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In September this year Field Service News and ClickSoftware teamed up to launch the FSN Think Tank Sessions. The idea was simple to bring together a selection of senior field service professionals from different industries and and different company sizes and give them the opportunity to discuss the pain points, the challenges and their vision of the future of service and see where the similarities lay.

Across the following few months there will be a series of articles that will help share the insights discussed at this inaugural Think Tank Session and in the first part of our opening series we explored the discussion points that focused on the importance of the Field Service Engineer's role asking whether it is growing or diminishing in importance in a world of automation and digitisation. In the concluding part of this feature we continue the discussion and explore the importance of ownership when following up on customer issues...

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There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service which is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly.Click here to apply for your subscription now!  (by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

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In the part one of this feature we concluded with an excellent point being made by Keith Wilkinson, VP of Sales for ClickSoftware who commented that in today's field service environment the 'field service engineer, from a digitisation perspective, needs to have all the tools, all the knowledge and information possible at his disposal so he can be empowered - so he can become that brand ambassador.'

Wilkinson’s point is a hugely important one and indeed is one that is becoming a serious consideration for many service organisations.

Whether you are offering outcome based solutions and service is crucial to your primary revenue stream or whether you are still running your service operation as a cost centre within a product-centric business, the fact remains that good service can go along way to retaining business, whilst poor service will drive your customers into your competitors arms.

However, as Darren Thomas, Service Manager Northern Europe, Waters Corporation points out, whilst the field service engineer is perhaps the most important part of this equation he isn’t the only factor.

 

“What about the follow up as well though?” Thomas asked the group.

“Constantly informing them [the customer] about the progress that is being made? For me it is very much about how you bring that customer with you through the resolution journey - how you outline to the customer how you will solve their problem – and that can come down to communicating across the management chain as well just the field engineer.”

“It’s an information train isn’t it – and that is dependent upon transparency and honesty,” concurs Kris Oldland, Editor-in Chief, Field Service News.

“Personally, I think more companies need to perhaps embrace that notion. More companies need to say to their clients ‘this is the process we are going down to resolve your issue, we can’t get this fixed right away but we are moving heaven and earth to get it fixed and here is what is being done.’ Because there is nothing more powerful when it comes to engendering brand loyalty than facing a real customer service challenge and bringing the client with you through that issue and into resolution.”

“Turning around a bad experience and transforming it into a good experience is something that can make that customer become a customer for life – mainly because it is making them feel valued and understood,” he adds.

“I think we need to remember the old maxim about quality over quantity,” comments Vasu Guruswarmy, the recent former VP of Global Service for Schlumberger.

“Whether it’s people or automation each one brings its own power.” He adds.

“Definitely the bar on automation is rising; and there is no getting away from the fact that knowledge systems are critical. But we had the problem before we went worldwide [with their own knowledge bank] that everybody believed in reinventing the wheel because that was the value that they sought for themselves - and so the idea of putting knowledge in a system was an anathema for most people and it took us a long time to turn this culture around.”

“In fact, I had to take a slightly provocative approach.”

“We had people that were facing challenges asking ‘what do I have to do in this condition?’ And some guru in the world would answer their problem - which was great because the first time around as it adds enormous value, but then there was a slightly negative impact on the business because there was little checking to see if what was being added was repetition, had it already been covered before?”

Indeed, this is often the problem with implementing knowledge bases, as Thomas had previously alluded to - it can become a challenge to stop the tail wagging the dog if left unchecked with multiple articles covering the same ground. However, for Guruswamy and Schlumberger the issue went deeper than just one of inefficiency.

“Once everyone in the organisation began to realise that they just had to go to the system to get answers, then our ‘experts’ who were used to answering bulletin board questions had to be challenged with ‘you are an expert because you can solve new problems not just because you keep parroting the same solution’ to change their mind-set.” Guruswamy explained.

 

“For us the quality of people that we engage who are facing the customer is absolutely vital. And so as the bar keeps rising with automation it is even more important that the quality of people remains high – because when the automated solutions fail that is when the engineer must bring resolution. They need to know the customer and they need to know what the problem is – and then find the resolution.”

“There is no point in having 200 field service engineers running around with 180 of them being inefficient – and that is the biggest challenge that many companies face,” he concluded.

Again it was an excellent point for consideration.

“It is a fair assumption to say that for most companies when an engineer is ultimately sent out, when the truck rolls, that this is the end result in a chain of events that have led to diagnostics and remote or self-repair having failed?” Oldland asked the group.

“Is the engineer is now expected to have an additional level of knowledge and experience to provide the expert resolution that couldn’t be delivered via any other means?” He added.

“For us we are looking at automation to get better efficiency for the engineers that we’ve got,” replied Robin Bryant, Service Director of JCB Scot.

“But in our industry we are dealing with companies that may have one machine or they may have ten machines and when they have an issue they may be doubting if they buy any more. So when the engineer comes out and makes a good impression, turns it around, fixes it and is positive about the product it can have a huge impact on whether that next purchase is our equipment or a competitors.”

“We’ve always had some guys around the depot that are really good at that stuff and they are great guys, but then there are those that aren’t so good in that part of the role and so we are looking at how we get training out to the team to bring everyone up to that upper level. Ultimately, the engineer can have a hugely positive impact with the customer but they can also potentially have an equally negative impact as well, so for us automation is as much as about brining service standards to a consistently high level as it is about the efficiency gains we see from it.” He added.

“For us also, we have a very prominent parent brand in JCB and they set high standards in our service delivery expectations that are a reflection of the importance of their brand. They set us targets in terms of where they want us to be in terms of service level, the quality of our engineers and the amount of training that we have to do, but they are also incredibly supportive at the same time.”

Again Bryant’s comments were echoed across the group, reflecting the general acceptance of the importance of the role the field service engineer plays within an organisations ability to retain business from their clients.

Dr Wilhelm Nehring, CEO thyssenkrupp Elevator, UK and Eire summarised the group’s discussions so far neatly saying “Of course, one of the nice thing about this group is that we are all from different industries and from companies of different sizes, but one thing for us in our industry is that we cannot allow our clients to maintain or repair a lift – it is a matter of health and safety.”

“For us we have constant contact with our clients through our engineers, and I very much like the phrase Darren [Thomas] used earlier of ‘brand ambassadors’. This is exactly what our engineers are for us. To a certain degree I think the role of the service engineer has become more important, I would also agree with Steve’s [Smith] point that it has always been an important role, but the competitive market out there has made the role of the service engineer more visible and so things like training and teaching your staff to be that brand ambassador have become vital.”

“It’s a different thing to do, to engage with the client. You need to be able to have the technical skills to actually fix the lift - but you also need to interact with the client. What else does the client want? What else does the client need?”

“For us at thyssenkrupp, our engineers are the most important asset that we have – so when we get feedback from clients about how brilliant or impressive our engineers are, this is our lifeblood. This is what we do – so it is incredibly important to us.”

“Coming back to how we enable that, we invested heavily in what we call ‘International Technical Service Centres’ because we also undertake third party maintenance on other companies assets. We have 1.2 million units under maintenance – and about a third of them are other makes and brands so we need to enable our people to maintain these other units as well.”

“We do this through technical services, with reverse engineering etc and this is why we are the first in our industry to take this approach and we have by the far the best technical services because we invest so heavily in these centres. We have them all across the world as a support for the engineers and technicians – and that is what gives them the platform for them to do their job.”

 

“If you then come into the client experience, so lifts as a commodity, a lot of people don’t care toomuch about the lift as long as it goes up and down, most people don’t think about a lift until it breaks down,” he adds

“So one thing that we have done is to invest heavily in IoT. In part, this is to be ahead of the game, but it’s fiercely competitive because the developments in IoT are so fast. For example, twelve months ago I thought wow; we are so far ahead of the game, then this year I feel already that the world is changing so fast that we really need to be on our toes to stay ahead.”

“For us Automation, IoT - all this digitalisation that we’re talking about is not something to replace engineers, or even to have less engineers - it is for us to enable our engineers to do the job better than they could before. Today our engineers, before they arrive on site know already why the lift is not working so they can make sure they have the knowledge and parts to hand to drive that first time fix.”

“Then as we move to the second phase and we talk about the IoT and Machine learning, and we now have over 110,000 units connected to the system, which allows us to enter this predictive phase which means that with all the data we have from these installations, we can define patterns, build clusters with similar installations, similar components, similar locations, like a hospital for example – so we can then go to our clients and say ‘this part is likely to fail within between seven and seven and a half years.’”

“It’s no longer a conversation based around a gut feeling from our engineers on site, we are now able to have that conversation backed up with solid data and insight that allows us to fix it before if fails. In theory we want to move to completley pre-emptive maintenance.”

What is interesting across the discussion is that whilst the reasons may be varied as are the industries represented in our small but highly knowledgeable group, the central theme remains the same.

Automation is a reality in all corners of maintenance and service delivery.

 

For some like Scot JCB it is a tool to ensure the highest standards delivered by their engineers become a consistent norm across their workforce, for others like thyssenkrupp it is at the heart of revolutionary change both within their organisation and indeed in their wider industry.

For Waters, automation offers an opportunity to reduce costly truck rolls whilst improving mean-time- to-repair through knowledge bases and remote diagnostics, something Schlumberger have also embraced in the past.

However, as Nehring expressed automation doesn’t necessarily mean fewer field service engineers, it means field service engineers better placed to do their job.

So as we move into a world of outcome based contracts and a world of remote diagnostics - the field service call becomes increasingly important.

As Guruswamy alluded to - what is the point of having a large field service workforce if only 10% of them are truly experts?

Perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, automation and digital transformation have raised the stakes even further for the field service engineer.

By the time a truck roll is scheduled, the issue should be either fully diagnosed so a first time fix is now expected by the client or the issue has proven to be more complex in which case the field service engineer is now being seen as your organisations leading expert, the top guy sent to not only save the day, but also to potentially save your organisations reputation and retain your customer’s business.

Today’s engineer it seems not only needs to be a ‘true expert’ as Guruswamy discussed, but also a friendly face, your ‘brand ambassador’ with softer people-skills in his locker as well.

Has the importance of the role of the field service engineer grown in an age of digital transformation and automation?

The consensus from our Think Tank is absolutely, the field service engineer has become one of the most critical roles within an organisation - and recruiting and retaining good field service talent has become more important than ever before.

 

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There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service which is available for Field Service News subscribers.

 

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly.Click here to apply for your subscription now! (by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

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This inaugural session of the FSN Think Tank was sponsored by:

 

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In September this year Field Service News and ClickSoftware teamed up to launch the FSN Think Tank Sessions. The idea was simple to bring together a selection of senior field service professionals from different industries and and different company sizes and give them the opportunity to discuss the pain points, the challenges and their vision of the future of service and see where the similarities lay.

Across the following few months there will be a series of articles that will help share the insights discussed at this inaugural Think Tank Session beginning with this opening series in which we discuss whether the importance of the Field Service Engineer's role is growing or diminishing in importance in a world of automation and digitisation... 

 

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There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service which is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly. Click here to apply for your subscription now! (by applying for your subscription via this link you accept the terms and conditions here and a plain english version is available from our main subscriptions page here) 

 

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One of the most interesting things about the field service sector is that whilst as a discipline it sits across a huge variety of wide and highly disparate industries there remains overwhelmingly the same fundamental challenges, pain points and goals for every organisation operating a field service division.

 

Whether you operate in the print/copy market or heavy manufacturing, whether your engineers and technicians fix vending machines or jumbo jet engines, you will invariably find more common ground with other service leaders from different industries to your own than you will find differences.

In many ways the same is true whether you have 10 engineers in your territory or 10,000.

Yes, some of the challenges of running a larger field service operation are more complicated, as are some of the tools you may use to do so - but the fundamental elements of what is great service and its growing role within industry remains in organisations of all sizes.

Given the focus of companies across all industries on Digital Transformation has the importance of field service calls become even more important in terms of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Experience - as increasingly, the field service visit is now the sole (or at least most frequent) face-to-face interaction between an organisation and their customer base?

Has the role of the field service engineer become more important in this age of automation where digital customer interaction touch points are now heavily outweighing personal face to face human interactions?

Opening the conversation on this topic Steve Smith, CTO with Astro Communications, explained that for him and the team at Astro, the importance of great service and the field engineers role in delivering a good customer experience is something that has always just been part and parcel of the job.

“I’m not sure it’s more important, I think it is has always been important, especially if you’re in a customer service business,” he began.

“The only thing we have to compete against anybody else is our standard of customer service.”

“For us I think on that front it’s all about the diversity of people we employ which has been an important factor. We even taken people from a hospitality background and then teach them the technical side of the business, putting them through training or apprenticeship. We have also taken on ex-military people as they have the right mind-set, although again not necessarily a technical background per se, but we find that they have the personal organisational skills, the self-management skills that are important for a technician.”

It is an interesting opening point and one that is increasingly being echoed in a number of different service organisations. There are far more skills to being a good field service engineer than just the technical - and often it is easier to train the technical skills than it is to train softer skills such as communications and organisational skills.

“Ultimately, it really does stand out when you have good customer service,” Smith continues.

“For example, the MD of one of our own clients, TGI Fridays, always says that when you get great customer service, you feel it’ and that sums up our ethos as well. I think that for us, that approach has always been important, but perhaps with increasing competition more of a spotlight is being placed on service as a differentiator today.”

For Darren Thomas, Head of Service in Northern Europe for Waters Corporation, the growing levels of automation and remote maintenance driven by the fundamental economics of field service means that the importance of the field service engineer has indeed increased dramatically.

“It’s costs a lot to send an engineer to repair a broken system so we are investing a lot in what we are calling an ‘Expert Centre,” he explains.

The idea is one that many organisations have also adopted, a central destination where customers can discuss the issue at hand and go through some diagnostic tests with an expert which in an ideal world could help the customer get back up and running faster, whilst avoiding the need for an expensive truck roll for Waters. One nice element of the Waters’ approach is that many of their experts split their time between the expert centre and out in the field - so the field and repair skills of the expert centre staff are kept as high as possible.

However, whilst in theory it is a good solution that offers a potential win-win for customers dealing with simple issues, the flip side is in a situation where the resolution isn’t so straight forward, it can result in the customer having to perhaps feel like they are having to jump through a few hoops before they can get an engineer sent out to fix their problem.

 

“The negative feedback that we get from our customers when they contact the knowledge centre is that we ask them to carry out a lot of tests before we can dispatch an engineer and that can be frustrating when we are asking an experienced person have you done x,y and z?” Thomas explains.

“However, the point is that for our organisation it is the primary interaction that is important. So if a customer calls the Expert Centre then we can affect a good diagnostic or even a remote fix - so we are investing in tools to do that where possible. We are currently implementing a global initiative which we are calling ‘Knowledge Centre Support’, where we are pooling all of the first-time- fix reports - whether it be via an engineer in China , Europe or the USA.”

“Essentially, if one of our engineers comes across an issue that they haven’t faced before they are then tasked with writing up the resolution to that problem - which is then made available to all of our engineers and the Expert Centre, further helping us identify issues quickly.”

“We really are dedicating ourselves to that first-time-fix via remote support.” He adds.

At first glance, this may appear to be driving less importance to the field service engineer role, yet whilst it may potentially reduce the number of service calls Waters needs to make, the flip side of the same coin is that when an engineer is actually dispatched it means that all other routes have been exhausted. In which case by the time the engineer arrives on site the issue has become even more important in the eyes of the customer.

It is therefore vital the Field Service Engineer is able to deliver in this scenario.

This is something that Thomas firmly agrees with.

“At the end of the day once the engineer is sent out to our clients he or she then becomes the ambassador for our company. They become really  important in terms of ensuring the customer is fully satisfied,” he comments.

“I think their role is absolutely evolving in that sense.” He adds.

It is an interesting point for discussion and Keith Wilkinson, VP of Sales for ClickSoftware picks it up and carries the point further.

“We are all consumers of services whether it be from your bank, utilities providers , telco or media provider – we are all seeing this rise in automation and self-service, so you could look at it and ask – ultimately is that human touch point still important?”

“But what inevitably happens is that automation, that self-service aspect will ultimately go wrong at some point and when it does go wrong we then we have that one brief moment of truth where the engineer is sent out into the home or work place to not only just solve a problem, but also to make an impression on the customer.”

“The customer will likely have tried some levels of self-service or even to self-fix the device because they just want to get it back operational again so they can get on with their own job – so now the engineer has all their trust and faith in your company riding on their shoulders.”

“So that engineer, from a digitisation perspective, needs to have all the tools, all the knowledge and information possible at his disposal so he can be empowered - so he can become that brand ambassador. I think those scenarios it can make a huge impact on whether or not, when the time comes to renew that specific contract you actually do so or whether you think ‘I had an important issue that wasn’t really resolved effectively’ in which case your advocacy of renewing that service may be less assured.”

 

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Want to know more? There is also an exclusive Briefing Report from this session entitled Disruption, Development and Diversity in Field Service available for Field Service News subscribers. If you are a field service professional you can apply for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and we will send you a copy of this white paper along instantly. Click here to apply for your subscription now!

 

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