Professor Tim Baines of Aston University, looks back across his personal 30 year journey with servitization whilst looking forward to an industry defining event in the servitization space taking place in Birmingham later this year…

My first article on servitization was published in the late 1990s. Of course, we didn’t call it servitization then, rather the article talked about something called Total Service Manufacture. I didn’t think of it as anything special, I was simply trying to understand different competitive strategies that manufacturers might adopt - at that time Western manufacturers were being bombarded with outsourcing and offshoring ‘no brainer’ advice. ‘Do services’ was my reaction!

Focus on Services

Reflecting on the past 20 years, it is interesting to see how this focus on services has grown. Take the term servitization; first it was a case of ‘what is this word’, then ‘how do you spell it’, moving to ‘we do it already’, and now ‘this could help, tell me more’. Each stage in our evolution of understanding servitization brought with it its own challenges, and bizarrely we are now perhaps in the most dangerous phase. 

Manufacturing businesses are recognising that servitization is a valuable phenomenon, and those that sell technologies and services to this industry are asking how they can get on the bandwagon. We now see re-branding and re-styling everywhere. Companies that used to sell technology and systems that enable efficient spare part delivery to field service engineers, are now promoting themselves as ‘partners on your servitization journey’. Yet in practice, nothing has changed in what they offer. It happened with Lean and it’s happening now with servitization. Pollution is all around us! 

So where do you look now for real thought leadership? Well, I am biased, but I’ve dedicated my working life to what I believe in, and that is the university system. You see, a fundamental role of a Business School is to educate business.

This education is based on research, evidence and logic, and a translation of the broad body of science into digestible and reliable chunks of knowledge. This is what we do at Aston for servitization and advanced services, and we have a duty to be custodians of these concepts. What we need to do right now, is to overcome the pollution and ensure that industry is set on a reliable and informed understanding of servitization.

 

"The World Servitization Convention has been designed to raise awareness and the adoption of servitization and advanced services..."

 

This is why we have created the World Servitization Convention. This convention will be different to every field service conference or trade show you might consider attending this year. Firstly, it is coupled with the Spring Servitization Conference – the established research conference for the international academic community. Secondly, it has a series of industry keynotes and panel sessions from true industry leaders in this space – Thales, Rolls-Royce, Baxi, Goodyear, Alstom, Legrand, Domino, Mazak, etc. And we have an equally impressive range of small businesses – KoolMill, AE Aerospace, UV Light, CHH ConeX. 

Thirdly, the is the exhibition where over 20 manufacturers are sharing (not selling!) what they do in this space: Heat-as-a-service, Health-as-a-service, Mobility-as-a-service. Not just talking about servitization, but demonstrating what this looks like in practice. Finally, the convention is covering a comprehensive range of topics: from service strategy to finance, and digital technologies to business model innovation. A true one-stop-shop.

The World Servitization Convention has been designed to raise awareness and the adoption of servitization and advanced services. It is targeted at the owners, executives and senior management of manufacturing, engineering and technology businesses. This is a not-for-profit event hosted by the Advanced Services Group (ASG) at the Aston Business School.

This event is funded in part by a carefully selected group of four partners; IFS, DLL, Blueprint AMS and Servitly. Just like our manufacturing exhibitors, these sponsors are genuine thought leaders in this space and have worked closely with the Aston team to ensure the event fulfils its objective.

So, all you need to know about servitization will be in one place in September.

The World Servitization Convention brings together the global community of leading servitization researchers and business executives to advance their servitization strategies, experience demonstrations of the technologies enabling advanced services and transform the future of manufacturing. This three day convention in Birmingham, UK really is intended to move you forwards on your servitization journey; delivering a true outcome rather than just selling you things!

 

To find out more about the event  and to register, please visit www.advancedservicesgroup.co.uk/wsc2020

In this exclusive Field Service News series published in partnership with HSO, we look at three key cases that can convince your board to invest in the systems that can drive your field service operations forward and to the standards expected of modern field service delivery.

 

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An unexpected but amusing cameo in a recent live stream with Nick Frank and Harald Wasserman not only brought a welcome moment of levity but also shone a spotlight on an important, but often overlooked aspect of remote working. Kris Oldland, reflects back on the session... 

I'm sure everyone of us at the moment is under a greater level of strain than we have ever felt before.

For me personally, I can confess to having never been under so much pressure. As an independent publisher, we have a tendency to punch well above our weight as it is, with an output that matches and dare I say it, betters that of any of the mainstream publishers I have worked for during my entire career in publishing. This is something I take immense pride in. 

Similarly, as the field service sectors leading global voice, I felt it was simply our duty to react in a proactive and positive manner to the current Covid19 pandemic and so establishing the support channel that we have created to host a series of live sessions to help offer guidance to field service companies during this time was something that I knew in my heart we had to move mountains to do. 

It is at times of crisis that we need both leaders and we need to come together as a community. It is our job as the primary layer of news media in the global field service sector to facilitate that. And we may be winging it a little, as are we all at the moment, but so far, I think we've done a reasonable job of achieving quite a lot in very little time - thanks in the main to the wonderful support from our friends in the industry.

But I'll freely admit, it has been tough, I'm tired and I know there is a long way to go yet. We'll get there, but there is a long, long way to go.

 

An Excellent Moment of Learning from an Unexpected Source: 

So a week or so on from the first Emergency Symposium we hosted on Covid-19 and its impact on field service organisations and I have just a moment to take stock on everything that happened in a whirlwind of anxiety, anticipation, and action.

While there have been countless excellent learnings from our Covid19 sessions, which you can catch up on here, perhaps one of the most important aspects of the current situation was raised by an unexpected cameo on my recent stream with Nick Frank and Harald Wasserman of Si2 Partners. 

 

"It was the follow up cameo that brought a wonderful moment of levity into what have quite understandably been a series of tense sessions across the week..."

 

It was a moment of sheer unexpected levity, and it shone a light on a very important, yet potentially easily overlooked, aspect of the remote working environment we are all currently engaged in. 

Just as Nick was speaking about the importance of strong leadership we saw a blurred flash across the camera as his young daughter entered into the shot. However, it was the follow up cameo that brought a wonderful moment of levity into what have quite understandably been a series of tense sessions across the week. With the wonderful exuberance of youth on her side, Nick's daughter proceeded to torment her Dad, with a pair of bunny ears behind his head and a wry smile to our live audience before treating us to one more wave as her brief, but enjoyable cameo came to an end. 

It was an endearing moment, one that reminded us all of the humanity that lies behind the screen - something that was acknowledged by a number of the audience in the chat room of the live session. 

 

"Actually, you are letting people in to your lives and I think this is quite difficult for some people..."

 

Nick coped with things admirably, and there were shades of Professor Robert Kelly's famous BBC video interview, which went viral, for sure. However, what this intervention brought forward was an important discussion on the importance of levity in these challenging times. 

"The thing about remote working and 'virtual sessions' is that they are very intense," Frank commented during the stream. 

"The meetings are much shorter, they are to the point and rather than having one or two sessions which are much longer these are shorter, more frequent and more intense. The other thing is that you can see the environment. Actually, you are letting people in to your lives and I think this is quite difficult for some people. 

"But now, because of the situation we are in, people are getting used to the seeing the working environment and it actually becomes OK, we're all in the same boat and it is of no surprise. What it brings is an informality to the discussion which completely changes the means of communication.

"I think it is these moments of levity and socialisation that can allow us to understand our teams as people and who they are and that is an important part of leadership, and good leadership is vital at the moment." 

Well said Nick and thanks Katy for bringing a smile to many of our faces at an intense time. It was a lesson many of us needed - i.e. to remember that while we may be working a million miles an hour to get through this crisis, while the rolling news continues to update us on everything that is in front of us, ultimately we must remember that a moment of levity, a reminder of the human behind the screen, can be a wonderful tonic to keep us going. 

 

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In a recent edition of the Field Service Podcast, Field Service News, Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland sat down with Doug lacy, CEO and Founder of Pivital an ITSM company who have embraced the power of the blended workforce.

The original interview was part of an interview for a documentary that Field Service News have produced in partnership with Field Nation looking at how field service organisations can harness the power of the 'blended workforce' in this manner.

However, the full interview contained a huge amount of insight so with Doug's permission we took the audio from the session and published it in its raw unedited form as an episode of the Field Service Podcast. 

 

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You can find the full podcast alongside all of the other episodes here

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Transparency in the Field Service Cycle:

In the excerpt above we hear from Lacy as he describes the importance of transparency in the whole of the field service cycle especially when it comes to understanding customer challenges and perceived poor engineer performance. 

"We were providing a router deployment for a very large bank in the US which involved thousands of sites. We did a pilot and our techs were really struggling and we got the feedback that our techs were not doing a good job and they were taking too long to do the install," Lacy begins.

Knowing the regular performance of his own team to be of a very high standard, he realised that something wasn't quite right for there to be this much negative feedback. His response was to take a closer hands-on look at the situation himself by doing a site visit himself on a job near their local headquarters in Colarado, USA.

 

"While such C-level site visits are important, Lacy believes they shouldn't be necessary as technology develops to offer the transparency we require..."

 

As Lacy, thought the situation wasn't as clear cut as it had seemed.

"My experience was that first of all I waited 20 minutes just for someone to show up and take me to the network closet. I then spent another 20 minutes looking around for where the network closet was and where the routers were. We finally figured out that they were behind all of the Christmas decorations that had just been piled up on top of the router. It turned out to be issue after issue that was nothing to do with the tech's performance.

"Having some of that visibility, it had been four hours since I had arrived there, and it had been challenge after challenge, and all environmental challenges nothing related to our tech. I could then bring that visibility to our client and explain what I had experienced." 

However, whilst such C-level site visits are important, Lacy believes they shouldn't be necessary as technology develops to offer the transparency we require. 

"If we could find a better way for our clients, through technology to just be able to see, where the tech is struggling and what are the actual reasons why that tech is struggling - that insight makes a big difference in client satisfaction. Plus, it also sets the tech up for success.

"It is all about the communication and being able to understand what are techs are experiencing on site, and if we can use technology to do that, even better." 

 

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In this exclusive Field Service News video series published in partnership with HSO, we look at three key cases that can convince your board to invest in the systems that can drive your field service operations forward and to the standards expected of modern field service delivery.

 

 

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Want to know more? There is a full documentary that dives deeper into this whole topic, which is available as premium content to fieldservicenews.com subscribers...

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This Premium Content is Sponsored by:

 

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Louise Robertson from Localz outlines some of the challenges the mobile workforce face during the pandemic and ways of negating its impact.

 

Covid-19 means we are living in an extraordinary time; we are hyper-aware of who we are interacting with on a day-to-day basis. This is further heightened by the need to reduce the number of people we connect within the real world. Human movement has been restricted to assist with #flattenthecurve.

Essential services must continue to function and mobile workers need to keep the infrastructure working. Roadside assistance, plumbers fixing broken heating and boilers, electricians restoring power, utility personnel performing essential maintenance, healthcare workers attending to in-home patients, and deliveries of everyday essentials.

Confinement is rapidly altering consumer expectations, activities, and motivations, this will impact the customer perception of different brands in different ways. (Day 3 and I am crawling the walls of my home office) Keep in mind you have an opportunity to excel (or fail) because customer expectations are high now with so much emotion and uncertainty.

 

The delivery of service and products has changed 

Everyone is brainstorming isolated customer scenarios to build a customer-centric approach in the face of Covid19. Consider:

Changes to customer needs and journeys

There is no longer ‘business as usual.’ Customer awareness, concern, and reaction to the virus is rapidly shifting expectations and needs. Growing government restrictions will impact customer demands.

Be proactive now with information for customers

Over-communicate with customers and employees who are concerned and demanding information. Use agile, personalised daily communications to keep teams updated, protected and positive.

Put the isolated customer at the centre of your plan. Address how you can help customers keep themselves safe in this pandemic and address their concerns and fears. Conveying what your brand is doing to ensure a safe service or shopping experience in physical locations can earn trust (and business).

Information that will reassure customers can include:

• Advance identification of the mobile worker sent to the consumer: photo, name, vehicle registration number, relevant licence credentials, and even body temperature readings.
• Pre-arrival information, job details, accurate ETAs, and tracking maps that update in real-time. The customer can be prepared to socially distance themselves.
• Real-time two-way communications between the mobile worker and the consumer enabling contactless property access and sharing of last-minute details.
• The issuing of unique one-time PINs enables deliveries and service appointments to be authorised, approved and completed in a contactless manner as there is no need for any physical contact or signing on a device.
• For product deliveries ‘to the doorstep’, customers can advise a safe place, can track precise arrival, and can be notified of delivery completion - helping to reduce concerns about goods being left outdoors.

Communication in action

You can proactively collect feedback from customers in real-time to monitor how your field team is coping.

How your brand responds to questions like this will vary wildly based on your category. Reviewing the tone of your marketing and communications plans at this time is important. You have to pull planned communications which are out of sync with the crisis. (Cruise offers and restaurant experiences)

Gartner says, "Listen to your customers": CX and customer insight leaders are in a better position than others in the organization to understand how customer needs and expectations are swiftly changing.

Real-Time Feedback

Attitudes and perceptions will change very rapidly, so it will be essential to establish real-time feedback monitoring and reporting. People who were not taking the virus seriously a week ago are doing so today. Simply put, month-old data on customer attitudes and perceptions of your service may as well be decade-old data. Have full visibility of your mobile workers to keep abreast of changes that may occur day-to-day in the coming weeks and months.

Where your brand depends on real-world delivery of products and services plan...

• How you will serve customers if those are curtailed?
• Will you need to implement testing or provide masks to customers?
• How will you deal with customers who exhibit symptoms? Must your employees in every location understand and interact with local health officials?
• How can you use communications to support people who are quarantined?
• Can you shift to contactless digital delivery of field services?
  
  

Answers to these questions are not easy since they involve issues of product, logistics, inventory, supply chain, and operations. These questions are not only relevant for brands in the most immediately affected categories, like health products and travel. These questions can and will impact your customers and your brands in the coming months.

Resources are shifting as companies change their focus from solving broken touchpoints to addressing distinct and urgent customer needs and flexing to address severe operational, manufacturing, or logistics issues. Under normal conditions, CX leaders fight to secure and keep resources, but in the coming months, their ability to use customer insight to inform urgent decisions and support shifts in priorities will be more important than maintaining a steady course.

“In this extraordinary period of time, it has never been more important to address the fears of consumers who are literally locked in and worried about everyone they interact with. Reassuring them with frequent communication so they know exactly who to expect, the steps you’ve taken to keep them safe, precisely when you’ll arrive and enabling them to communicate their precise instructions for access is not just important, it’s vital. Without this, you may well find you’re locked out.”

(Tim Andrew, Co-Founder, CEO Localz)

NB This article was inspired by an article from Augie Ray of Gartner which you can read here. 

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Take a look at these videos to see how Localz is helping during the pandemic in terms of communication, feedback and team visibility.

 

Jan Van Veen, founder of moreMomentum, outlines a crucial approach he has been developing within his peer-sharing community to help service organisations grow through innovation and diversification...

Manufacturers with a narrow innovation focus miss many opportunities, see more innovations fail, often see that competitors do exactly the same thing and struggle to turn their innovations into growing revenues and margins.

Leading and successful manufacturers cover a much wider scope of innovations than those that stagnate and fall behind competition. They actively search for opportunities to improve the value they promise their clients, how they deliver the value and how they capture part of the value. 

They find and launch more innovations for growth. Sounds like a good recipe, doesn’t it?

The problem: Too narrow innovation

Many manufacturers have a too narrow focus on their innovations. Their dominant focus is on improving features and functionality of the products they sell. An increasing portion of the manufacturers also improve their services, but are still focusing on break-fix and maintenance services.

There are major disadvantages of the narrow innovation focus:

• Companies miss many opportunities to better serve their clients and grow their business;
• Most innovations are not a complete solution, miss crucial aspects and therefore fail;
• If clients do appreciate the new value, they often have the buying power to benefit from this new value without paying more for it;
• For competitors it is easy to recognise the innovations and do exactly the same (or better), hence, commoditise the new capabilities and value even before the investment is earned back.

As a result, they not only fall behind competition. In today’s rapidly changing industries, they ultimately run the risk of be pushed down the “food chain”, stagnate or even become obsolete. This is pretty frustrating, but does not have to be like that.

How Many Manufacturers Struggle to Grow with IoT

A common struggle is to drive growth and monetise new remote capabilities.  Most manufacturers focus predominately on predictive maintenance, remote diagnostics and remote resolution. The aim is to increase the value they offer to clients by improving uptime of their equipment and the resolution time if a failure occurs.

They encounter the following typical challenges:

• Uptime is already quite high, so there is not much room for improving the value for clients. If uptime is already 95%, how much value will it bring your client to increase uptime to 96-97%?
• Clients recognize that you will be able to deliver maintenance services at a lower cost, so they may actually expect to pay less, not more. 
• Competitors are working on exactly the same, so there is no opportunity to differentiate
• Clients fear a myriad of IoT networks, platforms and having their data flow to external parties. Every brand and manufacturer they work with is asking for the same.
• Clients start looking for a common infrastructure and services from neutral service providers.

As a result, manufacturers invest a lot, see little value coming in return and see a declining interest for business innovation from senior stakeholders in their company.

Solution: Search along 21 innovation tracks

Leading and innovative manufacturers have a pretty broad range of areas in which they innovate for growth. They are more open to new domains, new business models and new perspectives which enables them to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing industries.

In our research, we have identified 21 innovation tracks for growth, spread over 3 clusters. You can thrive in today’s disruptive world and achieve sustainable growth by widening your scope of innovation along these 21 tracks and by making strong and coherent combinations in each innovation.

Just like the leading innovators, make it a habit to embed these 21 tracks firmly in your innovation strategy:

• Actively search for growth opportunities
• Along 21 innovation tracks
• And enrich each innovation idea by combining a few innovation tracks.
  
  

If you want a more in-depth description of the 21 innovation tracks, you can download the Job-aid 21 innovation tracks to thrive during disruption. This includes a description of the innovation tracks and a template assessment sheet to assess your current portfolio of innovation projects and ideas.

The three clusters of the 21 tracks are;

1. The value you promise to clients

Which problems or needs do you solve for which customer segments? Your growth opportunities are in solving more or other problems of your existing clients and expanding the market you serve. Alternatively, instead of expanding on scope and market, you could also specialise more in a specific niche of customer segments and needs and become the market leader in that niche. This cluster of innovation tracks also includes developing your brand to better articulate and expose the value you provide.  

2. How you deliver the value

Which activities and capabilities do you need to deliver the promised value to your clients? Your growth opportunities are in building and improving the capabilities to deliver the value in an effective, efficient and consistent way, so clients get and see the value.

3. How you capture part of the value

Which portion of the value you create and deliver do you capture? So how and how much are you being paid for the value you deliver? This involves your pricing model, earnings model and your position in the value chain. Successful and innovative companies always have these three clusters – value.

A few examples of how the various tracks are embedded in their strategy;

• There was a latent need of easy availability of tools and information and easy access to music (track 1). A lot was already available for the techies, but not for the mass market until Apple made this easy and readily available (track 2).
• Various manufacturers have offered something similar before, but Apple made it a commercial success by learning from the previous attempts of others what was needed for success (track 8)
• Apple developed an ecosystem of products and services with seamless integration as well as the Appstore (track 7). Other app-developers can offer their apps in the Appstore as well (track 15), but have to comply with Apple’s requirements. They also need to pay part of their license fees to Apple (track 19). As the app-builders are replaceable and the Apple eco-system is not, Apple can afford to ask pretty significant fees (track 21 and 18).
• Apple’s brands is far beyond “great products”. It is much more about lifestyle, ease, fashion and desire (track 11 and 12).

Back To Iot – The Opportunity

Once you have the sensors in your equipment, the infrastructure for connectivity and data and the capabilities to turn data into valuable insights, there are many opportunities to enrich your innovations and business model and hence dramatically improve the potential for your clients and your own business. To mention only a few:

• Your clients are on a journey of becoming more digital and data driven in many of their processes. This is a challenge with many unknown domains, unanswered questions and uncertainties.
• How can you identify these new needs (track 1) and reduce the complexity and uncertainty for your clients (track 2)?
• With the data and intelligence you develop on the back of these data, you can help your clients to reduce usage of energy and materials, improve efficiency and productivity, develop their products and shift their core business (track 6).
• This could start with assessment and benchmarking services, evolve in consulting and training services and further grow into business outsourcing services.
• For example, Fresenius does not only sell the instruments for kidney dialyses, but also runs entire kidney dialyses departments in hospitals, including the staff treating the patients.
• Part of this journey is also advancing your brand from being a product manufacturer to a solutions provider and being known for what problems you solve. (track 11 and 12).
• For example, Caterpillar helps clients achieve operational excellence through advanced services covering asset management, project planning, fuel consumption etcetera.
• Particularly for component manufacturers, you have the opportunity to develop unique intellectual property with which you can improve the overall performance of bigger systems of OEM’s. This will make you less replaceable and increase your ability to secure your margins from the OEM (track 21 and 18) – like Intel Inside. 
• Maybe you can even do business with the end-client buying assets from the OEM (track 19). An example is how Rolls Royce does not sell its airplane engines to the airplane builders (OEMs) but to the users of the airplanes.
• For most innovations, you will need to develop new capabilities, processes, competencies and tools to deliver these new values in an efficient way (track 14).
• As your business becomes more focussed on outcome and starts building more recurring revenues, you will need to develop your sales model as well (track 20), with more emphasis on onboarding, driving and demonstrating customer success, improving customer life time value and step-by-step growing the business with your clients by upselling and cross-selling.

 

Conclusion

For sustainable success in today’s rapidly changing world, there is no single silver bullet. A great product or great service will not bring much value. To thrive in these disruptive times, you need diversity in your business innovation with initiatives in different innovation tracks as well as initiatives with a rich and coherent set of innovation tracks. That way, you will launch innovations which:

• Provide clients a complete, remarkable and desirable solution
• Are hard to replace by other actors in the value chain, like OEM’s or system integrators
• Cannot be easily copied by competitors
• Your clients will love to pay for

If you want to take your business innovation to the next level, I would like to recommend you and your team to;

1. Assess your portfolio of innovation projects along the 21 innovation tracks. How well are the 21 tracks covered?
2. Enrich each innovation idea and project by adding a few more innovation tracks to it.

Feel free to use our job-aid “21 innovation tracks to thrive during disruption”. You can download it here. 

It contains:

• A description of each innovation track with some examples
• An excel sheet to map each innovation to the 21 innovation tracks and get an insightful graphical picture of how diverse your innovation is
• Slides you can use to brainstorm with your teams to enrich your innovation projects.

Good Luck!

 

 

 

Jim Baston, Principal Consultant at BBA Consulting asks if there really is a difference between selling to and serving out customers if the approach taken is both moral and methodical?

How do you view the efforts of your field service team when they make proactive recommendations to your customers to purchase products or services?  Do you view these activities as “selling” or “serving”?  How you answer this question will have a significant impact on the results of their efforts.

 

Perspective

Most service managers that I talk to tend to speak about the product and service recommendations by their field service teams in selling terms.  It is interesting to note that most of these service managers say they are disappointed with the results of their initiative. I suggest that a major cause of their lack of success is because of the self-limiting nature of their perspective.  Here are the five reasons why a “selling” perspective can significantly limit our success.

Opportunistic/Short-term Focus. 

When the proactive recommendations made by our field service team are seen as selling they become “add-on” activities and we tend to see them from an opportunistic perspective.  “While you’re there have a look for other things that we can sell to that customer.”  We miss the opportunity to see the service value in the activity and include it into our overall service strategy.

Skills Development is Focused on Selling. 

When we view the activity by our field team as selling in nature, then it is natural to look to sales training to upgrade their skills to handle the new expectations.  Although these are important skills and can be helpful in many cases, they aren’t the only skills or even the most important.  The field service professional’s ability to build trust and maintain credibility is more important. 

Our customers will not act on a recommendation if they don’t trust the field engineer, regardless of how skilled the field engineer is in selling.  And, unfortunately, if we simply teach our field service team to sell, they may come across more like salespeople and actually diminish the amount of trust they have with their customers.

The Field Team Does Not See Themselves as “Salespeople”

Most field service professionals that I have met do not see themselves as salespeople.  Many actually resent the term being applied to them.  If they do not see themselves as salespeople, how do they react when we ask them to “sell”?  Chances are they will feel that the request is outside of their core responsibilities and will either fail to act as requested or only do so “if they have time”.

Measurement is Limited to Selling Activities. 

When we regard the field team’s role as selling, then we will tend to limit our measurement of the success of the initiative to factors such as overall revenues, small project work vs. contract base, number of proposals by field engineer, etc. Although it is prudent to measure these things, this limited focus may cause us to miss key measures that will impact our long-term success – for example, customer satisfaction and customer attitudes.  Measuring only sales related activities may also cause us to reward behaviours that encourage unnecessary “selling” activities that may also erode trust.

Difficult to Promote as a Differentiating Service. 

Many service companies that view the field service team’s proactive efforts as “selling” fail to capture and communicate the value of this activity to their customers. These firms typically don’t mention to their customers that they are encouraging their field team to look for more opportunities. After all, how do you communicate the value from the customers’ perspective of the fact that your field engineers are actively looking for more ways to make more money from them?

Let’s go back to the question I asked earlier: How do you view the efforts of your field service team when they make proactive recommendations to your customers to purchase products or services? Here are some questions to help you evaluate your own perspective. Do you:

• Replace the words “selling” and “sales” with the words “serving” and “service” in your discussion of the proactive efforts of your field service team?
• Position your field team’s proactive efforts as a service and ensure that each member clearly understand that their efforts are an integral part of the service that they provide and why?
• Use your tools and employ processes and systems to support the field team’s proactive efforts in the same way that you have tools and systems to support the other services that they provide?
• Talk about work generated by the field on how it serves the needs of the customer (rather than how much revenue it has generated for the company)?
• Talk to your customers about the proactive efforts of your field service professionals and how it benefits them?
• Ask your customers about their level of satisfaction about the value of the recommendations they have been provided by your field service team?
• If you answered “no” to two or more of the questions, perhaps a little more self-reflection is in order.

Engaging the field service team in promoting products and services can provide a valuable service for our customers and create a significant and sustainable competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive service market.  We may be limiting our own success however, if we perceive these activities as selling rather than serving.

The eternal hunt for field service excellence has recently been bolstered by the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence as a major tool in the arsenal of the field service organisation writes Aly Pinder...

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to the next big challenge for service organizations and manufacturers. How can wemake sense of the data we now have access to? From executives to the front-line field service technician, the ability to turn data into actionable insights will become the measuring stick for sustained success.

 

Leverage

To take this leap from data points to insights, organizations are ramping up quickly to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure volumes data (flow, sensor, vibration, temperature, or other data) can be mined quickly, accurately, and autonomously. When asked in a recent IDC survey, manufacturers listed Big Data and AI as a 4.06-level of importance (on a 1-5 scale, 1-not at all important,5-very important) regarding technologies integral to their service innovation journey.

The increase in importance should come as little shock to most as technology become ubiquitous in our daily lives, however what is interesting is the impact AI is having on service broadly and field service specifically.

As organizations evolve service business models to be less reactive and more proactive or predictive, the ability to leverage real-time data across a complex network of inputs is becoming critical for this transition.

Being reactive or break / fix merely requires a customer or an operator to call the service desk and report an issue. But in order to truly be predictive or prescriptive with service prior to a failure, organizations must leverage performance data to allocate resources, trigger a service event, and schedule the service to be delivered.

Organizations are looking to AI to explore field service excellence in some of the following ways:

• Better service planning and execution – How often have we talked about the “rights” of field service; right part, right tech, right skills, right time, right resolution. As much as we’ve commented on this and attempted to reach this utopia, many organizations still miss. AI connects the dots between each of the inputs across field service execution to provide the intelligence necessary to make the correct decisions, each time.
  
  
• Customer experience optimization – Even at a global scale, manufacturers and service organizations are finding they need to personalize service experiences for their customers. AI is enabling organizations to segment customers and deliver the level of support desired. Not every customer wants the closest technician, some just want to see the tech they’ve built a relationship with over the years. AI can and should be used to identify customer needs along with how best to resolve an issue. Should you resolve an issue remotely, or send a field service technician, or notify the customer directly with a customer support agent to walk them through the fix?
  
  
• Self-healing and suggestive preventative maintenance – As service organizations embrace servitization or product as a service models, they will need to deliver uptime and outcomes. Analyzing asset performance data and anomalies at scale provides the bridge to these new autonomous field service business models. But AI also provides the reporting capability to support the dashboards and details which will validate these premium services. Without capturing data points and rationalizing the service being delivered, customers may not understand why they are paying for service when they don’t actually see a failure occur.
  
  

More and more products and equipment are being connected every day which in turn is leading to volumes of data that needs to be managed. Passively managing data will be a waste of these IoT investments. Furthermore, AI can accelerate service business model transformation which has been talked about for years if not decades.

I look forward to seeing how field service organizations take advantage of AI to take this leap and meet customer expectations for an enhanced service experience.