Field Service News Research is pleased to announce the findings of their recent study run in partnership with HSO that looks at the latest trends around customer-centricity and the increasing use of technology to drive improved customer satisfaction standards...

In recent years we have seen a marked shift in the emphasis on the metrics which define success within field service operations.

Traditionally, the critical metrics within field service organisations have centred around operational success. KPIs such as Mean-time-to-Repair (MTTR), Technician Utilisation and First-Time-Fix (FTF) have always been at the top of any benchmarking study relating to this area.

However, increasingly across the last few years of undertaking such benchmarking studies, we have seen Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metrics become widely cited as critical KPIs amongst field service organisations.

For example, in a previous study hosted by FSN Research, we noted that 51% of field service companies now saw an equal weighting in importance between operationally-focused KPIs and CSAT-focused KPIs. Furthermore, 13% of field service companies went further and stated that they felt CSAT focused KPIs were of greater importance for measuring their business success.

Taking this in mind, FSN Research in partnership with HSO has undertaken a detailed study to understand precisely what CSAT metrics are being tracked.

At the same time, we must also acknowledge that the digital transformation journey our sector has been on for several years was significantly accelerated due to the pandemic across 2020 and into this year.

There has been much discussion of what the new normal will look like for the field service sector.

However, the indicators apparent within numerous studies from FSN Research and beyond suggest many of the key trends that were emerging will be at the heart of our thinking as we move into the brave new world of the post-pandemic field service operations.

Three of the key pillars of this future of field service are servitization, digital transformation and customer-centricity. Therefore, the second objective of this study is to better define the interplay between these three crucial areas.

Next, the study was designed to focus on how the digital transformation our industry is moving through can empower the shift to an industry more focused on customer success and, finally, to assess whether that transformation will lead us naturally towards becoming an industry that places servitization at its heart.

In the study we spoke to a sample of over 280 field service leaders from a variety of different industry verticals including manufacturing, utilities, telecommunications, power generation, healthcare, med-tech, security and many others.

The study was conducted during April and May 2021 and data was collected online via personal invitations to participate. The data presented in this report is quantitative. We are currently undertaking interviews with a selection of respondents for our final report within this study which will then be based on further qualitative data yielded in those interviews.

One company that stood as something of a beacon for the many of us in the field service sector struggling in the face of the global lockdowns was Koenig and Bauer, whose agile mindset allowed them to adapt quickly to the situation. In this excerpt from the Field Service Podcast, Koenig and Bauer's Lukas Fahnroth and Michael Keubel of Salesforce discuss what recovery might look like for field service companies and how we can get there.

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Want to hear more? Head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode Three 'Adaptability, Customer-Centricity and Recovery ft. Lukas Fahnroth & Michael Kuebel'

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A NEW NORMAL OF AGILITY FOR THE FIELD SERVICE INDUSTRY

In many ways it is our collective responsibility now to ensure that after all of the challenges we've faced and all of the heartbreaks people have seen across the last few months, we grasp the nettle and hold on tightly to the good that has come from the global lockdowns.

There is a lot of talk about the recovery but what exactly should that look like and how do we get there? How can we use the last few months as a catalyst for embarking on an ongoing continuous improvement journey? What does the conversation look like now in terms of the conversations you're having with customers? Is there a specific strategy or approach we must adopt as we look towards recovery and how you help your customers' customers as well?

"One of the important things that happened during the crisis for us was that we've extended a lot of the digital offerings we've had in place. We've improved on them in many instances" says Lukas Fahnroth, Koenig and Bauer.  "So the conversation for us currently revolves around further extending those actions we've taken and also keeping them in place, even if the crisis disappears. For example, for the hotline services, we've extended the video support calls. A lot of the offerings we've put out there, like the customer community with the analytics functionality, is really something that our customers have got used to, and that we at Koenig and Bauer now see as essential. So we're going to see a lot of those actions stay in place and keep this digital innovation momentum in place in order to further develop our digital strategy, even after the crisis disappears."

As Fahnroth alludes, the digital acceleration of the last few months has been dramatic, not just for Koenig and Bauer, who were already on the path very much anyway, but for many, many other companies. In essence we've already begun the process of building a new normal and that new normal is much more digital centric than what came before. 

 

"Salesforce is offering help here. Using our own platform, we have created a new product suite that we call work.com, which is the probably the first product on the market for organising reopening of businesses and especially addressing these topics..."

-Michael Kuebel, Salesforce

 

"We can split the Covid-19 crisis into three phases that we see," explains Michael Kuebel, Salesforce. 

"One is the fact that most of us have been stabilising and gone through a process to make sure we keep operations running, and I think Koenig and Bauer is a brilliant example of that. We have other clients in many industries that cope very well with stabilising but now they're going to the next phase which is a reopening phase, which also needs a different type of effort, and that is a muscle we haven't yet trained.

"We need to organise a safe return to the workplace by making sure that we don't overfill our offices. We must make sure that we can trace contacts of people in case somebody gets a positive test result, then you can trace back and understand who they met with, allowing you to inform customers to make sure you don't spread the virus any further, keeping transparency.

"Salesforce is offering help here. Using our own platform, we have created a new product suite that we call work.com, which is the probably the first product that is on the market for organising reopening and especially addressing these topics.

"The last phase, once we're all out of the crisis, is going to be continuing the growth path. When we look at the capabilities and the success factors, we feel that leadership in the crisis, out of the crisis and after the crisis is paramount. Lucas was very eloquently elaborating that people, employees, customers and society are watching carefully what leaders are doing and what their priorities are.

"Customer engagement is a super important pillar. Empowerment of people is something that I think is here to stay. And last but not least, business agility. Agility is easily said but difficult to do, especially when you look at Manufacturing. My background is Manufacturing and when it's about products and safety, excellence and perfection is the ultimate goal. Now suddenly, with agility, speed is the ultimate goal.

"I think customers have quickly become used to some new experiences and services. I think that mindsets have changed and if you then have platforms and the right tools, this can enable agility to meet these new mindsets. I think that's here to stay and this will be the muscle that we train today that we will use in the future to establish growth."

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Further Reading:

• Learn more about work.com @ www.salesforce.com/work/
• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Michael Kuebel on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kuebel-fieldservice/
• Follow Michael Kuebel on Twitter @ twitter.com/michaelkuebel
• Find out more about Salesforce Field Service Solutions @ www.salesforce.com/uk/campaign/sem/service-cloud/
• Follow Salesforce on twitter @ twitter.com/salesforce
• Find out more about Koenig & Bauer @ www.koenig-bauer.com
• Follow Koenig and Bauer @ twitter.com/koenigandbauer

In this excerpt from the Field Service Podcast, Salesforce's Michael Keubel and Koenig and Bauer's Lukas Fahnroth discuss why the concept of customer-centricity was critical in being able to navigate the tricky waters of 2020.

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Want to hear more? Head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode Three 'Adaptability, Customer-Centricity and Recovery ft. Lukas Fahnroth & Michael Kuebel'

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Customer Satisfaction Has to be More than a Tick-Box Exercise in Field Service Management

In a recent episode of the Field Service Podcast, Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News was joined by Michael Kuebel of Salesforce and Lukas Fahnroth of Koenig and Bauer as the two discussed how they worked together to ensure Koenig and Bauer were able to remain resilient not only within their own business but also to be there to offer support when their customers needed them most.

One of the things that really came through in that conversation was the importance of being close to the customer and certainly Koenig and Bauer were able to ride the storm while simultaneously being a rock for their own customers during the Covid-19 lockdowns. However, even this 200 year old company was challenged by these unprecedented times. As Fahnroth explained; "We have seen a lot of innovations being supercharged at Koenig and Bauer because of the crisis and we've always been an innovative company, but Covid-19 really changed the way everything looks and has reset our goals in many, many instances."

However, despite those pressures the German printing manufacturer remained resolute and this is something that Kuebel strongly aligns with Koenig and Bauer's strong sense of importance in customer service and placing the customer at the heart of what they do. 

"I get enthusiastic when I hear what Lucas is saying and when I see what Koenig and Bauer are doing. I really see the potential when I talk to customers and we have initial discussions where they want to talk about customer centricity. But sometimes I feel that service leaders can feel that customer centricity is just a buzzword - but for me, what Lukas has explained with Koenig and Bauer, you can see what customer centricity actually means. What an organisation looks like, that really puts the customer in the centre. 

 

"This is really impressive and this is, for me, a brilliant example where customer centricity is so much more than a buzzword..."

- Michael Kuebel, Salesforce

 

"I was at an event earlier this year called Koenig and Bauer 4.0 and I initially thought this would be an event all about digitalisation. But it was an event where Koenig and Bauer over the course of a couple of days invited hundreds if not thousands of customers from all over the world, to bring them together and explain to them and discuss with them what Koenig and Bauer is doing on the digitalisation forefront. To explain to their customers how such changes would make their life easier and help them to make their printing production run more efficiently. It was all focused on the 'what's in it for you.'

"It was not a show of 'these are the nice features that we have' or 'aren't we an innovative company', but it was really only focused on what's in it for you. I spoke to some of Koenig and Bauer's customers that day and they were really very, very positive seeing that and seeing how much effort a company like Koenig and Bauer puts into a transformation and how they emphasise that customer success is paramount to everything that they do.

"This is really impressive and this is, for me, a brilliant example where customer centricity is so much more than a buzzword," Kuebel adds. 

Kuebel's enthusiasm will surely only be mirrored by Koenig and Bauer's own customer base, who will have benefited greatly from the print manufacturer's continuing focus on customer satisfaction across all of their thinking. Indeed, as Kuebel outlines there is a world of difference between those companies who treat customer centricity as a buzz-word and those who have it etched within their DNA. It is perhaps at times of crisis that we see this the most.

As Warren Buffet would often quip "it is when the tide goes out that you see who is swimming naked.' With a 200 year pedigree based on innovation and rock solid business ethics, you can put a hefty wager that Koenig and Bauer won't be caught out by the changing tides that Covid-19 has brought us.

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Michael Kuebel on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kuebel-fieldservice/
• Follow Michael Kuebel on Twitter @ twitter.com/michaelkuebel
• Find out more about Salesforce Field Service Solutions @ www.salesforce.com/uk/campaign/sem/service-cloud/
• Follow Salesforce on twitter @ twitter.com/salesforce
• Find out more about Koenig & Bauer @ www.koenig-bauer.com
• Follow Koenig and Bauer @ twitter.com/koenigandbauer

Koenig and Bauer were an organisation who showed excellent agility, innovation and leadership during the pandemic. Here, Lukas Fahnroth explains how the embedded culture within the organisation helped them pivot and adapt so quickly.

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Want to hear more? Head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode Three 'Adaptability, Customer-Centricity and Recovery ft. Lukas Fahnroth & Michael Kuebel'

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Field Service Management, Driven By Customer service, Empowered by Digital Transformation

The story of Koenig and Bauer and how their early adoption of a digital transformation strategy allowed them to ride the troubling times brought on by the Covid-19 lockdowns, makes an excellent case study for what best practice can look like in field service. In a recent episode of the Field Service Podcast, Lucas Fahnroth discussed exactly what the culture was within the organisation and how they had been able to pivot during the crisis so effectively. Indeed, companies like Koenig and Bauer have led the way by showing how having an agile mindset within an organisation can be an essential component in success both in times of plenty and in times of famine.

But just how did Koenig and Bauer develop such an internal skill-set and what are the key attributes that empower them to be able to adapt so swiftly when presented with a seemingly insurmountable challenge? 

Koenig and Bauer is the oldest manufacturer of printing presses in the world," Fanroth begins.

"That means we've got a 200 plus year history of constant innovation and constant pivoting, which from my standpoint has only been possible because Koenig and Bauer has constantly looked after our customers and put the customer in the centre of everything we do. The Covid-19 crisis really hit us obviously across our worldwide service operation.  So it took a lot of care to work out how to deal with this in order to continue our 200 plus year success story of constant innovation and constant development.

"The way we at Koenig and Bauer see this crisis is actually as a sort of litmus test of our leadership where it really takes a clear vision in terms of not only how we see the crisis but also how we see our own role in these times of adversity and uncertainty. One thing is for certain - and that is that we will be judged by our response for years to come," Fahnroth adds. 

 

"We've produced 100,000 face shields and are donating them as we speak. That's something internally we've done in order to give back to our community..."

- Lucas Fahnroth, Koenig and Bauer

 

"On the one hand we will be judged internally by our employees and also internal stakeholders, but also externally by our customers. Customer centricity means that we as a company need to be a good partner to our customers, and especially during those difficult times it's necessary to be a good partner and what we've done is to communicate this very early on to the stakeholders involved.

One of the things that shines through in the wider discussion with Fahnroth and Salesforce's Michael Kuebel who was also part of the discussion, is the importance of communication. As Fahnroth explains; "We've talked a lot to our customers. We've compiled a package of Covid-19 response actions to help our customers and to really fulfil that role of a good partner in these challenging times.

"We've made special offers to our customers, we've given free access to our analytics tools and our customer community. We have stayed in constant contact with our customers, and we really try to deliver those individual responses and those individual aids that our customers need in such times. We've extended our hotline services and we've brought in more subject matter experts."

While the focus on customer-centricity is important, even crucial, the truth remains however, that such an approach is far more easily facilitated by a modern digitalised approach to field service delivery.

"We have also digitalised the process," Fanhroth explains. "A lot of those actions have been developed or were being developed before the crisis - we actually had a couple of them already in place. But what Covid-19 did for us was really supercharge this development and the market launch for some of those features. For example, our hotline services have been extended and we've been working with video support for our customers for quite some time. However, we've really seen the spike in demand for those actions and we are really seeing adoption grow and further develop with those actions.

"So facing our customers, we've really seen a lot of those products, a lot of those features and services we've sometimes already had in place, be supercharged," he adds.

There is certainly a sense of community leadership that appears to also underpin much of the thinking within Koenig and Bauer.

"Coming back to our general strategy, as I said, we have to also keep in mind all our internal stakeholders," Fahnroth comments. 

"So in order to fill this role of a real leadership, we've also thought a lot about our communities. Koenig and Bauer has used a lot of production and demo facilities and free capacities we've had to produce face shields for example. We've produced 100,000 face shields and are donating them as we speak. That's something internally we've done in order to give back to our community."

The very way in which Koenig and Bauer operate is also underpinned by a 200 year history of innovation, exactly as Fahnroth asserts and it is within that ingenuity that it would appear the secrets of success might lie.

"We've seen the way work looks like now at Koenig and Bauer," Fahnroth states. "We adopted G-Suite at the end of last year and we've seen a huge change in how people at Koenig and Bauer work now. It really is a change towards a more mobile way of working and a lot more collaborative. It's really changed a lot of the way communication and work at Koenig and Bauer looks and we're really glad to see that change of mindset," he adds. 

 

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Michael Kuebel on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kuebel-fieldservice/
• Follow Michael Kuebel on Twitter @ twitter.com/michaelkuebel
• Find out more about Salesforce Field Service Solutions @ www.salesforce.com/uk/campaign/sem/service-cloud/
• Follow Salesforce on twitter @ twitter.com/salesforce
• Find out more about Koenig & Bauer @ www.koenig-bauer.com
• Follow Koenig and Bauer @ twitter.com/koenigandbauer

Micheal Kuebel of Salesforce has been working with a number of companies to help them overcome the challenges of the global lockdowns. In this excerpt of the Field Service Podcast Kuebel identifies four key traits that he has seen emerge as common success factors amongst those companies he has seen adapt quickest and most successfully to the Covid-19 challenge.

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Want to hear more? Head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts and look for Series Five, Episode Three 'Adaptability, Customer-Centricity and Recovery ft. Lukas Fahnroth & Michael Kuebel'

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Leadership, Customer-Centricity, Empowerment, Agility

There has been a lot of innovation on show of late. Of course, much of it has been born out of necessity as companies have frantically tried to adapt to the realities of a global lockdown as we deal as a planet with the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Yet, undoubtedly some companies have taken the challenges of the pandemic far more comfortably in their stride than others. Have there been some shared fundamental tenets of how those who adapted best were able to do so?

Michael Kuebel, Senior Director of Product Management, Salesforce has been working closely with many companies including Koenig and Bauer who were an excellent example of a company that was able to show agility and ingenuity in equal measure as they pivoted and adapted to the new scenario of a Covid-19 infested world. He certainly believes there are some shared attributes amongst those companies who showed the same levels of resilience that Koenig and Bauer did. 

"We see basically four kinds of success factors when we talk to customers and see how they master this most turbulent of markets," Kuebel explained on the Field Service Podcast.

"Number one is strong leadership. We saw that when we talk to our customers and ask, 'how did you cope with the crisis?' We saw a common thread of companies establishing a clear understanding of customers and safety first. It was a time to come up with a complex strategy, it was a time for these simple clear directives.

"For all of the companies that we worked with, there was a focus on making sure their customers remained operational, and making sure that their employees, customers, their families and the society stayed safe. They execute this latest shift through a much more focused visibility. When in the past, they were looking at reporting cycles of a month, now it's more once a day or even intra-daily visibility. They need those KPIs right now, because it's such a volatile situation.

"Also, we saw that strong leadership must also lift the company through being a role model, creating trust and of course, making fact based decisions," Kuebel added. 

 

"You need to make sure that your people are enabled, that they have the tools and they have the knowledge to make decisions when in the field..."

- Michael Kuebel, Salesforce

 

Indeed, this has been echoed through much of the reporting Field Service News has done on the topic and it does appear that there is a strong correlation between those organisations who were able to act swiftly but from a position of data-driven insight and those organisations that coped best with the lockdown scenario. Another strong link amongst such companies is also the willingness to have open and ongoing customer dialogue. 

"The second aspect I mentioned, customer centricity," concurs Kuebel.

"We see customer engagement very much in focus. For practicality reasons at this time, we all need to enable our customers to help themselves better. That way they were creating a digital journey that the customer actually said, well, that's actually even effortless for me, it works and it's helping me stay productive. That is only possible if you have a 360 degree view on the customer and that you have processes that are centred around the customer.

"Then there is empowerment," Kuebel continues. "You need to make sure that your people are enabled, that they have the tools and they have the knowledge to make decisions when in the field. I think especially this factor of empowerment has been something that I think has received an enormous boost within the last couple of weeks during the crisis, just look at the amount of companies that suddenly have home office as the new normal - that was never a plan and now it works and it will be very difficult to turn this back.

"Once you create that level of trust, and you see that people are effective, even when they are not in the office, this is something that is there to stay. However, you need to have the right tools to enable people to work with them. You need to know if you have an on-premise solution, you have no chance in virtualising a call centre overnight, but with a cloud solution, the right tools, the right knowledge and the right information, it's no big deal to do that. We have a couple of customers that were virtualising their dispatching calls and jobs literally within hours."

The final factor that Kuebel lists is perhaps the secret sauce that separates those companies who are best-in class and the rest of the pack.

"Last but not least, you need this agile mindset and an agile platform that allows you to easily adapt to basically go into these MVP (minimum viable product) situations and roll it out with the view that it's good enough to stay afloat - and then, we see we can develop from there. When I look at Koenig and Bauer for example, when I talk to them, when I talk to their management, there's a very, very clear leadership. The way that they communicate with their customers, the predominant mindset is around customer centricity, agility and empowerment. It was therefore, no surprise to me that Koenig and Bauer were one of the companies that are able to manage through the crisis relatively well."

 

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Further Reading:

• Find the full episode of this interview and the entire back catalogue of The Field Service Podcast @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Read more about the impact of Covid-19 on Field Service @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/en-gb/covid-19
• Connect with Michael Kuebel on LinkedIn @ www.linkedin.com/in/michael-kuebel-fieldservice/
• Follow Michael Kuebel on Twitter @ twitter.com/michaelkuebel
• Find out more about Salesforce Field Service Solutions @ www.salesforce.com/uk/campaign/sem/service-cloud/
• Follow Salesforce on twitter @ twitter.com/salesforce
• Find out more about Koenig & Bauer @ www.koenig-bauer.com
• Follow Koenig and Bauer @ twitter.com/koenigandbauer