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Mar 13, 2019 • Features • Artificial intelligence • Future of FIeld Service • Gig Economy • KPIs • click software • Employee Satisfaction • Customer Satisfaction and Expectations
Ten years is a long time in field service. Trends come thick and fast with some trends thicker than others, attaching like coral onto the industry and becoming an integral part of service progress. The worldwide web and mobile technology are probably the two best examples of this; both have been essential in pushing the industry forward. Would we cope without them today?
It’s fair to label these movements as revolutions; their impact has been immense but smaller changes while not as monumental are just as significant. Today though, focus is swinging from technology enablers and back to customer service.
“Mobile was many years ago, everyone expects to have it,” says Hilla Karni, VP of Product and Customer Marketing at Click Software. Karni has just finished hosting a roundtable at Field Service Europe and we’ve managed to find a quiet dining room post-lunch to talk. I settle my dictaphone among skewed butter knives and bread crumbs. Sipping coffee, Karli continues: “In recent years, the shift has moved from a service operation that is a cost-centre, to a service operation that is an opportunity to impact customer service.”
The roundtable titled: The Science Behind Service: Metrics that Matter, centred on KPIs affecting customer service. The fact such a round table was taking place affirms how the industry is focusing on the end-user. “Before you would never hear of this,” she says. “KPIs were always around productivity, travel cost, overtime; it was always cost.”
But what about those enablers such as AI, IoT or specifically Augmented Reality (AR)? What role does AR play in the new customer focus? “Everyone talks about AR. But why are they using it?” She asks, pausing slightly. “It’s for the remote diagnostics which enables a better first-time fix. A first-time fix rate is the metric that combines efficiency, productivity with customer experience.”
In order to achieve customer focus KPIs, Karni tells me, smaller trends such as employee wellbeing are taking on a greater significance. “There is a very clear correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction,” she
says. “When an employer is happy with his or her job then he or she will deliver excellent service. Now we are seeing different investments around making your employees happier. There is a very clear correlation between happy and engaged employees with customer satisfaction.”
This, refreshingly, ties in with a general shift in occupational wellbeing and a positive approach to mental health in general. From a business point of view, work-related stress affects staff absenteeism; in turn affecting productivity. One thread of wellbeing, prevalent in field service is the time an engineer might spend on the road. Tools around scheduling play an important part in employee engagement and buy-in. Some firms, Karni says are handing autonomy to their engineers to create their own timetable. “Some of our
customers like their technicians to make more decisions by themselves.” The increase in wellbeing can be loosely attributed to the flexible nature of the modern workforce.
“When an employer is happy with his or her job then he or she will deliver excellent service..."
Today, freelancers choose their workdays and hours to fit their lifestyle. The typical nine-to-five day still exists but the gig
economy – so-called as each piece of work being akin to a ‘gig’ - represents another shift in efficiency and cost. Karni suggests large contractors, with their large overheads, can fail to deliver the required standard of customer service, paving the way for freelancers. “This is where the workforce trend is to have more freelancers, the uber-like model, offering a better service but it must be connected, ultimately, to a better customer service.”
So, if customer focus is the new trends in field service what technology revolution does Karni see to compliment it? Firstly, she is keen to re-label the progress. “I think the next evolution – and it is an evolution, not a revolution – is more focused around prediction,” she affirms. “Having prediction within the service delivery life cycle changes a lot of things because it makes for more
accuracy and real-time decision making.
“Previously, we still made decisions, many decisions. Then we got mobile so were able to streamline the process. Then we had more optimisation and got artificial intelligence to improve productivity and efficiency. Now we are taking it to the next level and saying, ‘Okay, how can I predict better to ensure I make faster, smarter decisions on the day of service, on the minute of service?’”
Despite the influx of new disruptive technologies – such as AR – Karni is aware that the main beneficiary has to be the end-user, the customer. “Everyone talks about the current trend in field service, which is AR. But if you ask ‘why are we using this remote technology’, it is ultimately to create a better first-time fix. A first-time fix rate is the metric that combines efficiency and productivity with customer experience. “You’re not adopting something for the sake of the technology. You need to have a very strong business case with savings. This is what is unique about field service management applications is that it needs to find the balance between time and cost savings while creating better customer service. If it was only a one-way thing it would not be such a valuable asset,” she says.
I push Karni on the role of the asset: the wind turbine, the air conditioning unit, the washing machine. When does it become more important than the engineer? “There is no replacement for the human touch,” she pauses again. “There is, however, a replacement for the process.
“If you can fix something remotely and it’s not a problem and it will smoothly recover, then I don’t see why the customer wouldn’t be happy because the washing machine is fixed. Having said that, if you fix something sophisticated and there is a break-down, I believe there is no replacement for human experience.”
Finally, as waiters circle impatiently around us to prepare the table for the next coffee break, I ask Karni, who has been with Click Software over ten years, why she enjoys working in the field service sector. “As I said, everyone talks about machine learning and AR but,” she says. “But when it comes to field service it’s real. It’s actual technology that serves a use-case and a business value.”
She finishes her cappuccino. “We make a difference I think, and this is what I like about what I do.”
Dec 11, 2017 • Features • Management • Cognito • KPIs • Laurent Othacéhé • Productivity
Improving productivity is the cornerstone of establishing a framework for delivering field service excellence. Laurent Othacéhé, CEO, Cognito iQ outlines why and how you should approach improving your field service productivity...
Improving productivity is the cornerstone of establishing a framework for delivering field service excellence. Laurent Othacéhé, CEO, Cognito iQ outlines why and how you should approach improving your field service productivity...
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Expectations of field service have never been higher
Customers are used to the speed of delivery and quality of service that they get from consumer companies such as Amazon; this has raised the bar for all service companies. Customers want a service appointment quickly, they want smaller appointment windows and they expect your field worker to have the right information as well as the skills, knowledge and parts to resolve their issue first time.
Against this backdrop is the growing need for the service department to both reduce costs and contribute to revenues. Uncertain economic conditions have led many companies to strive to be more efficient and field service departments are facing significant pressure to cut costs and “do more with less.”
How do field service organisations provide a better service to their customers, with fewer resources? Our customers tell us they are focused on efficiency and productivity gains, and this is borne out by the market:
- 56% of field service professionals say that their customers are demanding faster response times
- 47% of field service professionals say they need to improve service process efficiencies
- 49% of field service professionals say that the primary objective for their field mobility investment in the coming year will be maximising productivity [/unordered_list]
So how do you improve productivity?
To answer that question, you have to know what productivity means to your business. All businesses will have a different definition and an individual approach. For example, would you be happy to drive up the number of visits per day your field workers attend if that meant fewer first time fixes, or reduced customer satisfaction scores?
The old adage is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure but, these days, companies know that it is a bit more complicated than that – measurement for its own sake or using the wrong metrics to set targets can be counter-productive. It is vital to know how to measure success: which metrics are useful and which aren’t, which can be accurately determined and which can’t, how metrics interact and how setting goals and targets will affect how employees go about their jobs.
At the operational level, field service leaders need accurate, timely data about field operations and the analytic capabilities to look for bottlenecks and opportunities to improve.
In 2016, Field Service News reported that improving the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) used to measure performance was the top strategic action for the year ahead for 64% of field service organisations in the UK and Europe.
Field Technologies Online reported that 75% of field service organisations do not effectively measure their KPIs and 27% of those do not use KPIs at all.
Our customers tell us that the biggest challenges in improving productivity come not only from a need to define and measure it, but also from knowing how to influence workers to behave in the most productive way. This is a challenge that plays out at an operational level and an employee level.
At the operational level, field service leaders need accurate, timely data about field operations and the analytic capabilities to look for bottlenecks and opportunities to improve. At the employee level, leaders need to know how each field worker is performing, how to solve performance problems and how to motivate, train and support each worker effectively.
Simply, through continual improvement
This is not a new idea. Continual improvement is a well-established practice that seeks to increase customer value, reduce waste and optimise resources via incremental change, feedback and analysis. These techniques originated in manufacturing; on a production line, it is relatively simple to measure variables such as number of defects, as you can easily see how the work is being done and you can observe the impact when you make changes to the process. But as continual improvement methodologies have developed, they have been profitably applied in many other industries, so why not field service operations?
There are challenges: field service workers aren’t widgets that can be counted and checked. They work remotely, often independently, and may only come back to base on rare occasions.
Field service workers aren’t widgets that can be counted and checked. They work remotely, often independently, and may only come back to base on rare occasions.
Adopting a continual improvement approach means that first you plan and do: Planning data has historically been focused on task, time and location: telling workers what to do, where to go and when. But if you want to improve the plan for tomorrow, you will need to study how efficiently the plan worked today and act to make changes.
For example, were job durations as you expected? If tasks took longer than planned you may have unhappy customers and a big overtime bill. If they took less time, are you paying workers who have gone home early? Detailed data on durations enables you to act, adjusting task durations to feed back into the plan for tomorrow. It is the combination of many small changes, and the continual feedback loop of measurement, analysis and change that will gradually and incrementally improve productivity.
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Nov 23, 2016 • Features • Management • KPIs • management • Nicki Frank • Dag Gronevik • feld service management • Si2 partners
Nick Frank and Dag Gronevik of Si2 Partners joined Kris Oldland for our latest podcast where the talk was all about KPIs, in this excerpt we look at whether KPIs should be under constant review...
Nick Frank and Dag Gronevik of Si2 Partners joined Kris Oldland for our latest podcast where the talk was all about KPIs, in this excerpt we look at whether KPIs should be under constant review...
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Want to know more? Check out our Podcast with Nick and Dag on this topic here
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KO: Why are KPIs so important to driving a business forwards?
DG: First of al I think KPIs have one fundamental role and that is to drive behaviour. One of the risks with KPIs, as many people have realised is that they are interpreted and perceived as a controlling measure. But if you look at it from a driving the business perspective it really is all about driving behaviour.
To be able to link that behaviour you are looking at with strategy, budget,what the competition is doing, what customers are expecting... It’s quite a tricky cookie to crack but if you do it right, it is very powerful. One of the things people tend to forget is that we say Key Performance Indicators, there is the word Key in there, so people mix Key Performance Indicators, with performance indicators and it becomes a bit of a soup of KPIs. We should be really targeted on the ‘key’ word.
KO: It is a bit of a hackneyed phrase now but ‘what you can’t measure you can’t manage’ comes to mind. Is it really that simple, that we need to be measuring these things so we can improve?
NF: Actually that’s an old Peter Drucker phrase, but also I think it is quite often mis-quoted. Because he was also of the opinion that yes, you need the measures to gauge and give feedback on performance but actually there are things, part of performance that you can’t measure when your dealing with a person. In fact one of the key roles of a manager is to be able to provide this feedback to their people that can’t be measured or quantified.
[quote float="left"]The really big challenge that we are dealing with here is people and how people react. I think a lot of managers forget this because many managers equate measures with control.[/quote]The really big challenge that we are dealing with here is people and how people react. I think a lot of managers forget this because many managers equate measures with control. They want to control their business, they want to control their people, they want to prove to their bosses that they really know what they are doing.
So they measure everything and they tend to look at what has happened rather than predict what is going to happen and I think this is a mistake that many people make, they have too many and they are always looking backwards.
KO: It’s that rear view mirror approach - i.e. you can’t drive a car forwards competently, if your constantly checking the rear view mirror.
You’ve both mentioned influencing behaviour and influencing people, but KPIs are essentially all about cold, hard numbers, and that is a very rational and logical way of looking at what is not always a logical and rational issue, because people are different and not so easily quantified.
Is that the big challenge in terms of getting the right KPIs - in that we can’t just base our decisions on percentages all of the time?
DG: I think you have certain measure that are unavoidable, especially financial ones, that are measuring trends which are very important to keep there year-on-year, but you might also have KPIs that you might only keep for one year.
For example, a short term project or program or a local project that you want to monitor and give more visibility to. I think that is also an area where you can keep KPIs. But I think it is important to keep that perspective of the long term measure that you can actually see trends, because if you can manage that well, then you also have control of your business.
KO: So are KPIs something that should be under constant review?
DG: I think that you will alays have a core set of KPIs as I mentioned but other than that yes I think so. You have an agenda that you review every year, you have an operational plan and as a support to that operational plan you need good measures to track progress.
Also they [KPIs] allow you to communicate to the organisation, if you are behind - what could be the reasons? Then you have activities supporting all these measures and KPIs so you can actually address the issues quite quickly and effectively.
KO: What is interesting here is the fluidity you describe, that whilst of course you have your solid KPIs at the heart of the business, in addition to that there is this layer of shifting metrics that are adaptable to where the business is at any given time. For me that is something that can be often overlooked, it’s almost like KPIs are carved into stone tablets some times.
On a similar subject let’s talk about the different KPIs that you would set for the team compared to those you would set for management...
NF: I think as a manager you want to be in control of the business, you want to problem solve and you need a level of detail and that’s part of your job - to be able to drill down from high level metrics to the operational metrics in order to do that and in order to answer the questions from your own management.
That’s very different from what you need to do with your people and what you need to do to drive your people. I’ve found if your talking to field service engineers their eyes just glaze over if you start talking in too much detail.
They are just really interested in what they can impact.
[quote float="right"]Managers are one set of stakeholders, but the people who work in your team, who work at the coal face, they have another set of needs and it’s important to recognise that they are different and to actually find the measures that motivate them and they can do something about[/quote] Therefore, it’s actually very important to separate out the two. It comes back to what Dag was saying at the beginning, there is a reason we do this it.
It’s to drive the business forward and be more effective in terms of our processes but also mainly our people.
Managers are one set of stakeholders, but the people who work in your team, who work at the coal face, they have another set of needs and it’s important to recognise that they are different and to actually find the measures that motivate them and they can do something about - so that if they take an action they can actually see that they are impacting how the business is working.
You really should think of them as two different sets of stakeholders therefore you should separate out the different sets of KPIs.
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Want to know more? Check out our Podcast with Nick and Dag on this topic here
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Sep 13, 2016 • Features • KPIs • Podcast • resources • Si2 partners
In this the latest edition of the Field Service podcast Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief of Field Service News talks to Nick Frank and Dag Gronevik of specialist service management consultancy Si2 Partners about the importance of understanding the...
In this the latest edition of the Field Service podcast Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief of Field Service News talks to Nick Frank and Dag Gronevik of specialist service management consultancy Si2 Partners about the importance of understanding the KPIs you set and how they can be used as a tool to not only monitor performance within your field service team but also to improve it.
You can listen to a brief sample of the podcast above and if you would like to listen to the full podcast then you can download the full 45 minute conversation by clicking the link below:
Download the full podcast here
Related articles discussed in the podcast:
Driving success in service operations through leading indicators
Monetizing digitisation: start with the customer experience and work back
What impact will the IoT have on field service operations?
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May 16, 2016 • Features • Kirona • KPIs • Software and Apps • software and apps
Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona takes a look at the importance of measuring performance and constantly shifting KPI focus in a journey of ongoing improvement...
Nick Shipton of scheduling specialists Kirona takes a look at the importance of measuring performance and constantly shifting KPI focus in a journey of ongoing improvement...
Kirona recently collaborated with Field Service News and Bill Pollock from Strategies for Change, hosting an interesting webinar covering the key points raised in Bill’s field service benchmarking report.
During the webinar we discussed key trends across field service in terms of what organisation are looking to implement and improve in the future.
The most popular item on the agenda for UK and European organisations was to develop and improve metrics or KPI’s to measure performance.
The thought here was that organisations need to be measuring things better in order to improve and help with the following:
Customer demand for quicker response time
- Workforce utilisation & productivity
- Service process efficiencies
- Customer demand for improved asset availability
This if course is all very commendable and is absolutely the correct things to be striving for however, is developing new and improved ways for measuring what we are doing actually going to help us achieve these goals, or does it simply stop short and tell us simply how are we are doing today, last month, last year?
Back office systems, scheduling solutions and mobile solutions give us a whole wealth of potential data to look at and report upon (although those organisations who are yet to jump into the world of scheduling and mobile will only have the very basics), but are we using this data to the best of its ability.
“Traditional KPI’s are great for telling us how we are doing now, allowing us to answer the question is the business performing to set metrics? But they stop short of actually giving any insight into how we can improve?”
The setting of targets doesn’t answer the questions that allow us to improve, it merely creates a benchmark.
Having access to information that addresses; I am meeting the set number of field service jobs I need to complete today that’s great but could I do better if the organisation was configured differently.
The key point is that KPI’s are just a set of controls we like to put into a business to give us some comfort that we are running on track, which is as I say great but do they actually give us any view on how we could improve and deliver a better service to our customers, even if we are doing well.
For us at Kirona it’s about taking that wealth of data we have and giving tools to our customers that not only allow them to look at the standard KPI’s to ensure they are on track but also to allow them to start analysing where they could get better and implement those improvements.
If you only currently have only a fairly static back office system your ability to get access to meaningful data is going to be very limited, however with scheduling and mobile solutions such as Kirona’s DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager solution you suddenly have an extra dimension to the quantity, quality and type of data available.
Analysing this in the correct way then allows an organisation to start pinpointing exactly where efficiencies in the business could be made.
This extra dimension of data enables the organisation to understanding questions such as;
- We may be completing our set number of jobs per day, but actually how much is it costing us to do that?
- Are some geographical areas better performing than others?
- Can we improve this by looking at the distribution of our workforce across those areas?
- Am I giving my customers the most efficient times for appointments for my organisation, and can I improve this without impacting my service?
- Am I deficient in certain skills and abilities in different regions?
Are we selling or completing certain services in specific areas of our region and therefore do we need to move the workforce around to support that, or could we be offering a higher level of service in those service areas?
"If you want to keep ahead of your competitors, hitting your targets isn’t going to do this, the only way to do this is to continually challenge those targets..."
Also if you want to keep ahead of your competitors, hitting your targets isn’t going to do this, the only way to do this is to continually challenge those targets, continual improve your business and analyse what the data is telling you.
Look beyond your KPI’s!
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Apr 22, 2016 • Features • Management • KPIs • management • Nick Frank • service KPIs
Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2 Partners, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two...
Nick Frank, Founding Partner at Si2 Partners, discusses the importance of understanding the metrics you are measuring to asses both internal performance and external perceptions of your service delivery in the eyes of your customers, and how the two are closely aligned...
As a Field Service manager, imagine having one Key Performance Indicator in your business that could predict how your customers will experience your equipment. One simple measure that your teams could use as a focus for their primary mission; to ensure customers remain satisfied, loyal and profitable. The limitations of most measures of customer satisfaction and loyalty are that they look in the rear view mirror, in that they ask questions after the fact. Far better to create a leading indicator, but how?
To get a better feel for customer satisfaction, many managers spend time in the field talking to customers and their teams.
Some will create rafts of measures to monitor and improve their operations. Their logic being a great performing team is more likely to have loyal customers. However there is a temptation to measure everything, which can start to confuse teams.
The key challenge is to create measures that drive the right behaviours and culture, and not ones where people start to find ways of working around. So it is not quite as simple as many make out.
This balanced approach is pretty sensible, but a can be too ‘management speak’ for the people at the sharp end of the business.
The key challenge is to create measures that drive the right behaviours and culture, and not ones where people start to find ways of working around. So it is not quite as simple as many make out. From my own experiences of managing a european service operation, I always felt it would be extremely beneficial to develop a simple measure that was:
- Easily understood by everyone.
- That gave us a forward view that a particular piece of equipment was potentially going to lead to severe customer irritation and dissatisfaction.
Our business was injection molding systems, and we knew that something was going wrong in the customer when the spare parts spend of the machine increased, fault reporting was high and the same problem re-occurred over a 12 month period. We created a ratio of these 3 indicators and found that at a machine level, we could start to rank problem systems and identify those that were likely to turn into an irate customer.
Our thinking was that not only could this be used by the local teams to bring focus to a specific customer issue, it also gave an indications of how well teams were managing their installed base. Unfortunately for a number of reasons we were unable to operationalize this strategy and I often wondered how effective it would have been.
Recently I heard Mark Noble, Customer Support Director at Inca speak at a Service Community meeting in the UK. Inca design and manufacture digital printers and gave themselves the goal to improve the equipment productivity and hence satisfaction of their customer base. For their technology, it is the performance of the print head that controls up to 256 ink delivery nozzles, which is critical to uptime.
By combining 3 key performance parameters of the machine, alarms, nozzle deviations and productivity, Inca could rank their equipment in terms of the likelihood to cause customer dissatisfaction. They created simple dashboards that clearly identified the priority machines to be working on.
The analytical techniques are in fact relatively simple, it is more having the right mind-set to try a different approach which is the challenge.
A second example of this approach is at Peak-Service, part of the Qiagen corporation, a €1Bn technical services supplier for medical, analytical and industrial equipment. As part of their transformation journey, they created a customer experience indicator which aggregated measures of machine utilisation, revisits, call response time and call completion time.
They used this to help focus their teams and people on the drivers of customer experience as they moved through a transformation programme. This gave them one measure, which was easy to action and could be used to demonstrate results.
This thinking shows that by using operational data that already exists in most businesses, it is possible to create leading measures that drive action. The analytical techniques are in fact relatively simple, it is more having the right mind-set to try a different approach which is the challenge.
As products become connected through the IoT, so the opportunities to gain greater insight into customer experience and satisfaction will expand. Some might call this predictive and others a big data opportunity, but the name is not important. The critical insight we gain from these examples is that these companies are applying their deep know-how of their equipment and customers business, to identify problems before they happen.
Fore-armed is fore-warned!
If you would like to enter into a deeper discussion on this topic and others, why not join other industry professionals at the Service In Industry blog.
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