Three Ways to Increase Profits for Your Field Service Business Post-COVID

Oct 18, 2021 • Features • BigChange • field service • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • EMEA

BigChange shares with Field Service News how field service organisations can increase their profits in the post-pandemic world.

During August 2021, BigChange engaged the research consultancy Opinium to survey field service businesses about how they fared since the UK government eased their strictest lockdown measures.

Although, for the most part, many companies are doing better now than they were in July 2020, the study revealed that fewer than half of companies reported making a profit. In fact, those in the worst affected category fear they will go out of business in the next year as costs continue to rise and COVID-19 support measures are phased out. Here are three ways to increase profits for your business and bounce back post-pandemic.

HOW TO BOOST YOUR PROFITS

1. Reduce Travel Expenses

One of the best ways to maintain a healthy profit margin is to reduce business expenses. With petrol prices rising by 18% and diesel leaping by 16% to a near-record level over the last year, it's worth looking at your current travel costs and devising ways to minimise them.

If you're currently relying on spreadsheets to schedule your technicians' working days, you could be missing out on the opportunity to optimise their routes. Thankfully, technological advancements in recent years have made it simple to assign relevant workers to jobs based on their location, skills and qualifications and vehicle type.

A job management platform optimises routes, which helps to reduce the amount of time each technician spends on the road. Lowered travel times increase the number of appointments technicians can attend each day, making it a worthwhile investment.

2. Improve First-Time Fix Rates

Did you know, companies that achieve a high first-time fix rate of over 70% enjoy a 4% increase in revenue? Subsequently, it's crucial to equip your technicians with everything they need to complete their assignments the first time.

Keeping a close eye on your stock, equipment, and assets will ensure that you always have the correct items for each job and allows you to attend more reactive appointments. Modern asset management systems give you complete, real-time visibility over your inventory and allow you to assign gear directly to jobs.

By allocating equipment before each job, your technicians can rest assured they have the right tools to finish the work there and then. Plus, an increase in first-time fixes will liberate more time for your workers to take on additional jobs — which will prove to be particularly lucrative, as the workload has increased by 70% across the field service industry.

3. Digitise Your Processes

On average, we found that users of job management software grew faster than businesses still relying on spreadsheets and paper processes last year. Better still, those that made the most of the latest technology are now in a better position to take on further work and deliver it profitably in 2022.

Using job management software like BigChange, you can digitise all your processes and manage them on one easy-to-use platform. As a result, your back-office team can handle bookings — from the moment the customer makes an appointment right up to invoicing and payment — at the click of a button.

Furthermore, the system records all customer interactions, meaning you'll have a comprehensive record of information to refer back to whenever you need it without having to sift through mountains of paperwork. Additionally, you'll reduce business costs by eliminating the need to store documents on-site or pay for storage.Consequently, your team will have more time to spend on activities that contribute directly to business growth, leading to significant profits further down the line.

JOB MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS ARE THE FUTURE

It's no secret that COVID-19 has taken its toll on field service organisations. Currently, fewer than half of field service firms are profitable. That's why business leaders will need to think outside the box and look for innovative solutions that will help their companies bounce back.

In order to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in a turbulent economic landscape, you must consider how technology will help you overcome the obstacles you're facing presently. Job management platforms arm you with all the tools you need to boost profitability and provide a great return on investment, which will benefit your business long after the effects of the pandemic have disappeared.

HELP YOUR BUSINESS BOUNCE BACK STRONGER THAN EVER ON BIGCHANGE

BigChange's job management platform is helping field service businesses across the UK win more work, take control of their operations and deliver winning customer experiences.

Bring your customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, workforce management, financial data and business intelligence onto one easy-to-use platform and begin enjoying the benefits of a smarter way of working today.

Want to find out more? Discover how your business can grow stronger on BigChange here and arrange a free demo today.

About BigChange

BigChange is the complete Job Management Platform that’s helping field service businesses across the UK to win more work, take control of their operations and deliver winning customer experiences. Bringing customer relationship management (CRM), job scheduling, live tracking, field resource management, financial management, business intelligence into one simple to use and easy to integrate platform, BigChange liberates you from inefficient paper-based processes and the complexity of multiple different technology systems that hold your business back. Loved by office and field teams alike, our customers are achieving industry leading results and return on investment. The BigChange team is committed to customer success and no matter your sector or whether you have a mobile workforce of 10 or a 100, we’re here to make a big difference to the way you work and to help your business grow stronger.

BigChange will be exhibiting on stand D1 at the Field Service Expo.

Field Service Businesses Bounce Back from Covid, but Soaring Costs Mean One-in-Eight Fears Failure Within a Year

Oct 11, 2021 • News • BigChange • field service • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy • EMEA

Demand for UK trades has boomed since the end of the initial lockdown in July 2020. Plumbers, electricians, building-maintenance firms and other trades making up the UK’s 1.3-million-business field-service sector have seen their workloads increase by 70 per cent year on year, according to a new report published by field service management software provider BigChange.

BigChange’s State of the Field Service Sector report, now available at Field Service News, reveals that three-quarters of trades businesses saw demand increase in the year to July 2021. Almost one in five (18 per cent) took on over double the work they did in the 12-month period before. BigChange’s research indicates that demand for Plumbing & Heating, Plant Hire and Drainage increased fastest.

THREE-QUARTERS OF UK BUSINESSES SAW DEMANDS AFTER THE FIRST STRICT LOCKODWN ENDED, BUT MANY ARE STILL SUFFERING THE IMPACT OF THE PANDEMIC, COMPLIANCE ISSUES AND SOARING COSTS

Despite soaring turnovers (up 79 per cent on average) and average price increases of 47 per cent, fewer than half of trades businesses (48 per cent) said they were profitable in the year to July 2021. Debts have increased by 117 per cent among the worst performers in the sector, and one-in-eight firms fear they will fail within a year as Covid complications, compliance issues and surging costs continue to hit hard.

Most businesses surveyed (81 per cent) said that the pandemic had continued to impact their finances negatively in the last 12 months. 67 per cent said their margins had been squeezed by the cost of complying with new regulations, and rising prices for materials, fuel and labour are cited as ongoing problems by more than 70 per cent of respondents.

Richard Warley, BigChange CEO, comments: “While demand for the trades has boomed since the first lockdown, this backbone of the economy is not as strong as it might look. Only half of firms are profiting from this extra work. There’s a big difference between growing and growing stronger.”

“Many trades businesses have seen profit margins hit by a perfect storm of Covid, compliance and rising costs. One-in-eight fear they won’t last another year, partly because they’ve taken on more debt and racked up colossal overtime bills meeting customer demand.

“The strong, profitable businesses are succeeding by working smarter to stay in control of their operations, keeping a lid on costs, and making their teams more productive. They are using technology to improve management oversight, plan better and automate processes, and improving communication and response times as part of efforts to make the customer experience their new source of competitive advantage.”

You can access Big Change's State of the Field Service Sector white paper here:

The Journey to Achieving Your Desired Outcomes

Sep 02, 2021 • Features • Data • field service • Leadership and Strategy • Sam Klaidman

In this new article for Field Service News, Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, discusses the service leaders' journey to achieve their desired outcomes.

Here is an interesting conversation from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland:

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ [asked Alice.]

‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the [Chesire] Cat.

‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice.

‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat.

‘—so long as I get somewhere,’ Alice added as an explanation.

‘Oh, you’re sure to do that,’ said the Cat, ‘if you only walk long enough.’

Fortunately, service leaders know exactly where they want to go. They want to achieve the business objectives they signed up for in the strategic plan or in their individual goals and objectives (which are used to calculate their annual bonus.) Unfortunately, many of these leaders are missing a terrific opportunity to win their own version of the Euro Cup because they are not using all the tools available to them.

DRIP

Service businesses are buried in data. They get operational data from their products in the field, the people in the call centers, service managers, logistics people, and their peers in Finance, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and anyone else with an opinion. But what they are missing is insight – actually actionable insight. I call this condition DRIP:

Data Rich Insight Poor

Here is an example:

Most Field Service organizations survey their customers and measure one or more metrics they then use as key performance indicators (KPIs). The three most popular KPIs are:

Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
Customer Effort Score (CES)

You collect data about each customer and lump it all together to arrive at a single KPI number. Unfortunately, using any of these KPIs will not guide you to the actions you need to take to achieve your desired business outcomes like growing revenue, increasing employee satisfaction, and improving productivity. To get down to these actions, you must link individual data to actual actions taken by the customer to 1) find out what customers really did and how they responded to your survey and 2) go back and find out specifically what you have to correct to achieve a better outcome for your business.

The solution to the DRIP problem is to take your team on this journey:

SK1

There are not enough people doing this detail work, what one of my friends calls working in the weeds. So, let’s look at how NPS is generally used to see what you don’t want to continue doing.

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) first saw the light of day in 2001 when it was marketed as “The One Number You Need to Grow.” Today it is used in many businesses of all size and all industries. Also, it is used by many field service organizations. Interestingly, the NPS system has an enormous number of critics who think the whole thing is BS. However, there are real world examples that also support the validity of the system.

Let’s look at an example of where NPS and a high-level analysis yields some data that makes the analyst and their company feel like they are actually accomplishing something important. But they are not increasing desired outcomes.

A Quick Review of NPS

The interested party asks their customers the following question:

“Based on XXX, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or associate?”

They use an 11-point scale where 11 is definitely likely, 5 is neutral, and 0 is definitely unlikely. The results are then grouped as follows:

SK2

The 2 green scores are promoters, the 2 yellow are passives, and the 7 reds are detractors. The NPS score is the percent promoters minus the percent detractors so the score can be anywhere from +100% to -100%.

Some Data

Here is a chart produced by Bain & Company, the originator of the NPS system.

SK3

In this example, the surveyors are not worried about the NPS score: they want to understand how customer’s feelings correlate with their buying intentions. In this case, the promoters appear to be about 90-95% likely to consider their current manufacturer, the passives 75-80% likely to consider the incumbent, and the detractors only 40-45% likely to consider their current supplier.

Since the surveyors know the score each individual submitted, they can create unique programs to follow up with their customers in individual segments, or even sub-segments, to identify the reasons behind their feelings and then either correct any issues and/or offer compensation if their issue is beyond their control or unresolvable. Of course, in parallel, they must look at their internal procedures and policies to prevent alienating other customers.

But this is about intent. One of my all-time favorite business books is “Five Frogs on A Log” by Mark L. Feldman and Michael F. Spratt. The book is about mergers and acquisitions and is scary. The title comes from a child’s riddle:

Five frogs are sitting on a log.

Four decide to jump off.

How many are left? 

Answer: Five. 

Why? 

Because deciding and doing are not the same things.

This is important because we don’t care what people say they will do; we care about what they do! A customer who says she will be back to you tomorrow with a purchase order is worthless until the P.O. is actually received and booked.

With respect to the Bain & Company data, I think it would be much more useful if the question were reworded to “Based on XXX, how likely are you to lease or purchase your next vehicle from our brand (or maybe from our dealership)?” After all, your business objective is to sell or lease vehicles, not get referrals. Then the surveyor could track each respondent and find out the percent at each response level, e.g., 0, 1, 2… who leased or purchased a car from them. It might take one or two years to understand the value of increasing the percent of promoters by one point, but at least they would be able to move ahead with their CX program based on actual data.

Another Example but About Service Parts Usage, not NPS

Data - Your business is the Field Service arm of a hardware product OEM. And, unfortunately, you consume a large amount of parts every month. To find out what is going wrong, you have your parts manager prepare a report of actual total usage by part number and another report breaking out the same data but by type of transaction; i.e., installation. warranty, billable, and service contract. You quickly notice that one expensive part is the most used part during warranty.

Insight - If you are only concerned about minimizing your customer’s downtime, you would increase stock levels. But if your desired outcome is to increase company profit and CSAT levels, you would make sure that each defective part is returned for failure analysis.

Action – The failure analysts would share the FA results and the total cost of each field repair with both Engineering and Manufacturing. Most likely, the results would be either a part redesign or modification plus a change in manufacturing process

Outcome - When this is done, you might find it relatively inexpensive to swap out the old design whenever you have a field engineer on-site with access to the equipment. And obviously you would pull all the old parts from stock and replace them with the new design. Your overall cost savings is your desired outcome.

Conclusion

Without linking your data to your desired outcomes, you are basically looking at a gratification metric. It makes you feel good, but it doesn’t get you any closer to where you have to get.

Note: Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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!

How Should an OEM Organize Technical Support to Provide Memorable Experiences

Jun 22, 2021 • Features • field service • Trusted Advisor • Leadership and Strategy • Sam Klaidman

In this new article for Field Service News, Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, discusses how an OEM should organize technical support in order to provide the best experience to the customer...

Both Kris Oldland and other FSN authors have been telling us that for many businesses, the new normal will be touchless service. The customer will interface with the equipment and the OEM’s technical support team will use AR/MR/VR to help the customer troubleshoot and repair the equipment. Now the question is “Over time, how will customers feel about touchless service?”

Getting the experience “right” is critical for the business because in the B2C world, and more and more in the B2B environment, the most frequent customer interaction with the business is with technical support. And the quality of each experience is important because the individual’s cumulative perception of the experience they have with a business is the brand. To make matters worse, Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner and noted Psychologist, has written about what he calls the Peak-End Rule. This rule states that for reasonably short duration, we ignore most of the details except for 1) how we felt when we had the maximum “good” or “bad” feeling and 2) how we felt while the experience came to an end.

We may not know when our customer has reached the “peak” point, but we certainly know when the journey comes to an end. So, getting each transaction to leave a positive memory in the mind of the customer is especially important.

One way to ensure good outcomes is to organize and staff technical support organizations around customer’s technical skills. The challenge of this strategy is that we have to direct calls, emails, and chat sessions to the support person who is at the same level as the customer.

First, we must understand the technical level of the people who contact technical support. In a B2C situation the technical support engineer usually communicates with either a Level 1 operator, a Level 2 person with more experience, or a trained Level 3 FSE. Here are some examples of each:

Screenshot 2021-06-16 at 23.22.12

In a B2B company there are also three levels of knowledge that technical support works with:

Screenshot 2021-06-16 at 23.24.12

Notice that in the B2B environment, the personnel at all three levels are well trained for their job and also know the limits of their knowledge. In the B2C situation, the Level 1 and 2 people may think they know more about taking care of their equipment than they actually do and so the technical support people have to take extra care to ensure that these people do not create a bigger problem than what they started with.

Given all of the above, the best we can do is organize our technical support organizations into levels that match the levels of the customers. Unfortunately, that is easier said than done since the company has little control who calls in to get aid to fix a problem.

The easiest solution for the OEM is to have a great reference library organized into FAQ’s that cover the issues that the Level 1 and most Level 2 callers can safely attack. And then encourage the callers to look there first before trying to talk to a live agent. But we know this solution would frustrate many customers and lead to many negative comments on social media, your NPS score would drop into negative territory, and your Sales partners would make your life miserable because you were now part of the “Sales Prevention Team.”

Another solution is to implement Chat and use that as a Level 1 triage and, when that does not work, the agent can escalate to either the Level 2 or 3 Tech Support as appropriate. If you elect to try this route, consider having the Chat agent arrange for a callback by a tech support agent. As long as the call is complete in about 3 minutes or less, the customer waiting for the call will generally not be upset.

In conjunction with the chat/live call back solution, you can make sure that your company certifies the internal people who will be calling for Level 3 support. This way they can have a dedicated telephone number and you have a reasonably good chance that the people calling in are trained enough that your experienced tech support agents can be spending their valuable time dealing most efficiently with customers.

Whatever strategy you decide to implement, make sure that your callers always feel that their time is being respected and that you take their problem seriously. Empathy and understanding can go a long way to making touchless service into a positive experience.

Being a Trusted Adviser is Not the Same as Providing a Great Customer Experience

May 24, 2021 • Features • field service • Trusted Advisor • Leadership and Strategy • Sam Klaidman

Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, analyzes the role of the Field Service Engineer as the customer's trusted adviser in his new article for Field Service News...

In a recent whitepaper Beyond Remote Service: Is now the time to redefine service delivery? Author Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News presents a number of compelling arguments that support the notion that Augmented Reality will not only change Field Service delivery, but the long-term outcome will be good for customers and service organizations.

However, neither Kris nor other current authors discuss what will happen to the Field Service Engineer’s role as the customer’s trusted adviser.

What Is a trusted adviser?

There is a significant difference between customer experience and a trusted adviser. Customer experience deals with all the aspects of how the customer interacts with the company, their products, advertising, people, and processes. A trusted adviser is someone in the company who customers reach out to when they want honest, unbiased opinions about aspects of the company’s products, processes, or people.

In most B2B companies, people generally accept as fact that field service engineers are customer’s trusted advisers. I believe that every FSE with more than a few years’ experience in their company has been asked at least once:

“Is the new XXX worth buying to replace my old one?”
“Should I install the latest version of the XXX software?"

And the customer expects, and usually receives, an honest answer with supporting reasons. Also, the first thing that a person who becomes a service customer learns is “don’t give your FSE a tough time or complain to their boss unless it is a significant issue!” They want to make sure the FSE trusts the customer and they expect to be able to trust the FSE’s recommendations.

How will remote support change the FSE's role?

Remote support is the enabler of self-service. The customer who has the proper skills and tools can work with the remote technical support person and perform many of the FSE’s tasks as long as spare parts are available. This new process cuts down on the need for the FSE to actually visit the customer’s site to fix problems. The FSE role changes to concentrating on big projects like installation, major upgrades, infrequent troubleshooting of difficult problems, or uninstalling equipment.

Therefore, the key questions are:

“If self-service becomes the accepted business model, will using merged reality (MR), augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) systems remove the FSE as a trusted adviser?”
“Will our B2B technical support professionals fill the trusted adviser role?”

Why is the FSE a trusted adviser and not the technical support engineer?

The pre-COVID interaction between FSE and customer is quite different from the interaction between technical support and the customer. To help understand these differences, it is useful to look at the following table that compares how customers view our FSE’s and technical support engineers with and without using MR/AR/VR.

Screenshot 2021-06-08 at 20.52.08

However, if the FSE role changes to a few face-to-face infrequent interactions spread over a number of years, then the earned trust will not continue.

Who will replace the FSE as the customer's trusted adviser?

From the perspective of the service organization, the preferred choice is the technical support professional. But will technical support replace the FSE? Probably not. There are two reasons for this conclusion:

There is no continuity between technical support and customer. Tech support customers require a rapid response and as a result, calls are usually handled on a first-come-first-served basis by the first available operator.
There is no chance to create a lasting relationship because of (1.) above and because trust is usually earned from multiple face-to-face interactions.

And if not technical support, then who will take on this role? Possibly either sales or customer success.

Sales has a big obstacle to overcome. Historically salespeople were seen as being “coin operated.” The perception was that their recommendations were designed to increase their income. While today many salespeople place the customer’s best interest above their own, it will take a long time for the earlier image to be removed from people’s minds. And with customer success teams replacing sale for aftermarket upselling and cross selling, the salespeople may never get the opportunity to reset expectations.

Customer Success has a real opportunity for a few reasons:

They are relatively new so the do not carry any baggage
They are trained to work as consultants
They collect and use customer data to help increase the value derived from using the product and also for demonstrating the advantages of using what CS recommends
They are assigned to accounts and charged with building lasting relationships
Some under-utilized FSEs are likely to transition into customer success roles. They will bring their consultative skills and existing relationships along with them.

Therefore, in my opinion, the new customer trusted adviser will be someone from the Customer Success organization.

Key takeways

With self-service, field service will no longer remain as the customer’s trusted advisor
For B2B technical support, the people who call them are trained and know the limits of their competency
Sales will be unlikely to replace field service as the customer’s trusted adviser
Customer Success will probably succeed field service as trusted adviser
The career path for many FSE’s will be into Customer Success

As We Exit COVID, Your Company’s Brand May Be Under Attack

Apr 20, 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, discusses many aspects that field service organisations should consider and evaluate as we start existing the pandemic...

The pandemic still has the world in its grip, but it is becoming looser as vaccinations become more widespread. In some developed countries, we see signs of increased hiring and manufacturing output. And increasing manufacturing output means more demand for field service for installation, training, and warranty work as well as remedial repairs on equipment supporting the manufacturing ramp-up.

The big unknown is how B2B customers will react to field service continuing its emphasis on touchless service while they are thinking about the old normal. The answer to that question may impact how these customers think about our brand: which can have a major impact on our future business.

HOW B2B BUYERS SELECT A PRODUCT TO PURCHASE

As a service leader, you know about customers and their buying habits. You know that most products are becoming commodities and while there may be differences between products from different managers, those differences will disappear over time and new differences will emerge from other competitors. You also know that there is usually a minor difference in price and anyway, B2B businesses do not buy based on price.

So how do people choose who to purchase their new equipment from if not by price or features and functions? If we are totally honest, we would say the primary differentiator is service. Of course, our sales and marketing peers would disagree with you, but we know they are biased. They would probably agree with you if you said, “people buy based on the brand.”

WHAT IS A BRAND?

If you ever want to get into a good argument with sales and marketing people, just ask each person to write down their definition of brand. Do not be surprised if there is no agreement. During my research, I discovered a wonderful article “Defining What a Brand Is: Why Is It So Hard?" In the article the author, Tracy Lloyd, shared a few definitions:

David Ogilvy, the “Father of Advertising,” defined brand as “the inangible sum of a product’s attributes.”
The Dictionary of Brand defines brand as “a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.”
Marty Neumeier, author and speaker on all things brand, defines brand by first laying out what a brand is not: “A brand is not a logo. A brand is not an identity. A brand is not a product.” Neumeier goes on to say that “a brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.”

Definitions 2 and 3 are remarkably similar yet hard to do anything with.

In late 2012, my friend Harry Klein, a professional Marketeer, and I decided to collaborate on a White Paper that we called “Because I’m The Customer!” A Guide to Managing Your Brand & Customer Experience in the Age of the Customer. Here is a paragraph from the White Paper:

As Brian Millar wrote in his FastCompany article Branding Talk Isn’t Helping Your Company. Here’s What Should Replace It:

“If you promise something clearly, deliver on that promise, and repeat the process, you build strong emotional links to your company with certain consumers. But that’s where the value resides: in my head and your head, and your mother’s head. And the stuff inside my head is my property. If brands exist at all, they exist in the minds of consumers. I can switch my brand of search engine at a moment’s notice. Bank accounts and makes of automobile are a bit more hassle to discard, but I can still change my mind about them.”

So, a brand is unique to each of us. It is the sum of all promises and experiences we had with a product, service, or company. This perception changes as we forget old or irrelevant promises or experiences and add newer ones to our memory. And to make matters worse, we might have different perceptions of different situations with the same product or service.

Here is an example: Think about your current car. If we are talking about design and ease of use, you might say “It took me only 30 minutes to figure out how to set up the infotainment system.” But if I ask you about the dealers training on all the new features, you might say “he was confused and so was I.” And if ask about fuel economy, you might say “It is great on the open road, crap in city driving, and does not come close to what was on the sticker.” But if I just ask, “how do you like your new car,” you might respond “I love it and feel like I rule the road when I drive it.”

ARE BRANDS REAL?

Even though brands only exist in our minds, they are real because we make our purchasing decisions based on our current perceptions of the promises the manufacturer makes and our experiences about how well these promises are met. In other words, brands drive how money is spent! That is as real as it gets.

In January 2021 McKinsey & Company released an interesting article “The Rising Value of Industrial Brands.” One of the six main insights in the article is;

Visibility drives performance—but only for a few players. The top three brands in each segment average a total 60 percent of visibility, and the top brand typically has four times more visibility than the third-place competitor. Overall, 5 percent of companies capture 95 percent of total visibility. And top-quartile companies enjoy about 30 percent higher ROIC than those in the bottom quartile.

McKinsey & Company uses visibility (share of voice) as the measure of brand favoritism. They define visibility as “… brand name mentions in the media, including industry publications that customers read to learn about new products, systems, and technologies. Because B2B sales are increasingly held to the same standards as B2C sales channels, including the option to purchase online, we also tracked the growth of searches for the brands on major online search engines.”

Next, they show how share of voice impacts the company’s ROIC (Return on invested capital):

Picture 1-Apr-15-2021-10-21-39-29-PM

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

Since a brand is the sum of all promises (expectations) and experiences we had with a product, service, or company and brand visibility drives ROIC (and other financial metrics), then your promises and delivered experiences are driving your financial results. That raises two questions:

Question 1. Where do expectations come from?

There are six sources of customer expectations

Organizational promises
Competitor’s promises and/or performance
Personnel promises
B2C experiences
Previous experiences with your business
Comments from friends and associates

Unfortunately, you and your business can only influence #1 and #3. The other four are outside your control but you must be sensitive to them and if you or your team discovers that customers have expectations that differ from what you can routinely deliver, you must reset their expectations. Doing that professionally will prevent disappointment when the experiences are as you promised, not what they wanted.

Question 2. Where do experiences come from?

Every interaction your company has with a customer or prospect creates a new memory of an experience. The two most important steps you can take to make sure you are providing great experiences are

Train everyone on how what they do and say impacts how customers feel about doing business with your company
Follow up either all interactions or a randomly chosen subset of all interactions and talk about how the customers feel about their experience. Discussions are better than surveys because people are sicker of surveys than they are of being locked down at home. Do this every day with the same people making the calls and analyze the data using as many views as you can imagine. Then share the results with everyone in the company.

WHY IS MONITORING BRAND PERFORMANCE ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT AS WE EXIT COVID-19?

During the past year, we have all been busy implementing touchless service, a blended workforce, and trying to avoid sending our Field Engineers on calls for both health and safety and economic reasons. Many of us believe that these initiatives will continue into the future and become our permanent business model.

This was expected during the height of the pandemic and customers subconsciously adjusted their expectation to accept what you were providing. But what if customer’s expectations revert back to the 2019 business model and you continue to deliver on the 2020 model? A major gap will open up and customers will feel disappointed.

The solution is marketing communications. You and your team must proactively reset your customer’s expectations to be in line with your intended future deliveries. There might be some intense customer discussions and you may have to modify your plans if the pushback is too great. You must ensure that the experiences your business delivers either meets or exceeds your customer’s expectations.

Finally, when the folks in the C-suite start looking for more revenue and profits, don’t automatically jump on the cost-reduction train. Make sure your promises are being met and exceeded by your performance. It takes work but it is worth the efforts.

Do You Know How to Integrate Knowledge and Data Into Your Service Business Processes?

Mar 23, 2021 • Features • Data • Nick Frank • field service • Leadership and Strategy

Nick Frank, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Si2 Partners, discusses how companies can successfully integrate knowledge and data into their business processes in this new article for Field Service News.

While the vast majority of organisations recognise that managing Knowledge and Data is a key source of competitive advantage, how many equip their team members with the understanding to effectively integrate these solutions into their operating processes?

Within the Service Leaders Network, we recently ran a collaboration project with a small number of Service Leaders to look at this challenge. The result has been the development of a pragmatic framework and self-assessment tool, that all service professionals can apply in their day-to-day working environment. A simple management blueprint that encourages managers to ask incisive questions that will increase the likelihood of success of their Data or Knowledge projects

The conversation came about when we asked a group of service leaders about their Knowledge and Data challenges. The topics included access to expert product knowledge, sharing specialist competencies, knowledge retention, competency management, knowledge transfer... The list was indeed long and many of these challenges you no doubt can relate to.

As the collaboration project progressed, the group realised they needed a framework to judge what was good practice across different solutions and approaches. They recognised that most managers understand WHY knowledge and data is important to them and they know WHAT they need (hence the long list). But where there is a big hole is HOW to get there. Through a slow process of virtual meetings, one-on-one interviews (this was the time of COVID) and supporting analysis by a facilitator, we moved towards the framework you can see. A simple tool developed by managers, for managers that helps them take actions that will increase the likelihood of success for their data or knowledge solution.

The thinking framework consists of four interdependent factors that should be considered when integrating a data or knowledge solution into an organisation’s processes:

Purpose
Data Architecture
Process and Tools
People

For a business process to leverage data and knowledge to the full, all four factors should be considered and where necessary planned for. This is especially important where investment is made in specialist tools and technologies such as a Service Management Software, Human Resource IT solutions and Advanced Analytics Data Solutions. Let’s look at these four areas in a little more detail:

Purpose:

This is the “Why” of the data solution and can be articulated in different ways depending on where the project lies on the Strategy – Operations continuum. Purpose of the data solution should contain some, but not necessarily all the following components:

Fit with the vision and strategy of the company
The KPI’s or performance measures to be influenced
The risk to be managed
Value created, costs reduced, or loyalty created

Without a well-defined purpose, the project is likely to lack direction and so disappoint or fail in its return-on-investment objectives.

Common mistakes: A company who invests in SharePoint with a generic goal to ‘share data in the business’, without understanding the KPI’s being influences or the data being collected. They are often disappointed with the results.

Data Architecture:

With a clear understanding of Purpose, it is possible to define the data/knowledge to be collected by the process, or the data/knowledge required to support the process. Knowing whether this data is structured (numbers) or unstructured (text/words) is key to defining how it is collected and analysed within the business process.

Common mistakes: Defining Key Performance Metrics indicators without understanding if the data can be collected and analysed in a sustainable fashion.

Process & Tools:

The next component is to define how data/knowledge fits into business processes and the tools required to ensure it is presented in such a way such that decisions can be made. Often managers will jump to this step without understanding Purpose or Data Architecture resulting in sub-optimal data/knowledge solutions. Common mistakes: Remote Data Capture is a common data solution, but it does need to be built into the Service process if it is to deliver sustainable value. Too often it is seen as just another activity we do.

People:

Without people’s willingness to engage in the Knowledge management process, initiatives will fail. The key is to design this factor into the Knowledge/Data Project at the start, whether that is building a culture where knowledge is shared, developing the skills required to support the process or simply good old-fashioned change management to ensure engagement. This is the component that many business leaders miss when implementing knowledge management solutions.

Common mistakes: Within the Service CRM processes, users do not update master-data, or worse still, simply bypass specific data entry requirements to save time, as they do not understand the implications of their actions.

Want to know more about your own skills, take this very short 4 question self-assessment using this link: https://si2partners.outgrow.us/si2partners-3

If you want to know more the Knowledge and Data Implementation framework, then you can contact nick.frank@si2partners.com and he can support you with engaging workshops that will help you and your team identify how to integrate data into your business processes. Si2 also have run a series of workshops that help service professionals to become more data savvy. To date more than 200 professionals have participated in these programmes which aim to raise their bar in terms of how to use data.

Make Sure You Set Achievable Expectations When Rolling Out New Services

Mar 18, 2021 • Features • field service • Leadership and Strategy • Sam Klaidman

In this new article for Field Service News, Sam Klaidman, Founder and Principal Adviser at Middlesex Consulting, discusses the importance of setting realistic and achievable expectations when rolling out new services.

In 1988 Michael R. Mantell wrote a book “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff.” Now we know that Mantell was wrong when it comes to Field Service.

Here is the real story! In the coming months and years, it is likely that your organization will be implementing a steady stream of changes to the way you do business. Some of these changes that are on most service leader’s minds are:

Touchless service
Blended workforce
New business models – XaaS, IoT
Circular economy
Digital transformation
Servitization
Predictive maintenance
Artificial intelligence

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS AND OTHER BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Before we jump into the details, it is necessary to understand an idea and three definitions.

The ideas expressed in this article originated in “How small service failures drive customer defection: Introducing the concept of microfailures” by Sean Sands, Colin Campbell, Lois Shedd, Carla Ferraro, and Alexis Mavrommati.

Service failure – any service that fails to meet a customer’s expectation. They come in two varieties – macrofailure and microfailure. Because services quality is influenced by individual’s emotions, the following definitions are imprecise and may leave you a little uncomfortable. Don’t worry!

Macrofailure – Sands et al define a macrofailure as a “negative service encounters in which customer expectations go unmet by a wide margin.”

Since each of us will react differently to any specific outcome, the best guidance we can provide is to quote from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Steward in a 1964 decision about whether a movie was pornographic:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Until you get customer feedback that a particular transaction did not meet their expectation, you or someone who works with you must be the internal judge as you design services and set the expectations you will share with your customers.

FIRST AN EXAMPLE OF A MICROFAILURE AND A MACROFAILURE

An example of a service technician going to a customer whose product equipment has failed and the production line had to be totally shut down.

A macrofailure - When technical support decided that a service technician had to be dispatched, the support person said “Joe Brown has just finished up his job and will be at your facility within 30 minutes.” Unfortunately, the dispatcher did not tell Joe that the whole factory was shut down, so Joe stopped for lunch. He arrived 45 minutes late. The plant manager was really mad and after Joe departed, she called the SVP Field Service and totally blasted him.

A microfailure – Another day, the field technician showed up within the promised window and immediately got to work. One of his repair steps was to reboot a controller. This step usually takes 8 to 10 minutes. During that time, he called the office to update his status, but the customer only saw Joe standing about 20 feet from the equipment talking on his mobile phone. She didn’t say anything to Joe, so he never had the opportunity to explain that the repair was still going on while he was on the phone and that he was watching the controller and ended the call as soon as the reboot was complete.

WHY ARE MICROFAILURES IMPORTANT?

When a customer experiences a macrofailure, their usual reaction is to complain to the company. And service departments are exceptionally good at quickly and efficiently solving big problems and communicating their results back to the customer. If done well, most customer’s either stay as loyal as they were before the incident or actually increase their loyalty! After all, the customer now knows how their service provider will act in a messy situation and the customer comes away with increased peace-of-mind.

But when a microfailure occurs, the customers usually suffer in silence. Usually because they are embarrassed to make a big deal over a minor problem and they don’t want to create a reputation of being a complainer. But there is another set of factors that come into play:

1. We remember negative situations and forget positive ones

2. The negative situations grow in our minds and the ill-will accumulates

When it comes time to renew their contract, the customer who has experiences a small number of microfailures blows them up in their mind and finally unloads on the service seller. Typical outcomes are:

The salesperson is depressed or demotivated
The customer declines to renew their contract
The customer demands a discount before renewing
The customer shares their frustration with other customers or prospects
The service organization does not have an opportunity to make things right before the become highly visible at an inopportune time

HOW TO PREVENT MICROFAILURES FROM GROWING INTO A MAJOR ISSUE:

Strategy	Tactics
Detect microfailures	· Encourage customer complaints · Reassure customers that you hear them and the concerns are valid · Train staff on how to deal with complaints · Track complaints
Repair microfailures	· Offer a small gesture & nonmonetary compensation · Train staff about how all failures are important · Empower the team to solve the problems in real-time · Make sure there are no repercussions for the customer
Prevent microfailures	· Try and predict when a microfailure is likely to occur · Enhance your continuous improvement efforts · Consider under promising so you can over deliver · Cocreate services experience with your customers

A final comment

In the July-August 1990 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Christopher W.L. Hart, James Heskett, and W. Earl Stasser, Jr. published the classic article “The Profitable Art of Service Recovery.”

The second paragraph of the article states:

“While companies may not be able to prevent all problems, they can learn to recover from them. A good recovery can turn angry, frustrated customers into loyal ones. It can, in fact, create more goodwill than if things had gone smoothly in the first place.”

This is true for both macrofailures and microfailures. If you treat both of them the same way then you can’t go wrong.

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WHAT IS A BRAND?

ARE BRANDS REAL?

CLOSING THE CIRCLE

WHY IS MONITORING BRAND PERFORMANCE ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT AS WE EXIT COVID-19?

Further Reading:

Further Reading:

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS AND OTHER BACKGROUND INFORMATION

FIRST AN EXAMPLE OF A MICROFAILURE AND A MACROFAILURE

WHY ARE MICROFAILURES IMPORTANT?

HOW TO PREVENT MICROFAILURES FROM GROWING INTO A MAJOR ISSUE:

Further Reading:

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