UNSCRIPTED Ep. 381
Sarah Nicastro attended Field Service Next Europe 2026 in Amsterdam last week. What follows are six things that stood out, drawn from sessions she attended and conversations she had. This isn’t a comprehensive event recap. It’s what stuck.
1. Creating memorable service impact starts with the employee
The focus on the frontline was a through line across all three days. Patrycja Sobera, SVP of Unisys, delivered a keynote on experience management that made the case clearly: shifting from SLAs to XLAs means looking beyond what you committed to deliver and asking how that delivery actually made the customer feel.
Patrycja shared the story of her most recent ride-along with a technician in Sydney and her goal to do at least one per quarter. No substitute for it, she said. She also brought the concept to life in the room. An envelope under a seat, a prize for whoever found it. A small moment that turned a session into an experience. That’s exactly the point.
The reminder underneath all of this: we’re asking a lot of frontline employees right now. Roles are shifting, technology is ramping up fast, customer expectations are rising. We need to be listening just as hard as we’re asking.
2. If you want higher service value, you have to accept higher risk
Anna Jern-Houttu, VP of Kalmar, was on a panel about aligning service with corporate growth goals. Her point was straightforward: no risk, no reward. If you want to move the needle on service value, that means taking on more risk as a business, and that’s a company-wide commitment, not something service can do alone.
Organizations know the potential is there. The reluctance to take the steps required to realize it is what stalls progress. As Anna put it, once you get out of the comfort zone, the momentum starts to build.
3. There’s no such thing as “the customer”
Eric Lepre of VMI Group was on a panel about evolving the service value proposition. His observation: we talk constantly about focusing on the customer, understanding the customer, but there is no single customer. There are individuals, personas, functions, and roles, each with different needs, different relationships with your services, and different definitions of value.
The work is in the mapping. And it has to happen internally too. Different functions within your business interact with those customer personas in different ways, and inconsistency across those touchpoints erodes trust fast. As AI becomes more embedded in service operations, the trust customers have in the people delivering service becomes even more valuable. Eric’s point was that trust has always mattered most, and that’s not changing.
4. Successful transformation is rooted in empowering people
Caroline Hagström Markland of Vattenfall shared a real-world case study on Tuesday that made the case for people-first leadership in practice, not just in principle. She opened with this: effort isn’t the problem, conditions are.
She described taking on a customer service function that wasn’t performing and beginning by simply asking employees what wasn’t working. Fix the conditions, then ask for performance. She talked about removing restrictive processes, giving people space to do the job in a way that works for them, and staying close as a leader during concentrated phases of change rather than delegating and stepping back.
Small things matter too. Music in the office. Post-it notes recognizing good work. Celebrating progress. These aren’t soft suggestions. They’re part of building an environment where people can actually do what you’re asking of them.
5. Service is still underinvesting in marketing and product management
Sarah moderated a panel on Tuesday on creating a unified commercial strategy for leveraging marketing and sales to scale service value. The panelists, Chiara Maiello and Chris Stotnicki of Syntagon, Andy Warner of Hitachi Energy, Mette Dalmanoglu of Philips, and Nick Vanderveer of IFS Nexus Black, each brought a different lens to the same problem.
The conversations that followed off the panel were just as interesting. The role of product management in service kept coming up. A service leader Sarah spoke with had just hired their first service product manager. It’s gaining traction. The service value proposition is as complex and layered as any physical product. It deserves the same investment in R&D, marketing, and commercial strategy. Many organizations aren’t there yet.
6. The debate over whether technicians should sell is far from settled
It came up across multiple sessions throughout the week and surfaced again on day three in a voice of the frontline panel. The industry is genuinely divided.
One of the more memorable framings: a technician arrives with an S on their chest. That S can stand for Superman or it can be a dollar sign. What the customer sees matters enormously.
The nuance is in the intent behind the ask. If the organization is genuinely working on behalf of the customer, asking a technician to suggest a replacement, flag an issue, or recommend a service isn’t really selling. It’s being consultative. The discomfort comes in when it’s rooted in quotas and bonuses, and that’s where the resistance is justified.
Future of Field Service ran workshops on this at both the New York and London events in partnership with Simon-Kucher, and the conversations were lively in both cities. London was more tense. Some attendees had strong views that technicians should not be selling at all.
There’s no clean answer yet. A complete division between technician and revenue feels too disconnected and misses genuine opportunities to serve customers well. Turning field engineers into constant lead generators isn’t the answer either. This is one worth continuing to explore, and Sarah’s looking for voices on both sides of the debate.
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