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Smarter customer engagement, an interactive customer service hub and streamlined knowledge management are some of the enhancements Microsoft will introduce to its Dynamics CRM platform in 2016. Microsoft Dynamics General Manager Bill Patterson gave Field Service News Editor-in-Chief  Kris Oldland the low down on the innovations .

Having spent 2015 focusing on productivity improvements in Microsfot Dynamics, Microsoft is turning to customer service experience enhancements in 2016.  "It has probably been one of the most significant areas in innovation and investment we've been making in Microsoft," Patterson states.  "We see that organisations today are operating still like they were ten years ago. They are still trying to compete on the basis of price or on the strength of their product or service that they have for their offerings. But key data is really beginning to emerge that a lot of consumers today are largely beginning to stay with brands due to the customer experience and we see customer service playing a huge role in that realm of differentiation."

We have all been part of good customer services experiences but those that we remember oftentimes are the most extremely bad ones. What we are trying to do for enterprises today is really help them understand their customers, help them engage with their customers and help them empower their employees to really drive and centre that degree of engagement."

"While organisations may understand this dichotomy, the reality that they find themselves in today is that a lot of their tooling is dated, a lot of their systems have not been modernised to keep up with the needs of their customers and they are struggling with the proliferation and explosion of channels in the digitalisation of the service experience like never before."

Indeed,  in the modern world of the empowered consumer building a cohesive customer experience that translates across the multitude of different touch points with your organisation is critical. "This notion of digitalisation and the empowered consumer really is creating a juxtoposition with the enterprise, because the agent today is mostly dealing with technology and screens that were built for the last decade of computing."

 

This presents one of two key challenges for today's service-oriented organisations.  While the challenge to deliver the level of service excellence is spread across a growing number of channels, simultaneously there is the challenge of overcoming high employee churn rates within customer service roles which Microsoft analysis of labour statistics around the customer service role both in the US and the UK has revealed as worryingly high at around 27%. "If you think that one in four of your team is turning over every twelve months increasingly it's a really struggling proposition to keep employees engaged and empowered to ultimately to deal with customers. "

"And that meta-trend - the ability to engage with customers and to empower employees - is really what's driving Microsoft, what's driving our innovation force behind our set of releases."

With their latest roll out their Dynamics platform, Microsoft is looking to resolve these challenges with three new elements that Patterson describes as being at the centre of that employee empowerment and customer engagement problem set for an organisation. Perhaps the biggest of these changes, and one that is likely the headline grabbing development, is a complete overhaul of the user experience.

"Most CRM systems have been built over time with this notion of the relationship and relationships take time to emerge and unfold for an organisation," explains Patterson. "So it's s oftentimes that a CRM system is designed with lots of data, lots of forms and lots of views. For organisations who need to keep up with high scale but low amount of data within an interaction there was a dichotomy between the optimised user experience and the user experience we find today in most CRM systems."

"So we went back to the drawing board and back to the core of the user experience itself and designed what we think is the most productive user experience for customer service agents on the planet."

A bold statement indeed.  So what is the detail behind the hyperbole?

Interactive Service Hub

The UX Microsoft has introduced is called the interactive service hub. It has the ability to handle large screens of information, and to take a screen and easily turn it into an interaction. It's a technology that many will be familiar with in social solutions, Patterson readily admits. However bringing it into the customer service team at large to help them engage across all the digital channel - web, social email and so on - could be a very powerful tool.

"There is also a focus on building much tighter integration between what Microsoft refer to as Tier One agents (those who have to deal with the most volume) and Tier Two agents (those who have to deal with the escalations coming from the tier one team).  This could prove an important aid in increasing efficiency resulting in speedier resolutions for customers.

 

That interplay between tier one and tier two today for most organisations is where you see the highest degree of latency in closing a business operation. It is our belief that if we can bring the tier one and tier two teams together in a way that information is continuous and seamless throughout a service funnel, then we could help teams react, respond and resolve issues much easier than before.

Smarter customer engagement

2016 will see the release of what Microsoft calls smarter customer engagement.  It's an interesting concept that builds upon their own social engagement technology while addressing what is perhaps a key flaw. "What sentiment and social screens have proven is that it's a signal, a belief at a point in time but it may not get to the full unearthing of a customer perspective on things," Patterson begins. "So in addition to some advances we're making in the social engagement side we're introducing our Voice of Customer solution." This is based on some tech acquired last spring to go to the next level of voice-of-the-customer and feedback as part of the business process."

"When you combine the sentiment analytics with the enriched information on an interaction or on a survey perhaps, organisations can further understand their customers in a way that's not just only a point in time or what they might have said on a social network. The combination of these two is how we see organisations truly coming together to engage in new ways with their customers."

Knowledge capture and management

The third of the new developments particularly caught my attention as it is a tool capable of helping tackle a significant issue being faced by many, many field service companies: the challenge of capturing the knowledge, locked away in the heads of a workforce rapidly set to walk away from the business as they reach retirement age.

Again the challenge is two-fold, firstly there is the capture of this knowledge to ensure it remains in the organisation and secondly there is the need to make this knowledge easily accessible.

 

Microsoft's knowledge capture platform incorporates a WYSISYG designer to allow for simple and easy creation of content, as you'd expect, but perhaps more importantly they have also included social collaboration tools which allow companies to bring teams of people together to work in tandem on the creation of an article.

The upshot of this is that either each article becomes less disputed or you create fewer articles authored by individual experts who have distinct points of view. Either way it makes for a more streamlined approach to developing a knowledge bank and when the aim is to help deliver quicker understanding to your workforce and swifter resolution to customer problems, then quality should always trump quantity.

This is also something that Microsoft are acutely aware, says Patterson, pointing out that most knowledge management solutions have been built more as knowledge aggregators which end up taking in so much volume and so much data that agents really get lost in the cloud of information.

"Often what happens is an organisation will spend so much time indexing and not enough time thinking about the meaningful information that helps drive an interaction to a resolution.  Over time the knowledge index becomes less and less trusted by the customer service team."

"So our focus was putting the knowledge into the core hands of the agents and the experts inside an organisation who can put the right information into the hands of the customer service interaction team so it can become a more thoughtful and ambient experience for an agent."

Supported by a powerful machine learning engine, the knowledge management tool analyses the content of what an interaction is about and pro actively surfaces and pushes the right knowledge into the hands of the agent whilst they are taking the call. This ability to place focused content intelligently in the right place at the right time could hugely improve resolution times within a service centre. However, the magic doesn't end there as the system essentially continues to refine itself through each interaction.

"Once that intersection between knowledge and interaction come together that binding, that fusion if you will, actually tunes the machine learning engine even further and enriches it even further this article solves this problem," enthuses Patterson.

Each of these developments are exciting in their own right but together it looks like Microsoft Dynamics 2016 is certainly shaping up to be an impressive update to the platform.

However, when it is bundled together with Office 365, Microsoft’s productivity suite, for a cost of between £40 and £95 depending on your own configurations, this becomes a platform offering fantastic value. Long may it continue.

 

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The latest developments in remote workforce management are helping companies to get more from their field service teams, explains Paul Ridden, CEO, SmartTask .

For field service companies that provide contracted, scheduled staff to client sites, workforce costs are a significant overhead, especially when you consider the constant pressure on margins and the need to provide innovative services to win new contracts.

Remote workforce management has been around for some time, helping companies to capture proof of time, attendance and work completed, enabling them to monitor the status of their teams centrally. Now systems are emerging that bring all of these components in to a single package along with the other key back office functions required to effectively manage field service teams. As a result, they can now provide complete peace of mind that personnel are safe while ensuring they are delivering the services agreed.

Such tools can work alongside systems including payroll, invoicing and rostering, using real-time data to verify timesheets, provide accurate proof of work and overcome scheduling challenges. This is helping to maximise profitability of contracts using the most appropriate employees, billing correctly and not overpaying. Meanwhile, it is possible to integrate intelligent rostering and control room to automate and streamline operational processes as well as reduce office-based administration costs.

 

Based on a framework of electronic proof and attendance it is becoming possible for existing staff located at client sites to effectively take on additional tasks such as inspections or audits, enabling organisations to provide areas of differentiation to clients and make best use of resources to boost profitability. There is also an opportunity to provide a tool to register an operational issue or risk, irrespective of the remote worker’s core function, with an effective process included to encourage and simplify such an action.

Using smart forms, via a mobile application, an employee can quickly complete and submit an incident report, which triggers an email escalation process sent to the appropriate department so they can deal with the problem immediately. This means supervisors and managers can have a live-view of any issues, failures or wastage with details electronically captured including photographic evidence where appropriate. A copy of the incident can also be sent to an online portal where it can be monitored and managed through its lifecycle while providing data for trend analysis via the management information generated.

These flexible smart forms can be configured for a wide range of uses including alerts, inspections, audits, requests, job acceptance and job completion. In particular, it is possible to implement an electronic compliance solution for health and safety, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COSHH hazardous substance procedures. These checks can replace existing manual processes to achieve immediate workplace compliance, while streamlining administration and saving money.

Typically, a paper-based solution is not only time consuming and costly to manage across multiple sites, but is easy to falsely or fraudulently complete. In contrast, a smart form registers the exact time it was completed and with signature capture shows which employee undertook the check. Furthermore, all the data is delivered to the online portal, so it is collected electronically in real-time without having to post hard copies and have someone collate manually.

The latest developments in remote workforce management is evolving beyond simply proof of attendance. It is providing the potential to enhance business performance and help overcome some of the operational challenges faced by companies in the field service marketplace in terms of revenue growth, customer satisfaction and compliance.

 

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Over 300 service companies are now using its paperless 3-in-1 JobWatch field service solution, reports UK mobile workforce management solutions BigChange.

Launched three years ago, JobWatch was developed to give field service businesses of any size everything they need to plan, manage, schedule and track their mobile workforce. The easy to use, simple to implement system combines back-office, mobile app and real-time vehicle and resource tracking in a single cloud based solution.  It provides end-to-end management of the entire service process from quotation all the way through to invoice including intelligent planning and scheduling. A whole mountain of paperwork is replaced with automated workflows on the JobWatch app that guides mobile engineers or drivers through all their tasks.

According to BigChange’s CEO and founder Martin Port, JobWatch aims to bring mobile workforce management technology to the thousands of small, medium and large businesses that still operate using manual paper based processes:

“Historically this technology has been out of reach for SMEs given the cost and perceived complexity. JobWatch is a game-changer for these businesses, giving them the power of a ‘big enterprise’ system but with incredible simplicity, affordability and customisability.”

Among the users are nationwide hire companies Nixon and Elliott Hire who are using JobWatch to streamline the servicing of equipment and portable toilets  across the UK. The Forestry arm of Komatsu uses JobWatch to manage the servicing of huge timber felling and processing machinery.

JobWatch is proving to be a growth catalyst for startups such as waste and recycling specialist Clearabee who adopted the system back in 2013 when they had a single vehicle. Their business has grown rapidly and the company now serves over 30,000 nationwide clients across 15 sites with a team of 50 employees.

The return-on-investment for users is significant, says Port. “A perfect example is dp Doors.  JobWatch has brought their business 25% more revenue each month, thanks to smarter scheduling and greater productivity across their 23 strong field service team. This equates to an extra 4 jobs per engineer per week. Admin in their back office has been reduced by 15% and this time saved is being dedicated to value-adding sales and marketing activities. Failed jobs have been reduced by 50%. Their annual fuel savings from JobWatch are in excess of £5000 and this saving alone is paying for their JobWatch system.”

 

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It's been a long standing reply to companies seeking to put their press releases in a publication I've been working on whether it be in field service, finance, insurance or any of the other various industries i've worked in in my years in publishing...

"I'm happy to look at anything you think is news worthy" I would say "however, please try and make it something of interest, our readers aren't generally interested in whether you've moved office etc"

And then along come ServiceMax who basically did just that, however they did it in such a fantastic way with this video that I felt it was worth breaking my hard fast rule on this one occasion. Why? well not only does the video have a great sense of humour to it (which is always a sure fire way through this wizened old journalist's gruff exterior) but actually while ServiceMax hopping from one side of the great city of London to another may be the catalyst for this video, the story that lies within it is actually something that I think will be of interest to readers of fieldservicenews.com i.e. the rapid rise of a field service software provider that have gone from start-up to a leading organisation within their sector within less than a decade.

 

Understanding what has made so many field service organisations turn to ServiceMax to help them move into the standards of service expected by 21st Century customers is perhaps akey indicator into what the challenges are for field service companies and how our industry is evolving.

So for the first time in my publishing career. Ladies and gentlemen I'm here to announce ServiceMax have moved offices. Watch the film above to find out more.

 

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Enterprise mobility company Kony Inc. has launched a mobile solution with SAP-Certified Integration to help companies modernise their field service processes for mobile devices, IoT and wearables.

The Kony Mobile Field Service solution for SAP Business Suite is a set of three new apps and implementation services designed to help businesses move away from a paper-based field service operation to a completely mobilised environment within 30 days.

“We are seeing more organisations turn to mobility to streamline processes and increase productivity; however, many are still held back by expensive upgrades and limited resources,” said Dave Shirk, president, Product, Strategy and Marketing for Kony. “With Kony Mobile Field Service solution, enterprises using SAP Business Suite can now quickly mobilise the field team without investing in expensive upgrades to their SAP systems, or having to rip and replace their entire backend infrastructure. With mobility, they can now process more work orders, improve their service levels and first time fix rates; and ultimately increase revenue by introducing the ability for technicians to upsell and process payments in the field.”

The solution is a single integrated suite that optimises the entire field service business process. This enables businesses to maximise efficiency while processing notification, planning and tracking, and executing work orders all in a single integrated app suite.  It is built on the Kony Mobile Platform, and extensive experience and expertise based on helping global companies and brands mobilise their field service business processes.

One of the first users to deploy the solution is Irish utility company ESB.  "Servicing more than two million customers, we needed a mobile solution that our field technicians could rely on to help streamline work orders and improve overall efficiency,” said Eugene O’Sullivan, Networks Mobile programme manager, ESB. “We turned to Kony to help mobilise our field services because data is very important in our industry and Kony’s solutions offered the data synchronisation we needed. With our Mobile Work Order solution, technicians have the ability to view work order details, see location maps, review meter details, and record data to complete the work orders.”

Kony is a silver partner in the SAP PartnerEdge program and provides enterprises using SAP systems the flexibility and agility they need to use these apps as is or they can customise the front-end application design and integrations with their back-end systems to fit their requirements. In addition to SAP, Kony can also mobilise other enterprise applications such as Oracle, Microsoft, Siebel, and Salesforce to drive process improvements.

 

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Commercial catering and refrigeration equipment service provider Serviceline has transformed its field service operations with the Maxoptra dynamic scheduling and planning system from Magenta Technologies.

Serviceline has completed stage one of the project to streamline its operations by providing better visibility of its mobile resources and availability of service engineers’ time.  By automating 90% of field service tasks, the company now has time to focus on enhancing customer service.

Serviceline has 120 engineers collectively possessing more than 400 different skill sets. Planning, matching and allocating work to the best qualified service engineer is very challenging, especially when new jobs come in during the day, which continually changes priorities.

“We had this vision of what we wanted the business to achieve. For us, customer service is key. It’s all about communication, the relationship you build and maintain with your customers. We always had a belief that if we could automate the planning and scheduling process to quickly provide the information our people needed to make the best decisions, then they would have more time to talk to customers,” said Steve Elliott, Managing Director of Serviceline.

“Maxoptra is the embodiment of that concept. It is the first and only dynamic scheduling and planning system that we have found which does that, where there is the programming functionality to take away 90 percent of what our staff had to do manually.”

Elliot continued: “It used to take six months for a new planner or dispatcher to learn fully how to use the two booking systems we used to manage the complexity. Now we have complete visibility of where our engineers are and the status of each job. This allows us to consider options and make the best routing and planning decisions quickly.”

The software is fully integrated with the existing SaaS telematics platform, to provide a map-based real-time display of vehicle location, job status and work schedule. Serviceline can now have optimised schedules from Maxoptra sent directly to in-cab terminals, allowing the field engineers to navigate to their jobs and report their progress in real time. The system also highlights variances from plan.

 

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Facilities and maintenance services provider Arcus Solutions Ltd has achieves a 20% improvement in productivity following deployment of Aeromark Optmatics mobile workforce management software.  Additionally, services levels are up 40%.

In 2013 Arcus went to the market to look for a new system that would help improve the management of the maintenance service to their customers and optimise the productivity throughout  their 155 strong field service engineer workforce.

Aeromark Optimatics was selected as it offered smart technology that would  provide clear visibility of field operations and optimisation of the whole service process, minimising operational costs whilst at the same time improving service levels.

After the first six months of full operation, not only has the cost base been optimised but the service levels delivered have improved by 40%.

“Aeromark’s agile approach combined with the power and flexibility of their Optimatics technology has enabled our entire business process to be optimised and aligned with best practice. This has resulted in over 50% reduction in touch-points, statutory paper records have been replaced with electronic documentation and we have seen a significant, reduction in fuel and wasted time” said Parag Gogate, Head of Projects and Quality at Arcus.

“As a result of the considerable success of this project, we have decided to roll out Optimatics as our standard enterprise software across the whole group” continued Parag.

Optimatics provides a complete mobile workforce management solution for the entire process of service delivery, from scheduling, workflow driven mobile applications through to vehicle tracking. It provides Arcus’s administrative employees a more consistent approach to working, which enables them to plan reactive jobs more efficiently, by sending accurate customer data directly to the Aeromark mobile application.

Roger Marks, Managing Director of Aeromark said “We are very pleased with the results from the deployment at Arcus Solutions who have not only enthusiastically embraced the technology but also the associated changes in business process. We look forward to working with Arcus on the next phase of the wider project.”

 

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The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced a review of compliance with consumer law in the cloud storage  services sector. While the review is focused solely on establishing compliance with consumer law, it is being driven partly by the European Commissions's strategy to build a "Digital Single Market" so may ultimately have wider implications for business cloud services. 

In the UK, the review has been prompted by consumer concerns about price and service changes for cloud storage. Cloud storage is used by a growing number of UK consumers to store photographs, music and documents: an estimated 40% of UK adults use cloud storage services.

The CMA review of consumer law compliance in this important sector follows some reports of practices and terms being used that may breach consumer law. For example, the CMA reports it has heard about consumers being surprised by significant price increases and by reductions to unlimited storage capacity deals after contracts have been agreed. The CMA is also aware of concerns about the loss or deletion of some consumers’ data.

The CMA’s review will assess how widespread these practices are, whether they breach consumer law and how they are affecting consumers. The review is open for responses until 15 January 2016. The CMA wants to hear from businesses about their practices and from consumers and industry experts about their experiences.

Nisha Arora, CMA Senior Director, Consumer, said: “Cloud storage is a dynamic and growing sector which is already highly valued by consumers. “We want to hear from business, interested organisations and consumers about their experiences, to assess whether companies understand and comply with consumer law and whether cloud storage services are working well for consumers as a result.

“If our review finds breaches of consumer protection laws we will take further action to address these which could include enforcement action using our consumer law powers, seeking voluntary change from the sector or providing guidance to business or consumers.”

The CMA review may ultimately have implications for business because it is being driven in part by the European Commission's strategy to build a 'Digital Single Market. This builds on the previous European Cloud Computing Strategy, which was designed to speed up and increase the use of cloud computing across all economic sectors and included work on developing ‘safe and fair’ terms and conditions.  The Digital Single Market strategy aims to develop legislative proposals for simple and effective cross-border contract rules for consumers and businesses.

The CMA report is expected to be published in May 2016.

 

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Infor, the provider of cloud-based business applications for specific industry sectors, has announced Mobility for Field Service (MFS), an application that allows customers to use its M3 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from anywhere via a mobile device.

Mobility for Field Service v15.1.0 takes work orders that have been assigned to users in Infor M3 and displays them in a clear, easily digestible format that is easily understood on a mobile device. Colour-coded status indicators show how far each assignment has been processed, and workflow settings can help the user choose the most logical way in which to proceed with the assignment. Within each assignment, an intuitive layout of key data helps the user access the relevant information quickly and easily. This allows field users to simplify operations by creating a streamlined approach for working with M3 in the field.

The mobile solution uses Infor Ion middleware for transactional integration between the user’s mobile device and M3.  A run-time license for ION is provided to customers that are not currently using the middleware system.

MFS is currently available for tablets running on Android 4.4 or later and Windows 8.1 or later, as well as personal computers running the Windows operating system. Support for the iOS operating system is currently planned during 2016.

Innovative components include: integration for Infor document management, interconnected data sourcing and reporting, and an administrative toolbox that incorporates quick configurability features.

“As the equipment-centric industries continue to evolve and modernise, the technologies that support day-to-day operations must also mature and keep pace with the user. It is with this in mind that we created Infor Mobility for Field Service, which facilities access to strategic data from wherever the user may be located,” said Brian Dunks, product director, M3 Product Management, Infor. “This solution has been thoughtfully designed in response to the needs of our customers, to ensure that all users, including field technicians, are suitably equipped with the same high-quality tools that are utilised throughout the enterprise.”

 

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