The Service Council published some interesting data over the past several months that emphasize some opportunities and challenges in field service management in general and in shifting to a remote service model specifically.
One infographic highlights the role that field service management plays in service innovation. According to the Service Council data, top planned tech investments for 2024 are artificial intelligence (AI), business intelligence (BI), and field service management. FSM is outpacing CRM and ERP in market share. The top focus areas for digital transformation across service organizations are currently technology interoperability, customer touchpoint management, and worker enablement (including training process efficiency). These insights indicate there is still a lot of work going on behind the scenes to get data and technicians aligned in useful ways.
Their State of Remote Support report includes some additional insight into technology priorities and challenges. For example, two in three companies lack the dedicated resources to achieve remote support efficiencies by innovating through IoT-based machine learning models or AI.
Related to that, the inability to predict and prevent why remote support was necessary was the second most common reason for challenges in this area, and there was generally an indication of low success with more proactive approaches to field service and support.
According to the report, “The motivation for shifting left is the simultaneous improvement in customer experience, asset uptime and service costs by resolving events earlier in the process and with less touch points – essentially removing waste. However, the reported challenges and the top 3 focus areas going forward (Knowledge Management, Employee Training, AI-Assisted Diagnostics) are geared to mitigate the impact from customer-triggered events. Best-performing organizations will be the ones that integrate data, processes and technology to understand the reason for service events, anticipate their occurrence and proactively influence the resolution path.”
The Service Council also noted that data is being underutilized. Many companies cannot use IoT data at scale, and roughly a third noted that they could not really consume their own knowledge base effectively to help solve problems. Asset proliferation is making this worse.
A Bold Vision
Reading these numbers brought to mind my recent discussion with Clinten van der Merwe, SVP and Head of Global Service and Project Management at TOMRA Recycling.
Clinten mentioned a pretty bold goal during that interview, relative to service sustainability: “[W]e set the strategy that by 2035 will be fully digital, which is very ambitious. I know … but as I mentioned before, the challenge is that … we don't want to sit in 10 years’ time selling machines, but unable to support our customer.”
Clinten described a potential future where technicians are working remotely, fixing machines from coffee shops while wearing flip-flops. This was part of what he called the company's North Star vision. You can question how aggressive or realistic this goal is, but if you are a field service organization ramping up digital transformation, hoping to shift toward more proactive and remote service, and working to become more attractive to today’s talent, that description is not entirely off the mark.
The obstacles outlined in the Service Council data can stymie that vision. As he put it, you need the right digital tools and processes in place, along with a lot of automation. Putting a strong foundation in place – technologically, process-wise, and culturally – is critical to making that remote service vision a tangible reality.
Moreover, that type of vision requires not only the means to provide remote troubleshooting and remote service, but also the ability to pull useful insights from those service encounters, and do so in a way that can help service organizations illustrate their value to customers in a service delivery model where they may not physically encounter the technician (often or at all). On the bright side, customers are primarily focused on whether or not a machine is running, and if you have the right tools in place, you can more easily sell them on that idea of paying for uptime rather than break-fix.
“And that's what it comes down to, is really saving money and cost to our customers, that overall total cost of ownership, but getting to a place where you can actually put on a piece of paper that you're guaranteeing a certain level of uptime availability,” Clinten said.
The warning in the Service Council data is that companies are having trouble getting useful information out of their existing systems, and that they still have integration work to do. If your technicians are remotely recalibrating machines to get ahead of problems that would otherwise result in downtime, you must be able to show what they did, why they did it, and why that is important and valuable to the customer. Without interoperable tools in place that can generate those reports easily, a remote service or digital transformation initiative can struggle to gain traction.
My conversation with Clinten covered a lot more ground, including the importance of getting management to see field service as a key revenue stream and the cultural changes involved in this type of transformation. You listen to the entire conversation here.