equipment. Tech companies such as Oracle have been starting to see this form of ‘Customer Success’ management as a key organisation capability, but it is equally important to equipment manufacturers.

To be able to deliver on this goal, service team members need to understand:

• How the business makes money and their contribution to that process.
• The expectations on them as a Trusted Advisor and where on the Support to Sales continuum we want them to be. This is key! One of the major reasons these initiatives can fail is that the service technician feels they have to sell, which can quickly destroy the ‘trust’ in the relationship. This is when communication and re-enforcement of the message is critical to success.
• The wider business offerings the company provides and the value they can bring to the customer
• In your industry, what does the customer really value and trust.[/unordered_list]

3. Fix the Customer

Only when you understand yourself and the customer, are you ready to act as a Trusted Advisor. There are some helpful guidelines that really can help technicians do an excellent job.

• Make sure there is a clear process and expectation for the customer interaction. For example I have heard many service managers use the mantra; ‘Fix yourself, Fix the customer, Fix the situation’
• Develop communication skills required to be successful such as ‘Active Listening’ to develop empathy with the customer, ‘Talk well’ to quickly identify the issue and ‘Develop Rapport’ to build the relationship.
• Make it easy to accesses information on the customer such as problem & upgrade history, BOM, visits and orders.
• Provide tools and training that helps technicians identify pain points and articulate the value of different options the customer might have.
• Provide a clear path to closing the sale that does not compromise the relationship. In most customer environments, trust is created because there is not a sales discussion but a benefits discussion. To close the sale, the Technician needs to have a very easy process that allows the customer to take the next steps without feeling they have been pressured. Generally this is either a lead generation process where inside sales will follow up and close the opportunity, or it might be the availability of a fast and easy order placement to satisfy the need for ‘low value’ orders.[/unordered_list]

4. Motivation - Practice makes Perfect

But how to ensure motivation? Some people are motivated by money and some are more motivated by solving the customer’s problems (generally technicians). There is no right or wrong answer, it all depends on your people and what makes them tick. Whatever direction you choose, you should make sure that the Trusted Advisor role is embedded in their job profile through balanced performance measures. Another important facet to motivation is to share best practices and experiences with colleagues.

Have senior technicians coach or mentor the more junior. Use direct customer feedback insights and processes to demonstrate that Trusted Advisor behaviour does make a real difference to customer’s satisfaction and loyalty.

Developing Trusted Advisor capability in your team is very much a management art. So gaining different perspectives from internal and external colleagues is extremely important as you raise self-awareness, discover the secrets of consultative selling, coaching and best practices.

If you would like more practical advice on how to get the most from your service operation, you can contact Nick Frank at nick.frank@si2partners.com

 

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Nick Frank, Founding Partner with Si2 Partners explains why profitable long term growth comes from having the right people in the right place at the right time and why technology although important, usually plays a secondary role...

In todays fast moving world this might be an “off- message” statement, but the truth is that it is still people who deliver profits. As a result creating ‘High Performance Teams’ or what some call the ‘Self Learning’ organisation has become a priority in staying competitive within the new digital economy.

Sustainable improvement requires a commitment to learning.

In successful organisations, this is embedded in the DNA of its people which drives themselves forward to deliver results that makes the real difference.

How does your team measure up? Perhaps a good place to start is to review how your teams manage problems and the language they use. Most technically orientated organisations pride themselves on solving problems.

Ironically, too strong an emphasis on problem solving does not necessarily drive the customer-orientated behaviours we are looking for. Problems are in fact very static, with a focus on past events.

If organisations are not careful, problems become a blame game, concentrating on why things cannot be done. ‘Yes but……’ is a phrase that become endemic within the organisations way of doing things. However, problems are also the life-blood of innovation, in that they can create a focal point for organisations to rally around.

 

The resulting solutions are often focused on customers, are dynamic in nature and focused on the future. The language of solutions concentrates on ‘Yes and…’, seeking possibilities and opportunities. It is in fact solution thinking that really drives the organisation forward in creating competitive advantage.

A self learning organisation is one that has the rigour to identify and quantify problems, yet the discipline to shift to solution thinking, develop forward momentum and achieve results.

This problem-solution-problem-solution learning loop sounds fairly straight forward, but actually requires a level of management maturity that is often surprisingly missing from many organisations.

As Winston Churchill pointed out, learning is all about engagement: “Where my reason, imagination or interest were not engaged, I would not or could not learn”

So how do we go about creating a culture of ‘self learning’, which is deeply embedded in the corporate DNA. In most businesses, focussing on two important aspects of organisations can really make a difference. The first is a strong vision of what the company is all about, why it is there, what it is trying to achieve for its customers and how.

More important than the vision statement’s words, is the way that it is communicated.

Successful communication comes from:

1. Targeting your message: For example Field Service Techs have very different drivers from their Product Sales colleagues.
2. Augmenting logical reasoning with an emotional appeal that inspires employees to do things differently.

The second aspect is Values.

A company’s values are the core of its culture. While a vision articulates a company’s purpose, values offer a set of guidelines on the behaviours and mindsets needed to achieve that vision. While many companies find their values revolve around a few simple topics (employees, clients, professionalism), the originality of those values is less important than their authenticity.

Developing a culture that is aligned to values and vision is what provides people with a purpose, and this is the key to facilitating innovation.

Organisations that successfully create a self-learning environment typically start to see:

• Problem being solved systematically
• Experimentation with new approaches to work
• Learning from other companies and a focus on customers solutions
• Greater knowledge transfer through out the organisation
• An acceptance that change is normal and to be embraced

To get the ball rolling does not necessarily require large complex change projects. For example at Amazon, every person who wants to pitch a new idea to the management, is asked to describe it as a press release written on the day that the idea is launched. This press release, together with a list of ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ is what Amazon executives use to judge whether there is real value in the innovation.

This relatively simple idea forces everyone to focus on outcomes and solutions.

And if leaders ‘do what they say!’, then these practices and thinking, can become part of an organisations DNA.

 

So if you sense that your teams are struggling to execute on new opportunities that are arising in this digital age, or are becoming to focused on problems and falling into the blame game, then perhaps it is time to think about how you can evolve the dynamics of your organisation.

Using a 3rd party to help leaders gain new perspectives can be useful, because people listen more to a new voice. However, at the end of the day it is the Leadership at all levels in the organisation who by taking reasonably simple steps can set expectations, ‘Walk the Talk!’ and move the organisation on.

Nick can be contacted on nick.frank@Si2partners.com. Si2 ON-Demand is a unique advisory and support service that enables top performing leaders to solve problems and get things done, quickly, easily and cost effectively.

 

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The key to digital transformation for field service organisations lies in people and not technology writes Nick Frank of Si2 Partners...

“The rate of increase of industrial devices being connected to the internet is up 25% per year, but customers don’t really appreciate how the capabilities and benefits of the IoT are relevant to their business’

So says Dave Hammond, Product Manager at MAC Solutions. And he should know, as he sells and manages the market leading eWON router, which enables industrial equipment to be accessed securely and remotely, across the Internet. For business leaders, his ‘grass routes’ observations are far more insightful into the challenges of monetising data, then the many articles routinely churned out on the subject.

It highlights the importance of mind-set above all else, which is all about getting back to management basics, a point that many commentators have lost sight of. What becomes clear from talking to people like Dave is that servitization, industrie 4.0 and Digital economy have little perceived relevance to SME businesses at the moment. Their focus is on better meeting the needs of their customers but mainly reducing costs. Many are enabling their equipment for remote connectivity with a business case solely based on savings and cost reduction.

 

They can easily imagine and so justify the investment based on a reduction in costly service visits through remote diagnosis, especially during the warranty period, where they bear 100% of the cost. With the number of devices being put on-line booming, everything sounds pretty good with the market. But Dave and his colleagues at MAC are concerned at the lack of ‘market understanding’ from the UK SME’s they talk to.

In their ‘Connectivity Roadmap’ most customers are stuck at level 2 - ‘Get Connected’, which is all about cost! They struggle to justify moving to the next phase of delivering proactive service revenues and ultimately transforming their business.

 

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So what are the underlying causes of this stagnation and an inability to step up to the challenge?

Part of the reason lies in the lack of maturity of the tool sets being developed by IoT providers such as GE, Microsoft and PTC. In the last 3 years, huge investments have brought these tools into the realms of reality, but they are still relatively cumbersome to integrate into the business processes.

Despite what you might read, it is only larger businesses that have the resources to invest in developing their own bespoke infrastructure; and even then, most of the tangible gains remain in the area of cost reduction.

For many in the industry, another challenge is around culture. Most quarters of industry have struggled to really imagine what the technology can do for their business. They have become trapped in product-centric thinking, rather than deeply analysing where the value is delivered within their customer and industry value chains.

The good news is that the business case to ‘Get Connected’ is so inequitably clear, that at least many engineers have been encouraged to pilot the technology and learn for themselves what it can do.

A second challenge is the conservative nature of many industrial businesses in adapting to fundamental change. Together these represent a significant mind-set issue.

The message for many businesses is that to maximise their return on technology investment, they would do well to challenge their current culture to become more outward orientated and service focused.

 

This means not only better understanding customers’ needs and their immediate problem.
But moving deeper into how to harness their inherent know-how and technology to help their customers make money. By moving emphasis away from technology towards outcomes and operational excellence, many businesses will be able to deliver more value and hence profitability.

The problem is that this is a ‘back-to-basics’ approach, based on common sense and, as we all know, common sense is one of the hardest elements of business upon which to act. Leaders can start by encouraging an ‘outside-in’ approach, taking a long hard look at the value they add to their customers and how they influence the industry value chain.

Then together with the experiences they gain in understanding the power of these digital technologies, they will develop the insight and confidence to turn data into profits.

So, if you sense your initiatives in developing these new capabilities are slowing down or not meeting your expectations, perhaps there are three basic challenges for you to review...

1. Do you have the right level of insight to use your know how to make your customer more profitable?
2. Do you know how to use information to make your operations more cost effective?
3. Are your people encouraged to explore new ideas and have an environment and process in which innovative ideas can be turned into reality?

 

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Nick can be contacted on nick.frank@Si2partners.com Si2 ON-Demand is a unique advisory and support service that enables top performing leaders to solve problems and get things done, quickly, easily and cost effectively.

 

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Nick Frank, founding partner at Si2 Partners outlines why the importance of people and culture cannot be overlooked when looking to instil a culture of continuous improvement and innovation...

The mistake many leaders in industry make, is to believe that defining a clear vision and strategy with ruthless follow up is the only recipe for success. This may indeed initiate change, but rarely do the results last. Often3-4 years later, the business will be addressing the very same issues, but under a new management team.

In todays increasingly digitized world this challenge is particularly relevant for leaders of service businesses, who feel they must react to new technology to avoid being left behind by their competitors. Maximizing the potential of these capabilities does not come from the technology or even adopting innovation processes, it must start with our own people.

The problem is that in their urgency to achieve results, many leaders breeze over the communication, incentives and cultural engagement necessary to achieve the required emotional buy-in from employees.

In their minds, treating change as a rational process makes it easier to determine key priorities, identify pitfalls and plot a roadmap with a beginning and end. But many initiatives fail, because employees and clients do not act as rationally as leaders assume. In fact people have been shown to be very unpredictable, making this part of change management more art than science.

 

Most managers will tell you, ensuring your people are engaged in what they are doing is the very lifeblood of a business. Some may use use fear, which gets things moving, but is only ever effective in the short term and does damage in the long term. Most agree that people have to be basically happy to sustain change over an extended time period. This ‘happiness’ is essentially influenced by the culture of the organisation, which evolves from the values displayed by leaders, their vision and the backing of stakeholders who own the business.

This is not new to experienced managers, yet so many focus on the well defined processes of moving from strategy to operational excellence. On reflection, profitable long-term profits are really generated by creating a culture that engages people to deliver excellent products or services that create customer value. This in turn drives customer loyalty, providing the opportunity to expand margins and increase profitability. This simple truth was re-confirmed to me in a recent workshop discussion, which included managers from Federal Express. They commented. ‘Our values drive us to start with our people and that the profits will come, never the other way round’

In todays world, where technology is rapidly changing the face of Field Service, many leaders would do well to focus more on the mind-set of their people that allows them to express themselves and have the confidence to try new ideas even if there is a risk of failure.

How can leaders inspire their teams to innovate and succeed?

We have seen successful leaders demonstrate five key attributes in creating a dynamic self learning organisation:

• Powerful story telling: One of the most powerful concepts leaders can use to turn dry strategy into an engaging vision is through story telling. Since the dawn of time, people have been captivated by stories. The role of leaders is to tell the story that inspires all the stakeholders in the ecosystem, not only employees, but also clients and shareholders.
• Walk the talk: Telling the story is not enough. Leaders have to live it and live to the values they espouse. Commitment is key to credibility!
• Common language: If story telling is the key to inspiration, creating a common language is the key to longevity. Language becomes a habit. It influences how people solve problems whether that be inside the organisation, or interacting with customers and partners. Creating a common language and view of the business is much more than words. It is creating a mind-set that influences how we articulate ourselves and conduct our everyday business.
• Relentless follow up: Changing culture is not an overnight process. It is often said that to integrate a new habit, one must repeat an activity 21 times. It is no different for developing culture within an organisation.
• Solution focused mindset: Discovering problems should be encouraged as they help bring clarity to our. However it is important not to dwell on the problem and who to blame. Solutions drive organisations forward!
• Think how many times something goes wrong in the business, which leads to significant shift in approach by senior management. To turn problems into opportunities, leaders need to be committed to creating self learning solution orientated organisations around them.

The message is not to wait until your CEO starts to talk about innovative self learning organisations. You can start ‘now’ developing a successful mind-set first for yourself and then your teams, that will allow you to take advantage of the amazing opportunities offered by the new technology’s around us.

Nick can be contacted on nick.frank@Si2partners.com. Si2 ON-Demand is a unique advisory and support service that enables top performing leaders to solve problems and get things done, quickly, easily and cost effectively.

 

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Nick Frank, Managing Partner with Si2 Partners, gives us a back of the envelope exercise that could yield dramatic improvements to our customer understanding...

For the vast majority of service managers and leaders, customer experience is something intuitive, as most effective professionals already have a good feel for what is important to their customers.

However, as the pace of technology commoditisation increases, so customer experience is becoming an important differentiator to creating loyalty and revenue growth. Perhaps its time to add framework to intuition, so that service leaders can communicate their experiences to their teams more effectively!

One very easy and often overlooked tool for gaining insight into how clients feel about our service is the Customer Journey Map.

It’s a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail, or a service, or any combination.

It can be a back of an envelop exercise lasting 30 minutes, or a full working day working with a cross functional teams. Whichever approach you choose, it will undoubtedly provide you with insight into your customers feelings about the service they receive from you, and where opportunities may arise to drive customer loyalty or new sales.

In its simplest form the journey usually has a timeline. For example this might be lifecycle of a field service call: Request, Schedule & Dispatch, Service, Invoice.

For each part of the lifecycle examine these four key elements from the customers perspective:

1. Activities and actions of the customer in that step. This includes all the touch-point interactions between the customer and organisation
2. The motivations for the customer going to the next step in the process, what they are feeling and why do they care? These emotions are key to improving the journey.
3. The Questions the customer is asking themselves: This might be details about the work to be done, the jargon you are using or looking for recommendations on how to avoid further failure.
4. What are the Barriers that stop them from moving to the next stage of their journey.

At the end of this this thinking process, you can then validate your thoughts with clients within a structure that is easy to communicate and talk about.In general there are three reasons why managers and service designers use the journey mapping tool:

1. To improve Customer Experience across an end-to end set of interactions. The Field Service Call example would be typical of this type of use.
2. Understand the Sales journey, the critical point of interaction which influence how the customer feels about us, and what sales opportunities might arise.
3. Design the User Experience for a particular part of the journey. This has become particularly relevant as more business ‘shift to the left’ and incorporate more self service into their processes. A detailed analysis through each touch point of the software such as a FAQ page then becomes critical to ensuring that customers have a good experience.

Journey maps originated in the Service Design community, which has brought a much more user centric approach than traditionally existed in the industrial world. In addition to these basic mapping concepts, they have created tools to enable better empathy with customers and their emotions.

One such tool you might consider are personas. This is a fictitious character that illustrates the needs, goals, thoughts, feelings, opinions, expectations and pain points of the user.

By defining a typical character, we can explore the journey through the eyes of the persona and how they might interact with the different channels they come across such as websites, apps, call centres or field service organisations.

More sophisticated journey maps will also examine ‘moments of truth’.

These are the critical interactions that leave a lasting impression and often occur at touch-points known to generate anxiety or frustration.

How do you go about developing a Journey Map? Here are six simple steps you can follow for developing your own Customer Journey maps:

1. Define your goals for the journey map(s)
2. Gather research and customer insight
3. Analysis and discussion with a cross functional team
4. Sketch the journey
5. Refine and digitise, especially if you want to use the map to communicate with your people
6. Share and use: make the journey map live in your organisation

If you would like to read more about customer journey mapping, you can find more practical advice at the Service in Industry Briefing blog

 

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Si2 Partners consultancy is launched to help industrial companies leverage services and take advantage of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) or Industry 4.0 to beat the competition and win in their markets. Founding Partner Nick Frank tells us more 

Si2 On-Demand is a new way for managers and their teams to get advice and the support they need to get things done – as they need it, when they need it and as much as they need!  Managers engage with Si2 to solve problems, get new ideas or validate their thinking.  If they have capacity constraints, they use Si2 specialists as an extended workbench to complete their tasks -virtually, rapidly and cost effectively, wherever they are in the world. An innovative smart platform enables access to expert practitioners and consultants as well as a growing Insights Library, 

Leading industrial manufacturers have long seen the installed base as a business opportunity and as a way to moderate economic cycles. Faced with intensifying competition and limits to growth from product sales in developed markets, after-sales services provides ways to drive new revenue streams, improve margins and ward off competitors.

Today, services are an anchor business for many companies and have evolved from pure product support to encompass sophisticated offerings to help customers better manage or outsource industrial processes, including asset management, maintenance or parts of production and logistics. Nevertheless, even more companies have either not taken part in this evolution or failed to realise its benefits due to a flawed strategic approach or implementation. The well documented “service paradox” phenomenon, where profits decline even as volumes increase, is something that managements must learn to overcome.

 

Forward-looking companies have gone on to drive competitive advantage by bundling products and services into integrated solutions, delivering outcomes to customers demanding functionality and performance.

When outcome displaces the product from the centre of focus, transactional relationships with customers become more co-operative and longer term, as both sides work together to co-create value and share risks.

With customers locked-in and competitors locked-out, price pressures are moderated through value- based pricing. Currently, outcome-based services or performance contracting are viewed as a way to bend cost curves to improve performance in many industries, including healthcare, infrastructure, technical services, aerospace, defence as well as large machinery. Nevertheless, while customers have benefited from these business models, the same cannot always be said for suppliers.

Companies contemplating outcome-based services must overcome a number of hurdles, including assessing and managing risks as well as understanding how to measure value. Their challenge is to blend their value chain into customer operations, integrating ecosystems of suppliers and partners into value networks. They must invest to scale their business, but ensure that demand is sufficient and customers are open enough to try new approaches.

 

With technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things enabling more productive service operations, there is now increasing evidence that digitization, is also sparking a ‘revolution’ in thinking, driving servitization and new business models. By enabling companies to collect and analyse data on an unprecedented scale and granularity, new services are being designed to improve products, process performance and customer experience.

Data is becoming a key new asset class, perhaps even more valuable than the underlying physical assets and processes. It is crucial for competitive advantage, and necessary for OEMs to avoid commoditisation of their products. Those with real vision are investing in new digital service platforms (“Anything-as-a-Service”),  to drive disruptive growth and new customer demand while dramatically reducing costs.

Si2 Partners reflects this new age of disruption. With the ambition to help industrial companies leverage services in increasingly digital environments, Si2 Partners offers On-Demand Advisory and Support, delivered through collaboration technology by people who know how to make things happen, Si2 helps companies not only shape their servitization transition, but focus on all the critical issues affecting their service businesses, including strategy, business models, organisational development, sales, marketing and operations as well as technology.

 

Operating across many industries and all geographies, Si2 Partners is uniquely placed to deliver solutions to problems or work successfully on major business transformational issues, such as business building, operational improvement, change programs or new go-to-market initiatives. Si2 combines a deep understanding of service business, a unique blend of top management and consulting expertise and strong industry experience.

Each business and the context within which it operates are unique, requiring a bespoke approach. Si2 works with management teams to understand their views, requirements and objectives, while bringing industry insights, proven methodologies and services thought leadership to the table.

 

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Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two are closely aligned...

Despite the bigger plan, do you find that the barrage of every day problems and deliverables makes it difficult to achieve your vision?

Most of us are driven by the everyday objectives of our boss, organisation and stakeholders.

The best performing leaders are not only able to deliver tactical results, they seem to be able to rise above the daily noise of business, see the bigger picture and figure out how those small wins can be turned from haphazard steps into a coordinated journey.

A key challenge is that ‘service’ is a business in its own right.

To be successful, all elements of a business have to be coordinated and managed from sales, to operations, finance to people as well as resources.

Put this in the context of a working business, where different levels of capability and maturity will exist in the organisation, and it can be pretty hard to figure out where your priorities lie. One way is for leaders to constantly see their challenges in relation to the whole business, so that they keep a perspective on how these elements fit together.

For example one could view a service business as requiring four essential elements to be successful:

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1. Value: Do you deeply understand the experience and value outcomes you deliver to the customer within the industry value chain? Have you clearly defined your business model and how you will organise your business to deliver success?
2. Go To Market: Are you effective at creating and selling products, services and solutions that can access this value?
3. Service Delivery: Can your operations consistently and profitably deliver services to the expectations of the customer?
4. Plan / Leadership: Is there an explicit plan that is financially backed and supported by the organisations leadership?

[/ordered_list]

Although a pretty straightforward way of thinking, most managers can get caught up in the everyday activities and lose sight of the bigger picture. To illustrate this, lets look at one of today’s hot topics, ‘How to maximise the potential of the Internet of Things(IoT)?’

Many companies are still confused as to what the IoT means for them, especially as most commentators are also struggling to see how companies can move themselves forward in a practical pragmatic manner.

We see lots of ideas and case studies focused on what the potential could be, but few suggestions on how to achieve the goal.

Perhaps companies should first focus on the ‘Value’ that the IoT capability can bring to their customer’s value chain as well as their own bottom line.

This goes deeper than customer needs. It is important to understand what makes customers successful in terms of growth and profit within the industry value chain. Then it is possible to identify the expertise or data that can be generated to make a difference to the customer’s profitability.

As companies explore value, they will start to want to try ideas out, perhaps a few very low key pilot projects with customers, to open their minds up to new opportunities and potentially business models.

For a product company, this could really start to challenge their ‘Go-To’ market thinking. The fact that piloting propositions for services is an important part of their design process runs contrary to many product development processes.

The pilot process will also impact the ‘Service Delivery’ operations that must consistently and profitably deliver the value proposition.

In particular with digital technologies, having the software and analytical expertise in house to develop robust solutions is often a challenge to be overcome.

Increasingly it is necessary to work with partners or even as part of an inter-dependent ecosystem.

 

Lastly and most importantly, it is critical to have a ‘Plan’ that is backed by the leadership with a commitment to resources.

Probably the biggest frustration from managers driving change is that great ideas do not receive the resources they need due to short-term budgetary reasons.

What we see is that even in this relatively high level simplistic example, there are a complex interacting set of factors that leaders, as drivers of change, have to manage in parallel.

This complexity is a fact of life and will not go away.

This is why a factor that makes top performing managers successful, is having a perspective of how the daily grind fits into the big picture.

An even simpler way of cutting through the confusion of developing a services business can be summed up by a Steve Jobs quote:

‘You’ve got to start with Customer Experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way around'

 

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Want to know more? Nick can be contacted on nick.frank@Si2partners.com. Si2 On-Demand is a unique advisory and support service that enables top performing leaders to solve problems and get things done, as and when required

See our website at www.si2partners.com or gain insights on our blog ServiceInIndustry.com

 

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