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Field Service News Editor-in-Chief, Kris Oldland offers up some insight into how field service has become a core differentiator amongst competing organisations and how the trend towards advanced services is being driven by technology...

 

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This video was originally included in a video presentation run in partnership with Salesforce.

Download the full webcast @ http://fs-ne.ws/Y8ny30lsZUR

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In this excerpt from an exclusive fieldservicenews.com webcast Scott Flatman, Regional Sales Director, Salesforce about how technology is enabling field service companies to bridge the gap between their customers and the mobile workforce.

 

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Want to know more? The full webcast is available for fieldservicenews.com subscribers. If you are a field service professional you may well qualify for a complimentary industry practitioner subscription and if you apply for your subscription using the link below you will receive instant access to the full webcast.

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Salesforce’s VP of Product Management Chet Chauhan, explains why for those companies seeking to embrace a vision of outcome-based services at the heart of their business future, the platform approach is vital...

Servitization is very much top of mind right now, particularly in manufacturing circles - but also in the wider business landscape as well.

A lot of companies are seeing that their products are getting commoditised and have rightly identified that the path to much-needed differentiation is through enhancing the service experience. Whether they are business to business, business to consumer or even something more complex like business to business to consumer, we are seeing companies of all different types focussing on services as a way to get closer to their customers.

It is an approach that yields multiple benefits - companies adopting such an approach get to see how their customer base is using the products, meaning more tailored and better-targeted marketing and sales efforts - but also they can gain insight into how they can better improve those products and feed that insight back into their R&D teams.

However, the fact still remains that for most companies the initial steps on a path towards a servitized business model often tend to stem from companies feeling the pressure to get closer to their customers - a pressure that is in itself driven by the fact that customer service has widely become one of the key differentiators between businesses today.

Senior business leaders across the globe are asking “as our products become more and more commoditised how do we differentiate on additional services that we can introduce to our offering?”

Field service has played an intrinsic role in the quest for improved CSAT standards in recent years, and with so many customer touch points becoming digitised, that is only likely to increase in the future.So let’s try to unpack some of this and explore what the future of field service looks like on an intelligent platform.

So the first thing to consider really has to be ‘How do you get closer to your customers?’

It is only at this point that we can really start to consider the next important consideration, which is ‘How do you deliver a better customer experience?’

Of course, field service has played an intrinsic role in the quest for improved CSAT standards in recent years, and with so many customer touch points becoming digitised, that is only likely to increase in the future.

However, the smart companies embracing servitization see that for the approach to be truly effective, i.e. for it to be more than just a shift in revenue from product to services, but to actually become a genuine paradigm shift that simultaneously makes your customer relationships more profitable and longer lasting, they need much better capabilities to connect to with customers across the whole journey within the organisation.

This concept needs to not only sit on the service side of the business but also be understood from the sales and marketing perspective as well. When an organisation understands this and wants to fully manage the whole customer journey seamlessly - this is when the importance and value of a common technology platform really come to the fore.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen some very important technologies emerge which are having and will continue to have a significant impact on field service delivery.

Firstly, Cloud Computing really drove down costs whilst offering the ability to offer infinite opportunities in terms of scaling businesses. IoT is perhaps the technology that has grabbed the most headlines in 2017 with a some excellent IoT platforms appearing including our own, that allow you to constantly connect to your assets. Mobile has of course been around for many years now but again the technology is keeping pace with other advancements, meaning our engineers and technicians are increasingly more empowered even when working in highly remote areas.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen some very important technologies emerge which are having and will continue to have a significant impact on field service delivery.However, it is another big technological trend that we are now seeing really bring everything together and that is Artificial Intelligence (AI). In a sensorised world of IoT & Big Data AI really is critical. When you have a hundred million sensor events being recorded every hour, a human simply cannot comprehend meaning from that level of information - they will simply drown in the data. Yet, AI can deal with such quantities of data very well and then turn that data into insight, the insight into actions and then it is in actions that we will find value.

We need to think of all of these technologies as being integral elements of an ecosystem rather than being individual technologies - and this is why we are seeing the common technology platform become vital. If you are to adopt a truly servitized business model then you absolutely need to be able to orchestrate the full life-cycle of service and customer interaction in one place.

Indeed, we are already beginning to see examples of these types of forward-looking developments appear in a number of different sectors.

We are seeing many companies connecting their assets - though really this is only the first step in the process. It is when Artificial Intelligence is introduced to take this data and turn it into insight and action that things really begin to get exciting.

In fact, some of our clients are now using multiple layers of AI across their entire service cycle. Often there will be one core AI to draw insight from the vast sets of data across a whole fleet of assets. Something like IBM’s Watson can transmit that data into our own Field Service Lightning platform the second AI, Salesforce’s Einstein takes over as it is designed to handle the more specialist needs of a service call.

The basic premise is that an AI like Watson will assess the data, figure out where it needs to take action and will then communicate directly with Salesforce.The basic premise is that an AI like Watson will assess the data, figure out where it needs to take action and will then communicate directly with Salesforce.

If there is a break-fix scenario or if there is a maintenance scenario where an additional job needs to be added to the next preventative maintenance work order, that is all done in an automated fashion within Field Service Lightning.

The engineer can be automatically scheduled using our own AI (Einstein) to make sure the person scheduled has the necessary credentials. If it is a preventative maintenance scenario then it will look at when the next preventative maintenance job is scheduled, make sure that it’s within the time frame required, put the work order in and make sure the parts are ordered and will be on the truck on the day of the job.

So let’s just recap briefly to think about how this process comes together across all of the various technologies.

Firstly, you need to have the IoT element which in turn is dependent on Cloud Computing and Big Data. Then the various AI capabilities to initially read those events in order to begin automatically creating field service job and finally there is a need for the second AI to actually handle the setup and scheduling of both preventative maintenance and break-fix jobs.

Of course, reaching back to the customer and keeping them informed of the stellar service you are delivering is also key so we need to be connected to the contact centre solution as well. And let's not forget that the customer themselves will want to be on whichever channel they prefer - whether it be a mobile app, online portal or SMS and you need to facilitate that for them in whichever fashion they choose.

Many of our clients are already embracing the growing trend of outcome-based revenue models and field service is one integral element of thisSo all of this really needs to be running on a single dedicated platform for it to work seamlessly - yes, you can definitely bring together a number of different solutions and tools by having various integrations across the network, but the reality is that the cost of doing so would be prohibitive - that’s before you even consider the ongoing challenge of keeping everything updated and working harmoniously.

Indeed, the evident need for a common platform approach that can facilitate the seamless transfer of data and actions across different business divisions is the exact reason why we launched Field Service Lightning in the first place.

Our customers were coming to us and telling us ‘this is what we need to do.’ ‘This is the experience we want to deliver and we need you to add field service to your platform so we can orchestrate all of this.’ Many of our clients are already embracing the growing trend of outcome-based revenue models and field service is one integral element of this, as is sales and marketing and as are all other business units.

The key is being able to let the data and insights flow across the business as a whole and to achieve this you really need a platform that can bring together all of these various functions and technologies we’ve discussed in this article including AI, IoT, Mobile and of course FSM – you need all of that in a single place to make it work effectively, but the benefits of doing so will be felt across each and every department within your organisation.

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Marne Martin, CEO of ServicePower, discusses how the “intelligent” service organisation is able to meet increasing customer expectations whilst simultaneously driving increases in revenue and brand loyalty...

Productivity, for field service operations, is the means to an end of delighting both your customer and the C suite in your company.

Improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue are the holy grail of any field service department. If you are also able to do these two things using a hybrid workforce, your internal metrics and profitability of your service organisation can also improve.

Large enterprise organisations have long understood the value of artificial intelligence algorithms embedded within mobile workforce management technology, in its ability to improve productivity and efficiency of staffed mobile workers, as well as its ability to provide field teams with the process and information needed while on site to resolve issues in a single visit.

The power of big data, cloud computing, and machine learning are all proven to reap benefits of more productive, least costly schedules which improve overall metrics and customer-centric KPIs like schedule adherence and mean time to schedule. Service priorities can also be driven off of more than SLAs and start looking to customer profitability, propensity to purchase additional services, and a number of other emerging customer-centric areas that service organisations are starting to focus more on.

 

In the last decade, more and more of these same organisations have taken hold of the additional benefits of intelligently integrating contracted mobile workers into the labour mix, as well as the ability for customers to schedule into the time slots that a service organisation or manufacturer want to make available.

Using contractors expands capacity, in terms of availability, skills or geographical coverage, field service organisations can provide service when and where their customers require, in a manner that’s more consistent with an employee with a branded van.

In an “intelligent” service organisation, service is enabled to meet the customer’s expectations, drive increases in revenue, brand loyalty, as well as efficient capacity planning.

By using the available technology, plus a hybrid workforce model that looks to coverage and demand to assess what technicians you need where, the type, skills and training such that you can begin blending employed with contracted workforces, the next level of productivity beyond that of your peers can be achieved.

Field Service experts know service. But what can expertise in field service bring to complimentary sectors that are used only to point to point travel optimisation and not schedule or priority based optimisation.

The fact of the matter is that any business with mobile workers whether service, sales, delivery, inspection, home health care, etc. are dearly in need of the ability to drive improved schedule prioritisation, compliance and productivity.

Even financial services companies with work allocated to the back office can benefit from optimisation.

 

With that goal in mind, ServicePower recently released Boost, on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Boost provides any organisation with mobile workers beyond field service, to healthcare, financial services and sales teams, the ability to continue using their Salesforce application to manage customers and create work orders for when field based services, of any type, are needed. Then, using Boost, pass that list of work orders or tasks to ServicePower which uses our patented Artificial intelligence-based optimisation technology to produce a more productive, least costly schedule.

Boost makes schedule optimisation go far beyond only travel optimisation as it does both to achieve greater improvements in productivity, capacity and schedule compliance available to every organisation, easily, from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Start moving beyond just the CRM to after-sales service to prioritise your visits by propensity to buy, profitability on orders, or any other customer metric you feel important.

It’s also worthy to note that true optimisation is not geo-productivity or Uber-like logic. Products that claim geo-productivity or Uber capabilities do provide a mechanism to schedule a resource when a customer raises a hand for a service. So, is response time better in this scenario?

Yes, in so much as you have a worker in the field already sitting idle, you can see their proximity on a map, and send them to the new customer. It doesn’t limit the schedule costs, because it’s not taking into account the entire daily schedule. It’s reactive scheduling, which is nice if you have slack  capacity, but slack capacity costs money.

On demand scheduling is great, from a PR perspective. It doesn’t offer the proactive services customers expect from providers today.

Mobile workforce management software with optimisation does.

Boost, in particular, provides more than a point on a map. It provides an easy route to a real optimised schedule, using your existing Salesforce implementation, regardless of whether you’re managing 25 mobile workers or 1,000.

Find Boost on the Salesforce AppExchange at: http://sforce.co/2p4mKV2

 

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Bill Pollock, President & Principal Consulting Analyst, Strategies for GrowthSM explores what Cloud CRM giant Salesforce entry into the FSM market will mean for the sector...

 

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Strategies for growth are concluding their latest benchmarking research and they need your input.

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With the introduction of Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning, the FSM market has now witnessed, in the space of only two years or so, a trifecta of large, established, ubiquitous, global companies – each historically known for their respective other business platforms and solutions – entering the FSM market in a “big way” (i.e., in terms of market posturing, press releases, promises of FSM market dominance, etc.).

The largest – and potentially, most promising of these – include:

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• Oracle, acquiring TOA Technologies in 2014;
• Microsoft acquiring FieldOne in 2015; and, now
• Salesforce announcing Field Service Lightning (FSL) for market launch in Spring/Summer 2016 (i.e., no acquisition made; platform includes ClickSoftware technology).

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However, of these “big three”, only Salesforce has elected (i.e., at least, so far) to build its FSL functionality, albeit, with help from ClickSoftware for schedule optimisation), while the remaining two have each elected to “buy” their way into the segment.

Whether it makes a difference to potential FSM solution users as to whether their vendors have acquired their way into the business, or have built a home-grown model is unknown at this point in time.

However, past research conducted by Strategies For GrowthSM (SFGSM) would indicate that it will most likely not be a major selection or evaluation factor for most potential solution acquirers. In fact, it will probably end up being a non-issue for most.

 

Other smaller – but typically faster-growing – FSM solution providers may have brought their respective solutions to market much earlier than Salesforce, although Field Service Lightning still has certain advantages that these other relatively new entries to the global FSM market are not as likely to have.

Further, the introduction of Salesforce into the global FSM through its Field Service Lightning offering now provides an added level of competition to the competitive landscape – a level that ServiceMax and its peers have not seen in recent years (i.e., save for the emergence of the acquired “newbies”, such as Oracle/TOA, IFS/Metrix and Microsoft/FieldOne, etc.).

For example, ServiceMax – which is essentially built on the Salesforce platform, itself – had virtually dominated the recent FSM user market in terms of familiarity/awareness, marketing and promotion, and user consideration and adoption in recent years.

However, the May, 2015 announcement of the company’s strategic partnership with PTC “to provide [a] comprehensive and connected Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) solution offering” (i.e., where ServiceMax provides the SLM support, powered by PTC’s ThingWorx IoT-based platform) positions it, in some minds, as just another one of the industry’s “new” and/or reengineered SLM vendors, among other like vendors.

All-in-all, the entry of Salesforce into the FSM market does not simply represent the addition of a single “new” competitor to the overall landscape – but, rather the introduction of a “new” synergistic “mix” of traditional FSM functionality (i.e., built on the platform of one of the most popular and well-respected vendors, ClickSoftware), but seamlessly integrated into the overall Customer Experience, CSM and Sales Management suites offered by the “world’s #1 CRM company”.

 

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As such, potential users have the opportunity to not only choose a “new” FSM solution provider – but a “new” type of integrated FSM vendor, with a “new” (i.e., to the FSM market) corporate culture and philosophy for providing “cradle-to-grave” pre-sales, sales, after-sales service and perpetual customer support to an ever-evolving and demanding customer base.

In any event, the introduction of Field Service Lightning reflects Salesforce’s continuing “push” to enter this expanding global market segment on at least an “at par” basis with the other major players currently comprising the “new” FSM market entrants.

However, while its entry into the market may initially seem like something “new” for Salesforce, it is not necessarily a “new” idea to the many services organisations that could realistically be thought of as potential Salesforce FSM customers – actually, many have already been using Salesforce to assist in running their respective services organisations for some time now.

For example, the results of SFGSM’s previous two Field Service Management Benchmark Surveys, conducted in 2011 and 2014/15, respectively, reveal the following about Salesforce’s historical positive image and reputation within the global FSM community – even before it had formally entered the market this year with its Field Service Lightning offering.

 

The following data is derived directly from these two SFGSM FSM Benchmark surveys:

In SFGSM’s 2011 Field Service Management Benchmark Survey, respondents were asked to answer a number of questions relating to their familiarity with each of 48 individually listed FSM solution providers. The specific question asked was: “For each of the solution vendors listed below, please indicate the ones with whom you are currently familiar in terms of their Field Service Management applications.”

For the 2011 survey, Salesforce was not included among the 48 pre-selected FSM vendors listed in the questionnaire; however, based on new information obtained during SFGSM’s one-on-one telephone interviews conducted as part of the 2014/15 survey Discovery Phase, Salesforce had been mentioned enough times to be included as the 49th FSM vendor – although, it still did not technically offer an FSM solution at that time!

Therefore, in 2011, the most cited FSM solution providers, listed in terms of their respective familiarity among the respondent base, specifically as a “Field Service Management solution provider”, were as follows:

2011 SFGSM FSM Survey Results (percent familiarity as an FSM solution provider):

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• #1 @ 39%; SAP
• #2 @ 33%; Oracle
• #3 @ 29%; ServiceMax
• #4 @ 26%; ClickSoftware
• #5 @ 24%; Astea
• #6 @ 18%; Servigistics
• #7 @ 17%; Metrix
• #8 @ 15%; Microsoft Dynamics

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The 2011 survey results reaffirmed the #1 & #2 standings of SAP and Oracle from earlier FSM surveys, and reflected the growth of ServiceMax which, for the first time, had surpassed ClickSoftware in this historical series of surveys.

Further, although Microsoft also did not yet offer an FSM solution in 2011 (i.e., the company did not enter the FSM solution market until July, 2015, via its acquisition of FieldOne), it was still listed as #8 (i.e., at 15% familiarity) by the respondents to the survey. It is noted that two other of the highest cited vendors have since been acquired by larger organizations (i.e., Metrix, by IFS in May, 2012; and Servigistics, by PTC in October, 2012.)

However, SFGSM’s 2014/15 FSM Benchmark Survey update (i.e., with the expansion of the list of potential FSM solution vendors to include Salesforce, for the first time) reveals a largely altered ranking of the most familiar FSM solution providers, as follows:

2014/15 SFGSM FSM Survey Results (percent familiarity as an FSM solution provider):

[unordered_list style="bullet"]

• #1 @ 56%; Salesforce
• #2 @ 50%; SAP
• #3 @ 35%; ClickSoftware
• #4 @ 32%; Oracle
• #5 @ 28%; ServiceMax
•  #6T @ 25%; Astea
• 6T @ 25%; Kronos
• #8 @ 21%; AT&T Advanced Mobility Solutions
• #9 @ 21%; Microsoft Dynamics[/unordered_list]

In 2014/15, while SAP actually increased its FSM market familiarity to 50% (i.e., from 39% in 2011), and Oracle dropped a mere one percentage point to 32%, Salesforce, the “new” entry to the list of vendors, was cited by 56% of survey respondents as one of the FSM vendors with which they were currently familiar – again, however, without actually offering an FSM solution at the time.

Thus, the key takeaways revealed by trending the two most recent SFGSM FSM Benchmark Surveys, are the following:

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• In 2014/15, Salesforce had already been recognized as a potential FSM solution provider by a majority (i.e., 56%) of the field services marketplace – despite the fact that it did not actually offer an FSM solution at that time.
• Microsoft, through its CRM Dynamics platform, had also risen in familiarity as a potential FSM solution provider, growing from 15% familiarity in 2011, to 21% in 2014/15 – despite not formally entering the FSM market until July, 2015.
• The historical leaders in terms of FSM solution familiarity (i.e., SAP and Oracle) have, as a result, since been relegated to the #2 and #4 positions, respectively, trailing far behind Salesforce.

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We have seen these types of familiarity rating anomalies in the past; however, what the trend data clearly reflects is that many field services organisations have already been using (arguably, mis-using?) either the Salesforce and/or Microsoft platforms for more than just sales management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, respectively.

And, that this is apparently not limited only to Small/Medium Businesses (SMBs), but also to small-to-medium-sized divisions of larger services enterprises, as well. In many cases, Salesforce (and/or Microsoft CRM) serve double duty within the organisation with respect to their use in managing some of the key components of FSM. In fact, in 2014/15, 7% of respondents also reported that Salesforce was their “primary FSM solution provider.”

 

What this all means is actually good news for Salesforce – and especially for the services organisations that have historically been relying on the company’s platform to support their field service operations, in that, with the introduction of Field Service Lightning, they will now be afforded with much greater FSM functionality – however, this time from a solution that is specifically designed for use in running a services organisation.

While other companies, all with fairly deep pockets, have either tried to buy their way into FSM, grow an FSM capability organically, or some combination of the two, not all have had either the resolve – or inclination – to strive to dominate the FSM market.

However, with respect to Salesforce, the combination of a corporate mentality that looks to dominate in each of the markets they serve, with a documented history of key players in the FSM community having already been using (i.e., or mis-using) their CRM platform to assist in running their respective services organizations, the prospects for Salesforce actually becoming a dominant leader in the FSM marketplace may be a somewhat safer bet.

Nonetheless, it must still be stated that, so far, Salesforce has only announced a very small portion of field service capability (i.e., key components including contract management, parts management, etc. are still missing) and, as a result, the jury will continue to be remain “out” until more of the company’s Field Service Lightning offering actually hits the market – in full – and in sync with the market’s expectations.

 

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TomTom Telematics has announced the launch of  WEBFLEET for Sales Cloud, an app that integrates TomTom’s WEBFLEET telematics platform with Salesforce, making it easier for sales staff to use the CRM system on the road. It will also enable companies to manage their sales forces more efficiently and empower them to connect with customers, partners and employees in a whole new way.  The app is available on the Salesforce AppExchange marketplace.

The integration between WEBFLEET and Salesforce helps to reduce cost and administration time through automatic trip reporting and simplified appointment management. Businesses and drivers are also provided with greater insight into driving performance.

“Companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners and employees to thrive in the age of the customer,” said Ryan Ellis, VP, Product Management, AppExchange, Salesforce.

“By leveraging the power of the Salesforce App Cloud and integrating real-time telematics data with Sales Cloud, TomTom Telematics provides customers with exciting new opportunities to improve business performance through connected car technologies.”

Taco van der Leij, VP Marketing at TomTom Telematics added: “Integrating WEBFLEET with Salesforce is a natural extension of our Logbook application, which automates mileage registration for expense claims. Both help to make business administration easier for staff on the road, providing them with tools to improve their sales performance. Furthermore, by combining telematics and CRM, sales managers can gain visibility and insight into performance in the field.”

WEBFLEET for Sales Cloud allows office staff to assign client appointments in the Salesforce calendar to the employee’s TomTom Pro Driver terminal. Dashboards allow trip data to be compared with opportunities, leads and closed deals to analyse the effectiveness of each sales representative.

 

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Built on the Salesforce Customer Service platform, Field Service Lightning promises to harnesses the latest mobile and IoT technologies, enabling companies to deliver connected, intelligent customer service from phone to field...

Salesforce one of the world’s leading CRM companies, announced this month the launch of Field Service Lightning, a new field service solution built for today’s connected world.

Harnessing signals from connected devices and customer data from Salesforce, Field Service Lightning is designed to be a modern approach to field service that is built for mobile and the Internet of Things (IoT).

With Field Service Lightning, Salesforce state companies can now unite customers, connected devices, agents, dispatchers, and employees in the field with one powerful service platform to deliver a seamless customer experience from phone to field.

With 6.4 billion connected things in use today 2020 predictions stating that number will reach 20.8 billion, the implications for field service are staggering. As connected devices become smarter and more predictive, it will create new opportunities to reinvent the customer service experience.

Built on Service Cloud, Field Service Lightning is built to enable companies to deliver mobile, intelligent customer service from phone to field.

In the initial press release Salesforce have stated that Field Service Lightning users will be able to:

Connect their entire service workforce:

Field Service Lightning connects the entire service organisation from call centre to the field.

Agents, dispatchers and mobile employees in the field will be on a single, centralised platform, bringing a new level of transparency and efficiency to customer service.

Service agents will have a 360-degree view of the customer and can create a work order from any case.

Mobile employees in the field will now have access to the customer’s full service and purchasing history, empowering them to easily resolve any issue that may arise and possibly upsell the customer on another product.

For instance, a homeowner requests a service visit because their Internet connection has gone down.

After resolving the issue, the technician sees within the field service app that the homeowner has previously asked about a faster Internet connection.

Using this insight, the technician presents new packaging options and the customer upgrades to a faster Internet speed at a discounted rate.

Intelligently schedule and dispatch work:

At the core of field service is scheduling and dispatching.

Leveraging features from ClickSoftware like scheduling and optimisation, Field Service Lightning promises to take dispatching one step further by applying a layer of intelligence.

Scheduling is automated based on skills, availability, and location to optimise on-site service. Rules can be put into place to automatically assign senior field employees to complex service issues, and junior field employees to the routine service calls.

Because scheduling is automated, dispatchers can focus on the real-time view of service operations and adjust resources accordingly.

For example, if the first job of the day ends up taking longer than anticipated, a dispatcher can assign a different field employee to the next job so the customer’s appointment does not get delayed.

Or if a mobile employee gets delayed by traffic, a dispatcher could route another field technician to the job.

Track and manage jobs in real-time:

Customer service moves fast and forward-thinking companies need real-time access to their service data.

Field Service Lightning promised to enable all service employees to update work orders, issue change requests and adjust job status, anytime, anywhere and on any device.

A staggering 65% of field service workers still print out their service tickets and bring them in their vehicles, slowing down the service process

Now, an employee in the field can see their open work orders on their mobile device, update them throughout the day as they complete jobs, and all the information is seamlessly updated in Salesforce.

We are just beginning to see what customer service can look like in the era of mobile and IoT,” said Mike Milburn, SVP and GM, Service Cloud, Salesforce. “Field Service Lightning gives companies the ability to reinvent their approach to service by connecting the phone to the field on a single platform, resulting in an amazing customer experience.”

Pricing and Availability:

Available in most regions now Field Service Lightning starts at $135 for organisations that have at least one Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition Service Cloud license.

 

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Some really interesting statistics around CRM put together in this infographic created by Salesforce...

In part one of this exclusive interview with ServiceMax COO Scott Berg we looked at the the similarities between widely differing industries, the rapid rise of ServiceMax and why the IoT hasn't quite got fully up to speed as yet.

Here in this second section of the interview we begin with the another key significant technology trend, Big Data and why it was the at the heart of the headlines coming out of the ServiceMax CIO summit a few months earlier.

As our conversation turns to this Berg begins nodding agreement.

“We think we are in quite a unique position to make Data actionable.” he says. A pretty bold claim.

He begins to expand further “These Data lakes and all the other terminology around Big Data, all this predictive stuff and data science is all great but somebodies got get it into the hands on a technician in order to benefit from it. To maybe direct their next step or predict their next move. There will always be people involved in the chain, so we think its really our unique place to play as we make Big Data actionable.”

 

“We have a configurable process, we have the mobile device, so if there is going to be any directing or leading or sharing and tapping into knowledge its probably going to be done on a disconnected mobile device under ground at the top of a scaffolding or something like. So our interest in it is trying to connect data science and Big Data into that actionable footprint that you can put in front of the technician.”

This focus on the end user leads us to another current topic of conversation in software circles – is customisation the root of all ills or an acceptable process to refine off the shelf solutions?

 

“I think the whole nature of customisation has changed” answers Berg as I put the question to him “As you know we are on the Salesforce.com platform, and I don’t think that customisation is necessarily a bad word because its so controlled and its such a configurable and extendable experience anyway.”

“We certainly do stress configuration to the extent that this year we’ve really tried to repackage our implementation and delivery offerings. For small businesses we have something called Express, which is an out of the box ‘trust me this is what you need’ solution. If you work with us in three weeks you’ll be live and it’ll look just like the demonstration.” He says

“So we’ve tried to get certainly more prescriptive about it but I do think that peoples notions of customisation are ERP. So obliterated unrecognisable sets of code that drop you off at the road map and that quite frankly it’s a large part of our success I think. Because there is so much of that in Siebel today, one of our big customers has three versions of Siebel all of them deprecated so their off support and they’re faced with this problem its unrecognisable, its un-upgradeable they may as well just go buy another solution.”

“I think that the Salesforce platform has really changed everything. The way that we have to operate in that platform as an independent software company on someone else’s cloud means everything has to go through vulnerability, security and compatibility automated checking. So anything your customer would do on top of that, or anything we would do for a customer, basically inherits that stability. I think that’s just a radically different technological model than traditional ERP”

 

Of course Salesforce.com ended up proving a lot of their far bigger competitors wrong and now it seems that this is a rush to catch them up. It’ll be interesting to see if in the future all companies will follow their route.

As Berg himself outlines “ I think you’ll see a lot of the vendors out their trying to follow Salesforce’s lead and trying to follow some of Salesforce’s approach and try to become that platform as a service provider. You see them all launching market places and trying to attract people. Microsoft have been making a lot of noise around this and trying to launch the Dynamics platform. “

“But as somebody who jumped into the Salesforce.com bandwagon early on and as someone who every year we periodically reassess our situation I can say that nobody has really built the breadth and depth of a business application platform that those guys have.”

It is obvious to all that the connection between Salesforce.com and ServiceMax is particularly close. But is it too close? How reliant is the continuing success of ServiceMax on the Saleforce platform I ask.

“Having been involved with several start-ups in the past I think that they [Salesforce] were extremely critical for us especially in the early days.” Responds Berg.

 

“If you think of what it would have taken for us to launch a data centre and secure it, to build all the platform capabilities and redundancy, also that some of our first 12 customers were in the Middle East and Europe and there we were with two founders selling everything themselves out of northern California… how could that be right?” he pauses leaving the question hang for just a second before continuing.

“All because of the global reach and the global acceptance level of the Salesforce.com platform. So yes it was very important early on.” He concludes.

However as Berg explains the relationship has changed overtime as ServiceMAx themselves have grown to stand on more of an equal footing.

“Overtime I think that the value of the relationship has shifted a bit.” Berg concedes “Salesforce has become much more of a platform, and we don’t tend to get as many outright business referrals from them as before.”

“And it is certainly a big credibility statement to pass our EU safe harbour framework certifications and things because we’re in it but we’ve expanded so much in our own intellectual property investments around the mobile devices, iPad, and frameworks for our configurable workflow that I think when you stack up all the functionality in our product today, its heavily tipped to us now.” He admits.

Look out for the final part of this exclusive interview coming next week... 

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