Field Service News | Features (11)

Standard BI Tools Aren’t Foolproof

Jul 22, 2021 • Features • Digital Transformation • Service Leadership • Aquant • customer experience

In this second excerpt from a recent white paper published by Aquant, we discuss which methods are best for creating customer risk scorecards and managing workforce performance issues.

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

If you are yet to subscribe you can do so for free by hitting the button and registering for our complimentary subscription tier FSN Standard on a dedicated page that provides you instant access to this white paper PLUS you will also be able to access our monthly selection of premium resources as soo as you are registered.

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A host of analytical and business intelligence (BI) resources exist solely for keeping tabs on metrics.

But standard BI tools still have limitations.

For one, they don’t usually understand a large chunk of your free text service data, including details sourced directly from customer comments, call center agent notes, field technician debriefs, and machine log files. Standard BI tools make it challenging to access, analyze, or interpret unstructured data without a team of data scientists on standby.

Classic BI dashboards only display what’s currently happening within an organization based on past data, which is usually incomplete. The big picture remains obscured once again, making it difficult to use those insights to reach company goals and spot patterns that reveal likely future events. This can lead to the prioritization of unnecessary KPIs, or even worse, analysis paralysis.

Business leaders need total transparency and understanding of their current service landscape to succeed. And these can only be accomplished using tools that give you quick access to easy-to- read analyses that go beyond past trends, offering an idea of what is likely to happen in the future and providing prescriptive recommendations.

Leaders should be leveraging data-centric insights to create the most desired outcomes for their customers — ones that support growth and provide teams with the visibility and know-how to resolve any issues that arise.

Evaluating Performance With Standard KPIs Alone Creates Blind Spots

Most service organizations track KPIs, but too many narrowly focus on single measurements such as first time fix. Knowing the FTF rate is an important performance indicator, but when measured in a vacuum, it offers an incomplete or inaccurate snapshot of the health of your service organization.

Without zooming out for a 360-degree view, decisions that boost one KPI might lead to systemic and costly service issues. For example, how is team performance impacting customer satisfaction, or how are high first time fix rates driving up service costs?

It is beneficial to have a comprehensive understanding of service KPIs, including:

First time fix (FTF)
Mean time to resolution (MTTR)
Mean time between failure (MTBF)

By looking at these metrics in depth, you’ll gain deeper insight into every aspect of the service lifecycle, and see clear connections between performance and service outcomes.

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant.

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

If you are yet to subscribe you can do so for free by hitting the button and registering for our complimentary subscription tier FSN Standard on a dedicated page that provides you instant access to this white paper PLUS you will also be able to access our monthly selection of premium resources as soo as you are registered.

The Evolution of Quality Service

Jul 21, 2021 • Features • Aly Pinder • Covid-19 • Servitization and Advanced Services • GLOBAL

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Aly Pinder Jr, Program Director of Service Innovation and Connected Products at IDC. Aly is a seasoned expert in the field service industry,...

Are Service-Centric Companies Placing Too Much Emphasis on Placement?

Jul 20, 2021 • Features • Digital Transformation • Workforce Managemnet • Field Workforce • EMEA

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined by Mark Belenky, CEO Software Outsourcing Solutions and a specialist in workforce management solutions to work through some of the key findings of an exclusive Field Service News Research...

Overwhelmingly Staff Utilization is the Biggest Issue in Workforce Management

Jul 16, 2021 • Features • Digital Transformation • Workforce Managemnet • Field Workforce • Managing the Mobile Workforce • EMEA

In the Post-Pandemic World, Customer-Centric Service Is Critical

Jul 15, 2021 • Features • Digital Transformation • Aquant • Covid-19 • customer experience

In the first article of a series of excerpts from a recent white paper published by Aquant, we look at the importance of providing exceptional customer experience in the post-pandemic world.

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

If you are yet to subscribe you can do so for free by hitting the button and registering for our complimentary subscription tier FSN Standard on a dedicated page that provides you instant access to this white paper PLUS you will also be able to access our monthly selection of premium resources as soo as you are registered.

The acceleration of digital technologies in every sector from grocery delivery to banking created customer expectations that are higher than ever. And there’s every indication that it will remain this way.

Customers want effortless service interactions. To win hearts and wallets, you have to provide interactions that go beyond “good.” Every interaction should feel personalized while also aiming to wow. For service organizations, the expectation is that you’ve joined all the dots before a service ticket is placed.

For many organizations who are already in the midst of transformation projects, the question is how to pivot technology adoption and service delivery to achieve those goals. For some, Net Promoter Score (NPS) has been the best way to do that. They monitor loyalty and metrics and give companies intel on how users feel about services — but in the current landscape, where time is money, there are a few drawbacks. Often, the feedback is too ambiguous, arrives too late, and lacks full context, rendering companies powerless to change outcomes.

NPS can’t tell you why a customer left a particular rating, doesn’t explain why clients are loyal, and doesn’t provide guidance on how to improve your services. When measured alone, NPS leaves a lot of room for interpretation and little for prevention.

Additionally, NPS won’t help service leaders innovate, nor can it help teams achieve opposing business goals. There is a need to improve customer experiences, but it’s likely you’ve also been tasked with hitting other goals including cost savings and service efficiencies.

A better way to deliver exceptional experiences, manage relationships, and work towards larger company goals is to use preexisting service data as a guide. Innovative organizations are looking at artificial intelligence’s (AI) capabilities to surface critical data and bring insights and knowledge to the forefront. Organizations are realizing that it can take twice as much effort to repair a broken customer relationship than maintain a healthy one. To start predicting customer issues before client relationships sour, use data to contextualize your current offerings and relationships.

Strenghten Relationship by Defining Them

Modern technology is convenient: clients can research and decide to go with another manufacturer or provider at any given point. Therefore, you need to do everything in your power to earn and keep your customers’ loyalty. A good way to start is by making sure that you are differentiating your products and services.

Yet isolated answers can’t provide the big picture, even with the help of KPI data. It can still be a challenge to see the underlying health of your organization or customer relationships.

Seemingly-healthy dashboards may be one issue away from bubbling over, making it more crucial than ever to adopt the right tools to unearth and manage your metrics.

Consider the Following:

If you were the customer, why would you choose your company’s product or service?
Do your goals align with your clients’?
How are you ensuring that you’re meeting customer expectations?
Are you measuring your clients’ loyalty beyond NPS?
Are you at risk of losing any customers?
If your largest client decided to choose another product or service, how would this impact your business?

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant.

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

If you are yet to subscribe you can do so for free by hitting the button and registering for our complimentary subscription tier FSN Standard on a dedicated page that provides you instant access to this white paper PLUS you will also be able to access our monthly selection of premium resources as soo as you are registered.

Do You Have a Replacement Strategy for Customer Facing Employees?

Jul 14, 2021 • Features • field service • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • Sam Klaidman

In this new article for Field Service News, Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, analyzes the advantages of hiring for attitude and training for skills.

Introduction

According to ToolingU-SME “Relentless turnover in the manufacturing industry is threatening companies focused on driving productivity and profitability. Finding talent is one of the biggest challenges in the industry, so losing employees, whether entry level or seasoned, significantly compounds the problem.” And the same dynamics apply to field service and technical support technicians. And according to Forbes, “Companies that create annual budgets will find their 2021 budget busted because of the rapidly increasing rise in the price of talent – both for internal employees and for talent provided by third-party service providers”.

Why do you need a replacement strategy?

In the May 5, 2021 issue of Thomas Insights, I published an article titled The Silver Tsunami: As Older Employees Plan for Retirement, It's Time to Plan for the Future of Your Workforce. The article went into detail about older employees preparing to retire and what you can do to prepare for that inevitable situation. Now we are seeing the effect of what some people call “the great crew change.” This is the voluntary churn of large numbers of employees from all disciplines in their business. Why is this churn happening now? While you may have reduced your workforce because of the pandemic, the voluntary exit will accelerate within the next few months. Here are some of the reasons:

As the situation at home returns to normal, many older workers will feel comfortable moving into the next phase of their lives
As jobs open up, many people will convince themselves that “the grass is greener” at another employer
Companies more desperate than yours will offer large pay increases or sign-up bonuses to fill their vacancies
Companies that used the last 18 months to improve the tools and processes they provide their employees will attract the younger employees who grew-up with digital technology

Where Will I Have a Problem?

If your technology is old, somewhere between 5 and 10 years, expect trouble with your younger and technical savvy employees. You can also expect turnover in clusters if you have some managers who do not relate well to their employees. And most importantly, expect employee churn in the customer facing sales and service departments.

Sales because their world has changed from face-to-face to virtual meetings and customers who now reach out to potential suppliers when they are about 75% of the way through their buying journey. Also, in many industries trade shows are now obsolete!
Service because the technicians are reading about remote support and if you implemented it, some will miss the travel and in-person customer interactions and will look for a company that has not yet caught up with competitors. And if you did not implement it yet, the rest will look to work at a more advanced company.

To make matters worse, Sales and Service people are extra important to your business because they interact with all your customers. And the Service people interact during the whole time the customer owns your equipment while the Salespeople only interact with customers when there is a new selling opportunity. This means that replacing, or preparing to replace, your service team is the most impactful area for you to focus on.

What is the single most crucial decision I can make when I prepare my Service technical employee replacement strategy?

Good service people have a lot more skills and attributes than just knowing how to fix inoperative equipment. These are the areas where customer facing field and help-desk engineers (in person and virtually) must excel:

1. Technical skills

2. Understand business; basic finance, logistics, P&L, Sales, and Marketing

3. Understand business processes and systems

4. Customer relationships. They should be their customer’s trusted advisers.

5. Negotiating

6. Communications

7. Creativity and problem solving

8. Soft skills including listening, empathy, and how to avoid confrontation

9. Self confidence

10. Accountability

11. Adaptability

12. Loves learning

13. A sense of urgency.

Considering the breath of skills, abilities, and personality traits in the list, I recommend that you make a firm commitment to hire for attitude and train for skill. In the opening paragraphs of the 2011 Harvard Business Review article Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill, the author describes the reinvention of a primary-care clinic that was producing great results. They did it by redefining the jobs and throwing away the old playbooks. When asked how he found the right people for these unique positions, the practice’s leader, Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle, said “We recruit for attitude and train for skill,” … “We don’t recruit from health care. This kind of care requires a vastly different mind-set from usual care.”

And the July 1, 2021 issue of Industry Week included an article titled One Job, Two Good Candidates - Would You Hire for Attitude or Aptitude? The key conclusion was:

“And what are they finding? That “hard” skills are increasingly transient, and "soft” skills — or “personal habits and traits that shape how you work on your own and with others” — are what’s worth investing in when it comes to human capital.“

What is the single most crucial decision I can make when I prepare my Service technical employee replacement strategy?

There are only two things you have to worry about:

1. Before you start the hiring process, you must get HR on board

2. After you hire someone, you must have a detail training plan to on-board the new hire

As you start trying to hire candidates based on their attitudes, soft skills, and personality, you will need lots of help from HR. Here are some of the areas where HR will be critical:

Training the interview team on how to evaluate these soft attributes.
Figuring out how to compare post-interview notes and fairly evaluate all candidates.
Identifying sources of candidates. When I was hiring field service engineers, I loved hiring people who were leaving the military. My first preference was the nuclear navy followed by air force line mechanics. People from both groups had a terrific ability to quickly learn complex technical topics with minimal instruction and they excelled at many of the soft skills and attributes you will need.
Communicating with these non-technical people and learning to not dismiss a candidate because she doesn’t physically meet your image of a great field service technician.

By the time you are ready to make an employment offer, you will need a detail training outline, schedule, and list of resources. In fact, an outstanding candidate should ask you how she will receive her technical training before accepting an offer. No really suitable candidate will accept an offer unless she is convinced that you will build on her skills and help her succeed in this new role. Once your new hire shows up for work, you must make sure that she has a productive on-boarding experience that reinforces the idea that she made the right decision to join your business. There is nothing worse for an organization than to have a new employee quit in the first days after joining the business.

Conclusion

It may take a while for your business to learn the advantages of hiring for attitude and training for skills but keep working at it because this is the future!

What Types of Solutions are Being Used in Workforce Management amongst Service-Centric Companies?

Jul 13, 2021 • Features • Digital Transformation • Workforce Managemnet • Field Workforce • EMEA

Service Insights, Aquant’s New AI Tool, is the Missing Link in Exceptional Customer Experiences

Jul 13, 2021 • Features • Artificial intelligence • Digital Transformation • technology • Aquant • GLOBAL

The platform converts messy service data into detailed insights for service executives, providing visibility into customers at risk of churn and workforce training opportunities.

Service executives, do you want to see into the future and prevent customer disasters ahead of a negative Net Promoter Score (NPS) or service escalation? Aquant’s Service Insights makes that possible by doing all the complex data analysis for you.

“Historically, service decisions have been made using only a fraction of available service data. That causes blind spots into customer satisfaction and creates an environment of reactive problem-solving. If you wait until you receive a negative NPS, it’s too late,” says Shahar Chen, CEO and co-founder, Aquant. “The new normal in service requires providers to approach customers with solutions before a customer comes to a provider with a complaint.”

That kind of data-driven decision-making fosters better customer experiences and improves service outcomes. But before you can make informed decisions, you need a clear picture of what story the data is telling — and that’s been a roadblock for many organizations.

Service Insights Curates and Analyzes Disparate Data and Provides Actionable Recommendations

Service_Insights_Dashboard

“We’ve worked with leading service organizations to build a powerful analytics tool that is designed for business users,” adds Assaf Melochna, president and co-founder, Aquant. “Service Insights provides targeted information in the language that service leaders understand, and it does so in days, without the need for a multi-department deployment.”

Service Insights is Not a BI Tool. It’s an Entire Data Science Team at Your Fingertips

Aquant delivers a 360-degree view of the service lifecycle. Unlike traditional BI tools, Service Insights is able to access more of your data, and then analyze and interpret it — without the need for a team of data scientists. Users will see immediate value following a simple deployment process. Isolated data points become descriptive and predictive intelligence presented through auto-generated reports and easy-to-access graphical dashboards. Here’s what’s possible with Service Insights:

Mine insights out of your (un)structured service data - Gain a deeper dimension of insight into your unstructured data with Aquant’s Service Intelligence Engine by identifying key symptom and solution data directly from customer comments, call center agent notes, field technician debriefs, and machine log files. Formerly hidden data becomes a powerful decision-making tool.
Generate service performance and risk models - Service Insights automatically generates trends, recommendations, industry benchmarks, and predictions based on more than 5 million service tickets from manufacturers and service providers. Leverage Aquant’s predictive modeling to create customer risk scorecards, and manage workforce performance, and training strategies.
Get the right insight at the right time - Need a quick summary of your business, a snapshot of customers, or an overview of the workforce before your next meeting? Aquant auto-generates easy-to-read overviews for each customer or service provider, identifying key statistics and important trends. Focus on the most critical service issues without having to dig into dashboards.

To learn more or schedule a demo, get in touch.

3 Tips to Quickly Scale Your Appliance or Food Service Repair Business

Jul 12, 2021 • Features • service excellence • technology • Aquant • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • GLOBAL

In this article from Aquant, we look at three tips to scale appliance and food repair businesses rapidly with the help of easy-to-use AI tools.

Service businesses are busy in 2021, and all indicators point to steady — or even above-average demand — lasting for the foreseeable future. Typically, high demand is great for business, but nothing has been typical about service in the last year. Many companies, especially owner-operator repair businesses, are turning away customers and additional revenue because they’re at capacity.

What Challenges Do Service Companies Face?

While industry demand has outstripped technician supply for at least the last decade, most businesses were able to manage — but COVID exacerbated the challenges of a sector already pushed to its limits. Some of the biggest contributing factors include:

● A lack of qualified appliance repair technicians

● The need to ramp up service teams quickly due to heavy demand post-Covid

● Increased repairs due to heavy home appliance usage during the pandemic

● Supply chain shortages that resulted in fewer new appliances available for purchase, creating an avalanche effect: consumers and business delayed new purchases, and older equipment required more frequent maintenance and repair

● Preferences for remote resolution options

Service businesses, from home appliance to food equipment repair and maintenance, are experiencing such a high volume of service requests that the search for qualified technicians has reached a tipping point.

“Repair companies are triaging calls, hiring new employees and navigating backlogs from the broken supply chain for parts,” states the Washington Post. That was just one account of many from an in-depth article that details the extent of the gap between service provider availability and customer demand across the country.

But rapid hiring, especially when paired with a scarcity of parts, puts added pressure on service providers who are already maxed out. Sound familiar?

problem-solution-triage-screenshot

What Challenges Do Service Companies Face?

New, easy-to-use AI tools are available to help service companies of all sizes upskill a new crop of employees quickly. This ultimately makes it possible for your business to take on extra demand while still providing exceptional customer experiences.

1. Upskill the New Workforce Quickly to Slash the Skills Gap

The workforce shortage is not new. Skilled trade positions, particularly technician and engineer roles, have been the hardest to fill. There are other obstacles compounding the issues, too.

The Baby Boomer retirement wave is in full swing. Your most senior techs are leaving and taking all their repair knowledge with them.

Millennials and Gen Z employees approach work differently. The two youngest generations leave jobs nearly twice as often as their older counterparts. This result is an increasing skills gap, and most in the industry don’t have the resources or budget to spend months or years training employees.

A better solution: Hire motivated employees with minimal appliance repair experience and quickly turn them into seasoned experts in weeks instead of years. That’s possible using technology that provides accurate recommendations with as much ease as a Google search.

How Aquant helps: Our service engine has digested and analyzed every major home appliance and food service equipment repair manual, combining them with real-life best practices from veteran, certified technicians. The intelligent tool is easy enough for any member of the workforce to use. That empowers every member of the workforce to perform as well as your longest-tenured employees.

When knowledge is easier to acquire, employees can work on honing soft skills like customer service and relationship building.

2. Increase Your First Time Fix Rate

It’s easier said than done. If everyone on the team could make accurate repairs more quickly, you could take on more clients and bill for more services. Bumping up your team’s first time fix rate is challenging in the face of other demands, especially with a more junior workforce — but it’s possible.

A better solution: Make sure that dispatch diagnoses the problem correctly during the initial customer complaint call. Then provide the technician with all the relevant information before they arrive on the job.

How Aquant helps: With a click of a button, your team can access information from all the major appliance and equipment manufacturers and pinpoint the problem and necessary parts needed with a high degree of accuracy. This increases the chances of your technician arriving with the right knowledge and the right parts to fix the issue on the first try.

3. Offer Clients Remote Resolution Options

How many times have technicians been dispatched to a job site, only to arrive and find that the solution was as simple as hitting the restart button or flipping a switch? Customers don’t want to wait days for a solution that they could have fixed themselves in minutes. And your business can’t maintain wasted truck rolls in the face of a demand avalanche.

A better solution: Train customer support to resolve less complex issues during the initial customer call. Instead of having them flip through manuals or consult decision trees (which takes time and can be frustrating), give them options to triage issues in a matter of minutes using an intelligent, digital tool.

How Aquant can help: We’ve created an intelligent — and evolving — database of service information based on millions of service tickets. Using the smart triage system, your support agent walks through two to four service issue scenarios with the customer, and the tool identifies the most likely solution. If it’s a simple fix, you can guide the customer through remote resolution.

Increase the Number of Brands You Support While Scaling Up

In addition to helping your technicians solve problems faster and more accurately, Aquant is like a cheat sheet for repair and maintenance companies. With data from all the top major home appliance and food service equipment brands, you have access to a pre-populated database with the information any technicians need to get the job done, regardless of the brand.

ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘features’ CATEGORY

Standard BI Tools Aren’t Foolproof

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant.

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

The Evolution of Quality Service

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Are Service-Centric Companies Placing Too Much Emphasis on Placement?

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Overwhelmingly Staff Utilization is the Biggest Issue in Workforce Management

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

In the Post-Pandemic World, Customer-Centric Service Is Critical

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

This feature is just one short excerpt from a white paper published by Aquant.

www.fieldservicenews.com subscribers can read the full white paper now by hitting the button below.

Do You Have a Replacement Strategy for Customer Facing Employees?

Further Reading:

What Types of Solutions are Being Used in Workforce Management amongst Service-Centric Companies?

Want to know more?

Further Reading:

Service Insights, Aquant’s New AI Tool, is the Missing Link in Exceptional Customer Experiences

Service Insights Curates and Analyzes Disparate Data and Provides Actionable Recommendations

Service Insights is Not a BI Tool. It’s an Entire Data Science Team at Your Fingertips

Further Reading:

3 Tips to Quickly Scale Your Appliance or Food Service Repair Business

Further Reading:

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