In a recent edition of the Field Service Podcast, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland sat down with Doug lacy, CEO and Founder of Pivital an ITSM company who have embraced the power of the blended workforce.
The original interview was part of an interview for a documentary that Field Service News have produced in partnership with Field Nation looking at how field service organisations can harness the power of the 'blended workforce' in this manner.
However, the full interview contained a huge amount of insight so with Doug's permission we took the audio from the session and published it in its raw unedited form as an episode of the Field Service Podcast.
You can find the full podcast alongside all of the other episodes here
Transparency in the Field Service Cycle:
In the excerpt above we hear from Lacy as he describes the importance of transparency in the whole of the field service cycle especially when it comes to understanding customer challenges and perceived poor engineer performance.
"We were providing a router deployment for a very large bank in the US which involved thousands of sites. We did a pilot and our techs were really struggling and we got the feedback that our techs were not doing a good job and they were taking too long to do the install," Lacy begins.
Knowing the regular performance of his own team to be of a very high standard, he realised that something wasn't quite right for there to be this much negative feedback. His response was to take a closer hands-on look at the situation himself by doing a site visit himself on a job near their local headquarters in Colarado, USA.
"While such C-level site visits are important, Lacy believes they shouldn't be necessary as technology develops to offer the transparency we require..."
As Lacy, thought the situation wasn't as clear cut as it had seemed.
"My experience was that first of all I waited 20 minutes just for someone to show up and take me to the network closet. I then spent another 20 minutes looking around for where the network closet was and where the routers were. We finally figured out that they were behind all of the Christmas decorations that had just been piled up on top of the router. It turned out to be issue after issue that was nothing to do with the tech's performance.
"Having some of that visibility, it had been four hours since I had arrived there, and it had been challenge after challenge, and all environmental challenges nothing related to our tech. I could then bring that visibility to our client and explain what I had experienced."
However, whilst such C-level site visits are important, Lacy believes they shouldn't be necessary as technology develops to offer the transparency we require.
"If we could find a better way for our clients, through technology to just be able to see, where the tech is struggling and what are the actual reasons why that tech is struggling - that insight makes a big difference in client satisfaction. Plus, it also sets the tech up for success.
"It is all about the communication and being able to understand what are techs are experiencing on site, and if we can use technology to do that, even better."
Want to know more? Check out our full documentary on the 'Rise of the Blended Workforce.'
If you are a Field Service News subscriber the link below will take you straight to the documentary.
If not, the link will take you to our subscriptions page so you can join 30,000 of your field service management peers and subscribe now and get access this documentary and all of our other premium content!
Sponsored by:
Data usage note: If you're subscription is our sponsored complimentary tier, by accessing this content you consent to the contact details submitted when you registered as a subscriber to fieldservicenews.com to be shared with the listed sponsor of this premium content, FieldNation who may contact you for legitimate business reasons to discuss the content of this content.
Field Service News is published by 1927 Media Ltd, an independent publisher whose sole focus is on the field service sector. As such our entire resources are focused on helping drive the field service sector forwards and aiming to best serve our industry through honest, incisive and innovative media coverage of the global field service sector.
Leave a Reply