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Stephen Wilson, CMO, eBecs provides some key advice on making sure you select the right software provide to meet your needs when making the important decision to invest in Field Service Management software...

Choosing the right field service software is an important decision, as it has real, long-term effects on your business’ profitability and customer retention. So taking the initial time invest to understand your options and how they will improve efficiency, information, and communication sets you up for long-term success. You’re investing time and money into a product and so, in turn it should also save you time and money. There are questions you should ask and key issues you want to investigate as you compare vendors.

Development Costs

Oftentimes vendors will have a base product that provides your business with the basic tools to automate and store information. It’s the additional add-ons and customisation that starts to increase the initial set-up fee or monthly subscription fee. These costs are not always apparent when simply looking at a list of features.

It’s important to understand what features will incur additional costs, and whether or not you need them. While certain features may appear to increase productivity, reduce frustrations, etc. you need to know if the ROI is going to justify the cost.

Implementation Time

How soon can the system be up and running? If you’re working with a vendor who is building your application from the ground up, while being white-labelled and built to fit exactly your needs, development time can be up to a year. Meaning your ROI is a long way out and you may find that your business needs will change during that time.

A system built using a plug-and-play model tends to have shorter implementation time, and allows for those initial building blocks to be built upon, adding customised features as needed.

Mobile Applications

When building enterprise grade mobile applications there are some very key differences between the coding of a web application and a mobile application. What works on a desktop, doesn’t necessary translate to a mobile device. Performance, security, and features can all be affected.

Ask vendors what they use to build mobile apps;, if they say HTML5 they’re not going to be the right solution for you. Native apps provide a stronger, more dependable solution, especially for field service techs who are consistently on the road and rely on the app to manage client calls.

Third-Party Integrations

The ability to integrate with third-party applications is key. There is no solution that does absolutely everything a business needs. From a customer facing website, to a CRM, to payment processing. There are applications that will need to be integrated with your field service solution. Find out how the vendor handles third-party integrations. Are there limitations on what can be integrated?

Security

Consider all the different employees in your business. Do they have different access to different information? Does the vendor’s solution handle multiple roles and access permissions? You may need this on both a group and individual level and so the system needs to be flexible. Make sure you know what types of permission levels you need and what is possible.

Automated Routing

A key feature of many field service software solutions is the ability to automatically generate routes for techs, scheduling their service calls in the most efficient manner (to save time wasted between calls and the distance a technician has to drive). Automation can have big benefits, freeing up employees to do other tasks, but you want to ensure that the automation is creating the most efficient solution, and that it’s easy for a human to step in and make adjustments to the schedule board when necessary.

Also, take a look at the scalability of the solution. As your business grows and you add more technicians or additional jobs into the system you want to ensure that it runs as quickly as it did before. The ability for the system to update in seconds as opposed to minutes is important in ensuring that techs have the most up-to-date information.

Start making strategic lists

Before speaking to vendors, build a checklist of features: the needs and nice to haves.

Create a long list of vendors to ensure you are properly evaluating all your options. Then address your needs first so that you can eliminate any vendor that isn’t going to be able to provide you with a solution that will make your business run smoother and more efficiently.

The nice to haves can help you compare overall cost of working with one particular vendor over the other. When you’ve narrowed you’re your long list to 3-5 potential vendors, then use your checklist to compare each individual feature/benefit.

Your field service management vendor is going to be a long term investment, so you want a partner that will grow with you and provide you with the best possible solution for your needs.

If you would you like to learn how the right vendor and field service solution can help you grow your business, by better managing your customer’s changing expectations and still deliver high customer satisfaction, sign up for the January 31 live webinar here

Tesseract’s service management software is about to be put to extremely good use. BCAS Biomedical Services Ltd (BCAS Biomed) will use it to more effectively manage thousands of life-critical devices for hospitals, healthcare professionals and the emergency services.

BCAS Biomed is a leading UK provider of Managed Equipment Services for the medical sector, maintaining everything from ventilators to defibrillators to ultrasound machines. Its current medical-sector-specific management software tells BCAS Biomed what assets need servicing and when, and also manages the scheduling. However, BCAS Biomed’s recent growth has highlighted some limitations, as well as the need for a mobile working solution for the field service engineering team.

“With some of our hospital contracts, we’re literally managing thousands of assets,” says Steve Dampier, Operations Director for BCAS Biomed. “Because these are life-critical devices, compliance is of the utmost importance. We chose Tesseract because their asset management software will help us track the history of the equipment more efficiently. They also offer local support, which is really useful for us.”

 

BCAS Biomed will be incorporating Tesseract’s Diary Assist and Remote Engineer Access (REA) modules in an effort to cut out delays, improve visibility and go paperless. Diary Assist will be used to schedule planned maintenance, replacing the company’s manual diary. REA will allow engineers to create and submit digital worksheets in real-time, rather than having to handwrite service reports and post them in.

Steve says, “Tesseract has much more functionality and longevity than the sector-specific system we have now. There are so many layers to the Tesseract system, so much scope for flexibility. It’s basically future-proof.”

 

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rapidBizApps has announced the launch of SunSight, a new field service management software for Solar energy providers. The software was built for solar installers to gather field data digitally, streamline business workflows and do more installations.

With SunSight, Solar installer companies can now maximise productivity of field workers, maximise their vendor time utilisation, save time and convert overhead costs into profits.

“While the potential for green energy is immense in the United States, many Solar companies are faced with challenges of overhead costs that does not allow them to fully tap into the potential of Solar growth.”

“With SunSight, solar companies can shorten the time it takes to get data from the field and quicken business operations. This translates to faster project delivery, more installations per month and more profit per project,” said Satish Penmetsa, CEO of rapidBizApps.

Designed for ground staff, operations managers, project managers and members in the field service management organisation, SunSight features project portfolio management, digital field data collection and a one-tap approval system to make time consuming tasks faster than ever before. Managers can also create their own custom forms to collect data of their choice. More importantly, Solar projects can be managed even when on the move.

 

Project and Business stakeholders can get an instant snapshot of all business activity to stay updated whenever any activity is made on a project. SunSight can be connected to an analytics platform of choice to receive actionable insights that can help transform the way projects and field services are managed.

“Solar companies now have the power to deliver projects faster and bring in the Solar revolution. SunSight is designed to handle the hassles of field service management, data collection and project management while industry professionals can focus on field service innovation and delivering value to customers,” adds Satish.

SunSight is built for a workforce using the Android, iPhone or iPad devices. SunSight is also fully cloud-based which means the software can be accessed on any computer with an internet connection and a modern internet browser.

All data is safely and securely stored on the cloud with cutting-edge technology to protect information and customer privacy. SunSight also adds integration with CRM and ERP systems making it a fully integrated solution for Solar Providers. Since the software is cloud-based, it is constantly updated with newer features that are instantly available to anyone using it.

 

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After a decade of building a solid reputation as a management consultancy specialising in mobile workforce management, Leadent recently announced a new string to their bow - Leadent Service Cloud. It’s a bold step to move from consultant to solution vendor, so Kris Oldland caught up with Alastair Clifford-Jones, CEO of Leadent to find out more about both the new solution and why they felt it was right for them to bring their own offering to the table...

Having built a successful business as a specialist mobile workforce consultancy delivering successful Field Service Management (FSM) solutions based on technologies such as ClickSoftware, Leadent is a name reasonably well known within the field service sector - particularly within their home shores of the UK. Indeed, CEO Alastair Clifford Jones is a man that should be familiar to Field Service News readers as an occasional FSN columnist and member of our inaugural #FSN20 list of key industry influencers back in 2015.

However, as many readers may have noticed across the last few months a new Leadent brand, Leadent Service Cloud has appeared alongside the original Leadent offering - it appears that Clifford-Jones and his team have decided to take all they know when it comes to implementing other vendor’s solutions and launched a solution of their own.

Well, that’s half-right. Leadent Service Cloud is in fact essentially Oracle Field Service Cloud with additional other solutions tailored to specific vertical needs included which Leadent have identified dependent on their expertise specific vertical markets.

The key USP however, is that Leadent Service Cloud also draws on the experience Leadent have in implementation and so they are able to work to incredibly short implementation times of just a few weeks - not bad for a cutting edge solution that incorporates other vertical specific requirements you may have.

“The idea is that Leadent will be able to advise what other products would also benefit a field service organisation that can be plugged into the Oracle suite via the Cloud,” Clifford-Jones explains.

“The reason we will ‘bolt on’ other products into the solution is that we will then take what we see as best-in-class for different size of businesses, or different industries etc - and we can then start to adopt a portfolio approach to field service clouds.”

 

It’s quite a dramatic addition to their existing business so I was curious to understand if this was something that had been planned for some time - was it the classic case of an overnight success story that took ten years to put together, or was it more a case of everything just falling into place at the right time?

“Basically we already had many clients talking to us through the consultancy side of the business, where we are quite heavily involved in software evaluation and various other things,” Clifford-Jones begins.

“We’ve always done the large scale implementations - and with Oracle Field Service we had begun doing all their training - we do all the training for the Global Partners. From that we felt there was a really good opportunity for us to combine our understanding of the industry and our understanding of processes, plus we really understand product implementation - you put those together and you can start to do really rapid implementations.”

In addition to this evident skill-set that Clifford-Jones identified within his own team, there was also the market pull of the Cloud. As we saw in our own recent research into Cloud based FSM solutions, not only is adoption of the Cloud  increasing at a greater speed than ever before, but also amongst those companies still using an on-premise system the majority are considering a Cloud based solution when they next overhaul their existing solution. This is something Clifford-Jones has identified within the market also.

“I think there is a huge demand from the technology perspective with people wanting to put things in the Cloud,” he comments “But also from a cash-flow perspective, people are looking much more at a SaaS model. What we are offering is the ability to deliver enterprise grade field service management software at a relatively cheap price.”

 

“Because everything is implemented via templates we can get people set up and running within four to six weeks and the implementation costs are all rolled into the monthly fee so there is no upfront CAPEX fee,” he continues “it just seemed a logical progression with us bolting on the consulting part of the business with the technology part of our business - especially with the backdrop of changing customer requirements and changing customer demands.”

However, whilst some demands are changing as the power of Cloud computing starts to gain resonance amongst field service organisations, other demands remain the same, even across disparate verticals - and it is here where the experience embedded within Leadent Solutions comes to the fore.

“As we work with more and more companies from different industries what we’ve found is that in reality field service really is a straight horizontal process that is undertaken the same in almost all industries.” Clifford-Jones explains.

“The big challenge companies have had in the past is that so many implementations were about reimplementing existing processes with new technology and that’s kind of failed.”

“So if you can go in and say these are the best practices and processes you should be using - and redesign the organisation to fit those processes that allows for truly rapid implementations. In terms of industry specifics there are then certain tools that various industries will then want to use, such as GIS, and these can be simply bolted on, as required”

And perhaps here lies the rub - as an organisation known as a consultancy rather than a software vendor, Leadent are more used to putting such questions to their clients, and similarly their clients and prospects may be more open to such a conversation also - it would be a much tougher sell from a software house to convince a company to change their workflow. The more cynical amongst us thinking that they are perhaps just trying to get us to adapt to their software because either it is hard to customise or lacking in functionality.

Yet, when we hear the same advice from an impartial and authoritative consultancy then are we more likely to understand the logic of updating workflows and processes so they are in-line with the modern systems that are being used? Quite possibly - and the benefits of this approach are something Clifford Jones is fully aware of.

 

“When you’ve got processes that have been designed and they’ve worked and they’re proven already in your specific industry why reinvent them?” He asks

“You’ve already done that work and the thinking has already happened. It’s the heritage of consultancy, and dare I say it, our own rock solid understanding of how businesses work and their processes. This allows us to leverage the technology pretty easily as we approach projects always thinking about the business challenges and how we address these challenges - rather than going in to talk just about technology.”

“When you start to think about it much more as consulting led rather than technology led (even though technology is a huge part of it) you can have much more sensible conversations. You can start to challenge people a lot more about why they ought to use standard processes rather than reinvent processes, all because you really understand what it is they are ultimately trying to achieve.”

“I also think, given the number of clients in field service we’ve worked with over the course of the last ten years that we absolutely understand the challenges and the types of processes that are needed.”

Such a confident approach is of course understandable, Leadent have indeed worked with and delivered for some great high profile clients in the last decade. However, the flip-side of that coin is that having made the move from consultancy to software vendor their legitimacy as a consultancy could be diminished.

“It’s a very different dynamic, but that is why we’ve done it through a separate organisation.”

Clifford-Jones replies when I put this point to him.

“It’s run differently, the approach to clients is different to the consultancy approach and we will quite often rule ourselves out of the technology work if we are going into a consultancy appointment with a client. We don’t want to see consultancy as pre sales for technology.”

 

“Also, generally speaking the consultancy clients we are talking to have huge workforces and it’s not something that our version of Oracle Service Cloud would work for - we are looking at organisations that can have up to 250 field service engineers for Leadent Service Cloud.”

Of course, the Oracle Service Cloud can handle much bigger organisations (for example Virgin Media are one of their clients in the UK.) However, those kind of implementations are a lot more complex - you’re not going to get up and running with that in four weeks.” He adds.

Indeed, one of the many benefits of Cloud models is their scalability which in addition to the SaaS business model mentioned previously makes Cloud solutions perfect for small organisations.

With this in mind I was curious to see if there was a lower limit for Leadent Service Cloud also.

“I guess there is a lower limit because if you have a smaller number of engineers then you don’t need sophisticated technology to manage your workflow. So our view is that a lower limit would be around 25 to 30 engineers. The reality is that below that number, there are cheaper products that provide the functionality you need at that size,” admits Clifford-Jones honestly.

Indeed, this is the kind of answer that you would expect from a consultant, or even from a software vendor trying to adopt a consultative approach to their sales process - but this does lead us to an important question - how does Clifford Jones see his two separate businesses evolving? As a consultancy Leadent’s very strength, (i.e. being small and focussed enough to fully understand both their clients and the niche sector of field service in general), will also always be the biggest barrier for them in terms of rapid growth.

Yet various research sources including, Aberdeen, Service Council and Field Service News all identify that there is a sizeable chunk of the industry that are yet to adopt a FSM solution, whilst at the same time many other field service organisations are now in the situation where they need to upgrade creaking old legacy systems.

 

In short there is a lot more potential for quick wins that can fuel growth for Leadent’s technology business than there is for their consultancy business. Does this mean that Clifford Jones thinks ultimately Leadent will be more focussed on that area of the business, with the consultancy becoming a side show?

“In terms of revenues I think the Leadent Service Cloud will take off more but in terms of importance I think the consultancy business will always remain incredibly important to us as that is the part that gives us the knowledge that will allow us to accelerate the growth in Leadent Service Cloud,” he begins.

“In terms of the business, our vision is absolutely to maintain the consultancy business. We are doing more than ever in terms of market development on that side. The consultancy side of the business is set to grow by about 50% this year, so we are on a pretty good trajectory to grow that part of the business as well.”

Of course the other side to this story is that whilst this seems a great deal for Leadent - it is also sees Oracle gain wider access to the market as well. Given the recent release of Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning and Microsoft’s acquisition of FieldOne, both of which were of course preceded by IFS’s acquisition of Metrix and 360 Scheduling a few years back - there is a very distinct feeling that the market for FSM solutions is once again potentially going to be dominated by a smaller number of larger players rather than a wider pool of smaller, independent best-of-breed solutions.

I was keen to see if Clifford-Jones agreed with this sentiment and what it meant for the field service organisations that rely upon such technology.

“One of the things about the smaller players is that they tended to do well in areas where they could be price sensitive,” replies Clifford-Jones.

“I think one of the challenges that they will find is that implementation is becoming so much easier, you are able to implement products like Oracle Service Cloud in four weeks, and in the past that would have been one of the USPs of the smaller players perhaps.”

 

“It is also probably a similar case for Salesforce’s Field Service Lightning and, Microsoft Field Service as well - so I would see some of the smaller players currently coming under threat at the moment.”

“When you’re buying Software as a Service, your not having to invest in a whole lot of hardware, you’re not having to invest in a whole lot of things that you would have had to have done in the past if your were to implement ClickSoftware for example. And that is going to cause a challenge for some of the smaller players.”

Of course, one potential danger is that the FSM solution sector which has rapidly evolved in the last decade, could potentially be facing a period of stifled innovation as we get used to seeing just the same few faces around the table. However, Clifford-Jones believes that can be avoided if the big names pay attention to the partners within their ecosystem.

“I think that all depends on how they use their partner ecosystem,” he comments. “The big difference is that in the past a lot of these big guys have done technology for technology’s sake and they haven’t really understood what the business requirements were.”

“I do think this is one of the problems with larger organisations, especially when they are technology organisations - how do they get the real understanding of the business challenges?”

“I think what a lot of these big players need to do is think about their partner ecosystems and make sure that they take the input from that - because we understand where all the challenges are for field service businesses really easily -far more so than a software provider.”

 

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Late last year Retriever Communications celebrated a 20-Year Anniversary of providing mobile strategies to industrial enterprise with the mobile-first company looking back at two decades of sustainable growth and innovation and putting forward the argument that experience trumps transient fashion...

Retriever Communications, a global provider of mobile automation solutions for enterprises in the industrial space, celebrates its 20th anniversary this month. Born from the mobile-first vision of its founder and CEO, Mary Brittain-White, Retriever helped bring field service management into the 21st century with its robust and intuitive mobile applications, while continuing to innovate based on the latest technologies and end-user research.

"In some tech hubs of the world, the pursuit of youth and unicorns has overshadowed understanding of what enterprises actually need. We built Retriever on the basis of experience, sustainability and understanding of our own and our customers' environments. Retriever's 20th anniversary celebration is a testament that this model works and it is here to stay. There's something to be said for validation and experience," said Mary Brittain-White.

 

Retriever Communications has been featured by Gartner in its Magic Quadrant, Field Service Management, for the past four years in a row. This year, Retriever was the only vendor in the Quadrant not to lose a single customer over the past year and had the highest customer satisfaction results.

In fact, Retriever's average customer relationship spans more than 10 years. "Our experience and research show that customers want industrial-strength apps that are responsive and robust, not gimmicky. And in addition to developing apps that work well regardless of the connectivity environment, we also take a hands-on approach to service, so our customers know we are always there for them," Mary Brittain-White added.

Retriever serves enterprises in a variety of industries across 3 continents, helping companies streamline their field operations, witnessing increases in productivity of 20-35 percent, improving customer service and cutting IT costs.

 

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With a handy announcement from Gartner arriving just in time for their annual European conference Maximize Europe, ServiceMax were in buoyant mood across the two days in Amsterdam. Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News was on hand to get reaction from ServiceMax’s Dave Yarnold and Rick Gustafson...

With in excess of three hundred attendees sitting in the main hall of the Krasnopolsky Hotel in Amsterdam waiting for Dave Yarnold’s keynote speech, the mood in the ServiceMax camp was already on a high. However, what tipped the mood into one of true celebration was the announcement just a few days earlier that the San Francisco based company had just come out at the top of the pile of the much awaited Gartner Magic Quadrant Field Service report.

With a whole bunch of product innovations and customer success stories already lined up for the next two days - this recognition from Gartner really was perfectly timed - adding both a sense of gravitas and triumph to the sessions across the two days of Maximize Europe.

“We didn’t know when it [the Gartner announcement] was going to hit the street so everything you saw, the whole presentation around our model, our platform, our services, and our passion was already in place. But then we were able to insert the validation of all of that as well,” comments Dave Yarnold, CEO of ServiceMax as I caught up with him a little later in the day.

“It was a beautiful thing to be able to come here present our mission and our progress and then show that validation from a really credible third party - it was really fantastic. The timing was terrific,” he adds.

 

Indeed, one of the biggest factors in why the Gartner Magic Quadrants are so widely acknowledged as key industry benchmarks is that it they are not just based on a set defined group of criterion from one organisation, but also upon feedback from each company’s own clients. This is something that makes the recognition even more important for Yarnold.

“It’s the biggest thing,” he says. “Everybody meets with these analysts and everybody presents their products but where there the rubber meets the road is the references.”

“Being able to give the analysts lots and lots of accounts with lots of companies getting results from their operations and then of course the specific comments that were made in the report about large companies expanding their global roll outs and actually getting all kinds of great financial returns - those are the things that go beyond hype,” he adds.

However, one gets the feeling that even without the Gartner announcement, the conference would have been a very upbeat affair. Field Service News has now attended the last three Maximize Europe events in a row and there are considerably more people and more buzz about the place than there was at the inaugural event held in Paris just a few years ago.

“We changed our strategy a little bit this year,” explains Yarnold when I comment on the growth of the event. “Instead of having a major event in San Francisco and two minor events in Europe and APAC, we’ve acknowledged all three regions are important to our business so rather than force our European or Japanese customers to fly to San Francisco we decided to make a concerted effort to do a great event in all three places.”

“I think what’s important when you're trying to grab the hearts and the minds of a group is you have to create an environment for the tribe to get together so they can share experiences and learn from one another,” Yarnold continues.

“Even at lunch I was introducing companies who were saying ‘oh you're a ServiceMax user that’s great, we use your parts in our products so let's talk’ and that really helps. It helps them with their business and clearly it helps us because they’re bonding around the experience that they’ve had with us.”

There was one slide in particular that really caught my eye in the morning’s opening sessions and that was the sheer number of partners within the ServiceMax ecosystem, the market place for which was only launched just over a year ago. I was keen to understand just how important that partnership ecosystem was in the continuing success and vision of ServiceMax and what role it would play in the future of the company.

“Several years ago we came to a couple of realisations,” opens Yarnold when I discuss this with him.

“One was that at the time, we were doing all of our implementations because customer satisfaction was so important to us - we wanted to make sure that every single customer was thrilled with us. However, we reached a point where continuing to do that would mean it would be really hard to scale the company. Also we were broadening our geographic presence and we needed to have partners that operated locally, using the local language.”

 

“The other thing that we were seeing, especially as we got into larger situations, was there were areas of functionality that it just didn’t make sense for us to build when some of our partners had that functionality.”

“Still we were surprised how fired up those partners were to engage with us and the last time I checked about half of our customers have actually used one of our partner’s products in conjunction with ServiceMax. It’s been really great to see that since we set up that partner market place . We can’t do it all so we’ve been thrilled with the support we’ve got from the partner community.”

In terms of the technology itself there was one definite show-stealer Field Service Connect, ServiceMax’s IoT solution, which was showcased with a number of successful case studies. Given the relative infancy of the product which launched just over a year ago, were the team at ServiceMax surprised how quickly these customers were able to show real value in using the tool?

“I was not surprised by it all,” replies Rick Gustafson, CFO, ServiceMax. “We’ve brought to market a nice bite-sized way to go about this that can deliver real business value. We’ve had the early adopter program which we’ve run half a dozen customers through it and now we have a couple of customers that are going to expand it broaden it out across the business.”

“I think the key to this is we boil it [IoT] down to a very simple value proposition and we talk about it as a way of getting started with IoT. We make it very understandable, very pragmatic, with well-defined outcomes and when we sit down with the customers we intentionally say let's focus on two or three use cases lets not try to boil the ocean,” Yarnold adds.

“The key to these hype areas is you’ve got to get some value for your early customers otherwise everybody says it was just over-hyped and it dies. Here there is real business value,” he concludes.

It would seem that both an army of satisfied customers and now Gartner themselves would agree with him too.

 

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GE Digital yesterday announced that it has completed the acquisition of ServiceMax, a leader in cloud-based field service management (FSM) solutions, for $915 million.

The acquisition provides GE Digital with new capabilities in the $1 trillion market for industrial service, enabling customers to immediately gain more value from their assets and find greater efficiency in their field service processes.

GE Digital's Predix solution is positioned as the only software platform that offers complete connectivity from the edge to the cloud and computing capabilities at every level of the industrial software stack.

Combining Predix with ServiceMax technologies GE Digital believe that they will be better positioned to help their industrial customers accelerate productivity outcomes for industry by combining cloud-based mobile applications with Predix. This acquisition brings together the use of digital twins, cloud applications and big data analytics with world-class field services domain expertise to unlock asset productivity for industrial customers. With this acquisition, GE will add analytics and insights into the ServiceMax logistics, workforce optimisation and deployment models.

The ServiceMax platform provides a full suite of applications, including inventory and parts logistics, scheduling and workforce optimisation, and work order management. As a result of this transaction, customers will be able to access these offerings from a modern rapid application development cloud and field-ready mobile platform that combines the strength of GE’s deep domain expertise and advanced industrial portfolio with ServiceMax’s field service expertise. The company will leverage the Predix platform to further the development of additional industrial applications focused on service delivery.

 

“This acquisition advances our vision of building a Predix-powered industrial world. Improved productivity is critical for industry, and digitising field services is a cornerstone of a successful digital industrial strategy,” said Bill Ruh, CEO, GE Digital. “By combining our technologies with ServiceMax, we continue to enhance the overall Predix technology stack for our customers. This transaction, along with our previous acquisitions of Wurldtech, Meridium, BitStew and Wise.io, is directly aligned with our strategy to drive growth both inorganically and organically by building the capabilities to support the digital industrial transformation through Predix, APM and the Digital Thread.”

Together, the companies have already driven significant productivity for GE and going forward they will co-develop service products and accelerate commercialisation in order to drive additional value for customers. GE estimates there is a market-wide opportunity to improve service productivity by $25 billion through the use of analytical tools.

Morgan Stanley acted as exclusive financial advisor to ServiceMax with Gundersen Dettmer LLP serving as legal counsel for ServiceMax. King & Spalding, LLP served as legal counsel for GE Digital. The transaction closed on January 10.

 

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Call centres staffed by operatives who are not able to make decisions rate considerably worse than call centres that can automate processes, research from [1] Inisoft reveals...

The poll of 2,000 UK adults overturns the received wisdom that automation is a bad thing for customer experience.

Top irritations for customers were:

1. Having to repeat your complaint to multiple people (58.40%)
2. Being placed on hold repeatedly during the call as staff checked policy (40.40%)
3. Feeling like the person you’re speaking to is reading from a script (32.00%)
4. Not feeling that the person you are speaking to has the authority to fix the problem (31.70%)
5. Feeling like the person you are speaking to is insincere (15.40%)

“All of the major customer bugbears are the sorts of experiences typical in a call to a poorly equipped call centre.” said Oonagh McBride, the Head of Inisoft.

 

“Ironically, call centres that lack proper automation tend to give customers the impression that they are talking to automatons.  A poorly equipped call centre will have staff floundering to find the answer to increasingly complex enquiries from customers, leading to delays, inconsistency and frustration.  When confronted with ill-prepared call centre staff, customers often express fury.”

The research also highlighted the importance of agent confidence when it comes to hearing customer problems and going off script if required.  In fact, 75% of those polled stated that receiving an apology was important.  For those aged 35-54, over 30% consider the apology to be ‘very important’.

Oonagh added: “The more technology that call centre operatives have at their disposal, the more they are able to do what they do best, which is to communicate naturally with customers in the sure knowledge that they have all the resources they need.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, only 6% of customers claim that their experience with contact centres is always good – or that there were no frustrations.

 

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1] Research carried out by Censuswide for Inisoft between 9th-11th November 2016.  Omnibus poll took a representative sample of 2,002 UK adults.

 

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Laraine Geddes, Marketing Manager, Kirona explains how dynamic resource scheduling & mobile working can help you keep promises to customers...

Driving efficiencies in your organisation and ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Regardless of whether you are managing planned maintenance, reactive field based tasks or complex projects, efficiency comes from doing the right things, at the right time with the most appropriate resources. For the customer, what they want is exactly the same, for you to keep your promises, to perform and complete the task required when you say you will.

Kirona have outlined four ways in which organisations can deliver their promises to customers.

Setting expectations:

It is a careful balance to ensure that customer preferences for appointments are taken into account while also optimising resource utilisation and minimising travel time of operatives. When procuring dynamic resource scheduling software ensure it provides available appointment slots to be offered to customers, whilst highlighting the most efficient slots for the organisation in terms of resource utilisation and travel time.

Setting the right expectation & keeping promises can achieve Customer Satisfaction of 95% or higher.

Communicating with your customer:

One of the primary reasons for appointments being missed is no access to the property, often caused by the customer not being at home.

Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) makes it easy to keep customers informed. Each appointment can be confirmed by email or SMS, with reminders being sent at time intervals such as 24 or 48 hours before the job is due. When an operative updates the job on their mobile device to say that they are en-route to the property, an SMS can be sent to remind the customer.

There will always be exceptions that occur.

Whether it is an unavoidable overrun of a previous job or delays caused by traffic, it is essential that the customer is kept informed. Through the seamless and real-time integration of DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager mobile workforce application, such delays can be proactively managed with a communication sent to the customer informing them that their operative has been delayed and resetting expectations of when they will arrive. Not only does this approach reduce the negative impact on customers, it can also reduce calls from customers to your contact centre chasing progress.

 

North Lanarkshire Council’s no access rate dropped from 40% to just 3% through use of Kirona’s DRS and Job Manager.

Dealing with the emerging day:

No two days can be the same and it is common for events in the day, including emergency work, to require changes to the schedule. The challenge is to cater for overrunning work or new work items while keeping customer promises and also ensuring that you continue to operate in the most optimum way.

By utilising Kirona’s Job Manager as your mobile working solution integrated into Dynamic Resource Scheduling, you gain full visibility of the work being performed in the field. You can see in real-time potential delays and the impact that this will have on your intra-day schedule Rather than having to hold back emergency slots in your schedule or allocating emergency work on a first availability basis, DRS enables you to take a more efficient approach. As changes in the day occur, DRS re-evaluates the day’s plan, adjusting work allocation to take into account the emerging work or availability to ensure you maintain the most optimum work schedule across all available operatives.

Delivering a first time fix:

Not all jobs run to plan. A job can simply take longer than expected. The efficient way to deal with this is to provide the operative with the time they need to complete the task. This avoids an additional appointment being required and ensures that your original promise to the customer is kept.

Step one to increasing the rate of first time fix is ensuring that for each job you have the right operative, resources and time allocated. Key to this is an effective triage process that ensures you can define the key parameters used for scheduling work. Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) enables you to define different categories of skills and qualification of each operative and to align this to job requirements ensuring you always send the right operative.

 

When complications or work variations arise, the seamless integration of Job Manager (JM) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), enables for this to be immediately notified to planners. With full visibility across all operatives of the day’s work and its progression, they are able to quickly sanction job variations and realign work items to ensure other customer commitments are met.