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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Dr Chris Raddats of the University of Liverpool a seasoned expert with experience from both the industry and academic sides of the aisle centred around servitization, digitalisation and service marketing.

During the discussion, the two discuss a wide range of topics related to Raddat's sphere of insight including reflecting on the current learnings that are coming from a recent raft of academic literature.

In this excerpt from that full interview, the two discuss whether we are beginning to see servitization and advanced services reach a critical mass in the terms of momentum amongst field service focused organisations.

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full-length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

 

Further Reading:

• Read more about Servitization @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servitization
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ www.fieldservicenews.com/digital-transformation
• Read more about Academic Studies @ www.fieldservicenews.com/the-view-from-academia
• Find out more about participating in Chris's latest academic study @ research.fieldservicenews.com/current-studies
• Follow Chris Raddats on Twitter @ twitter.com/chrisraddats
• Connect with Chris Raddats on LinkedIn @ linkedin.com/in/chrisraddats

In this final feature from our series of excerpts from an exclusive Field Service News white paper published in partnership with Help Lightning, that is exploring the practical questions surrounding Augmented Reality we see how Revolution Retail Systems achieved an incredible adoption rate in record time when rolling out AR... 

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So how have Revolution Retail Systems (Revolution) adopted Augmented Reality into their existing service workflow?

“We phone-fix 70% of our calls that come in through level one and then we move to level two before dispatch,” explained Barker.

“If a customer comes through to level one and that call is then progressed to level two, we send them a Help Lightning link to work with the customer to ensure they’re opening the appropriate access points, for example. It also allows us to see if we can identify any broken cables or anything like that. We can see if anything has happened to change the structure of the device, so we know exactly what is going on before dispatching an engineer. We can capture pictures, know what module requires attention, and attach that information to the case. Only then would will we dispatch a technician to replace the module."

Revolution are currently using Help Lightning as a standalone application within the Help Lightning server in terms of workflow. However, it is available as an integrated CRM app, the implementation of which is currently on the roadmap for Revolution. However, even in its standalone format, the tool’s adoption within the contact centres’ workflow has been hassle-free.

Similarly, from the customers’ side, the tool’s use is simple, which is critical for any new technology we expect our customers to adopt. In Revolution’s workflow, a link is simply sent to the customer via email, which can either open in a dedicated app or even in a standard browser.

Indeed, for Barker’s team, the adoption process was a smooth one, which is both testament to the ease of use of the solution and Barker’s own change management skills.

 

"Firstly we kept talking to the teams about it, explaining the ‘whys’ behind it. It is essential to have those daily conversations with the folks who are using it and those who are not...."

 

“The solution is very intuitive,” Barker explains, “so it wasn’t a complicated training session. In our learning management system, we built a computer-based learning module, rolled it out to the floor, and just let the team see it.  We trained everybody on it, and we then gave it a week or so to see what we were getting in terms of adoption.

“Initially, we weren’t seeing the interaction that we wanted, which can be expected with any new technology rollout, so we looked at how we could improve the adoption rate. We did this in several ways. Firstly we kept talking to the teams about it, explaining the ‘whys’ behind it. It is essential to have those daily conversations with the folks who are using it and those who are not.

“We then ran some incentive schemes. For example, we’d run a contest for a month based around utilizing the AR. We offered prizes and rewards for the team if they could prevent a dispatch. These incentives were designed to make the benefits of using the tool tangible for our team. We wanted to prove to them that they could do it and use it in their day to day workflow.

“Then once we’d shown them that they could leverage the tool, we then said, ‘OK, now you have to use it. Now it’s part of the process.”

Introducing the solution in a gentler way that reinforced the benefits allowed Revolution to formalize the process to the point where it is now a fundamental part of the triage process.

“Now it is part of our agents QA forms and their requirements are that they’re using the AR on a daily basis. We now pull the stats around AR usage and communicate those numbers regularly. Our agents are held to a metric and it is part of their employee scorecard,” Barker explains.

This two-tiered approach has achieved an impressive adoption rate, with the process taking just three months to go from roll out to becoming a cornerstone of their workflow.

Having done so, the value for Revolution in leveraging the power of AR has been not so much in developing dedicated new revenue streams but reinforcing their position as an industry leader, helping to both secure new business and strengthen existing relationships.

“We’ve leveraged our use of Help Lightning almost as a marketing tool,” explains Barker.

“When we have executive meetings with Walmart or Target and in fact, any of our significant customers, our CEO has done demos of Help Lightning with their executive team so that they see what the store’s interactions with our help desk are like. It’s a compelling demonstration, placing us on the cutting edge of technology and being able to demonstrate we are an industry leader and show that we’re investing in the latest tools to help our customers.

“That’s the value proposition for us. We didn’t change our billing model at all for our customers. When we integrated Help Lightning, we didn’t increase their cost. Because while we’re absorbing the cost of Help Lightning we’re also seeing the savings associated with it.”

 

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Hilbrand Rustema, Managing Director and Founder of Noventum to discuss the findings of Noventum's Remote Service Delivery Benchmarking study.

During the discussion, Rustema outlines the key data trends that emerged within their study as well as offering his deep-level insight into the meta-trends of field service and how these have shifted dramatically in recent times.

Here Rustema provides his executive summary of the findings from this detailed study and what this means for the wider field service sector.

Find out more about this study and the work Noventum undertake @ www.noventum.eu

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full-length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

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We would also point you to the excellent Service Centricity Playbook that is available over at Noventum Service Management's site which you can access on @ https://www.noventum.eu/the-service-centricity-playbook

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Further Reading:

• Read more exclusive Field Service News content from Hilbrand and the team at Noventum @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Noventum
• Read more about Digital Transformation @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Follow Noventum Service Management on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/ByNoventum
• Read more research-based content dedicated to the field service sector @ https://research.fieldservicenews.com/
• Connect with Hilbrand Rustem on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilbrandrustema/

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

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

Here the three discuss why AR is set to become an absolutely vital tool in the not too distant future of the field service sector.

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

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Do you know what your maximum service revenue potential could be based on the product units your organization sells? Is your current service revenue less than this maximum? Do you have a process to upsell service contracts into your existing installed base? Coen Jeukens VP of global customer transformation at ServiceMax explains more...

If you gave one or more puzzled looks while reading that, chances are you are suffering from upsell leakage.

In my previous article on revenue leakage, I defined two types of leakage: contract and non-contract leakage. In this article, we’ll define upsell leakage. It is very likely that upsell leakage at your business could be twice as big as the other two combined.

Understanding Upselling Leakage

As a service organization, you’d like all your customers to buy your premium service. Some customers will buy ‘gold’ service level for their installed base, others will be happy with ‘basic’ service. It all depends on the use case of your customer and their propensity to value the services you offer. As use cases tend to change over time, you may want to consider setting up an upselling program using the touchpoints from your service delivery.

“If you don’t ask, you don’t give them the opportunity to say yes.”

Not having such a program deprives you of revenue potential; being the delta between your current service revenue and ’gold’ service level.

Defining the Upsell Service Revenue Potential

To quantify upsell leakage we can use a mechanism known to Sales as TAM (Total Addressable Market). Suppose you sold 1,000 units at $10,000 each. Suppose a ‘gold’ service contract has an annual selling price of 12% of the unit selling price. This would put your service-TAM at $1,200,000 per annum.

Imagine your service department has 600 of those 1,000 units on their radar screen. The rest is sold via an indirect sales channel and/ or lost-out-of-sight. This gives an installed base visibility of 60%. Let’s assume those 600 units generate a service revenue of $400,000, split across:

• 10% of units are in (OEM) warranty and don’t generate revenue (yet)
• 50% of units have a bronze, silver, or gold contract generating $240,000
• 40% of units don’t have a contract and generate $160,000 in Time & Material (T&M)

With the above figures, you currently reap 33% of your service-TAM and you have an upsell potential of $800,000. Monitoring this upsell leakage metric should give you the incentive to put a revenue generation program in place.

Identifying the Metrics that Impact Upsell Leakage

In the numeric example, we’ve touched on three metrics that impact upsell leakage.

• Installed base visibility: It all begins with installed base visibility. Units not on your radar screen will not contribute to your service revenue! This is easier to manage for units sold via your organization’s direct sales channel, though it does require an effort to manage the life cycle from as-sold to as-maintained. For units sold via the indirect sales channel, you’ll have to exert extra effort to get access point-of-sale data, maybe even ‘buying’ the data.
• Attach rates: Both warranty and contracts are attached to the unit, thus driving attach rates. Attach rates are ‘boolean,’ they say something about having an attached contract, not about the amount of revenue you get through that contract. Attach rates start at the installation/ commissioning date of a unit. Either Sales makes the attached-sale at point-of-sale of the unit or the Service department drives the attaching post-point-of-sale. The driving metric for Service is to maintain a continuum of attachment throughout the life cycle of the unit.
• Service revenue contribution: Within the subset of attached contracts, you’d like to have as much revenue contribution as possible, ‘gold’ service being the holy grail. Per service contract you could have any of the following revenue contributions:
  • OEM Warranty: 0% of Service-TAM
  • Enhanced Warranty: 33% of Service-TAM (only the on-top-of OEM warranty piece)
  • Extended Warranty or Basic Service: 67% of Service-TAM
  • Gold: 100% of Service-TAM

Remedying Upsell Leakage

The overarching paradigm to growing service revenue is twofold: increasing your installed base visibility and making sure you have attached offerings to those units.

Getting visibility on units sold via the indirect channel is slightly more complicated, but once you quantify the associated service-TAM with those units, you may have the ‘funding’ to ‘buy’ the data. This may even lead to revenue sharing models with your channel partners. The last piece of the puzzle is using the visibility of the upsell leakage gap whenever you have a touchpoint with your customer.

Note that the original (service) contract has been drafted many months ago by people who are further away from the business, who could not 100% envision the service reality of today. You thus may end up in an entitlement conversation where the customer has an urgent requirement whereas the contract ‘only’ covers for the ‘basics.’ The delta is an upsell opportunity. Either resulting in an upgrade of the service contract or maybe only upgrading an incidental work order. In case the latter happens more often, you have the data points to convince the customer for the former.

Now, understanding that upsell leakage is potentially twice as big as contract and non-contract leakage together, you may have found your compelling reason to start another revenue growth project.

Learn about ServiceMax Entitlements here. 

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Read news and articles about ServiceMax @ www.fieldservicenews.com/servicemax
• Learn more about ServiceMax Entitlements @ www.servicemax.com/asset-360/warranty-contract-management
• Read more articles by Coen Jeukens on Field Service News @ www.fieldservicenews.com/coen-jeukens
• Find out more about ServiceMax @ www.servicemax.com/uk
• Follow ServiceMax on Twitter @ twitter.com/ServiceMax

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Hilbrand Rustema, Managing Director and Founder of Noventum to discuss the findings of Noventum's Remote Service Delivery Benchmarking study.

During the discussion, Rustema outlines the key data trends that emerged within their study as well as offering his deep-level insight into the meta-trends of field service and how these have shifted dramatically in recent times.

In this excerpt from that discussion, the two explore how the dual innovations of remote service delivery and outcome-based services are beginning to dovetail within the emerging new-normal of field service.

Find out more about this study and the work Noventum undertake @ www.noventum.eu

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full-length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

We would also point you to the excellent Service Centricity Playbook that is available over at Noventum Service Management's site which you can access on @ https://www.noventum.eu/the-service-centricity-playbook

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Further Reading:

• Read more exclusive Field Service News content from Hilbrand and the team at Noventum @ https://www.fieldservicenews.com/hs-search-results?term=Noventum
• Read more about Digital Transformation @https://www.fieldservicenews.com/blog/tag/digital-transformation
• Follow Noventum Service Management on Twitter @ https://twitter.com/ByNoventum
• Read more research-based content dedicated to the field service sector @ https://research.fieldservicenews.com/
• Connect with Hilbrand Rustem on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilbrandrustema/

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

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

In this excerpt from that session the conversation focuses on whether remote service and Augmented Reality should primarily be viewed as a standalone mechanism for delivering service or part of a broader, more holistic service portfolio.

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News is joined on the Field Service News Digital Symposium by Clay Barker, Director of Service and Support, Revolution Retail Systems about their use of Augmented Reality within their field service operations.

During the discussion, Barker outlines how the tool has driven multiple benefits across their field service operation including improving customer satisfaction and increasing first-time fix rates as well as outlining how they achieved an effective roll-out which achieved excellent adoption rates in just three months of implementation.

Here, Barker reflects on the initial thoughts having seen the Help Lightning Augmented Reality tool and the potential he could see for its application within their field service operations.

 

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Want to know more?

FSN Premium subscribers and FSN Elite members can access the full length interview plus many, many more in the Field Service New Digital Symposium.  If you have an FSN Premium account you can access the video on the button below. If you are currently on our FSN Standard subscription tier you can upgrade your subscription by clicking the link below. 

If you are yet to subscribe you can join 30,0000 of your field service management peers by subscribing to FSN Standard for free to gain access to a monthly selection of premium content or select either FSN Premium or FSN Elite for even more resources. Click the button above to visit our subscription page to find out more. 

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In this sixth article from his blog series on “supercharging” revenue generation through the field service team, Jim Baston, President of BBA Consulting Group,discusses how to get buy-in from supporting divisions.

The third item in our list of steps to ensure our success is getting buy-in from supporting divisions. There are a lot of interdependencies associated in delivering a service. For example, in the process of recommending a product or service, we may rely on a sales team that reports to another division to follow up on the initial inquiry and provide the customer with detailed product information, payback evaluations and the final proposal. And, in delivering a product or service, we may depend on another group within our organization to provide a specific part of it.

This can work well if everyone is aligned, but, unfortunately, this is not always the case. Sometimes the other departments don’t have the same interest or excitement about the opportunity or the same relationship with the customer. When this is the case, they may not treat the customer or the opportunity with the level of care and urgency that you would expect. If this happens, the customer may become disappointed and the field team frustrated.

By recognizing this, we can take proactive steps to address any misalignment and prevent these types of problems from occurring. There are several things that we can do. For example, we can speak with the management of those groups to get their commitment and the commitment of their team to support our efforts in the manner required, and we can set up a system to address any problems relating to any misalignment quickly and efficiently. We can also take steps to personally address any problems early that cannot seem to be corrected in the normal way.

Next time we will consider how what we say and do as managers, can impact our success.

Reflection

Thinking about your service of making recommendations, what are some of the relationships that you depend upon to perform this at the highest levels? As you work through this exercise, consider any interdependencies in areas such as:

• Completing the proposal
• Presenting the recommendations
• Delivering the service
• Specific areas within the organization such as:
  • Sales
  • Projects
  • H.R.
  • I.T.

Under each identified interdependency, identify the specific proactive steps you can take to ensure complete and seamless alignment.

 

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Further Reading:

• Read more about Leadership and Strategy @ www.fieldservicenews.com/leadership-and-strategy
• Read more exclusive articles by Jim Baston @ www.fieldservicenews.com/jim-baston
• Connect with Jim Baston on LinkedIn @ linkedin.com/jimbaston
• Learn more about Jim Baston and BBA Consulting Group @ jimbaston.com
• Connect with Jim Baston directly by email @ jim@jimbaston.com