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Marne Martin, CEO, ServicePower discusses the growing shift towards outcome based services and explains why it is key for field service organisations...

Mobile workforce management software is today a “must have”, not a “nice to have”, part of a company’s technology stack.

Organisations managing mobile or remote workers must ensure a consistent customer experience and grow revenue while still maximising the productivity of staff. They must do this while also managing supply and fluctuating demand, meeting SLAs, controlling costs, and ensuring consistent well branded service delivery. Technology is the best tool to use to achieve those objectives.

So if we know what the company needs, what does the customer expect? We know that customers expect better ‘outcomes’ for the monies they spend on service delivery. It’s not about just appearing on time and repairing the product or equipment any more.

What are outcome based services?

Outcome-based services acknowledge customers in a much different way than traditional break fix services. Customers have wants and needs, surely, but they also now require that more tailored or improved outcomes be driven by those wants and needs. They are no longer looking at just the specific qualities of a product or service, but at the ways in which each can use your services to meet their own goals.

Business outcomes are increasingly becoming a real selling point that differentiate one company from another. Focusing your service offerings more on business outcomes edge out the competition, build customer loyalty and longevity, and improve the lifetime value of each and every customer.

Outcome based service is not a new concept. Why is it top of mind now?

The simple answer is technology. Technology facilitates offering outcome based services in a way manual processes never could. Technologies like that enable hybrid workforces, optimise by customer priority, IoT, M2M and even a truly mobile workforce management software facilitate outcome based services like no other technology which have emerged in the last few decades.

 

These can be used by field service organisations to deliver proactive services, based on data and information which improves the overall experience for the customer by helping them use the products better, or more efficiently.

Solid commercials can also be built around the offering, including providing customers more opportunity to purchase complementary things they might need.

Outcomes based service delivery takes that proactive service model, facilitated by IoT/M2M and MWFM and layers on additional services to make that customer more sticky, long term, and it can even increase revenue or profits along the way.

How does a mobile workforce organisation transition to an “outcomes-based” approach to field services delivery? 

Offering outcome based services is the next generation revenue model in field service. The field service industry has long been a hot bed of technology and process innovation, especially as metrics have shifted to a customer centric model. In that customer centric model, customer satisfaction, retention, and / or additional in-brand purchases are the outcome desired.

Even more attention is being focused on relating payment structures to outcomes and paying based on up-time, not just meeting a maintenance schedule or a break-fix SLA.

Use technology to make the shift in a cohesive way. Software can be used to identify a product which requires maintenance to prevent a future failure, or to indicate, often before the customer is aware, when a product like a boiler in a manufacturing facility is about to fail.

Field managers can plan labour capacity based on failure data and maintenance requirements more accurately to reduce time to repair, meeting or exceeding contracted response times.

 

Since service organisations can predict future failures, and schedule and optimise teams into future schedules, remote workers can be proactively, intelligently deployed for repairs, reducing schedule costs while preventing total operational standstills that impact the customer’s productivity. Imagine the benefit of preventing a total line shut down at a plant because your team was deployed prior to a total seizure of a machine.

Maintenance schedules can be also created which improve equipment ‘up time’ and even proactively address upgrade opportunities which offer additional revenue.

Mobile workers deployed with devices outfitted with real time, integrated mobile dispatching software can access information to address the immediate needs, but also to tap into additional information, such as training and product usage guides, ‘how to’ guides, that add additional benefits, providing that new outcome for each customer, resulting in not only reducing the field service organisation’s own costs, but ultimately in improved customer satisfaction, increased sales of future service and maintenance contracts, accessories or replacement products at end of life.

Outcome based services facilitated by technologies like mobile workforce management software which provide analytics, capacity planning, mobile dispatch, and optimised routing to plan staff, create maintenance plans, mobile on site process, facilitate on site collaboration and provide customers with information and data, help field based organisations reduce the complexity of operating products like industrial boilers or elevators, and help customers reduce the operational complexity of product operation, while maximise usage of the products.

Why are outcomes-based approach so important for field based organisations?

The most important benefits of offering outcomes based services are loyalty and improved future revenues, as well as reduced operating costs. Think ‘customer for life’.

Outcome based services reduce the complexity of operating products, while providing value added services for your customers which increase the usage of products. That proactive approach improves the customer experience which leads to increased customer revenue in the future.

Outcome based approaches teach the customer organisation, as well as the field service teams, to value ‘up-time’ rather than focusing on ‘downtime’ which requires repair, minimising the time an asset is down or a customer is inconvenienced.

 

The technology exists right now to move to a proactive, outcome based service model. The most successful companies are the early adopters that use their mobile workforce management solutions to deliver the technology which supports this evolution. Don’t delay -- make the leap sooner, rather than later, before your loyal customers become loyal to another organisation

 

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ServicePower, a market leader in mobile workforce management software, announced recently that the acquisition by Diversis Capital and subsequent delisting from the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange has been completed.  Diversis will provide ServicePower with financial investment and business expertise to help it achieve long term growth and promote the ongoing successes of its partners, employees and customers, building upon the Company’s successful 2016 performance which featured double-digit revenue growth and EBITDA profitability.

Through the deployment of its transformational technology used by some of the largest companies in manufacturing, insurance, security, utilities and telecom, ServicePower helps any field based business with high-value assets or high job volume to grow revenues, add additional lines of service, and improve customer satisfaction resulting in rapid return on investment.  ServicePower is the leader in working with customers to optimise the use of employed and extended workforces, allowing its customers to embrace the latest technology and business process innovations, including enabling “Uber-like” capabilities.

“We are increasingly working in a world where customer service is paramount,” said Ron Nayot, Managing Partner at Diversis. “When we looked at where the best potential investment for Diversis would be, ServicePower was the clear choice.  We believe market demand will continue to increase for the Company’s mobile workforce solutions and the business transformation it enables.  Diversis is excited to partner with ServicePower to invest in its next phase of growth.”

 

“We really want to push the boundaries of what is possible so that our clients can deliver personalized services in the field that are remarkable, that make them stand out from the crowd in the eye of their customers,” said Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower. “As a private company with the backing of a well-respected investment firm like Diversis, we can move faster and push harder than ever on the roll out of our industry-best artificial intelligence engine for scheduling, leadership in extended workforce management, and focused development for the core markets we serve.  We are in a much better position to deliver on our considerable ambitions with both the financial and business guidance Diversis provides.  We anticipate great success and continued growth.”

 

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Marne Martin, CEO ServicePower explains the benefits of an integrated dedicated and freelance workforce and why scheduling them shouldn’t be a chore...

Service is going through an exciting change as businesses are finding more productive ways to satisfy the needs of their customers, while also improving their bottom line. We aren’t talking about “just” overflow or managing seasonality, we are talking about executing on a strategy that can fundamentally change how and the speed at which you provide service to your customers. As business moves forward, more and more companies have come to realise the benefits of a labour model that can really harness both productivity and customer experience advances.

In the past, technology, work flows and field service management techniques weren’t particularly reliable at managing a labour model that wasn’t either a dedicated workforce or a freelance workforce. But times are changing.

 

The capabilities of software that can handle the complexities of using both a dedicated and extended workforce are here. Having done this now effectively for more than a decade for many of the best known enterprises, here is our advice on such “hybrid” labor models, ensuring the highest productivity and customer satisfaction levels.

Let’s consider the reasons many organisations deploy a labour model utilising both a dedicated and extended workforce.

Availability

Customers want service now. An extended workforce enables expectations to be met when demand is high, and also buffers cost when demand is low. Using a mix of labour resources with appropriate credentialing and training expands your capabilities at a lower cost while also getting service to your customers sooner.

Cycle time management

Using cycle time calculations from business intelligence applications, businesses may distribute work to the mobile resources with the lowest cost or most desired cycle time metrics, both of which may fluctuate between employed and contracted resources, given current conditions, to meet customer demand. Cost can also be factored into this understanding that time is money.

Quality control

Organisations which deliver field based services may manage job distribution based upon quality of service metrics. Maximise your customer experience by ranking well liked technicians higher so that if they have capacity, they get the job.

Seasonality

Being able to simultaneously search and book employed or contracted mobile workers enables you to manage your workforce consistently, while also meeting KPIs during demand fluctuation.

Catastrophic events

Catastrophes are happening at a higher rate than ever before. It’s critical in those catastrophic situations for feet to hit the ground immediately to provide care and services, for instance to insurance policy holders. If you are a business that handles catastrophes, if you don’t have an extended workforce and also one that is tied into your core technology solutions, you should.

Extraordinary territories

The cost of expanding the reach of service where there isn’t significant and steady job density is high. To decrease costs and improve productivity,it’s best to schedule and route mobile workers to jobs in the closest proximity to each other, to the mobile worker’s start and stop locations, and within the areas they know best. If jobs are infrequent, the cost of credentialing and training a freelancer may well be more efficient.

Infrequent or out of the ordinary jobs

The same can be said for ‘out of the ordinary’ jobs. Consider smart home system installation or customer product education visits commonly associated with outcome based services. Both type of job requires special skills. Do you employ uniquely skilled individuals and wait for work to come in, or contract a scalable workforce able to provide these services as needed? Clearly the latter is the best choice for many businesses.

Cost control

Similar to quality or cycle time control, using business intel to derive job cost by labour channel enables organisations to evaluate the least costly mobile worker for a job, depending on skills, travel, and salary for instance. The least costly resource may be a contractor rather than an employee.

We suspect one or more of these scenarios apply to your business.

Intelligent, integrated dispatching

Mobile workforce management software traditionally, especially within the field service industry, meant scheduling. There are several flavours of scheduling, however folding contractors into the mix requires more than attempting to plug them into those existing scheduling solutions.

Utilising an aggregated dispatching software platform provides those same jobs sources with the ability to send their work alongside other aggregated work, improving operational efficiencies and reducing costs, for every member of the service delivery chain.

Adding an integrated platform with a robust, intelligent and real time scheduling algorithm to intelligently and quickly determine the best routing scenarios, while also having the ability to ‘reoptimise’ the schedule, moving the jobs in time as well as between employees and contractors based on real time conditions, is a major plus.

ServicePower has been instrumental in the deployment of integrated, mixed labour strategies since 2004 including the configurable options through our broker product to fully automate the intelligent and dynamic scheduling of either employees or contractors through a robust, fully configurable rules engine, enabling our clients to seamlessly provide the best, fastest and least costly services within their industries.

 

ServicePower Unity takes that one step farther by providing our entire mobile workforce management platform via a SaaS deployment, for one low cost. We’ve taken the ability to dispatch any field resource and made it simple to deploy and easy to pay for whether your labour force are dedicated or freelancers

Scheduling mobile workers to meet customer demand is far less complex when you have a partner that understands the needs of your business and technology that supports an integrated dedicated and extended workforce.

ServicePower processes more than three million job interactions a day with proven ability to drive customer experience whether your technicians are your employees or freelancers. Let us help you to make it easier for your teams to evolve your workforce strategy and customer experience.

 

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Marne Martin, CEO at ServicePower outlines the key considerations for field service directors exploring technology, people and processes…

The field service industry is exceptionally diverse and surprisingly complex. Providers vary in size, geographical coverage, services offered, parts required to conduct repairs, inspections, installations, and maintenance or facility management. In today’s competitive world, customer satisfaction is considered the number one indicator of success, even as productivity, cost, and parts inventory management remain essential.

Workforce management software (WFM) is the technology cornerstone on which the success of the operations relies. New technologies, like social, mobile, analytics and cloud, IoT and M2M data, also impact the industry, presenting new ways to perform work, improve first time fix rates, and new business opportunities.

Technology

How does a field service business select the best WFM technology? What must service operations consider to ensure measurable success?

WFM solutions differ greatly, as discussed last month, so it is imperative to consider your requirements early to maximize the likelihood that what is deployed delivers the functionality you require, at the costs you expect. This checklist will help you build a foundation strong enough to maximize ROI and improve customer service levels.

Budget:	WFM implementation and maintenance costs vary. Determine if a license or a transactional SaaS model is best for your organization, evaluate the fully loaded costs, and make sure to have a partner that is willing to evolve with your changing needs.
Business Complexity:	The more complex your business, the more important true optimisation software, like ServiceScheduling, is to create the least costly schedules and highest customer satisfaction as the same time.
Business Objectives:	Make sure your business objectives are clear and your business partners are engaged and ready for any change management required.
Security Requirements:	In this age of hackers and identity theft, pick a solution that ensures your customer, employee and business data are safe.
Key Performance Indicators:	Agree on KPIs early and collect baseline data to measure improvements against.
Software Deployment:	To SaaS or not to SaaS? Decide if you want to deploy and manage an on premise solution or rely on vendor expertise.
Back Office Integration:	Increasing first time fix rates requires that technicians arrive with the skills, parts, and collaborative mobile dispatch software to support all tasks onsite. Decide during design what data, software and people access are required to support field work.
Integration Execution:	Decide if your IT team can support a WFM integration or if a system integrator is required to do the heavy lifting.
Training:	Don’t forget training. Staff must be trained to use the software as, how and when intended.
Continuous Improvement:	Stay abreast of new technology and changes in your own business. Ask for advice incorporating latest releases.

Process and People are as Important as Technology

Create processes and people policies as part of the WFM deployment. Technology cannot alone create a successful field service operation. The underlying processes and people create success.

Process

When developing an evolving operation, fundamental processes must be designed and implemented to ensure smooth operations and healthy ROI.

Work Scheduling:	Work scheduling is not routing. It is the process and tools used to create basic staff work schedules: shifts, breaks, lunches, PTO, and non-schedulable time such as training or vehicle maintenance.
Forecasting:	Demand forecasting goes hand in hand with labor supply forecasting. Invest in tools to plot demand, geographical and seasonal. Business intelligence tools are great options for demand forecasting.
Management Plan:	Define roles, responsibilities and tasks. Create performance management plans so adherence and success can be measured, and rewarded or corrected. Managers and employees thrive when expectations are clear. Discipline is less painful when plans are defined, published and applied evenly.
Parts and Equipment Management:	Define processes for procuring, warehousing and allocating parts to jobs. Define accounting process for tracking distributor invoices and returns to ensure credits and charges are correct. Define use policy for company assets, like trucks and tools. Enforce the policy with tracking technology to prevent misuse or fraud.

People

People are the most critical element of any field service operation. Create people, processes and policy to “sustain and maintain” your ROI goals.

Create a Task List:	Define daily tasks. Employees accomplish more and feel more accomplished when they understand what needs to be done each day.
Create a Playbook:	A playbook is critical and often overlooked. It is an operational manual which defines policies that dictate employee interactions and utilization of WFM software and operational processes which support objectives and KPIs, driving operational excellence and productivity.
Plan and execute the ride along:	Once tasks and expectations are defined and understood, ride along or sit with employees to understand reality. Identify what is going on in the field, call center or warehouse, to identify potential opportunities for improvement.
Validation:	Inspect your expectations! Perform customer surveys. Audit work performed. Customer satisfaction cannot be assumed simply because a task list and schedule have been completed. Validate process and policy adherence to ensure employee success and customer satisfaction.
Manage Expansion:	Don’t overlook the ‘fiefdom effect’. Policy, process and technology compliance and utilisation must be consistent and measurable across the entire organization to objectives are met.

 

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In the first part of this exclusive interview with Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower we looked at the development of their product suite with the recent launch of NEXUS FS^TM giving them a great platform to drive forward with Martin admitting that there will be a big focus on sales execution in the coming year as they see to capitalise on the considerable investment and resources they have put into developing and refining their product.

So in this the concluding part of this interview we ask just what what sector are they looking to conquer?

Well one of the advantages Martin sees ServicePower having over their competitors is that they are ideally placed to work across a broad spectrum of field service organisations.

“If you think of where we are now I like to describe us as in the middle of the triangle.” Martin begins.

“So you have ClickSoftware at the top and then ServiceMax and Service Bench in the two bottom corners. We sit in the inside of the triangle competing in all those areas. Each corner has slightly different focus but we are able to start looking at the markets and verticals of all three of those.”

 

“It gives us a very broad spectrum if we can compete directly where Click compete, where ServiceMax competes, where Service Bench competes that gives us a lot of business to go after and that is why sales execution is going to be very interesting as we go after that business.” Explains Martin.

It’s a bold strategy, that will see the UK based company, whose US offices are in Virginia taking on all comers, even ServiceMax who they also work with as a partner on occasion and whilst Martin clearly has respect for her Californian

based rivals, she also believes ServicePower are well placed to compete with them for business.

“I think ServiceMax validated that in the field service sector you really can go after the SMBs and the enterprise” she comments before adding “but the issue a little bit with ServiceMax of course is the cost, as a SaaS only solution it is quite an expensive solution and does has both the pros and the cons of being built right on the Salesforce ecosystem.”

“So we worked with NEXUS FS^TM to have a technology that is actually very scalable at a lower cost point. That will enable us to go in at a good and attractive price point and demonstrate real ROI to a lot of the SMB segment as well be able to scale that with functionality to the enterprise market as it’s very versatile and modular.”

However, as mentioned above, whilst the ServicePower team are gearing up for an eventful few years in the short term, Martin has an eye on the long term as well.

 

ServicePower now have a number of patents currently being filed having worked with KPP and Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK – an area Martin believes is a hotbed for emerging technology focussed talent.

“I’m a little bit of a technology nerd in the sense that I have always been involved with companies that have a lot of technology patents and interest in patents” confesses Martin “I firmly believe there is a ton of excellent technology developed there (in the UK) because there are still a lot of people studying maths and sciences in the UK and the quality of the technology is great there.”

And the area of this investment in technology is all focussed on developing the next-generation of algorithms to drive field service management scheduling forwards.

As Martin explained “Our simulated annealing algorithms is excellent, its very versatile and it works across a broad variety of verticals. But when you think about the future you want to get algorithms that use less meta-data and work faster and more efficiently.”

“You need to start thinking about not just optimising the work-flow and technicians but how do we start bringing in predictive analytics, more integration touch points and all these Big Data elements. To do that you really need to go to the next level.” She adds.

 

“That’s where we started doing the investment with some people in Manchester Metropolitan University looking at Quantum Annealing.”

“What’s interesting with the ServiceScheduling product, and this is one of the reasons it has always performed so well, is it never allows a bad schedule. When it optimises in the process it runs through various optimisation scenarios and then only writes that change if it is definitely better.”

“What quantum will do is do this in a more efficient way and faster. If simulated annealing takes an one-minute of optimisation to get to a result, we want something that will take 15 seconds to get to a result.”

“It also will enable us to migrate the product into the next generation.” Martin comments before explaining further

“Rather than a boring discussion on how do you keep re-writing the existing product, when we look forward five years we want to have a new back-end engine based on quantum annealing, so ideally we would have that in two to three years and that will fit in with a lot of the predictive capabilities that are in demand especially by the larger enterprises to day.”

Such vision and desire to innovate whilst also building the business in the current is impressive, however for Martin it really is a simple case of wanting to build a product that will become a significant player within the field service industries for many years to come.

It is also the biggest differentiator she can build between her companies and her competitors who she feels are not pushing the boundaries as much as they perhaps should be.

“Even if you look at SAP and Oracle and other big players, there really is very limited true technology innovation.” Martin states.

“ServiceMax doesn’t use any algorithms, the TOA algorithm is older, ClickSoftware uses so many algorithms that it makes its very complicated when training, or at least it makes it very labour intensive.”

 

“We want to keep driving superior results for the field service organisations but do it with technology that makes their life easy not complicated.”

Indeed whilst Martin is eloquent and laid back during our interview, she also clearly has plenty of belief in her product line which shines through our conversation.

“I’m very passionate about our product suite; I’ll put our products up against everybody, especially as we continue finishing off the road map of where we are going.” She states boldly.

“It’s coming together slowly but surely and steadily and us being able to do this across the next 12, 24, 36 months it’s going to be phenomenal.”

“We want to make sure that we are setting up a company that can continue growing in the immediate future but we also want to set up one that can keep growing for twenty years as an exciting field service player.”

Although they may not be ploughing that path alone, as Martin alluded to a soon to be announced partnership with Thingworx to add to their IoT partners, with the potential for other partnerships along the way.

“I am very much a partner person and one of the things that I have always cared about is not thinking business is an environment where I win by someone else losing. Instead we have to find ways with our partners and with our customers where we all win.” She states

“I think there is enough opportunities that even through a partner ecosystem, both should be generating profit whilst still delivering ROI to our customers.”

 

And this is at the core of Martin’s thinking when it comes to partnerships, delivering customer ROI must remain at the very hear of any conversation.

“My approach is I will partner with whomever is going to be a good partner as long as we can deliver real return on investment for our customers.” Adds Martin.

“Those partnerships that are all about window dressing and marketing, that the customers don’t get value from, well they may be nice but in the end its all about customer value.”

With a steady growth trajectory, a desire to innovate continuously and a firm grasp of the most important factor of all - delivering customer value, ServicePower under Martin’s guidance are certainly on the right track.

With an active sales approach being the adopted in 2016 there is a fair chance you’ll be speaking to someone in the ServicePower sales team at some point next year. Given the vision and direction of ServicePower , I’d say that when the call does come, you may well want to listen.

 

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