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In his role as Director of IFS Labs Bas de Vos, is at the heart of driving innovation forward in our industry. So who better to talk to find out what technologies we should be eagerly awaiting and what is the process to take these technologies from cool ideas through to practical applications...

FSN: What are the three most exciting technologies that have yet to come fully to light that you and your team are currently working on?

BdV: Firstly it is augmented reality or mixed reality as I see it, secondly I would say that drones are still in there as well and the third one is something that we have been working on for some time that we keep coming back to - autonomous assistance. New ways of interacting with business applications - can I talk to my device? Can I chat with my device - it’s a very interesting subject. We have a prototype and we are going to researching and further developing that.

Whether it will be an IFS product one day, that is something that with Labs I can never say up front - but I see the development now in the consumer space with speech control like Siri and Cortana and on the other hand chat-bots for Facebook and Snap Chat etc it’s all very interesting, so we shall see.

FSN: Your team demonstrated a great example of Drones, IoT and FSM software all coming together at the last IFS World Conference - is that product ready to go or was it just a proof of concept demo?

BdV: Well, yes it is ready to go but it won’t be an actual IFS product - we won’t have the IFS drone product out in the market - definitely not.

No, what we wanted to do was demonstrate how companies who want to do stuff like this can do so through using our IoT business connector. Basically everything that we demonstrated at the World Conference in that session, the integration of drone technology, image capture and recognition and automated data analysis was made all possible through the IoT business connector.

FSN: How much of what you and your team do is about actually giving your customers the ideas of what is possible to allow them to innovate themselves?

BdV: If you look at the mission we have as IFS labs it is threefold. Firstly, we exist to guide, basically we do a lot of research. We don’t get to only do the cool stuff - so it’s not only playing with drones! We do a lot of proper research into database technologies etc. So we are there to guide the R&D teams on what we think they should be picking up and taking further.

Secondly, we are here to talk to influencers, to help explain to the wider world what we are doing at IFS and what the purposes of IFS Labs as a technology incubator is all about.

Then thirdly, and perhaps the most important part of the job for me is that we are here to inspire our clients to do more with their business applications. If you look at my work personally it’s an equal split across these core functions. 

FSN: In general do you ever feel an urgency to push a project out whilst it may be still in Beta or do you think it is better to wait until the product is fully refined and completely free of bugs?

BdV: That’s a very good question.

First of all do I feel pressure to deliver IFS products around any given technology? The answer is always no and the reason for that is fairly simple. We are not here to compete with say Microsoft HoloLens in terms of technology. We will not be providing the actual AR technology ourselves.

What we need to do -which is part of the mission of IFS labs is to make sure that our business application is ready for when these technologies do become viable products.

What I mean by that is we need to be able to have an app ready to go on HoloLens to take advantage of that technology, or any other similar new emerging technologies.

Are we the guys that will actually create the technology? No I don’t think that is our core business and to be honest I don’t think that we would have the skill set to do that as well as others who are focussed on that area.

Our task at labs is to keep on monitoring the market and being able to leverage these exciting technologies once they are industry ready.

 

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Field Service News Editor-in-Chief Kris Oldland takes the opportunity to catch up with Tomasz Sinkiewicz, Comarch at the recent Field Service Medical conference shortly after he'd given a great presentation about why connectivity and not mobility was the dominant buzz word currently in the medical sector.

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Kris Oldland, talks to Lucio Golinelli, Senior Director of Service & Delivery with Sky Italia about the digital transformation they are undertaking and how it is helping to drive new profits....

There were a number of interesting case studies presented at the recent Maximize Europe event held by ServiceMax from companies across many different industry verticals.

However, one that really caught the eye was that of Sky Italia who worked closely with the field service management provider as part of an ambitious company wide digital transformation program.

As Europe’s largest Pay-TV company with dominant presence in the Pay TV sector across five European countries (UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy and Austria) Sky is a household name that resonates across the continent. However, the Pay-TV vertical has become increasingly competitive over the last few years and customer experience and satisfaction are two key differentiators in the sector.

So it was perhaps no surprise that improving customer experience through digital transformation was at the heart of the organisation’s move to dramatically change their business operating systems.

Indeed, Lucio Golinelli, a Senior Director of Service & Delivery with Sky Italia who has responsibility for both field services and the supply chain explained that the key benefits his organisation sought through the digital transformation - whereby they moved away from their traditional processes of field service delivery to a more digital centric process, were equally centred around both customer experience and financial KPIs.

However, from Golinelli’s side of the business this meant working closely with ServiceMax to find a solution that worked across their whole supply chain rather than simply adopting an off the shelf solution.

The main reason for this is that when it comes to installations, Sky Italia operate within the framework of an outsourced model.

“We have a multi level approach in that we have 400 company partners, which tend to be smaller companies or ‘entrepreneurs’ rather than large organisations - who then manage for Sky approximately 2500 installers,” Golinelli explained to me as he talked me through the challenges he faced throughout the transformation process.

“For Sky Italia, installation is not a revenue stream but a cost stream,” he continued. “Because for us the installation is just an enabler to provide the services to our customers.” So whilst traditional benefits of increased installer productivity may be a side effect of the implementation this was never an end-goal for Sky Italia.

Perhaps the biggest challenge Golinelli and his team faced was how to fully integrate their own needs - as an effectively B2B organisation dealing with the partner ecosystem, and their end users - who are a B2C market. Success here however, would provide Sky Italia with granular levels of information that can allow them to discover new up-sell opportunities.

 

In order to best achieve this Sky Italia simultaneously replaced their old FSM, CRM and marketing tools bringing them all together on one new Cloud based solution and working alongside ServiceMax to find a customised solution for their FSM tools.

Currently in the process of undertaking this transformation program, digital visibility will be built across the whole chain from Sky through to their end customers. This is vital as it means they are not just changing the way they interact with their customers, but even changing the interface with which they undertake such interactions.

Of course, the main challenge for any company that outsources its service is that they essentially need at least two flavours of the same solution. From a Global operation with a nationwide presence, Golinelli’s team will need different dashboards, KPIs and control rooms to those that the majority of their partners will require.

It has taken Sky Italia working directly with ServiceMax over two years to develop a solution that works across Sky themselves, their partners and their customers but it seems that all that effort is now beginning to reap it’s rewards.

They have already launched the initial phase of the development with almost 1,000 installers already on track - and Golinelli appears immensely proud to see his team flourishing.

“There are two aims, “Golinelli explains.

“Firstly, the real benefit of improved efficiency for us is less errors,and in particular less mistakes in administration - that has now been largely overcome and is being dramatically reduced.”

Secondly, it is also important that if Sky Italia’s new processes are to succeed, that the various new tools used in isolation.

“We moved from customised platform for CRM, custom FSM software, and a customised platform for marketing to a common cloud solution shared across all divisions,” Golinelli expands.

“Now we have all of the key operations based on the same cloud platform. This is very effective as the power of this system is the real-time exchange of information, from installer to an operator in a call centre or vice versa. We can also pick up a lot of anecdotal information from the installers and then feed that back to marketing, again in real-time.”

 

It is in this last concept that Sky Italia are truly seeing the largest benefit, the shared platform gives them a much better opportunity to upsell their products.

For example let’s say an installation is being undertaken and the installer can see there is a Manchester Utd flag. In real-time he can then check if the customer has the subscription for Sky Sports and can either try to make the upsell himself or feed that information straight back to his marketing department.

Although only mid-way through the process, the results so far have been impressive to say the least. The field service division is now responsible for generating more revenue than any other part of the business having seen a rise in the percentage of revenue generated by installers leap from 11% to 21%.

For Golinelli, the significant factor in their success so far is the easy movement of data from one business unit to the next. Meanwhile, for Sky Italia, the shift to a digital workflow is already beginning to reap it’s rewards as they move field service from a cost model to a cost + revenue model whilst customer satisfaction levels increase at the same time. Perfecto!

 

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Oneserve, field service management software specialist based in Exeter, UK has announced a key strategic partnership with machine learning and predictive analytics specialist BiG Consultancy. The partnership will see the companies enhance and accelerate Oneserve Infinite, Oneserve’s Predictive Service Management offering.

Whilst many continue to talk around the prospects and future potential of machine learning and predictive analytics, this partnership make it a reality.

Chris Proctor, CEO at Oneserve,  who was listed in the Field Service News #FSN20 list of key influencers this year, explains more: “Today we live in a world where our cost palatability is decreasingly rapidly, whilst customer expectations of service delivery are increasing at a seismic pace, driven largely by technology and innovations in our ‘consumer’ lives.

“By looking outside the conventional confines of traditional field service principles, technologies and systems we have been able to learn and bring on board a number of solutions and make them accessible to our customers,” concluded Proctor.

 

Initially the Oneserve team looked into the potential of IoT, but found that whilst it provided a decent tool as an edge based trigger, essentially customers could be told that there was a problem without being able to do much about it; there was still going to be a significant downtime, but with perhaps just more time to try and work out how to manage it.

It was when in 2016 that Oneserve began to see what the alignment of a holy trinity of technologies, Big Data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence, could mean to customers that the true potential of a solution began to become clear.

“We’ve used Artificial Intelligence within our current scheduling engine for some time,” explained Proctor.

“However, combining the three provided the ability to look much wider and understand the relationships between failures and the contributing factor. This in turn, provided capabilities that could predict failure months in advance, a hugely significant step for us. In some industries, the costs associated with a responsive breakdown repair job can be as much as 20 times higher than the planned job.”

Partnering with BiG was a key part in Oneserve’s strategy to accelerate developments in this area and develop meaningful, real-world use cases where it could deliver significant advantages to customers. BiG has worked successfully with high profile customers in the past in this type of area including the likes of CrowdCube, The MoD, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme and Microsoft.

BiG co-founder, Gerry McNicol commented. “BiG is excited to be partnering with FSM leaders Oneserve on this innovative project. The combination of Predictive Asset Maintenance and Field Service Management is a fantastic example of how real benefit can be gained for both customer and supplier.

 

“It’s a superb use case for IoT and Machine Learning technology showing tangible and measureable benefits. Once you’ve seen it in action you wish you’d done this sooner,” McNicol concluded.

“So far we’ve been working to predict failures using our system to prevent them and to use deep learning within our existing product to optimise ‘job’ success,” commented Proctor. “Providing users with the ability to know when a given task is going to fail and why, allows for changes to be made pre-emptively. However, we have huge plans at harnessing the power of Oneserve Infinite and Deep Learning in an increasing number of ways and BiG will be critical part of that.”

Oneserve Infinite is able to provide customers with:

• A system that can autonomously recognise a ‘failure event’ with significantly more warning, ensuring that the relevant teams are notified and operatives are scheduled efficiently to undertake planned maintenance to prevent downtime.
• Detailed maintenance schedules of work that will be required over a given time
• ‘Asset Commercial Viability’ projections to help companies understand the remaining useful lifespan on their assets
• On a Service Management platform this technology transforms ‘Responsive Breakdown Repairs’ into ‘Planned Maintenance Events, offering customers, and indeed, theirs, with vast cost efficiencies and a level of service excellence that will set the benchmark for the future

 

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Resource Type: White Paper
Published by:  Trimble
Title: A Quick to Field Service Metrics

 

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Synopsis:

Field Service Managers face a big challenge balancing customer service with operational efficiency. It can be often hard to know how each important aspect is performing; and making changes in one area can affect the other. A successful Service Manager will leverage KPIs to gain visibility into their operations; helping them to manage both aspects of their business.

This White Paper published by Trimble Pulse takes a look at the some of the key considerations as to what metrics field service managers should be focussing on.

The white paper includes sections on:

• The importance of KPIs
• The top 5 field service KPIs
• A guide to benchmarking your own KPIs against best in-class field service organisations.

Overview:

Historically, field service organisations measured their success based upon the cost of service delivery and revenue generation. However, as competition in the industry heats up and customer expectations reach an all-time high, measuring additional Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) has become critical to success.

Field service companies need to know what is working and what isn’t in their operations in order to make improvements. This is easier said than done.

With so much data flowing in from multiple sources, in various formats and through an array of tools, determining what is useful can be a minefield for service organisations. Nearly 30 per cent of field service managers believe their organisation is ineffective at using the data they collect and just 1 in 5 believe they get the information they need from field service data to help do their job.

 

Field Service Managers need to extract data from their operations in two ways.

Firstly, they need instant, accurate information on which they can make on-the-spot decisions and secondly, performance management analytics should also be gathered so they can benchmark performance trends and learn from  experiences.

Ultimately, you cannot improve on what is not already being measured.

Identifying KPIs, measuring them and setting goals for improving them will reap rewards for any service operation.

Importance of KPIs

In order for field service organisations to obtain and retain customers, they must have a solid understanding of how their field operations are performing at all times. When utilised well, KPIs keep the service team focused and, most importantly, identify where improvements in the business are needed.

The business dynamics of delivering field service have changed, and customers are demanding higher levels of service. Field service organisations need to adapt accordingly which often means empowering their technicians with the tools and knowledge to fix things the first time – every time.

KPIs can help measure how well an organisation is meeting this objective as well as provide data that will help improve the effectiveness of each technician in completing their job.

Top 5 field service KPIs

The white paper takes an in-depth look at the following KPIs

• Customer Satisfaction
• SLA compliance
• Technician Productivity
• Technician Utilisation
• First-time-fix rate

How do you compare

The white paper explores research by Trimble Pulse which highlights that there is a lot of room for field service organisations to improve upon when it comes to using field service data. The research surveyed field service managers to find how their organisations use KPIs and whether they are successful at leveraging KPIs to improve business productivity and efficiency.

Trimble asked a range of questions looking to establish what field service organisations perceive to be the top most important KPIs to how they use KPIs to inform business decision making, that’s if they use KPIs at all. Without this insight, how can you make decisions which enhance business productivity, cost efficiency and create loyal customers? Essentially, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

 

The final section of this white paper explores the findings of this research and outlines best-practice approaches to field service metrics.

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Numerous research from varying sources, including our own studies, have revealed that there is increasingly becoming two separate types of field service organisation. Those that have embraced field service management technology and those that have not. We spoke exclusively to Jonathan Best, SVP & GM Europe with Kony to get his insight on this divide...

As we catch up for a morning coffee in an upmarket cafe in the centre of Amsterdam it is interesting to cast our minds back to the last time we met, some months further back in London. At that point, Best and his team at Kony were just beginning to step into the world of field service and much of the reasoning, whilst based on solid suppositions, remained largely untested in the real world.

Now, however, many of those suppositions are being proven to be true, which is always a gratifying, but more importantly it confirms to Best, that they are on the right path.

Pretty much the entire underlying premise of Kony’s approach to developing field service management tools is that there are two distinct types of field service companies.

 

The haves and the have nots. Those with FSM technology and those without.

And whilst the latter are traditionally the low hanging fruit for any FSM system provider, it is the first group who are likely to benefit most from the approach Kony are taking.

“The thing that has been interesting for us is that talking to our product guys their view was that we would produce this set of components and we would see an increase in the number of people who implemented them as is. We’ve seen a few examples like that but typically they tend to be quite simplistic cases - typically companies that haven’t got any technology supporting their field service people at all,” Best begins.

“The much more common cases are where we find organisations who have already got some type of field service technology and what they’re interested in is how they can either augment or replace those existing systems with something more refined to their needs.”

“To put things very, very simplistically there are two types of field service company, those who have no technology at all - who are still using pen and paper etc. They are very interesting to talk to as they are very open minded, but still they don’t know what they don’t know.”

“Then there are those who are already using some technology with their field service operations but are finding it sub-optimal in some way.”

“Who I have yet to meet is somebody who has said we have all the technology we need perfectly at the fingertips of our field service technicians. I’m not saying that they don’t exist but from where I’m sitting I don’t think there seem to be too many of them,” he adds

 

In many senses, it feels that the approach Kony are taking is putting the onus of design back on field service organisations themselves. For those who have been around the block a few times this can have significant benefits, empowering them to iron out the imperfections of other tools that have been utilised in the past.

However, for those who have yet to spend time with another solution to identify what those imperfections would look like in their own business, such a solution may be a overly complicated. No so much running before they can walk exactly, more like buying a baby an expensive set of Nike running shoes.

“For those companies who don’t have any technology the challenge for them is should they go and buy an off the shelf FSM solution, which they can take out of the box, plug it in, set themselves up and it is going to give them a capability that they didn’t have,” Best explains.

“And they can typically do that faster and quicker than they could if they took a tool set approach - like what we offer, and then build things up themselves.”

“The people who like our approach are the ones who want to step iteratively into something or those who look at the quite formulaic approach to traditional field service solutions and find it sub-optimal.”

 

“If you can go into a shop and buy exactly what you want, or you can buy the bits to build something that can do exactly what you want - most people will buy the product not the components. Nobody goes into a shop and buys the parts to make a microwave oven, when you can just go out and buy one and it will do what you want a microwave oven to do,” Best quips.

“But the kinds of organisations who are interested in having some sort of approach to field service that isn’t supported by the typical solutions, these are the ones interested in building something themselves and that’s where the tool set we provide can often help them. The advantage being that what they end up with then is built bespoke to their needs, and is designed specifically to enhance their own unique workflows.”

 

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The 'uberization' of field service is a topic gaining much traction of late, could the gig economy alleviate pressures for field service companies meeting ever increasing customer expectations of shorter appointment windows or will it present too much of a challenge in terms of maintain brand standards in an age where customer satisfaction reins supreme?

This excellent infographic from ClickSoftware reveals some interesting findings from a recent research project they've undertaken on this topic...

 

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Want to know more? A full white paper based on this research is available to Field Service News subscribers. If you are a field service professional you can subscribe now for free and get this white paper sent straight to your inbox. Simply click here to subscribe now!

 

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Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief Field Service News asks isn’t it about time we learnt to manage spare parts as well as we can manage the mobile workforce?

When looking through the list of topics discussed in most field service conferences it seems that there is one area that is often heavily overlooked - which is namely the topic of parts distribution. So often we talk about the importance of getting the right engineer, with the right skills to the right job and getting them there on time.

Of course it’s all a moot point if they don’t have the right parts needed to complete the job.

Yet head to any industry event, or look through the pages of any industry journal (including even our own humble offering) and you will find far more content that is weighted towards managing the dispatch of engineers than you will see focussed on the dispatching the parts that they need to do their job.

In our defence it’s an easy trap to fall into - there are just so many more voices shouting about mobile workforce management than there are shouting about parts management and service logistics.

The challenge is that whilst the service that logistics providers can provide to field service organisations is absolutely crucial (and can offer very tangible performance benefits), in the wider scheme of things we must remember two key factors.

 

Firstly, the number of companies that can offer the ability to deliver across international borders and to the type of time scales that field service organisations require are very few and far between. Secondly, within such organisations, field service and parts management is really just a very small component of their wider operations, so perhaps gets a touch overlooked.

Yet, slowly that is beginning to change.

Companies such as FedEx, Keuhne Nagel and UPS have all stepped up to the plate to try and help resolve some of the pain points felt by field service organisations in relation to their parts delivery. Also we are beginning to see more and more senior logistics professionals become focussed on field service as a sector.

One such individual is Tim Helsen, Netherlands Country Manager, UPS who was speaking recently at the Field Service Europe conference held in Amsterdam, and I was pleased to receive his invite to connect over a coffee at the event to gain his perspective of how companies such as UPS can help field service companies overcome the perennial challenge of cumbersome and ineffective parts management and logistics.

“There are a couple of key trends as we see it,” Helsen commented when asked on why so many companies seemed to struggle getting spare parts into the hands of their engineers, or even in some cases just delivering parts to their customers.

“Firstly, we are seeing a large number of companies telling us that their customers are demanding better aftermarket solutions from them, yet when we spoke to those exact same companies they were not treating the aftermarket side of their business as a priority.”

“In fact, 78% of companies stated that effective spare parts management and delivery was highly sought after by their customers but only 12% were treating this area as a priority, so there is clearly a disconnect,” he adds.

 

Having spent time further investigating this disconnect Helsen believes that the causes are the pragmatic results of a number external pressures on field service organisations.

He identifies the challenges of recruiting, training and maintaining field engineers, who are themselves working on ever more complicated devices, as a key reason why companies naturally tend to push their focus, and indeed their infrastructure towards what he describes as ‘simply getting their guys out on the road.’ As such, parts management is often the neglected cousin.

However, this approach, whilst clearly being endemic to our industry is one of purest folly. In his presentation, given a little earlier in the day, Helsen went through a number of case studies highlighting how paying such little heed to the delivery of parts coukld have a dramatic knock on effect when it comes to the performance of field engineers.

Discussing how they had worked with Snap-On in the UK he explained; “They had 400 engineers and up until we began working with them those engineers would get their goods delivered at home. So whilst they were scheduled to start work at 8am, they would be waiting in between 8 and 10am.”

“The solution that we offered them was ‘you know which customers in the day you know you are going to help so we can redirect those packages so you don’t have to wait at home’. The packages will then be delivered to the closest proximity of that customer - which is typically between 5 and 10 km away maximum.”

The UPS solution also allows the technicians to pick up from locations such as petrol stations and newsagents which expands the available working hours adding additional flexibility (which can be a big benefit to customers and engineers alike) plus UPS also provide a dedicated app which allows for parts tracking but also allows engineers to redirect packages in real time.

One of the whole premises of modern day mobile workforce scheduling is that delays are always likely to happen so changes need to be made dynamically to re-optimise the day. By giving field technicians a means to also adapt the collection of any parts they need in reflection of such changes is a vital tool that should be welcomed with open arms by field service companies.

 

In fact, it could even be argued that seeing as parts should really be more easily managed than people, it’s incredible that such solutions are only now beginning to become part of the fabric of field service management.

For me, it seems that the biggest failing we have all undertaken - practitioners, vendors and media alike, is to treat parts management and service logistics as a separate entity to workforce management. Admittedly there are software platforms that incorporate parts management alongside FSM tools, Astea comes to mind as one solution that offers such a solution, but even then how closely aligned is it to the actual delivery of parts?

How many field service companies have fully integrated parts handling and delivery into their mobile workforce management systems?

Yet the benefits of doing so are clearly vast.

As Holden explains “If you look at the time savings in the magnitude of saving 80 minutes a day and multiply it by the number of engineers they have, this is a saving of anywhere between 2 and 6% of the total staffing of their engineers.”

“Linking back to the fact that many companies have a shortage of engineers [due to the issues around recruitment, training and retention mentioned earlier] then such a saving can go some way to overcoming that because they are able to do more with the same amount of engineers.”

 

Indeed, as I talk to Helsen, I find myself nodding in agreement as not only does his argument very easily stack up, but it’s almost a word for word a repetition of the arguments put forward by the scheduling engine providers.

Arguments which by now most in the field service industry are very well versed in to the point that they’re universally accepted as common sense.

The technology is available, and essentially the argument has already been won by the workforce scheduling vendors - even many SMBs now utilise some form of workforce optimisation, because the R.O.I is clear to see.

It seems the next easy win for field service companies looking to improve efficiency margins is quite simple - revisit your parts management and service logistics chain and put the same emphasis on getting the right parts to the right place at the right time as you do getting engineers - surely it’s about time we were able to get parts in the right place as well as we can people?

 

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Sumair Dutta, Chief Customer Officer, Service Council takes a look at some of the key areas of focus field service organisations need to consider in order to deliver success in 2017...

Annual predictions and forecasts are an interesting activity/discipline. I like to think of them as annual affirmations as strategic investments don’t necessarily change year-over-year.

In some instances, organisations are looking to expand on what they’ve been doing.

I believe the four primary areas of focus that will yield success in 2017 will be:

1. Increasing Predictability
2. Enhancing Efficiency
3. Identifying New Opportunities
4. Empowering Customers with Access and Information

The internal investments in data, automation, talent development, and engagement process realignment must be aligned with these objectives .

In each of the four focus areas, I’d like to share an activity or investment that’s likely to be top of mind.

Increasing Predictability

Focus Initiative: Executing on Predictive Models.

In our research, we’ve found that most organisations have used investments in IoT or analytics to increase their efficiency.

They are finally turning an eye to the predictive power of this information and in building delivery models to support predictive service. Effective delivery models (over-the-air, self-service, remote assistance, partner-based support, field support) of predictive support can be built on the existing reactive infrastructure, but do require an investment in training, communication, and change management. To that end, the service organisation needs the support of other business groups, mainly R&D, IT, and Sales and Marketing.

Emerging Initiative: Going deeper into customer feedback data to predict future events and avert negative outcomes.

Enhancing Efficiency

Focus Initiative: Better Use of Better Information.

Over the past five years, service organisations have made significant investments in mobility to empower the field service staff and in unified desktops to empower contact center staff.

In these investments, organisations have focused on making sure that all information necessary was available at the front-lines. The problem was that the information wasn’t available in context, making it difficult for front-line staff to use this information.

To tackle the glut of information on the front-end, we do see organisations re-evaluate technology investments to ensure that the right information is prioritised for front-line staff. Outside of technology, we actually see a great deal of investment into the structure and design of training programs and content to ensure that front-line agents are able to act on information that is made available to them.

Emerging Initiative: Evaluating Augmented or merged reality in field service and in training as it enhances the reach and scale of a centralised expert model and drives more from available and experienced talent.

Identifying New Opportunities

Focus Initiative: Diving into Installed Base Management.

While organisations are always on the lookout for new customers and new services to sell to those customers, there is an increasing recognition of the need to accomplish more with the existing installed base. In this, organisations are focusing their analytical minds on the portfolio of existing customers and the products and services that might be needed to improve retention and increase customer value.

Emerging Initiative: The development of customer care (customer success) teams that enable a consistent communication with customers to uncover pain points, challenges, and opportunities.

Empowering Customers with Information and Access

Focus Initiative: Improving Ease and Reducing Effort.

Motivational speakers often state that a differentiated experience comes from the ability of an organisation to surprise and delight its customers. In equipment-centric service the word surprise isn’t looked at as a positive.

Yet, there is a greater push from equipment manufacturers (and other organisations) to improve the experience that’s delivered to customers. Some of this can be attributed to consumerised experiences delivered by the likes of Uber and Amazon. Organisations we work with are looking to make it easier for customers to do business with them and this correlates with reducing customer angst and effort in seeking and acting on information.

Emerging Initiative: The use of messaging as a communication channel in on overall interaction portfolio to offer customers a greater degree of choice and convenience.

2017 is going to be anything but predictable. Yet the recipe for service success doesn’t change much.

Customers continue to take charge with increasing demands and expectations and organisations must respond with clinical efficiency internally and value filled interactions and touch points with customers.

 

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