The Acceleration of the Digital Transformation (podcast highlight)

Nov 04, 2020 • Features • Digital Transformation • Salesforce • The Field Service Podcast • Covid-19 • Remote Services

Gary Brandeleer of Salesforce talks to the Kris Oldland, Field Service News about how we are seeing unprecedented acceleration of digital transformation in the field service sector...

Want to hear more head over to our podcast library @ www.fieldservicenews.com/podcasts

REMOTE SERVICE DELIVERY IS NOW TABLE STAKES

In a recent exclusive Field Service News white paper authored by Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News we asked an important question “Do we need to redefine the value proposition of service, as we look towards moving towards a post pandemic world?”

It is an important discussion, one that many senior leaders in our industry are currently having, yet it is also a topic that is evolving and emerging in real-time as we piece together what the new normal looks like for our sector.

To build upon the white paper, which had a particular lens looking at remote services and do we move to remote first as a default in our industry, Salesforce’s Gary Brandeleer joined Kris Oldland on the Field Service Podcast to further drive the discussion forwards.

Brandeleer and the team at Salesforce have, of course had huge experience dealing with digital transformation and in the above excerpt from that conversation, Brandeleer and Oldland touch on whether the acceleration we've seen in the last six months towards digital transformation projects is truly unprecedented.

This is perhaps the biggest factor that will shape the way we view field service delivery both in terms of the value proposition and operational delivery. It is not only the leap forward that has been made, but it is also the rapidity at which almost all of us in the industry moved forward simultaneously that has caused such seismic shifts in our thinking.

As we saw in the last highlight from this podcast, we saw conversations go from “this is on our roadmap in five years’ time,” to “we need this now, how quickly can we implement it?”

"We were sending people onsite, now we are doing remote assistance. Can we do other things as well? Can we now invest in outcome-based services and push towards servitization and other things like this?"

Gary Brandeleer, Salesforce

"I would say the field service world has been quite often protected from rapid disruption, like this,” Brandeleer commented.

“We've always had time to implement things [in field service], even the optimization engine that we provide to companies. The companies who are implementing such systems know and understand the benefits the solutions will bring, but they also know that it's important to take that time when you are dealing with technicians, when you're dealing with mission critical business.

“You need to take your time to change such important things and make them more efficient over a long period of time.”

“I don't think I've ever really seen such a disruption where, from one week to another, these technologies literally became table stakes. I think that what we see as well is, of course, COVID accelerated many, many other trends for field service. I think what's happening is that the one trend that we seek from that disruption, also is this agility that you see now in field service.

“We were sending people onsite, now we are doing remote assistance. Can we do other things as well? Can we now invest in outcome-based services and push towards servitization and other things like this?" Brandeleer asks.

"These trends have been there for a while and people have been talking about it, but not really acting very fast. Are we now going to see the mentality of ‘well, we did it for remote assistance, we implemented in two weeks, and we have return on investment here – can’t we just do that for other things that we wanted to do?’ The world is in such a chaotic state right now, we must take this opportunity to drive more acceleration of things that we wanted to do, things that were part of a roadmap, but now we want to accelerate them.

“I think this digital transformation that's out there which traditionally can take quite a while for many field service companies, I think people are going to take as a table stakes now as well. Now companies want these digital transformation projects to happen very, very fast. They went time to value and that's another trend that came out of this COVID-19 disruption."

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