So far in this series of excerpts from a white paper recently published by Aquant, we've assessed the significant challenge field service companies face in finding balance in their workforce and the role Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play in helping companies do so. Now in the final excerpt in this series we look at how equally the implementation of AI requires a human touch to succeed. 

 

In Field Service we Must VALIDATE AI WITH HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

Much has been made of the idea that machines can replace humans for essential job functions. The truth is that AI is nothing without the real-life expertise of humans to guide and validate its findings.

Automating insights from historical data is not enough on its own. In order to ensure that findings about the solutions to service challenges are accurate, an organisation must bring in its experts to assess and improve the solutions offered. Before AI, organisations needed to take experts out of the field for months to help with training or knowledge sharing. With the right AI solution, experts can optimise insights in a matter of hours.

When solutions to challenges are automatically generated by a system, it enables members of the service team to spend more time doing what they do best—which is applying their expertise in the field.

 

Speed up the Training of your Field Service Engineers and Increase Their Expertise

With easy-to-access information that understands what you mean regardless of specific phrasing, and a dynamic pool of information to draw from, smart systems give all employees equal access to previously hidden information.

Skills that previously took years to learn (usually by waiting to personally encounter and solve each unique problem) can now be passed down to newer employees in a matter of days. In addition to solving the practical problem of on-boarding new hires, it also helps to engage millennials in a way they are more comfortable with. And when knowledge is easier to acquire, employees can work on acquiring soft skills like customer service and relationship building, which can’t be taught by even the most powerful machines.

 

Case Study: How 3D Systems were able to scale their field service wrokforce and decrease repeat field engineer visits with actionable insights

3D Systems empowers modern manufacturing with best-of-breed plastic and metal 3D printers.

They help manufacturing clients dramatically reduce build time and enable healthcare organisations to custom-fit solutions and improve patient outcomes. With a robust global client base, they needed to onboard new service techs quicker to get them out in the field and solving complex service problems.

As the workforce grew, one of the hardest issues was extracting the organizational knowledge out of the heads of the most experienced engineers and into the hands of everyone in the field. They turned to Aquant’s AI-powered service intelligence platform to mine and analyze all their information, including data stored in field service solutions, CRM, and parts systems. In addition, the tool was able to uncover info that lay dormant in free text notes.

"3D Systems has seen a 62% reduction in parts usage and a 39% decrease in repeat visits, driving significant cost savings..."

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine embedded in the technology is even able to map different phrases and words all back to the same problem, which structured the data more efficiently and made it easier to search. During the install process, which took less than a week, the tool scoured and categorized data, and then their best engineers sat down to validate the data and improve findings.

3D Systems is now able to leverage Aquant’s Intelligent Triage product to assess and troubleshoot customer tickets quickly, helping service pros resolve issues on the first visit. They’ve also decreased parts costs and usage by correctly identifying the source of the problem and sending the right tech, with the right skills into the field with the right parts.

All employees have more equal access to knowledge, making it easy for junior techs to get up to speed quickly. As a result of implementing Aquant across the organization, 3D Systems has seen a 62% reduction in parts usage and a 39% decrease in repeat visits, driving significant cost savings.

 

Would You Like to Know More? There is a Field Service News white paper on this topic available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Click the button below to access it now! 

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In our previous article in this series of excerpts from a recent white paper published by Aquant we explored the significant challenges field service companies are facing as they try to navigate the huge demographic changes that are underway at the moment as the ageing 'boomer workforce is replaced by their millennial cohorts. In today's article we explore why the current knowledge transfer tools are letting field service companies down. 

The labour shortage forces organisations to choose between immediate needs, such as having their most senior staff in the field addressing urgent customer issues, and long-term goals of documenting their knowledge and training new employees.

 

Knowledge Transfer in FIeld Service Requires Tools Fit-For-Purpose:

As most managers know, when resources are tight, the biggest fires get put out first and smouldering issues continue to be put off until they can’t be ignored.

It’s not that companies haven’t tried to harness insider info and scale training. There are mobile apps and field service tools designed to capture notes from the field.

However, change management can be a bigger barrier than the C-suite anticipates, leaving managers tasked with motivating the workforce to use the technology that some in the field consider clunky or time-consuming. And even when these tools are successfully put into use, it’s difficult to make these notes and comments that are captured on customer tickets actionable.

They’re often riddled with typos and contain information about multiple tasks in one long, free text form. How can any organisation parse that information and use it effectively?

This challenge is at the root of why so many internal knowledge bases are missing the deep insights of employees in the field. Plus, most of these solutions are static databases, as opposed to connected learning tools that know what information is necessary, can prompt employees to ask the right questions, and then figure out logical solutions based on partial inputs.

Digitally savvy employees are used to using tools like Siri that understand their location and habits and can offer intelligent solutions without the user having to do all the legwork.

 

Uncover Existing Data to Fill in the Gaps in Your Field Service Knowledge Base

People make the best mentors and trainers, and those with deep on the-job knowledge often excel at diagnosing obscure problems that newer employees may have never experienced, but these deeply knowledgeable employees only have so much time and ability to impart their wisdom.

As organisations seek to meet high customer service expectations, human knowledge must be combined with an artificial intelligence discipline called machine learning in order to democratize that knowledge. 

 

Use Machine Learning Technology to Distribute Existing Knowledge

Customer-facing organisations have far more information and institutional knowledge squirrelled away than most managers and executives realise.

There are free text notes, product images that sit within and outside of CRM, ERP, WFM, and other databases. Technology partners that leverage Machine Learning (the process of computers improving responses with experience) can capture this unstructured information and add it to the knowledge base, alongside real-time data, producing a rich and interactive pool of information that all employees can draw from.

The right application can make actionable recommendations and predictions based on this data, helping teams solve customer and service challenges efficiently.

 

Apply Natural Language Processing on Top of the Information Mountain

With the amount of data in play, it’s not enough to simply convert current and historical information into structured data which can easily be indexed and searched.

The problem is that different customers or regions might have different terms for the same issue. Plus, case notes about this issue might contain typos and misspellings, making it difficult to manually identify and categorise records. A solution that offers Natural Language Processing, in combination with Machine Learning, digs deep into the historical information and acts as a translator.

It will understand the root issue regardless of how it’s described by analysing the past examples, whether it’s faulty equipment or new installs. It will map these different ways of describing issues back to the same solution—even if the descriptions contain mistakes. In addition to helping call centre agents and techs in the field, it’s an essential learning tool to help employees level-up by quickly accessing critical data to get the job done.

 

In the final feature within this series of excerpts we will look at two more ways field service companies can utilsie the data within their existing records to help solve the field service skills gap as well as an industry case study from a leading high tech organisation in the 3D printing space. 

 

Would You Like to Know More? There is a Field Service News white paper on this topic available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Click the button below to access it now! 

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Field service teams are in flux. The existing drain to the workforce brought on by a deluge of retiring Baby Boomers combined with an unsteady economy is creating unprecedented service and performance challenges. In this series of excerpts from a new White Paper published by Aquant, we explore how Artificial Intelligence can pave the way to overcoming these challenges for field service organisations...

Even in an uncertain environment, there are cost-effective ways to ensure continuity of service. Adopting AI-driven field service technology will allow your service organization to pivot quickly and help erase the skills gap.

By capturing untapped tribal knowledge and making that insight accessible across your workforce, the technology will empower less tenured employees with the wisdom of your experts. The results are quicker, more comprehensive training for new hires, increased job satisfaction, and ultimately, a better customer experience.

 

Where to Find the Next-Generation of Field Service Professionals

Service teams are in a labor crunch.

According to 2018 global research by Manpower Group, skilled trade positions, particularly technicians and engineering roles, are the hardest to fill. This didn’t happen overnight. The Service Council detailed the coming storm in the labor market in 2015 research, noting that “70% of service organisations indicate they will become burdened by a retiring workforce over the next five to ten years.”

We are in the midst of that talent shortage and organisations are scrambling to fill openings, with more than 70,000 service technician jobs listed across the country. Baby Boomers, who make up a significant majority of the workforce in the service industry, are now retiring. In the next ten years about 10,000 Boomers a day (across all industries) hit retirement age.

That’s a lot of farewell parties.

Analysts and economists have been sounding the alarm bells for years about the coming crisis, but many companies have struggled to pivot quickly. While Millennials now make up the largest portion of the workforce overall, the service industry has struggled to attract and retain the digital generation, due in part to housing shifts from the suburbs to the city, and the large number of millennials who hold bachelor’s degrees compared to a generation ago.

While the majority of customer call centre and field service jobs don’t require a college degree, the jobs do offer many qualities that young talent are seeking, such as room for advancement and a sense of purpose. In order to recruit and retain young employees, an emphasis on professional development is crucial.

 

Don't Let You're Field Service Expertise Leave with Your Retiring Technicians:

 

In addition to contributing to the labor crunch, retiring boomers are exacerbating the knowledge gap in service. Unlike other industries where institutional knowledge is indexed, best practices documented, and lunch and learns held monthly with pizza, technicians often work solo or have limited interactions with other team members.

In lieu of imparting tips and tricks, technicians often keep knowledge of a myriad of parts, fickle machines, and client quirks tucked away in their head or scribbled down on paper work orders that fill desk drawers and glove compartments.

There’s also an employment tenure gap between generations, which is causing more turnover overall. 2016 research found the overall average employee tenure across all industries and age groups to be 4.2 years.

Millennials average roughly 3 years and Gen X average tenure is 6.5 years. Boomers have an average tenure of 10 years, but most are at or close to retirement age.

Even if you could hire more Millennials, the knowledge drain is forecasted to continue as the pace of churn quickens. 

Indeed, the challenges around finding balance within the field workforce is becoming increasingly difficult as we navigate this demographic shift.

However, it is not impossible and emerging tools such as Artificial Intelligence can really come to the fore in overcoming these challenges, which we shall begin to explore in the next feature within this series. 

 

Would You Like to Know More? There is a Field Service News white paper on this topic available exclusively to fieldservicenews.com subscribers. Click the button below to access it now! 

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IDC’s Aly Pinder explores one of the most crucial conundrums facing field service organisations today - how to ensure knowledge transfer is seamless across the organisation...

At some point we will finally reach the moment when all the seasoned field service engineers retire. I know, we have been foretelling this for years and in my case more than a decade. Despite this seemingly ever-present anxiety around replacing a retiring field workforce, many manufacturers and service organizations still list knowledge loss as a top challenge yet to be successfully addressed.

IDC Manufacturing Insights’ 2019 Product and Service Innovation Survey highlighted one of the top drivers for manufacturer’s service lifecycle management efforts is a need to capture and make accessible service knowledge and best practices. Building a culture of shared intelligence and accessibility of service knowledge, nearly half of organizations (42.7%) sampled in this study plan to leverage mobile devices for the purpose of increased collaboration amongst technicians.

These investments and prioritization demonstrate how much risk is inherent with having an entire workforce which often goes out on its own for an extended period of time, rarely coming back into a centralized location, and is one of the closest resources interacting directly with customers. The scary part is the value technicians to the customer experience is becoming more not less critical for manufacturers and service organizations.

In advance of losing field workers, I recommend you consider a few things:

• Identify your workforce that is planning to retire in the near future. Do you survey your technicians, at least annually, to ask them when they plan to retire? Assuming your technicians will retire at the retirement age of your respective country is quite risky. Reaching out to your technicians to identify when they plan to retire allows the organization to identify the level and urgency of the risk, plan for the loss, and even proactively strategize to either retain or hire more aggressively in advance of the loss.
• Get creative with technician retention. Organizations should establish a program that enables technicians to be able to work as a centralized expert. This is where gamification and incentives can be used to create a bench of technicians that are willing to stay with the company, accelerate the rate of capturing best practices, and recognize the value of the decades of experience which is held in the brains of the technician. Organizations would be wise to establish a role which based on identify qualifications or attainment of a certain expertise level can extend the viability of a seasoned technician staying on the team.
• Show your newer workforce a career path which is rewarding and valued. Many organizations struggle with creating tangible and exciting career paths for the workforce. Career paths are difficult to detail as there  are so many variables, both for the employee and the organization. This is an even bigger challenge with a largely remote workforce at many service organizations. However, the ability to communicate a future for the field technician is a critical step in addressing the workforce skills gap which should go hand in hand with trying to retain more seasoned technicians. This practice will help create a culture that values the service technician experience and show the workforce where they will fit in the broader strategy of the organization.

Talking about the retiring field force mustn’t be the end of the story that we tell each other, organizations must act now. Technology is one of the ways to capture and make accessible service knowledge, but manufacturers and service organizations need to identify their respective risk and build a strategy around addressing the loss of critical service knowledge.

Collaboration and shared purpose will enable organizations to get in front of this pending wave of retiring workers.

Kris Oldland reflects on whether a two speed approach to staff development is the way to deal with the transitory nature of millennials...

In the endless talk about the shift from the retiring baby-boomer workforce and the incoming Millennials, I as a representative of that overlooked, unforgotten middle child, poor old Generation X, would like to just take a moment to point out that we often tend to get left out of the conversation. Now, don’t worry, this isn’t going to be an article of self-pity - that’s just not the way us Gen-X folk roll.

Nope, we are the generation that just rolls our sleeves up and gets on with it.

Unlike our Baby Boomer parents and elder siblings, who were able to indulge in free love whilst turning on, tuning in and dropping out, that greatest consumer generation of them all, who spent every dollar they earned as they lived solely in the now, those of us in Gen X, got up off our backsides and went and got a McJob to see us through college before generally fixing the ‘Boomers mess and creating the easy gig that the Millennials got to inherit.

You know sometimes history can be a cruel mother to the middle child.

The Millennials are the first generation to exist in a time of huge technological advancement (and it’s subsequent impact on society) since the industrial revolution. Therefore, quite rightly, we should factor in such significant change when considering how we attract, develop and retain them within the workforce. All I ask, is just occasionally, spare a thought for us poor oft overlooked Gen Xers who have been quietly making things tick over for a long time now.

I mean, OK they might be the first google native generation, and the internet as we know it today may have been invented by a ‘Boomer, but it was us who terraformed the world wide web from the frontier town of the early nineties to the sprawling global metropolis it is today. You’re very welcome.

All of the above is of course said firmly with my tongue in cheek. Crikey, technically, I’m actually dangerously close to being a Millennial myself having been born in ‘80 - technically I think that makes me a Xennial - meaning I’m more down with the kids than my elder Gen X brethren, but still remember the sheer agony of pre-app dating, and the terrifying wait on the phone to see if it was your intended date who picked up, or her rather more hostile father.

And whilst, it is of course fun to pick on both ‘Boomers and Millennials alike from my lofty Gen X pedestal, there is a actually a serious point to be considered here.

Sure, there are plenty of things that we should be considering when the difference from one outgoing generation to the incoming generation within a workforce is so pronounced. I know, I’ve certainly spent plenty of time writing and talking about the topic in the past.

For example, ‘Boomers wear the knowledge they have earned through study and experience like armour. The deeper the knowledge, the stronger the armour - as the more invaluable they become to an organisation.

Millennials on the other hand, see knowledge as an easily accessible resource, always readily available and on demand through a couple of taps and swipes on the phone in their pocket.

"They are the first generation to exist in a time of technological advancement since the industrial revolution..."

‘Boomers viewed career paths as fairly straightforward, linear progressions. A ladder to be climbed, with progress being in steady increments, one rung at a time. Millennials, are as inclined to move sideways, often into a different industry entirely, and research by Deloitte showed the average time a millennial intends to stay in a job is just two years.

Another huge difference is that whilst financial remuneration always played a key role in ‘Boomers career aspirations, Millennials value the societal impact of a company and will look at soft factors like company policies on diversity, inclusion and flexibility, equally if not more so, than just money itself.

So yes, there undoubted differences between the two. And yes to reiterate such changes should be considered when talking about talent recruitment, retention and development. However, it feels to me that if we reassess things to radically within our internal procedures, we may be at risk of losing what I believe is the utmost important thing for any business to maintain if they want to be successful. An Inside-Out perspective.

Remember, as much as Millennials are our new/future workforce, they are also our new/future customer base.

It is obviously thus, highly important to acknowledge what makes this generation on the whole, buy into a brand - green carbon neutral policies for example carry as much wait in this age, as a cheesy celebratory endorsement would have back in the 80s. In doing so, and by being a company whose values Millennials can buy into, you will enhance your recruitment success. But one caveat here is it needs to be led from the top and be genuine.

Millenials have an inate ability to smell BS from distance.

The other issue I see with sweeping generalisations of a generation, is that by treating Millennials as a monolith, we may be at risk of overlooking the individual - and in field service in particular, the individual is often the star of the show.

This creates something of a duality that we must overcome and I suggest doing so by adopting a two pronged approach to our workforce. On one hand we need to acknowledge and embrace that many of the Millennials that come through the workforce may be just ‘passing through’ and invest in the technologies such as AR and knowledge banks, technologies which can make them as productive as possible, as quickly as possible. Here, we want a workforce with a shallow but broad skill set that can then be supplemented via remote assistance by experts with deeper knowledge when neccessary.

Simultaneously, we need to identify a number of career paths that enable those individuals who buck the trend of being part of a transitory workforce (and beyond the hyperbole there are many out there believe me) to grow within your company. Tap into the gamification instincts that are almost embedded in the root directory of Millennials by attaching gravitas, kudos and continual learning to roles where deep experience is built upon.

Ideally, such a two-tiered structure will ultimately allow you to utilise the emerging gig economy or contingent labour sectors - giving you flexibility within your staffing that could potentially be a major benefit to your P&L. A win-win all round. Alternatively, you could just ride it all out until the Gen Z cavalry arrives to quietly save the day just like us Gen Xers did for the ‘Boomers.

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News and Kieran Notter, Director, Global Customer Transformation, ServiceMax from GE Digital explore the findings of an exclusive independent research conducted by Field Service News and sponsored by ServiceMAx from GE Digital.

In this second excerpt from the full one-hour long webcast, Oldland and Notter discuss both what the must-have skills of the field service engineer are likely to be in the not too distant future taking into account the impact of industry mega-trends such as servitization, digitalisation and an incoming army of millennials.

Want to know more? The full webcast PLUS an exclusive report based on the findings of this research is available for Field Service News subscribers.

If you are a field service practitioner you may qualify for a complimentary 'industry practitioner' subscription. Click here to apply now!

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