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Green Network Energy UK will deploy Salesforce's CRM platform in Summer.

Green Network Energy UK has announced a partnership with Salesforce that it hopes will enhance its digital transformation and customer care programmes.

The independent energy supplier, set-up in 2016, plan to expands it use of the CRM platform in the summer which will see a new customer self-service online portal for customers that communicates service updates, tariff renewal options and allows for meter readings to be submitted.

Green Network Energy UK's Founder and CEO Sabrina Corbo says the technology roll-out will benefit their customer base. "Our aim has always been to make our customers feel special," she said. "We are committing to an enhanced relationship with our customers and showing that we are here to make a big difference as a big organisation in the energy sector.

Commenting on the partnership, Salesforce's SVP EMEA Cloud Sales, Sanj Bhayro said the modern-day utility customer now expects immaculate service. "Much like other industries, customers' expectations in the energy sector are on the rise, with customers demanding a seamless brand experience, getting support when the need it and on the channel of their choice. We're delighted to be working with Green Network Energy to realise their vision of connected, personalised service," he concluded.   

In this, the latest edition of the Field Service Podcast, Kris Oldland, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, is joined by Marne Martin, CEO of WorkWave and president of Service Management for IFS about her new role with IFS as well as discussing whether the time has come to finally recognised Field Service Management systems as a standalone category such as CRM or ERP [hr]

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Steve Wellen, CEO of FieldAware outlines the evolution of analytics and how field service organisations are reaping the benefits...

Research into field service management consistently shows that when respondents are asked what they are planning to invest in or are looking to implement, analytic tools, more and more, are being highlighted above other functionality.

No great surprise given that today’s field service operations can rely on many different systems and solutions, all of which generate huge amounts of data. However, being able to organise and analyse data in an effective, simple and reliable way is a major challenge and without the means of turning it into something actionable, many businesses just don’t benefit. So, where are we in the evolution of field service analytics and how are field service organisations making their data work smarter, not harder?

Data, data everywhere

Over the past decade, field service organisations have become overwhelmed by the increasing information coming in from multiple sources and in various formats. As field service has become more and more integrated with other business solutions, (including accounting, ERP and CRM), organising this data becomes such a complex task that it may simply end up being unused. Managers and team members may then revert to relying on what they used to do, or make decisions based on hunches to run the business, rather than use the business intelligence they need.

Business leaders understand the data they have cannot be ignored. The major challenge they face, however, is how to sift through the data and link it together in a meaningful way. Data is often from disparate systems, but needs to be collated and reported in an easily understood way, to reveal the valuable insights that are needed for day-to-day performance and longer-term business strategy.

A brief history of field service analytics

The early adopters of field service analytics have seen a transformation of the solutions available, and we have witnessed this evolution first-hand.

We have seen our customers move from their initial requirements of basic business reporting, through to needing a comprehensive business intelligence solution.

Early on, it was often a snapshot of what had happened that was required, for example, how many jobs had been completed. It soon became apparent that organisations had different performance indicators to manage, and individuals needed metrics specific to roles. A layer of sophistication was needed, with custom reports where customers could then dive deeper to retrieve further information.

They could explore the types of jobs that were being completed, monitor individual performance or compare geographies.

Using data to make business decisions then drove the need for further information and queries could be set up to examine any problems or if any differences were apparent, for example, time taken on jobs, cost variations or first-time fix rates.

In addition, alerts could be set to enable better management of SLAs by flagging potential issues such as at-risk jobs.

A continual journey

All useful perspective, but for those using analytics for the first time, there is now no reason to stop at what could simply be seen to be mimicking what paper-based processes capture on the ‘what’ and the ‘where’.

Leap forward and it is the ‘why’ within analytics capabilities that truly enhances the value. After generating basic reports, managers did not always have time, the knowledge or experience to translate the results into meaningful action.

Advances in analytics provide businesses with the ability to view data after it has been configured and cross-referenced using statistical modelling.

Better decisions can be made more easily as they are based on accurate, analysed information, and better decision-making means a more effective, efficient operation.

The future’s bright, the future is optimised 

Today, field service leaders realise they need analytics that enables them to make more informed decisions to continue to grow their business. Just having data is not enough – they need the ability to use the data to align service teams to work together towards meeting company goals and managing customer expectations. Organisations now demand analytics solutions that migrate from reactive to predictive operations.

They need to move from insight to action faster than ever before with business insights from finance, CRM, ERP, FSM solutions that they depend upon for everyday operations.

They need better teamwork and collaboration so that they can quickly arrive at consensus, act and capitalise on opportunities.

These include discovering hidden opportunities and finding the next big opportunity in the business intelligence.

The business is optimised not only through these day-to-day enhancements, but the operational insights are consistently fed back to business and management, enabling a real-time feedback loop ensuring that key metrics improve continuously - creating a cycle of continual improvement for the field service organisation and improved operations.

For more information on using analytics for your field service optimisation and how you can reap the benefits, visit www.fieldaware.com 

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IFS’ new ownership private equity firm EQT are standing true to their promise to accelerate the growth of the Swedish firm as they make to key UK acquisitions...

ERP provider IFS have further enhanced their offering into the field service management sector this month with two key UK acquisitions.

Both announced on the same day the Swedish organisation took ownership of both field service management system provider mplsystems and also implementation specialists Field Service Management (FSM).

Whilst the latter acquisition perhaps had an air of inevitability about it as FSM have been working as resellers and system integrators for IFS for some time now, it was the acquisition of mplsystems that will have raised eyebrows within the industry perhaps the most.

However, the acquisition also makes perfect sense from a technology point of view as mplsystems, who have only just launched a new genetic algorithm based scheduling engine themselves, (see page 8), are more widely acknowledged for their omni-channel contact centre technology which has earned them recognition from Gartner as a visionary within the CRM Customer Engagement Magic Quadrant.

Indeed, IFS’ move to bring this technology into their own, gives them a truly end-to-end service lifecycle solution, following a similar path to Microsoft in terms of how they have brought CRM and Field Service together under one platform.

 

“It’s quite specific why we’ve acquired mplsystems” Mark Brewer, Global Industry Director, Service Management told Field Service News as the announcement went to press. “It is very directly a recognition on IFS’ part that we have a gap in our end-to-end offering in the customer engagement area.”

“We were looking to acquire some IP, and in the case of mplsystems, some very strong IP, to plug that gap in the customer engagement piece, at the centre of which is their omni-channel contact centre capabilities.”

In fact, the acquisition of mplsystems and the integration of their contact centre technology within the IFS solution, is in perfect line with the roadmap that IFS appear to be continuing down, and sits perfectly alongside the introduction of the embedded CRM within their ERP solution that was introduced at their last significant roll out (IFS Applications 9).

“There has been a lot of conversation recently around the convergence of CRM and FSM and when speaking at Field Service Management Expo a couple of months back I alluded to this then also.” Brewer commented.

“We see now both technologies sitting under the customer experience space, and there will be three prongs to our offering in this area moving forward.”

 

“Firstly, we will continue doing what mplsystems have done very successfully across the last few years which is to offer a Contact Centre as a Service (CCaS) capability to many organisations with large contacts centres - people like Aviva and ALDI. The two other prongs to the offering then are that it will integrate with our IFS FSM solution so it will form the customer engagement capability of that offering. It will then also form the customer engagement capability of IFS Apps.”

“So whether you are taking down a service request, whether you are taking a return material authorisation, whether your taking a feed from an IoT connected device or even if you are utilising social or chat-bot technology, whatever the medium of engagement you choose we will go through the mplsystems customer engagement solution.”

So how do IFS see this new ability to manage the entire customer experience lifecycle? Is this something they feel gives them an advantage over competitors or are they getting themselves back on a level playing field? Is the inclusion of this technology a USP that they can push as vendors, or is it something their customers have been demanding for some time now?

“I think there are two points to that question,” Brewer replies.

“I think there is definitely a customer pull because we are seeing the focus that is evolving from productivity improvement and operational excellence to a model that is more focussed on revenue enhancement. In its most simplistic terms people are seeing service as a growing opportunity from a profitability perspective.”

 

“However, we do also see this as a USP as we believe we have best-of-breed capabilities in a number of our separate offerings and in our standalone FSM solution now we have the capability to run a world class contact centre, we have the capability to do world class optimisation and scheduling. We have the capabilities to deliver a full return material/reverse logistics operation and we have the capability to do very strong contract and warranty claims management as well.”

“All of those elements are what we perceive to be best-in-class, and by filling in the gap with the customer engagement capability, via the acquisition of mplsystems, we now genuinely have a unique offering as it is not just a broad set of capabilities, it is a number of complimentary best-in-class solutions that can feed into and off of each other.”

Finally, with the acquisition of FSM Ltd it appears to essentially be a case of bringing a very successful outsourced operation into the IFS fold.

“FSM has been a very successful in the UK and Ireland in securing some very big customers for us, they’ve got a great track record and ultimately with the new ownership of EQT we now have a much more aggressive growth strategy and in key geographies including Europe West (which includes UK) the investment is there to bring companies like FSM on board to support our capability to grow our market-share further."

 

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Pegasystems Inc.  a software company delivering strategic business applications to a number of  leading enterprises have recently announced the acquisition of Atlanta, GA-based OpenSpan, Inc., a privately held software provider of robotic process automation (RPA)  and workforce analytics software.

OpenSpan uses robotic automation to ease the burden on customer service representatives  by automating routine desktop tasks, thus increasing employee productivity and job satisfaction. By providing insight into desktop activity and automating or eliminating repetitive, time-consuming tasks, OpenSpan frees agents to focus their energy on delivering exceptional customer experience while also helping to lower operational costs.  

Running on more than 200,000 desktops at leading global enterprises, OpenSpan provides advanced robotic automation and workforce analytics capabilities that complement and enhance Pegasystems’ Customer Relationship Management application suite and Business Process Management platform.

This acquisition unifies robotics and workforce analytics with case management and real-time analytics for the first time. Organisations can quickly experience the benefits of an integrated desktop and leverage their insights and cost savings to transition effectively into a fully-unified CRM solution.

“Organisations are under tremendous pressure to transform their businesses into customer service machines to meet the new demands of digital customers,” said Alan Trefler, founder and CEO, Pegasystems. “We’ve already seen the power of Pega and OpenSpan working together to help our clients with their digital transformation initiatives. We believe OpenSpan’s cutting-edge robotics, workforce analytics, and process automation capabilities, combined with Pega’s leading process and real-time analytics, supports an emerging era of intelligent automation working in concert with people to deliver a better customer experience.”

Meanwhile Eric Musser, CEO, OpenSpan commented:

“Over the past 11 years, we’ve built a highly successful organisation that has helped introduce the power of robotics and desktop intelligence to mainstream business,”

“But this is just the tip of the iceberg of what analytics and robotics can really do. By integrating with Pegasystems’ proven applications and platform, we believe we can advance robotic automation and desktop analytics in exciting new directions that will change the way businesses interact with their customers.”

 

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Enterprise software company Pegasystems Inc. has unveiled Pega Field Service, a new CRM application that allows organisations to extend customer service capabilities to their field technicians and agents, improving customer service while reducing operational costs.

The out-of-the-box functionally enables field service organisations to unify data and processes across the front and back office for a 360-degree view of the customer. With predictive analytics and guided interactions, customer service reps will always know the next best action to take in real time based on a complete assessment of each situation.

A centralised management control panel monitors activity from customer service reps on the phone through scheduling and dispatching technicians in the field. The fully integrated mobile app allows field workers to efficiently complete their job with features such as digital signature capture to confirm completed work in real time and barcode scanning to ensure the right equipment is matched to the right part every time.

Pega Field Service is built on the Pega 7 platform, which incorporates improved mobile functionality including more responsive touch interactions. There is also support for larger data sets in offline mode which allows users to access data such as entire parts catalogues or full customer lists on the go.

The software can be customized to meet the requirements of specific verticals such as home inspections and appraisals, broadband installations for telecoms engineers and emergency services and equipment repair and maintenance.

“With the introduction of Pega Field Service, Pegasystems is building on a decade of experience creating field service apps for many of the world’s leading service providers,” said Kerim Akgonul, Senior Vice President of Products. “Now with Pega Field Service, we can provide a turnkey way for organisations to transform their field service operations and improve the customer experience while at the same time reducing operating costs.”

 

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What will be the key technology trends in 2016 for customer service engagement? Customer contact technology specialist Sabio outlines its top ten trends for 2016 and suggests five initiatives that should be top of  any field service company's digital customer service agenda.

“Today’s customers are having their service expectations reshaped by advances in consumer technology, and will become increasingly frustrated when having to engage with brands that don’t perform to the same levels as their best practice competitors,” commented Sabio’s Head of Consultancy, Stuart Dorman. “Offering more intelligent service and making it easier to engage can make a huge difference - not only by helping organisations to optimise operational performance, but also in terms of freeing up customer time so that they can actually spend more of their lives doing what they actually want to do.”

Dorman's predictions for the top trends for effective customer engagement in 2016 are:[ordered_list style="decimal"]

1.  Understanding the true impact of mobile – ever-increasing smartphone penetration means that a growing proportion of service interactions will be transacted on smart devices, so it’s essential that service providers ensure their customer journeys feature clear links to live service via an effective contact centre interface.
2. Placing Embedded Service at the heart of the web browser – with over 50% of customers going online before engaging with a contact centre, it makes increasing sense to embed service options within web pages – a trend that will develop further as WebRTC progressively turns the Web into an open communication platform.
3. Video-based service becomes mainstream – initial video pilot projects are now going live as organisations, particularly in sectors such as financial service, begin to see video support as a premium differentiator that can strengthen brand relationships.
4. Messaging platforms scale to deliver social service – social networks are busy building out their messaging platforms, and will start to open them up to commercial brands who recognise that’s increasingly where their customers are likely to be. With platforms like Facebook Messenger already supporting voice, organisations need to be ready to support those customers who want to engage directly from their social messaging environment.
5. Increasingly smart use of data and analytics – Speech and text analytics have now become essential contact centre technologies in the same way that customer feedback did 5 years ago. Now organisations are looking to leverage the immense computing power of the cloud to take this one step further. By combining multiple data sources such as voice of the customer, CRM data, speech/text analytics and contact centre meta data, organisations are using big data analytics techniques to drive an even deeper understanding of their customers.
6. Much smarter Virtual Assistants – the same technologies that are powering consumer search services are now being applied to intelligent virtual assistants. Rather than clicking, tapping, scrolling and typing - customers will increasingly have conversations with your website to get what they want, helping to transform their overall experience.
   [quote float="left"]Technology isn’t the barrier – it’s your internal siloes that are causing the problems...

    

7. Enabling natural dialogues through speech recognition - Ever-improving natural language understanding will go beyond simple speech recognition to create natural dialogues that effectively mimic agent interactions. Where the next generation of speech-enabled applications will quickly evolve, however, is in their ability to translate caller intent data into a more conversational, intelligent self-service experience for customers.
8. Biometrics gathers real market momentum – thanks to fingerprint recognition on millions of smartphones worldwide, consumers are now treating biometrics as a mainstream technology - with some using the interface over 30 times a day as they ‘sign-in’ to their personal device. Voice and fingerprint biometrics help to achieve the previously incompatible goals of both enhancing security while simultaneously delivering reductions in customer effort.
9. Removing the digital siloes - it’s hardly surprising customers get frustrated, when so many organisations still operate and manage their digital and contact centre strategies separately. Closing this gap, and recognising that when people call contact centres today they have probably already been online first, will increasingly define how successful organisations are in delivering on their end-to-end digital customer service goals. Technology isn’t the barrier – it’s your internal siloes that are causing the problems!
10. Measuring and reducing customer effort - the customer effort measure is all about surfacing those issues across channels that are making life harder than necessary for customers. Once identified, these can be systematically addressed to help reduce service costs, decrease customer churn and improve overall service levels.

“It’s also critical that organisations have the right strategic direction, infrastructure and expertise in place to take full advantage of these key technology directions,” added Dorman. “At Sabio we believe there are a number of specific programmes that digital customer service teams need to concentrate on over the next 12 months if they are serious about reducing effort and building an integrated Digital Front Door for their customers.”

Dorman says that in 2016 customer service organisations need to focus on:[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• Laying the foundations for Digital Service – organisations will need to draw on a broad portfolio of technologies in order to develop the kind of integrated journeys that will make life easier for customers. This will demand the development of ‘Digital Front Doors’ that embrace the end-to-end journey across both self-service and assisted interactions.
• Embed service into every digital journey - providing customers with true embedded service support for each stage of their digital journeys, with more context-sensitive embedded online service applications that draw on web chat or click-to-call to help resolve queries and enable customers to progress to the next stage of their journey with significantly reduced effort.
• Becoming Customer Service Session Designers – until now a major barrier to true end-to-end customer journey design has been the cost and complexity of creating solutions that draw together different parts of an organisation. Now, using the latest engagement development platform technology, customer engagement teams have the opportunity to take advantage of snap-in tools to ensure rapid and more cost-effective solution development.
  Experiment by creating your own Customer Experience lab – it’s often difficult for organisations to know exactly which strategies or technologies to deploy in order to achieve their goals. It’s worthwhile establishing your own Customer Experience lab to find out how new ideas measure up when applied to a meaningful sample of live interactions.
• Recreate your Roadmaps based on Customer Experience -Reducing customer effort and building a more seamless experience requires the development of detailed UX-based roadmaps, breaking down specific elements to consider how much of the experience is actually value-creating and how much is wasted through waiting due to overly-complex or broken processes.

 

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Seamless integration between sales and service together with productivity improvement tools are two of the key enhancements in Microsoft's new cloud-based Dynamics CRM 2016, which the company calls “game-changing”

Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2016 includes advancements in intelligence, mobility and service and is said to be the most comprehensive ever upgrade of the company's CRM  solution. The new enhancements are designed to increase productivity in three key ways: by providing a simple and seamless experience across Dynamics CRM and other applications; delivering an enhanced mobile experience for the worker on the go, and providing enriched data and analytics.

“Microsoft’s obsession with customer success is rooted in our ambition to reinvent productivity and business processes,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “Dynamics CRM 2016 is designed from the ground up to deliver core capabilities all in a single system to eliminate distractions, to make it easier to get things done, and to dramatically increase productivity so our customers can spend more time serving their customers.”

The new interactive service hub incorporates real-time dashboards that provide a single view of the workload, giving organisations and agents the flexibility to choose the order of case resolution. Interactive charts provide a visual representation of the work items and can be used as visual filters that allow agents to slice and dice the data, view what is most important, see the next action and focus on faster resolutions.  The Unified Service Desk gives agents access to Skype and Yammer so they can engage customers and peers via chat for service resolution and collaboration.

Turning data into intelligent action is a cornerstone of business transformation and productivity, and the new Dynamics CRM release includes data management and advanced analytics capabilities powered by the Cortana Analytics Suite. Azure Machine Learning capabilities are incorporated, enabling organisations to continually learn from the problems and solutions that they are encountering so that patterns can be identified, speeding time to resolution and continuously improving performance over time.

The new version of Dynamics CRM provides full offline capabilities for service professionals on phones and tablets and across all major mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows). The release also introduces the ability to create task-centered mobile apps to streamline the completion of activities on the go.

The new version of Dynamics CRM closes the customer relationship loop by providing an end-to-end solution for customer service across self-service, assisted service and field service. It captures the signals communicated in various channels in the market, and empowering the agent to provide meaningful feedback and leverages social channels to instantly track and analyse relevant sentiment and engage directly with customers on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

 

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The main difference between being able to make unhappy customers happy, and happy customers even happier, is the point of initiation. At least with unhappy customers, even if you do not know why they were unhappy before contacting them (or having them contact you), you can rest assured that you will get the chance to learn very quickly writes Bill Pollock, President of Strategies for Growth^SM

Ironically, however, it may actually be a bit more difficult to make a happy customer even happier than it is to make an unhappy customer happy in the first place – and you certainly would not want to accidentally do something wrong that might make them unhappy instead.

It’s all a matter of listening, understanding, responding effectively and working under the auspices of an intuitive set of guidelines that should largely come as second nature to the vast majority of the organisation’s customer contact personnel (including yourself).

What we have seen from our research is that the best approach for making happy customers even happier is to focus on the following guidelines:

• Make sure that you and your customer services team understand how the customer uses its systems and equipment as part of their ongoing business operations – make suggestions occasionally on how they can improve efficiency, save some money, go green or reduce waste, etc.
• Take steps to better understand the difference between the customer’s wants and needs – provide them with targeted information and advice that they can use to concentrate more on what they “need”, rather than on what they think they “want”.
• Understand the customer's plans for future expansion, downsizing or consolidation – make the appropriate recommendations for updating and/or modifying their existing service level agreements, or upgrading to newer or different models and technology.
• Keep track of the things you have done in the past to make them happy – do more of the same, and learn what other things or actions would also make them happy.
• Customers love to feel they are getting something for nothing – any documentation or materials that you believe may help your customers to utilise their systems and equipment more efficiently, or provide them with additional product or service information, will generally be gladly accepted.
• Customers also love to hear what other users like themselves are doing with their equipment – so, without divulging any customer-proprietary information, occasionally provide your customers with examples of what some other companies are doing, again, to improve efficiency, save some money, or reduce waste, etc.
• Provide your customers with new product or service information before it is otherwise widely distributed or disseminated – customers always enjoy receiving information before it is distributed to the general public.
• Share your organisation’s thought leadership collateral with your customers – most customers especially like to be made aware of White Papers or Case Studies that help them to understand the enhanced value propositions of the equipment and services they are using, or how their peers have benefited in ways they may not have anticipated through the use of your products and services.
• Provide a more "personal" side of your communications with your customers in order to establish a closer, and less formal relationship – but, be careful not to get too "personal"; just close enough so they feel they can depend on you to act as their surrogate within the company whenever a problem becomes larger than what both you and they, can handle by yourselves.
• Strive toward making your relationship with your customers a true "partnership", rather than just merely a “vendor-customer" relationship – this is the true essence of Customer Relationship Management, or CRM.

Of course, all of these guidelines are merely just words written in a magazine article; the true test can only be exercised by you and your customer and technical support teams on behalf of the customer.

In any case, you should always feel comfortable in relying on your own instincts in order to initially assess the situation, determine the appropriate course of action, and override any of these (or any other) guidelines on the basis of your accumulated expertise and experience.

If you are truly going to succeed in establishing – and maintaining – a strong relationship with your customers, then you must first have both the capability and the confidence to use your own judgment in taking the specific actions that will make your happy customers even happier.

 

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