What Exceptional Field Service Looks Like

Nov 10, 2020 • Features • Cognito iQ • White Paper • Digital Transformation

Field service leaders are not always aware of the potential for improvement, or the scale of the opportunities offered. This third excerpt from a recent white paper published by Cognito iQ offers an in-depth analysis of the three pillars of exceptional field service...

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whAT EXCEPTIONAL FIELD SERVICE LOOKS LIKE

When operations are working well, there may be no incentive to look for additional improvements. It is easy to improve where there are many obvious flaws, but finding the small ‘marginal gains’ that might improve service by a fraction here and a fraction there is much more difficult. However, in our experience, even limited action can deliver significant value. For example, our customer Ged Cranny, at Konica Minolta has calculated that saving just one minute in travel time per visit, over a year, equates to one engineer in headcount.

There are three areas in which service leaders can influence the outcome and strive for exceptional service.

Operational Productivity

Even before Covid-19, the UK was suffering from some of the lowest rates of productivity in the world. Research by PwC shows that if the UK were to catch up with Germany, it would boost the economy by £180bn per year. Some of that £180bn could be yours. How much would it help your bottom line if you were to improve operational productivity by, say, 5%?

In our experience, even field service operations that are working well can find 5% improvements when they set out to become exceptional, and improvements of more than 20% are not uncommon.
If you want to make tomorrow’s field service more productive, you will need to study how efficiently and effectively you have been working to date, identify opportunities to improve and act to make changes. One way to start is to compare your plan for each shift with the reality.

For example, were task durations as you expected?

If tasks took longer than planned, you may have unhappy customers and a big overtime bill.
If they took less time, are you paying workers who have gone home early?

If you have detailed data on how tasks were performed, you can analyse whether task durations were as expected.

Does this vary by type of task or by type of customer?
Does it vary by region or is the difference down to specific technicians?
And what are the trends over time?

Once you have answers, you can act. If you find that you have been allowing too much time for tasks, reducing task durations in the plan will enable you to get more done in the day. But by what percentage can you reduce durations before they become too short? Also, taking action isn’t limited to altering the plan. For example, if there are some technicians who are slower than others, is there an issue you could resolve with training, knowledge sharing or technical development? Conversely if one region is performing better, does one regional manager have a best practice that you can roll out to the company as a whole?

It is the combination of many small changes of this type, and the continual feedback loop of measurement, analysis and execution that will gradually and incrementally improve operational productivity. The theory is simple - continuous improvement is a principle of lean manufacturing now widely used in other disciplines - but the reality is more complex. It is vital to know how to measure success:

Which metrics are useful and which aren’t?
Which can be accurately determined and which can’t?
How metrics interact.
How setting goals and targets will affect how employees go about their jobs.

For example, you wouldn’t want to drive up the number of visits per day your field workers attend, if that meant fewer first-time fixes, or reduced customer satisfaction scores. You also wouldn’t want to implement changes that increase the cost of service by more than you are gaining in productivity terms. The goal is to find a combination of improvements that act to raise standards in all areas.

Some service companies are starting to implement 'shift left', a practice adapted from software development, which moves as many tasks as possible to the left, that is, earlier in the process. The approach is becoming more widespread in IT service in particular, but can also be used by field service companies to empower call centre staff and customers to access repair and maintenance information and proactively solve simple problems without needing a technician to visit. Shift left not only improves field service productivity, but by empowering customers it can also improve customer experience and, by empowering first tier support to do more, it leaves skilled technicians with the more interesting, complicated tasks to resolve, which can improve employee engagement too.

Customer Experience

Field service organisations know that customer experience is important. In a recent survey, 76% said that improving customer experience was their top strategic initiative. However, it can be a long way from setting a strategic initiative to actually delivering a great experience to customers. How can you turn your strategy into tactical actions, and then ensure that your employees are acting according to your plan?

Delivering a great customer experience means paying attention to every interaction the customer has with your company, whether that is through using your products and services or via your website, call centre, billing or social media. For many customers, a visit from a field service technician is the only time they will see a representative of your company face to face, so it’s clear that a visit is loaded with opportunities to delight - or disappoint - your customer.

Your field service technicians will need more than just engineering ability and knowledge: soft skills such as communications, interpersonal skills, decision making and problem solving are all important too. Training will be key, as will empowering your field-based workers to make decisions that help the customer, even if they sometimes have to bypass official processes. If the process isn’t working for the customer, it should be viewed as a bottleneck and, therefore, an opportunity to improve. Getting feedback from your technicians will help you understand the customer experience, as they often know where the problems are with the processes.

Another approach is for senior field service managers to spend time out in the field, to experience a day in the life of a field technician, and understand the impact that complex processes, organisational bureaucracy, or a lack of end-to-end service planning can have on the customer experience.

Of course, it is even more important to get feedback directly from customers. Many field service companies add a customer survey to the visit process, whether carried out by the technician on site, or as a follow up. Typically, companies use a simple metric such as the ‘Net Promoter Score’ (NPS), a widely used technique for assessing customer advocacy. However, it’s not sufficient to just track the score - you need to conduct analysis and take action.

Analysis will help you to understand questions such as how do you turn Passive customers into Promoters? How do you leverage Promoters’ willingness to recommend you? And how do you prevent Detractors from leaving and from telling others about their poor experience? You also need to define what counts as a good NPS score. Benchmarking against others in your industry, as well your own best efforts will get you a clearer picture. And the analysis doesn’t end there. You also need to consider what to do about the customers who won’t even engage with the question and give you a score. How do you drive up participation? Additionally, you need to have a method in place for analysing the free-form comments that customers add, as this is where you will gain some of the greatest insight

A high NPS is linked with business growth. A study by Bain and Company, who developed the NPS, shows that the organisations with the highest NPS in an industry sector had more than twice the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of those with average scores. Achieving a high NPS shouldn’t be a goal in itself, but profitable organic growth cannot long be sustained without doing so.

Employee Engagement

Field service is all about people. If your employees are unhappy and disengaged, it’s unlikely they will support your operational productivity initiatives, or be able to deliver the exceptional customer experiences you are hoping for.

Our customers tell us that some of their biggest challenges in improving operational productivity comes not only from needing to measure, analyse and implement change, but also from knowing how to influence and guide workers to behave in the most productive way. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to back this up; study after study has linked employee engagement to improved productivity, customer satisfaction, growth and profitability, as well as a whole raft of other business metrics, including employee retention; innovation; safety incidents; product quality and defects; shrinkage and theft; and sickness and absenteeism.

Strategy expert Erica Olsen talks about how businesses often fail to implement their strategy because they don’t manage their employees to deliver on the plan. She says “High-performance organizations accomplish extraordinary results, and they do it with ordinary people. The key to achieving is to structure an organisation so ordinary people can regularly accomplish outstanding things.” The performance of the service organisation can be seen as the sum of the performance of individual field-service focused workers - from the call centre and field service technicians, through to those involved in logistics.

"Connected devices are reducing some of the tasks that field workers need to do, such as routine maintenance checks, but they are creating new service methods, which means that workers will need to develop new analytical skills..."

Working to improve employee engagement is particularly important in field service for a number of reasons. Firstly, remote workers can feel isolated, and engagement strategies can help them feel connected to the back office and part of a team, whether that is at a local or regional level, or by job specialisation.

Secondly, there is a skills gap in field service, and an aging workforce. Research shows that 50% of large businesses in the UK report difficulties in hiring, with skilled trades, drivers, technicians and engineers being among the most difficult jobs to fill. Additionally, technology is changing the skills needed on the job. Connected devices are reducing some of the tasks that field workers need to do, such as routine maintenance checks, but they are creating new service methods, which means that workers will need to develop new analytical skills. Technologies such as virtual or augmented reality are also changing the ways that workers carry out their tasks. Workers may see these new skill requirements as a threat, however companies that are good at engaging their employees see these developments as opportunities to upskill.

Filling the skills gap requires retaining older engineers by retraining and reskilling, as well as attracting new younger engineers. Field service needs to be positioned as an enticing career option, with opportunities to learn, grow and develop. Many organisations are also filling the gaps with freelance workers, so it’s important to have well defined processes so you can on-board quickly and ensure that contractors are operating to your high standards.

Given that, in the UK, we’re lagging in terms of operational productivity, it’s not surprising that we are also lagging in terms of employee engagement too: a recent survey shows that employees in the UK recorded average engagement scores of just 45% compared to 54% in France, 56% in Australia and 60% in the USA. Another shows that more than a quarter of UK employees admit they aren’t performing to their best ability at work, compared to just one in five employees in Europe. Highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability, on average. No field service organisation can afford to ignore this opportunity.

Look out for the final feature in this series coming next week where we outline a seven-step plan to achieve exceptional field service.

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