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Further Reading:

• Read more about Aquant on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/aquant
• Read more about Service Leadership @ www.fieldservicenews.com/service-leadership
• Learn more about Aquant @ www.aquant.io
• Follow Aquant on Twitter @ twitter.com/Aquant_io
• Follow Aquant on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/aquant.io

 

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News welcomes Gary York, CEO and Evans Manolis, Senior Consultant Help Lightning as the group discuss the practical considerations of implementing Augmented Reality in Field Service.

The discussion looks at whether Augmented Reality (AR) is set to become a key part of the field service toolkit, how the shift to remote services will change the role of the field service engineer, the importance of effortless when it comes to new technology, how AR can improve multiple facets of field service operations and how it can be implemented effectively within just a matter of months.

In this excerpt from that conversation, the group discuss how the pandemic drove many field service companies to embrace the technology in a way they never would have thought possible in normal conditions.

 

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In many ways the world in which we operate has changed so radically that the work-flows of just two years ago may today seem antiquated and outdated for many of us in the field service sector. Yet at the same time when it comes to the fundamentals of service excellence, the essence remains firm - consistently anticipating, meeting and exceeding our customer's needs. It is a balance that all field service companies are attempting to strike at the moment as Michael Maoz, Senior Vice President, Innovation Strategy, Salesforce, outlines in this in-depth article...

The last year has forced all of us to rethink how we live our lives and run our businesses. In field service, employees and customers are focused on:

• Health and wellness
• Contactless interaction
• Safety
• Self service and remote support to reduce onsite visits
• Job effectiveness to ensure completion the first time

The organizations that excel at field service delivery share two characteristics:

1. C-Level executive commitment to field service as an area important to the business
2. Collaboration of field operations in an atmosphere of trust and transparency

This demonstrates empathy and an emphasis on alignment with the customer. These organizations recognize the central role that field service has in shaping perceptions about the brand overall. They listen to their customers, field technicians, dispatchers, customer service teams, and ecosystem partners. Amidst ongoing change, they use what they learn to stay aligned with different, and evolving, needs.

The enterprise goal is to profitably deliver a coordinated customer experience that spans the entire customer journey. In this way, the brand promise is consistent and reinforced at each step that builds lasting bonds with the customer

 

The realities of customer expectations in modern field service:

Customers expect field service to be as rewarding and easy as the best service experiences they have anywhere. The businesses that demonstrated innovation courage during the global pandemic were rewarded with strong growth. This innovation courage came through particularly strongly in field service, where every technician visit held the potential of a risk to health. The best companies reacted immediately and reexamined their technology priorities. They relegated long running strategic projects in favor of short sprints like remote visual support

With remote support, customers can use their video camera to show a field engineer the issue. The customer doesn’t need anyone to come onsite, and gets faster resolution; the company saves the truck roll. Making this more powerful, an AI component can be used to suggest possible root causes. A second AI component inside of the content management solution can extract the repair documents and instructions most relevant to the particular issue

When needing to go onsite, to provide the best experience, companies have shortened booking windows and provide proactive notifications on arrival time to keep customers updated and give them time to get ready. This reduces missed appointments, increases effectiveness, and provides a better experience for both the customer and the employee.

 

"One of our customers completely re-platformed their aging and disconnected software for phone support, website, mobile app and technician mobile applications onto a single platform from Salesforce. The resulting speed, consistency, and contactless service allowed them to accelerate business during the pandemic."

 

There are great cost savings through the combination of technologies such as remote visual support to significantly reduce the number of field visits, together with content discovery and appointment management, which speeds up the time to repair and shortens the onsite visit.

Beyond the cost savings to the enterprise, the use of new technologies and processes in a reimagined world of field service demonstrates empathy and alignment with the customer and with the employee, particularly during the pandemic, but equally so beyond the pandemic.

Customers expect to engage with their service provider via digital channels with the same easy and intuitive experience that they already have in every aspect of their life. A savvy field service organization needs to connect with their customers on the customer’s preferred channel, which is increasingly SMS and social channels. Customers expect their service providers to know them, know why they're there, and have the tools necessary to complete the task on the first visit.

 

Customer-Centricity is Critical:

The best organizations think of what matters most to the customer. The best service visit is the one that never happens to begin with; proactive support and remote resolution are of top importance. When a visit needs to occur, seamlessly managing the appointment is top of mind. The ability to provide the entire care environment is often overlooked.

It is not enough to book the visit at the customer’s desired time. True field service excellence also requires the organization to select the right technician, with the right skills. Excellence requires the organization to communicate the time of arrival, a summary of the work done at the time of the visit, and a follow up message, through messaging or email, that invites the customer to agree that the work is complete. This final piece: Agreeing that the job is not done until the customer says that it is done, is vital.

There is tremendous upside potential to boost revenue through field service for some industries such as home and business services, HVAC, medical equipment, complex device or infrastructure maintenance.

Many of our customers in these industries are already advanced in providing revenue-generating value-added field services. Some of these are remote diagnostics, remote software updates, remote monitoring, training the customer on best practices, owning centres of excellence that guarantee uptime, and selling uptime rather than selling the product in the first place! Look to these advanced industries. Learn from the best! There is no reason to invent best practices when they already exist in adjacent industries. In all of the cases we have covered, technology has been baked into reimagined processes.

 

What are the performance indicators that are the most meaningful to improve the brand? To lower costs? To boost sales? To improve the effectiveness and well-being of employees? To improve the customer experience?

 

One of our customers completely re-platformed their ageing and disconnected software for phone support, website, mobile app and technician mobile applications onto a single platform from Salesforce. The resulting speed, consistency, and contactless service allowed them to accelerate business during the pandemic. Their knowledge-empowered technicians to easily build trust with the customer.

These technicians are more highly motivated because they feel the empathy that the business has for them. They also have all of the information in their hands, and they know that the customer is situationally aware. These technicians are in the best position to build brand loyalty and deliver on upsell/cross-sell targets that many service businesses have.

The companies that are the trailblazers in improving field service to be more customer and employee-centric are measuring the value of improvements in five areas:

• Brand loyalty
• Costs
• Sales
• Employee experience
• Customer experience

Selecting the first targets for improvement requires measurement. Here are practical and measurable questions to ask: What are the performance indicators that are the most meaningful to improve the brand? To lower costs? To boost sales? To improve the effectiveness and well-being of employees? To improve the customer experience?

Each of these questions has to be converted into real numbers. To lower costs, you might decide that job duration overruns need to be reduced 25%. For customer experience you may decide that the customer needs to select their own time window and within a two hour window, and they must receive a text message upon confirmation and before arrival. These all can be converted into quantifiable numbers.

The savvy field service leader will seize the momentum and move forward boldly with a customer and employee centric approach to innovating field service processes. Define success criteria by selecting the targets you want to measure, determine several relatively small changes to impact those targets, iterate quickly, and measure each process through the eyes of the customer and the technician. There has never been a better time to make the move from follower to leader, and your customers are expecting nothing less.

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Further Reading:

• Read Tiffani Bova's recent blog about how with the right technology and training, your field service team is well-positioned to promote upgrades and new offerings, especially at the time of a successful service experience:
  Meet the Sales Team You Didn’t Know You Had: Upsell and Cross-Sell with Field Service for Growth
• Read Salesforce playbook sharing insights from over 4,000 global field service decision-makers:
  Strengthen Your Field Service Management Strategy
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about Salesforce on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/salesforce
• Follow Salesforce on Twitter @ twitter.com/salesforce

In this final article of a series of excerpts from a recent e-book published by IFS, we discuss how to achieve the full benefits of digital transformation with less risk, lower cost and in a fraction of the time.

In this third article of a series of excerpts from a recent e-book published by IFS, we look at how to use artificial intelligence to optimize resources and make predictive scheduling a reality.

In the third and final excerpt from a recent white paper published by Aquant, we look at four solutions for effectively building the new service workforce...

In the second article of a series of excerpts from a recent e-book published by IFS, we discuss how IoT and machine learning make predictive maintenance a reality.

In the first article of a series of excerpts from a recent e-book published by IFS, we look at ground-breaking service capabilities that enable you to maximize customer outcomes.

In this new article for Field Service News, Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, discusses many aspects that field service organisations should consider and evaluate as we start existing the pandemic...

The pandemic still has the world in its grip, but it is becoming looser as vaccinations become more widespread. In some developed countries, we see signs of increased hiring and manufacturing output. And increasing manufacturing output means more demand for field service for installation, training, and warranty work as well as remedial repairs on equipment supporting the manufacturing ramp-up.

The big unknown is how B2B customers will react to field service continuing its emphasis on touchless service while they are thinking about the old normal. The answer to that question may impact how these customers think about our brand: which can have a major impact on our future business.

HOW B2B BUYERS SELECT A PRODUCT TO PURCHASE

As a service leader, you know about customers and their buying habits. You know that most products are becoming commodities and while there may be differences between products from different managers, those differences will disappear over time and new differences will emerge from other competitors. You also know that there is usually a minor difference in price and anyway, B2B businesses do not buy based on price.

So how do people choose who to purchase their new equipment from if not by price or features and functions? If we are totally honest, we would say the primary differentiator is service. Of course, our sales and marketing peers would disagree with you, but we know they are biased. They would probably agree with you if you said, “people buy based on the brand.”

WHAT IS A BRAND?

If you ever want to get into a good argument with sales and marketing people, just ask each person to write down their definition of brand. Do not be surprised if there is no agreement. During my research, I discovered a wonderful article “Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard?" In the article the author, Tracy Lloyd, shared a few definitions:

1. David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” defined brand as “the inangible sum of a product’s attributes.”
2. The Dictionary of Brand defines brand as “a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.”
3.  Marty Neumeier, author and speaker on all things brand, defines brand by first laying out what a brand is not: “A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product.” Neumeier goes on to say that “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”

Definitions 2 and 3 are remarkably similar yet hard to do anything with.

In late 2012, my friend Harry Klein, a professional Marketeer, and I decided to collaborate on a White Paper that we called “Because I’m The Customer!” A Guide to Managing Your Brand & Customer Experience in the Age of the Customer. Here is a paragraph from the White Paper:

As Brian Millar wrote in his FastCompany article Branding Talk Isn’t Helping Your Company. Here’s What Should Replace It:

“If you promise something clearly, deliver on that promise, and repeat the process, you build strong emotional links to your company with certain consumers. But that’s where the value resides: in my head and your head, and your mother’s head. And the stuff inside my head is my property. If brands exist at all, they exist in the minds of consumers. I can switch my brand of search engine at a moment’s notice. Bank accounts and makes of automobile are a bit more hassle to discard, but I can still change my mind about them.”

So, a brand is unique to each of us. It is the sum of all promises and experiences we had with a product, service, or company. This perception changes as we forget old or irrelevant promises or experiences and add newer ones to our memory. And to make matters worse, we might have different perceptions of different situations with the same product or service.

Here is an example: Think about your current car. If we are talking about design and ease of use, you might say “It took me only 30 minutes to figure out how to set up the infotainment system.” But if I ask you about the dealers training on all the new features, you might say “he was confused and so was I.” And if ask about fuel economy, you might say “It is great on the open road, crap in city driving, and does not come close to what was on the sticker.” But if I just ask, “how do you like your new car,” you might respond “I love it and feel like I rule the road when I drive it.”

ARE BRANDS REAL?

Even though brands only exist in our minds, they are real because we make our purchasing decisions based on our current perceptions of the promises the manufacturer makes and our experiences about how well these promises are met. In other words, brands drive how money is spent! That is as real as it gets.

In January 2021 McKinsey & Company released an interesting article “The Rising Value of Industrial Brands.”  One of the six main insights in the article is;

Visibility drives performance—but only for a few players. The top three brands in each segment average a total 60 percent of visibility, and the top brand typically has four times more visibility than the third-place competitor. Overall, 5 percent of companies capture 95 percent of total visibility. And top-quartile companies enjoy about 30 percent higher ROIC than those in the bottom quartile.

McKinsey & Company uses visibility (share of voice) as the measure of brand favoritism. They define visibility as “… brand name mentions in the media, including industry publications that customers read to learn about new products, systems, and technologies. Because B2B sales are increasingly held to the same standards as B2C sales channels, including the option to purchase online, we also tracked the growth of searches for the brands on major online search engines.”

Next, they show how share of voice impacts the company’s ROIC (Return on invested capital):

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

Since a brand is the sum of all promises (expectations) and experiences we had with a product, service, or company and brand visibility drives ROIC (and other financial metrics), then your promises and delivered experiences are driving your financial results. That raises two questions:

Question 1. Where do expectations come from?

There are six sources of customer expectations

1. Organizational promises
2. Competitor’s promises and/or performance
   
3. Personnel promises
4. B2C experiences
5. Previous experiences with your business
6. Comments from friends and associates

Unfortunately, you and your business can only influence #1 and #3. The other four are outside your control but you must be sensitive to them and if you or your team discovers that customers have expectations that differ from what you can routinely deliver, you must reset their expectations. Doing that professionally will prevent disappointment when the experiences are as you promised, not what they wanted.

Question 2. Where do experiences come from?

Every interaction your company has with a customer or prospect creates a new memory of an experience. The two most important steps you can take to make sure you are providing great experiences are

1. Train everyone on how what they do and say impacts how customers feel about doing business with your company
2. Follow up either all interactions or a randomly chosen subset of all interactions and talk about how the customers feel about their experience. Discussions are better than surveys because people are sicker of surveys than they are of being locked down at home. Do this every day with the same people making the calls and analyze the data using as many views as you can imagine. Then share the results with everyone in the company.

WHY IS MONITORING BRAND PERFORMANCE ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT AS WE EXIT COVID-19?

During the past year, we have all been busy implementing touchless service, a blended workforce, and trying to avoid sending our Field Engineers on calls for both health and safety and economic reasons. Many of us believe that these initiatives will continue into the future and become our permanent business model.

This was expected during the height of the pandemic and customers subconsciously adjusted their expectation to accept what you were providing. But what if customer’s expectations revert back to the 2019 business model and you continue to deliver on the 2020 model? A major gap will open up and customers will feel disappointed.

The solution is marketing communications. You and your team must proactively reset your customer’s expectations to be in line with your intended future deliveries. There might be some intense customer discussions and you may have to modify your plans if the pushback is too great. You must ensure that the experiences your business delivers either meets or exceeds your customer’s expectations.

Finally, when the folks in the C-suite start looking for more revenue and profits, don’t automatically jump on the cost-reduction train. Make sure your promises are being met and exceeded by your performance. It takes work but it is worth the efforts.

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more exclusive FSN articles by Sam Klaidman @ www.fieldservicenews.com/sam-klaidman
• Read more about the impact of COVID-19 on the field service industry @ www.fieldservicenews.com/covid-19
• Connect to Sam Klaidman @ www.linkedin.com/samklaidman
• Find out more about Middlesex Consulting @ www.middlesexconsulting.com
• Read more from Sam Klaidman @ middlesexconsulting.com/blog