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Paul Whitelam, Group Vice President of Product Marketing, ClickSoftware takes a look forward to see what the key customer expectations challenges are set to be across the coming year...

Field service organisations are always thinking about evolving customer expectations. Major drivers of this evolution have included mobility, new service standards set by companies like Uber and Amazon, and businesses increasingly measuring their service operations by customer satisfaction scores. Through improved processes, smarter software, and cloud computing, many field service organizations have transformed how they view and deliver service. But their work is never quite done. In 2018, customer expectations will continue to rise. Fortunately, so will the capacity to meet them.

These trends are likely to shape the next stage in customer experience and service delivery. Let’s explore how technology can enable a business to embrace the future and delight their customers.

Everything on Demand

Fast delivery isn’t just for pizza anymore. Video streaming services give consumers instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows and on multiple devices. Too busy to run to the grocery store? Use Instacart or Postmates to have dish detergent and avocados brought to your door. Amazon now offers same-day delivery for select items.

It’s not your direct competitors setting customer expectations, it’s the best experiences these customers have had anywhereAs has been the case for some time, it’s not your direct competitors setting customer expectations, it’s the best experiences these customers have had anywhere. And today, they can what they want, and they can get it fast. A first-time fix will become table stakes for most service businesses. A truly agile field service organization will use mobility and automated schedule optimization to shorten the time to job fulfilment.

Having complete visibility into resource location and availability can enable reshuffling schedules on the fly, providing narrow and accurate appointment windows, and giving customers the ability to self-book appointments from their mobile phones will provide the on-demand experience they expect.

User Experience

There are times when hailing a taxi is both faster and less expensive than choosing Lyft or Uber, and yet customers continue using ride-sharing apps. This shows how much they value transparency and visibility into the service process. The ease of payment can’t be beaten—the price for a ride is shown up front and the customer is charged automatically. This level of transparency can also be provided to the service customer. The ubiquity of mobile devices means giving real-time information to customers about the location, and the likely arrival time, of the service professional—increasing service satisfaction, and acting as a differentiator in competitive markets.

Customers will be able to use a variety of channels to communicate with the service provider about the service visit. This is true on the day of service (providing apartment access details for example) as well as before the day of service (sending photographs about the issue that needs to be addressed to better prepare the service provider) and after (questionnaires about the quality of service when the visit is fresh in the mind).

The customer can stay involved in the service delivery process, and feels more informed and empowered as a result, all accomplished with speed and ease.

Machine Learning

As more field service organizations have moved to cloud-based solutions for managing their operations, they have the ability to leverage massive elastic computing power to rapidly process mind-boggling amounts of data into automated scheduling decisions. No longer constrained by infrastructure limitations, they can take full advantage of machine learning, mobility and data management that combine to enable improved operational efficiency and better customer service.

In 2018 and beyond, your customers will expect speed, transparency, precision, and frictionless interactions.Just as Netflix can provide uncannily specific movie recommendations based on the habits of similar users, using historical data about service delivery and the outcomes of previous engagements enables organizations to build models that are increasingly precise about the time a certain type of job will take a specific technician, and which tools or parts will be required. As organizations improve their understanding of the prerequisites of a successful task, they will get better at forecasting task and travel times, and develop better schedules.

By combining this with machine learning models that incorporate traffic patterns, service providers are becoming increasingly precise in predicting the field service team’s daily schedules and can accordingly make more precise promises to their customers—and keep them. Accurate information about the time and duration of a service visit—and that ability to deliver—will increase not just customer satisfaction, but also trust and loyalty.

Predicting the Future of Field Service

In 2018 and beyond, your customers will expect speed, transparency, precision, and frictionless interactions. No one can guess what disruptive app or service model will reset their expectations next, but honing the ability to deliver on the above is a safe bet. Understanding the factors that make for great customer experience will make it easier to assess which existing and emerging technologies will help you meet, anticipate, and outpace service expectations.

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News talks exclusively to Dan Sewell, COO of Espresso Service about the improvements to their service delivery that they have seen come to the fore since the implementation of Tesseract Service Centre, an Asolvi product.

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Field Service Technician enablement is both an important topic but also a frequently rolled out buzz-phrase that we hear within our industry. Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower digs deeper into the topic and helps us cut through the hyperbole to understand the key facts within this topic...

Technicians today are not the technicians of the past. Their expectations are continuously evolving based on the ability to consume information and communicate instantaneously from their connected devices among themselves, with assets, the back office and the end consumer.

ServicePower’s mission is to drive an excellent service experience and grow the value of every consumer relationship. To do that, we must focus on the technician.

Much time the past five years was spent talking about IOT. Less was focused on what a connected world means for the technician, and what is needed to work smarter. We know productivity, first-time fix and proactive maintenance is the holy grail of profitability for service organizations and customer experience. The technician is the key to both.

Consumer expectation of a seamless, digital experience has impacted the industry greatly as have technology trends, yet a true focus on technician enablement is still spotty.Consumer expectation of a seamless, digital experience has impacted the industry greatly as have technology trends, yet a true focus on technician enablement is still spotty. Our “best-in-class” customers bring technicians into the process related to user experience, and how data and workflow changes enable experienced technicians to be hyper-productive and how novice technicians become fully functional, faster. Likewise, the businesses which service a wide variety of equipment, work, or parts need technology that has best-in-class capabilities around artificial intelligence, data model flexibility, IOT, diagnostics, and robust, flexible mobile applications. They likewise need a consumer or dealer portal to collect and send technicians key information such as customer, product or service history, service contract or service level agreements.

Service technicians have become the “single point of failure” in the customer interaction because typical technology driven from the CRM and ERP ill-prepares them with a lack of information. Sales and financial systems provide customer and billing information but do not enable a game-changing service experience that improves brand, market share or revenue.

We endeavour to enable technicians to perform more efficiently with fewer points of friction in their daily activities. Consider the following.

Evolving Labor Supply

All technicians want to be successful on the job. The emerging millennial workforce uses technology every day. We must use veterans’ skills and talents while utilizing millennials to drive technology adoption. Functionality exposed to technicians is important. However, flexible date models, customer, product, and diagnostic information, available before and during a job, is equally important. First-time fixes don’t happen by accident.

Enable Technicians with Technology

Field service management technology is itself evolving, through artificial intelligence, but also more versatile data models that can use IOT or predictive information to update work orders, create differentiated service workflows, or deploy updatable forms in real-time, based on diagnostics. Asset data, IOT diagnostics and service history deliver service insights digitally, on-site. The best vendors and newest product releases do more with technology to achieve and exceed traditional metrics.

Intelligent portals

Intelligent portals are game-changing. They can do more than simply enable a service or technician location. Portals can digitally deliver appointment offers, which in the past, only the call centre would have had the insights to do. They can facilitate better service by allowing customers to upload connected smart sensor data, fault codes, photographs or videos of failed products, and interact with triage and field technicians. Portals better inform customers and prepare technicians to resolve issues in a single truck roll.

The latest mapping and location technologies provide consumers improved visibility of appointments, near-by technicians with schedule availability, and technician arrival estimates. Portals delight the customer and improve call centre efficiency by digitally handling booking, confirming and rescheduling appointments automatically.

Portals can even use AI, asset and service history to intelligently offer customers new products, accessories and services, without ever interacting with a call centre, snail mail or email, and before the technician arrives.

Mobile technology

Mobile technology has come a long way in recent years. While scheduling optimized technicians and parts together, status, and capturing payment are still a challenge for some organizations, overall, field service companies can now also use mobile technology to provide better, more personalized service in the field to every customer.

Effective mobile solutions deliver relevant customer, asset, parts, and diagnostic information in real-timeMobile applications provide entitlement, customer availability, asset information and technician location, real-time inventory, payments, and timesheet capability, as well as work order and technician status updates. Leading solutions were built with 100% configurability and flexible data models, which provide the opportunity to customize service events, improve first-time fix rates and improve customer satisfaction. Effective mobile solutions deliver relevant customer, asset, parts, and diagnostic information in real-time, as well as provide task lists, pricing and payments, and survey delivery for a faster, smarter, more satisfying experience.

Mobile technology is the best way to enable technicians to deliver the best experience.

Siri, Echo, Alexa and Cortana Aren’t Enough

Digital assistants are cool, but how can we make them more helpful? Displaying navigation, making calls or texts is handy. Digital assistants integrated with data hubs can deliver useful customer, asset, and predictive intelligence to technicians which require it to improve service delivery. `

Digital assistants become more powerful when integrated with AI, machine learning algorithms, asset and service history, predictive and repair information, providing an entirely different kind of assistance to field technicians.

AI can analyze data to derive cognitive insights and deliver it through digital assistants, resulting in the holy grail of better tech enablement, customer experience, and financial performance of the service organization or brand.

Technician Enablement Means Transforming Field Service Experiences with Technology

Friendly, competent technicians enabled with game-changing technology are the future. Sales secure customers, but your service technology retains them, increases your share of their wallets and grows your brand.

Don’t just give face value to technician enablement, own it, and make it a priority. Your brand and your customers will thank you.

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Having recently started a new role working with his Vice President, Whitney Reynolds, focusing on Customer Experience Matt Boretti, Director, Strategic Programs, Teleflex, was a prime candidate to take part in the day-long stream on the topic at the forthcoming Field Service Medical conference held this year in La Holla, California.

We spoke exclusively with Boretti ahead of the event to find out more about what he would be covering off in his presentation and why CX has become such an important area both in his organisation Teleflex and also within the broader medical sector.

"The customer experience group is a relatively new initiative in our organisation" begins Boretti.

"We've done extremely well financially across the last number of years, which has been primarily fuelled by a growth strategy that has been based on acquisition. As I'm reading and learning more around customer experience, I've come to understand that it is not unusual for companies that are in a heavy acquisition mode tend to not have the ASCI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) scores, so we were probably not unusual in that regard."

"Our President of the Americas, Jay White,  recognised this and I believe he was hearing from a number of our customer's if I didn't have to buy from Teleflex I wouldn't - I think that was a pivotal moment for him where he realised we need to do something different. In other words, what got us to this point where we are at now, is not going to get us towards where we want to go next."

With White identifying the importance of service to his organisation's aspirations, he pushed the topic and gained buy-in from his fellow senior execs with the result being Boretti and Reynolds heading up the newly formed Customer Experience group back in August last year.

As one would expect just six months in it has been a phenomenally busy period for the two, but perhaps crucially they have gone into the task with a solid understanding of what needs to be achieved and a well thought out roadmap of how they are going to get there.

"When we initially took this on we realised that we're not experts in this!" Boretti admits humbly. "So the first thing we did was we started to read a lot, and we also identified some organisations that had helped companies like us with similar projects such as this - which is change management at the core."

"We whittled a list of ten initial companies down to three who came to us to present their ideas. Then we finally chose a company called Strativity, who had worked with companies like Delta and Mercedes Benz, and they've established a straightforward process that was easy to understand so we could visualise how we should fit into that."

Alignment:

"The first step of the process for us was alignment, and in many ways, Jay [White] had already started that process via some of the socialisations he had done with the leadership group. However, there was still a lot of details to be established, so I think they were onboard, but they didn't exactly what they were signing up for. Therefore our first objective was to get everyone up to speed on what we would be undertaking here."

With this objective set, the first move was to hold a management alignment meeting to make sure all essential personnel were on the same page. However, it soon became apparent to Boretti that the path they were heading on wasn't going to be one of simple linear progression.

"What really struck me in that first meeting was that alignment is not just a phase that we will move out of. We will probably move from alignment into discovery, then back to alignment then into design and then back to alignment and so on. It really does need to be a journey of continuous improvement and refinement."

Communication

Of course, while as Boretti asserts alignment needs to be a continuously reviewed aspect that is returned to and evaluated through any process that will fundamentally shift a corporate culture, such as bringing customer experience to the fore, another vitally constant aspect that needs a concerted focus is on communication.

"We started doing a lot of communication from very early on," explains Boretti. "People would ask me what I was doing exactly, and I would say there are three things that we are doing. Great things are happening in the organisation that Whitney [Reynolds] and I had nothing to do with that were improving the customer experience, so the first thing we are doing is highlighting those great things and making sure people are aware of the good things that are already happening in the organisation."

"The second aspect was that we started to understand in the different functional areas of the business units where we wanted to make improvements for the customer experience but that were not easy and had obstacles in place - whether they be processes, people or systems. We wanted to gain an understanding of those which would be important to our group and help remove some of those obstacles so we could accelerate some of those."

"Then the last piece was the transformation itself. We knew that we had to change the mindset and to some extent our culture regarding how we view our customers and how we view ourselves servicing those customers - ultimately that is what we see as the long-term aim for the CX group."

Fortune favours the brave

For even the most seasoned service and change management professionals identifying the core areas of focus, building out a strategy and then beginning to implement that plan would be viewed as a reasonable return for an initial six months of hard work. However, Reynolds realised that they had the wind in their sails and in October tasked Boretti with holding a Customer Experience Week in December.

It was a bold move, for while it presented an opportunity to really drive home the awareness the for how the company was evolving concerning its customer focus, it would mean a lot of hard work to bring it together within less than two months. If the delivery of such an event is executed well, it can potentially have an adverse effect amongst the workforce. It was a definite sign of trust in Boretti and the CX group as well as the viability of what they were trying to achieve.

Fortunately, that faith was repaid, and they not only pulled it off but in doing so have been really able to accelerate their program so far. So what exactly did they include in their inaugural Customer Experience Week?

"There were three parts to customer experience week," explains Boretti. "Firstly we introduced an off the shelf training package from Miller-Heimann called Building Customer Loyalty where so we brought some of our trainers together who run leadership training internally and then trained the trainers, based on that course."

"We also brought in our customers into give presentations as well. It was interesting because when I first suggested this, a few people asked 'can we do that?' But this was a customer experience week so for me; it was essential that the customers were involved."

"With the customer presentations, we basically asked them to tell us three things when they came in. We wanted them to tell us what they expect from a medical device company, how they viewed our partnership and to tell us what we were doing well and then to tell us where we were falling short, what do we need to do differently, what do we need to do better."

"The final thing that we did was what we called departmental sharing. The thinking is that we everyone in the organisation either directly impacts the customer experience or enable the customer experience. We gave everyone a passport, and they were asked to go around the office, and they would get a sticker on the passport, and they would put the passport in Dropbox when they were done to enter a draw."

"Out of around 550 people within the office we had about 250 that participated in that event and another 200 involved in the training and about 150 that attended the customer presentation - so we really did manage to touch all of the office, and the reception was really positive."

Next step on the journey

So with a whirlwind six months plus and a highly successful Customer Experience week behind them already what is the next step on the change management journey for Boretti and his CX group within Teleflex?

"The real benefit for us from undertaking the CX Week is that we're now going to be producing a Customer Experience guide which we will be looking at in the June/July timeframe. What the event allowed us to do was identify what worked well, what didn't work well and what would we do differently."

"So we really have a strong baseline now for when we launch at full throttle in mid this year. Also, to come back to the point about alignment being a content area of focus for us, it helped us in terms of making sure the whole team could have some visibility into exactly what we are doing and why."

In many senses what the team at Teleflex are trying to achieve is not necessarily something new, customer-centricity and adopting an outside-in perspective of the business is a fundamental concept amongst companies with high CSAT scores. However, as Boretti raised above it is also an area that many companies, especially those that have grown through acquisition and therefore have multiple cultures embedded within them, struggle to master.

From speaking with Boretti though it certainly seems that Teleflex is adopting a sensible approach to establishing a central culture that has Customer Experience at its heart - something that will stand them in good stead for many years to come.

Want to know more? Why not join Matt and as well as the Field Service News team in La Jolla for field service medical in Feb 26th to 28th. Field Service News subscribers have an exclusive 25% discount for this event and if you are a field service practitioner then you may qualify for a complimentary industry subscription
Click here to apply for your subscription now and if you are successful a discount code will be sent to you via email within the hour!

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News, takes a look at a new line in wearable technology aimed at the medical sector launched by Nanowear and explains why he thinks it could be an essential aspect for field service worker safety...

Despite all the hyperbole (much of which I myself admit to being responsible for) wearables in field service has just never really taken off.

For example, the impact of the ultimate widespread failure of Google Glass did a lot to suppress the appetite for smart glasses. At the time of launch, Field Service Management (FSM) solution providers were queuing up to announce that they were working on a Glass app and the promise of hands-free working had everybody in the field service sector excited.

However, a mix of poor battery life and spotty voice recognition meant it never really met expectations. Add to this the fact that Google misjudged the product as something the consumer world was waiting for when the reality was it was always a product that should have been geared to towards industry and in particular areas such as field service, where remote workers could have benefited from such a technology.

Google misjudged the product as something the consumer world was waiting for when the reality was it was always a product that should have been geared to towards industryAnd while a raft of companies has since brought respectable, smart glasses to the market, with the pick of the bunch for my mind so far being Vuzix, the general feeling of disappointment with Glass is a hard obstacle to overcome. That said, with the rise in prominence of AR the smartglass market is getting a second wind, and I do feel that smartglasses will ultimately play an important role in the field service industry. But that time is likely to still be a few years away - when a couple of years ago it seemed imminent.

The same can't be said for smartwatches though. Again a number of FSM solution providers including IFS, ClickSoftware and ServiceMax all developed smartwatch applications.

However, looking back with hindsight these seemed to be more about developing an app for a technology for the sake of it, and then trying to work a use case back from that position - which invariably is a lot less likely to yield results. Ultimately the benefit of having a stripped down version of a mobile app on a field service engineer's wrist offered little benefit - especially when most smartwatches need to be paired with a phone in the first place.

While for smartglasses there is a distinct home for them in the world of field service, smartwatches seem to be very much a technology that belongs in the consumer realm.Ultimately, while for smartglasses there is a distinct home for them in the world of field service, smartwatches seem to be very much a technology that belongs in the consumer realm.

However, while smartwatches and smartglasses dominate the conversation, they are not the form factor that wearables come in. In fact, it is a new form of wearable produced by Nanowear, a New York-based start-up launched Venk Varadan and his father Dr. Vijay Varadan, that has caught my eye as having some serious potential within our sector.

The official blurb states that Nanowear is a "connected-self technology platform for diagnostics and chronic disease management and is the first-and-only company in the world to have received FDA 510(k) clearance for cloth-based cardiac remote monitoring."

So what exactly does that mean and why do I think it could play a role in field service?

Well first let's explore the technology.

Essentially, it is a cloth based sensor that contains millions of nano-sensors per square inch. In practice, this means that the cloth could be used in any manner of clothing and it simultaneously captures and relays real-time data from the wearer for remote monitoring at any time.

Sensibly the team at Nanowear have aimed there first product released using the technology, SimpleSense, at the medical industry. This makes sense for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it takes into account that important first rule of launching a tech business - have a clear understanding of the problem your technology will solve. There is a lot of medical and bio-engineering expertise amongst the team at Nanowear and SimpleSense is designed to tackle a very specific problem - namely Congestive Heart Failure (CHF).

By tackling CHF SimpleSense can position itself very much as a cost-saving development for the core market of hospitals, making it that much easier for them to penetrate a market with traditionally complicated and drawn out procurement chains.

Even under a Trump administration that is dramatically reducing the level of red tape regulation, gaining FDA approval is no mean feat and that accreditation will carry a lot of weight and recognition far beyond the medical sector.Secondly, it is a fantastic area for proof of concept. Even under a Trump administration that is dramatically reducing the level of red tape regulation, gaining FDA approval is no mean feat and that accreditation will carry a lot of weight and recognition far beyond the medical sector.

Indeed, when I spoke with Venk Varadan to find out more about the technology he was at a break from a meeting with Google AI team exploring some of the other possible applications for their technology. Other rollouts into different sectors are absolutely on the long-term roadmap, but I think in identifying one core application for the technology, to begin with, Nanowear will not only be able to establish a solid working proof of concept to expand upon, but are also able to avoid the 'boil-the-ocean' mentality so so many start-ups for foul to.

All too often we see excellent ideas and emerging technologies get lost as their founders try to push each and every possible use case all at once. In taking such a structured and measured approach, Nonowear is doing well to avoid that temptation and ultimately are more likely to be better positioned to penetrate other markets when the right time comes.

With that in mind, let us consider the role this technology could play in the field service sector.

Field service is by its very definition a role in which we put some of our most important assets, i.e. the engineers themselves, in an isolated and often dangerous position. Field service is by its very definition a role in which we put some of our most important assets, i.e. the engineers themselves, in an isolated and often dangerous position. Whether it be working at height, working in remote areas with live electrical equipment or even just behind the wheel going from one job to another, field service engineers are at risk simply by the very nature of the fact they are very often alone.

A wearable vest utilising the Nanowear technology that tracks vital body data regularly such as cardiological or even neurological data could quite conceivably be integrated into a remote worker application.

The question is then how can the data be applied to reduce the risk of the lone worker? The first thought in my mind would be that should an engineer be in an accident when working in a remote location - whether it be a fall, a blow to the head or heaven forbid even possibly a heart attack, then assistance could be sent immediately. This could vastly increase the chances of recovery and in severe cases maybe even survival.

How about the possibility of linking the vest to a kill switch when in the vehicle. So again should the engineer suffer a heart-attack behind the wheel the vehicle just comes to a stop? With the sensors available in modern vehicles it is even possible that the vehicle would be able to reduce speed and pull over safely under its own steam in such a situation. Indeed, such a device would have saved countless lives just a few years ago when such a tragic situation happened in Scotland for example.

Taking things one step further could the right interpretation of the data if applied correctly potentially even predict something critical such as imminent heart failure and avoid an engineer putting themselves in a dangerous position in the first place perhaps?

In fact, it is as we turn to the interpretation of the data that the fullest value of Nanowear becomes apparent. Not only have they developed the actual hardware, but they have also established proprietary systems for interpreting the data as well.

"I think for us the real USP is that we offer the full stack. You can't call yourself a data analytics company if you don't have clean pipes. If your just pulling data from everywhere all of your focus is going to be looking for data that you want to see, as opposed to analysing raw data. We have unique data sets because of how we capture them with our cloth. That makes us a better analytics company down the road," states Vardan.

It is the duty of every field service company to do everything within their power to mitigate the risk that their field service engineers face when working on their own."It is a more complicated story because it's materials, hardware, analogue to digital transfer, user experience and analytics that is a big stack for people to get comfortable with and that's why the IoT has been broken up into those five areas. But we feel we are best placed to provide the services as well as the hardware as we have the best understanding of the data."

In terms of the potential for Nanowear being rolled out into the field service sector personally, I think the business case is very straightforward. It is the duty of every field service company to do everything within their power to mitigate the risk that their field service engineers face when working on their own.

So while the initial rollout for Nanowear has a very specific focus within the medical sector, as mentioned above, they have already identified a number of further potential applications for it and are actively exploring other.

From where I'm sitting, wearable clothing to protect lone workers simply has to be one of them.

Want to know more? Why not join Venk and the Nanowear team and as well as the Field Service News team in La Jolla for field service medical in Feb 26th to 28th. Field Service News subscribers have an exclusive 25% discount for this event and if you are a field service practitioner then you may qualify for a complimentary industry subscription
Click here to apply for your subscription now and if you are successful a discount code will be sent to you via email within the hour!

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LaurentOthacéhé, CEO of CognitoiQ explores the importance of going beyond meeting customer expectations and ensuring you are delighting your customers...

Want to know more? There is a white paper on this topic that provides further insight available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers.

Not a subscriber but you are a field Service Professional? Click here to apply for a complimentary industry subscription to Field Service News and get this white paper sent directly to your inbox now as a thank you for your application

For some years now, the prevailing wisdom has been that in order to stand out from their competitors, businesses of all types must focus on their customers’ experiences.

Gartner says that in 2017 “89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator”.

The costs of bad service are well documented:

• Bad customer service costs UK companies over £37Bn each year
• More than a quarter of UK customers took their business elsewhere or spent less with a company due to bad service in 2016
• A customer is four time more likely to switch to a competitor due to problems with services, compared with pricing and product issues.

As are the benefits of good service:

• 86% of people will pay more for a better customer experience
• Better customer experiences can lift revenue by up to 15% and reduce the cost of service by up to 20%

This wisdom has taken hold in the field service industry too: our industry has traditionally been more focused on keeping costs down, but research now shows that field service companies are putting the customer first.

Field service managers say that ‘customer satisfaction’ is their most important KPI... But customer experience is more than just customer satisfaction.Field service managers say that ‘customer satisfaction’ is their most important KPI, ahead of technician productivity and utilisation, and first-time-fix rate. But customer experience is more than just customer satisfaction.

Managing customer experience means paying attention to every interaction, the customer has with your company, whether that is through using your products and services or via your website, call centre, billing or social media.

In this context, it becomes clear that a visit from a field service engineer is loaded with opportunities to delight – or disappoint – your customer.

Think about your own experiences as a customer

You are never going to be delighted with a company that fails to deliver: the product doesn’t work; the parcel doesn’t arrive; the engineer is late and can’t fix your problem.

The basics have to be right. And if they aren’t right, the company has to go out of its way to resolve your issue or deal with your complaint. So far so good, but what takes customer experience from good to great is those occasional ‘moments of magic’: the unexpected extras, or the human touches that you remember, and tell people about.

For example, when an airline gets everyone seated, their hold luggage stowed, and the plane takes off on time, then that is a Brilliant Basic: customers get the experience they expect.

The good news is that for every service organisation becoming a best-in-class service provider is an achievable goal.When the flight is delayed on the tarmac, but the airline gives everyone free food and drinks and lets them switch their phones back on to call ahead, then that is a Remarkable Resolution: the airline deals well with a failure of the basic service.

But when the flight attendant overhears a passenger worrying about getting her connection and making her sister’s wedding and contacts the destination airport to get the connecting flight held back, that is a Moment of Magic.

Of course, it is only the best-in-class companies that generally positioned to identify these needs and deliver those Moment's of Magic, however, the good news is that for every service organisation becoming a best-in-class service provider is an achievable goal.

The first step has to be adopting a customer-centric culture across your organisation and then empowering and enabling your team to deliver the new culture you have embedded through the application of technology such as mobile and data analytics.

Want to know more? There is a white paper on this topic that provides further insight available to fieldservicenews.com subscribers.

Not a subscriber but you are a field Service Professional? Click here to apply for a complimentary industry subscription to Field Service News and get this white paper sent directly to your inbox now as a thank you for your application

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Jan van Veen, Managing Director, moreMomentum interviews Seva Gavrilov, Market Unit Director, Russian of Volvo Penta

Volvo Penta is a global, world-leading supplier of engines and complete power solutions for marine and industrial applications. Their comprehensive, reliable solutions have helped customers all over the world increase productivity and performance – in every detail. By continuously improving their offer, through innovative, sustainable power solutions and the strengths and expertise of the entire Volvo Group, they have redefined premium for the modern market, operating entirely through their independent dealership network.

Seva Gavrilov joined Volvo Penta 22 years ago and took over leadership of the Russian business in 2007. He has always had a passion for nautical engineering, having graduated from the Marine Technology University in St Petersberg as a Naval engineer but also as a visionary with a head for business. Now, he is leading Volvo Penta through a programme of initiatives that are giving their dealerships a competitive edge, more momentum and increasing the company’s market share.

moreMomentum believes, as a result of our research, that successful long-term managers and companies have established ‘Momentum’, starting with 4 Winning Habits – Direction, Dialogue, Decision-making and Discovery. In this series of Momentum Case Studies, Jan van Veen, co-founder of moreMomentum, interviews proven managers across the globe who are successfully implementing the 4 Winning Habits to lead innovative, energised and engaged teams.

Challenges facing Volvo Penta Services in Russia

In the early 2010’s Volvo Penta decided its route to increased growth was through the large corporate fleet owners such as the shipping and oil companies who controlled significant purchasing budgets. A major obstacle to this goal however was the dealer network that had created Volvo Penta’s success to date. At that time, the dealers saw each other as competitors and lacked trust. When it comes to corporate customers, many dealers are smaller local companies which do not have the resources, skills or confidence to respond to large-scale bids and service contracts. They lacked expertise in areas such as advanced corporate financing, project management, HR, etc. On the other hand, the larger dealers needed access to local markets for customer relationships, delivery and customer service. Seva needed a new approach to dealerships.

The Strategy

An obvious solution would have been to consolidate the dealers into a smaller number of large companies that could cope with the large deals, but in a large country like Russia that was impractical – they needed to keep access to small local areas. Instead, Seva created a strategy that would do two things: reverse the company’s focus so it put customers/fleet owners first and also encourage collaboration between the dealers instead of competition. All this could only be achieved by influence, to change how the dealers worked with each other, so a new environment of trust and co-operation could be built. The strategy was planned out over several years and introduced step-by-step so as not to scare people, but take them along on the journey.

Here we will show how Volvo Penta in Russia demonstrated each of the 4 Winning Habits in the implementation of its plan, creating momentum for long-term sustainable success. The strategy shows that momentum can start in highly competitive environments or even in other companies, elsewhere in the value chain, when the 4 Winning Habits are employed.

Direction – the common cause that everyone can get behind

Seva needed the dealers in the network to see the value in each other instead of just competition. Each had different strengths and skills that could be of use to the rest and enable them to reach and respond to more varied customers. This goal of collaboration was the direction driving the programme, although the dealers didn’t necessarily know it in the beginning. They soon realised however that along with collaboration come happier customers and a reduction in stress levels.

Dialogue – open discussion at and between all levels to encourage new ideas

The Volvo Penta annual dealer conference had always focussed mainly on reporting and products, so it was attended by dealers’ more junior managers. Starting in 2012 however, the agenda was changed to focus more on communication. It started with simple steps such as roundtable discussions that let the dealers identify common opportunities and solve common problems by themselves instead of with Volvo Penta’s intervention. Whereas before they would often blame each other, open discussion now started even on contentious subjects such as price wars. In the second year, Seva provoked discussions to create a realisation that collaboration was possible and even desirable. He made them think for themselves how it could work and what the benefits would be, and they produced 30 benefits of sharing resources (e.g. specialised mechanics, financial experts, parts, knowledge, etc).

The focus of the conference shifted to strategy, and with added training on subjects such as finance, communications, leadership and finding solutions from conflicts, it attracted more senior delegates as it was seen as a decision-making forum. From the third year, the dealers created their own agenda which has gone on to strengthen trust and collaboration.

It shows that once people start to talk they also start to trust and then solve issues which were critical but difficult to solve before - Seva Gavrilov, Volvo Penta

To support the new collaborative approach, Seva improved the bonus scheme to reward dealers who contributed to the success of the group. Now, only 30% of bonuses are sales driven, the rest being based on competencies, skills and as a reward for sharing resources. There is even an extra bonus that dealers can award to each other as thanks for assistance. Since bonus levels also define the next year’s discount they are extremely valuable and sought after.

Decision-making – local decision-making empowerment

As a result of the new open environment, the dealers have taken it upon themselves to support each other. The smaller dealers, that used to rely on discounting, are now being ‘lifted up’ and actively supported by the larger ones. They’re not only a source of leads but can keep local customer relationships going and provide local provisioning in regions that would otherwise be too costly. Dealers are now regularly sharing mechanics, knowledge, financial expertise, etc.

In order to reinforce the new culture, the top six dealers voluntarily withdrew themselves from the annual ‘Best Dealer’ competition for four years, making the rest more motivated to win. Now, the competition is much tougher and the winners are more representative of the whole dealer network.

In addition, the four largest dealers joined forces to mutually fund and develop new management reporting software, connected to the accounting systems, to measure daily performance against targets. It provides a report on sales, customer satisfaction, parts, etc. Soon it will be rolled out across the entire dealer network, meaning common standards and quality for the big fleet customers.

If Volvo Penta had developed the software it would have been more expensive and created resistance. Because they did it themselves they made it in the way they wanted and paid for it themselves. I expect the roll-out to be quicker than if Volvo Penta had done it - Seva Gavrilov, Volvo Penta

Discovery – Looking for new external trends, opportunities and threats

The conversation with customers has changed. Dealers are less and less seeing themselves as just parts suppliers and breakage fixers. They are looking for other values such as budgeting, parts supply forecast, telematics and other service solutions.

Having in mind shared resources, dealers now know they can provide better service to customers than before. This also opens up opportunities which dealers were not able to afford before such as better payment terms to customers, quicker service, etc. Some dealers have also started to open branches in remote areas as they see them as opportunities rather than cost.

Next Steps

The next step in the programme is to develop higher levels of customer service, to create such a good feeling about the brand that the people in customers and dealers feel proud to use Volvo Penta products. Their relationships will grow into trusted partnerships where the smallest to largest customers can be open to changing market conditions and challenges they see approaching.

The group HQ in Gothenburg, Sweden has been watching Seva’s programme carefully and has already implemented some similar ideas internationally. Since the company is in a transition period from being largely product and dealer focussed to Customer focused,  Russia’s key message is to enforce the shift to end-user benefits. Improvements in change processes, complaint handling and collaboration between groups such as sales and service can make huge improvements.

Beyond that, Seva wants the dealers to think about why they are in business in the first place. He wants them to make so much money that they spend more on their life, to make a better world for themselves and the people around them. - Seva Gavrilov, Volvo Penta

It’s important to make the connection between profits and common social values and that will be the subject of the next conference. Money and profits are only the intermediate result, there are more objectives behind it.

What will they do with their profit? What is the bigger game? What is their direction?

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Kris Oldland Talks exclusively to Dan Sewell, COO, Espresso Service about why he and his organisation identified the need for a dedicated field service management solution including why they felt it needed to be a cloud solution and the reason they opted for Tesseract Service Centre Tesseract an Asolvi product has had on his engineer and dispatchers...

See more from this interview where Sewell outlines the impact of implementing the solution has had on his engineers here

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The digital revolution in the field service sector is continuing to move forward at pace, Michael Blumberg, Principal Consultant, Blumberg Advisory Group helps us keep track...

It seems that there is no escaping the Digital Transformation Revolution in Field Service at this moment. A splendid example of this is the Servitization of Manufacturing. Servitization is about the journey a company goes through as it transforms from a product-centric company where service is an afterthought or a necessary evil to one that generates a sizable portion of revenue from services; where service is the business.  The ultimate example is a Product as a Service business.

This is sort of the razor and razor blade scenario where the manufacturer gives away the razor in exchange for the recurring revenue stream that comes from purchasing the razor blades.  Instead of razor blades, it services or more specifically, outcome-based services.  For example, paying for the usage or result (e.g., outcome) produced by a product instead of buying the actual product.   To deliver on the promise, the provider of this outcome most implement a broad array of digital technologies to ensure the equipment is up and running whenever the customer needs to access it.  Downtime is problematic so you need to have technologies like IoT, AI, AR, etc. to ensure this high uptime.

In parallel to the servitization trend is the general ethos that businesses need to disrupt or be disruptedIn parallel to the servitization trend is the general ethos that businesses need to disrupt or be disrupted.  Uber has become the poster child for disruption.  This has lead many Field Service Organizations, software vendors, and technology providers to promote the concept of “Uberization” within field service.

Let’s put the term Uberization into context, when I hear the term Uberization, I think of providing customers with real-time, on-demand, always on, always connected solution.  Other terms that people associate with Uberization are agility and frictionless.  Agility is the ability to scale quickly, frictionless is where touch points that would delay the time it takes to complete a transaction are eliminated.  We might also think of a solution that incorporates aspects of the sharing economy or gig economy.

The Field Service Industry is far from being a laggard when it comes to Uberization.  Examples of how Field Service Organizations (FSOs) are achieving this outcome include but are not limited to:

• Utilizing IoT to monitor equipment performance and send notifications and alerts about the condition and performance of the machine
• Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to interpret these notifications, identify and diagnose problems, and take corrective actions
• Transmitting dispatch orders, triggered by IoT alerts, electronically to an ERP or CRM system and using Dynamic Scheduling software functionality to assign the right person for the job based on the needs of the job
• Turning to a freelance management system platform to source and dispatch freelance technicians on-demand to scale to capacity during peak periods
• Using Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, or Mixed Reality to provide less experienced field engineers with expertise they need to resolve technical problems they haven’t encountered before
• Relying on Big Data and analytics to optimize resource planning and allocation issues.[/unordered_list]

If FSOs are going to remain relevant and create value for their customers, their leaders must adapt and grow within the context of the trends identified above.   This motivation is required now more than ever.  Technological development and new business models are coming at such as rapid pace that leaders can afford to rest on their laurels or past successes of their company.  Past success does not guarantee future results!

In this digital age, companies must be faster, stronger and better than their competitorsIn this digital age, companies must be faster, stronger and better than their competitors.  A 5-year strategy is typically out of date within 18 months or less.  To survive and thrive in 2018, Field Service Leaders must have a crystal-clear vision about the outcomes they’d like to achieve within their organizations. They must pursue these outcomes with laser-like focus and adopt a sense of urgency about achieving these results.

Accountability to the mission is critical as is a mindset of certainty and a spirit of resourcefulness.

Quite often, the greatest of strategies and best of intentions are not pursued because of a lack of certainty or a perceived lack of resources.  The truth is that those who overcome enormous challenges and achieve phenomenal results have done so because of their determination (i.e., certainty) and their resourcefulness.   Cultivate these traits and the possibilities are endless.

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