joanna.darby@ifs.com, Author at Future of Field Service

Sarah shares a synopsis of the topics discussed at the Future of Field Service Live Tour 2023 stop in Birmingham on May 17^th.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. So we just wrapped the Birmingham Future of Field Service Live Tour event, so our UK event, which is the second of this year, our first event was in Sydney in March. And I realized I did not do a recap podcast for the Sydney event, which is unfortunate, but I'm going to chalk up to the time difference and jet lag and get back to it with the UK event. So this episode is going to be a bit of a recap and some thoughts on some of the key points that came out of this week's UK event. I liked doing these reflection podcasts last year because I thought it was interesting to go back and see what some of the common themes were that came up globally at all of the events.

Hopefully the video, for those of you that are watching this, looks okay and the sound is okay, because I had some travel challenges getting to Europe and ended up not having my luggage. So thankfully I, of course, had my laptop with me in my carryon, but the camera and headphones that I typically use aren't with me, so we'll just make do.

All right, so the UK event, we had a great day of sessions, a combination of interview-based sessions where I welcomed some great speakers to share their stories, their challenges, their lessons learned with the attendees, and then we had time both in the morning and in the afternoon where we broke out into small groups and had some sort of workshop or round table discussions to allow everyone an opportunity to really engage and share some of their own experiences.

The first session we had was with Alec Anderson of Koolmill and Dr. Parikshit Naik of the Advanced Services Group from Aston Business School. The Advanced Services Group, if you aren't familiar, are experts in servitization, and they're actually based in Birmingham, and they work with a variety of companies who are on the servitization or advanced services journey, one of which is Koolmill. Some of you may be familiar with Alec if you listen to the podcast regularly, he was a guest a while back and talked about their journey to servitization, so he shared a bit of that with the audience. Koolmill is in the rice milling industry, and it's quite interesting not only how their equipment is a differentiator, disruptive to the industry in how it is different than traditional milling equipment, but also how the servitization business model, or the as a service model, has been disruptive to the industry.

Some of the things we talked about during that session, one is really how, for companies in manufacturing that have a really deep legacy or history, a lot of times it's the cultural shift, the mindset shift to or around servitization that can be one of the most challenging aspects, or at least one of the earliest challenging aspects, so we talked a bit about that. We of course talked about the different benefits of the ASA service model in Koolmill's example, so we talked about the benefit to the company, we talked about the benefit to its customers, and we talked about the benefit to the environment and how it ties in with sustainability.

We also talked about how companies need to really look at servitization as the continuum that it is and understand that it's not a mission you can embark on and complete quickly, it's something that you really need to plan for over a period of time and really consider the different layers of transition that take place. So the Advanced Services Group is a really good resource in that way because they have a lot of content broken down into what that whole continuum looks like and what some of the biggest considerations are, also some of the most common challenges that organizations make.

So Alec shared some of his own experience, and then Parikshit added to that from the perspective of a lot of the other organizations that the Advanced Services Group works with, and I think really the mindset or the culture shift was a big one, understanding that when you start looking at advanced service offerings, or servitized offerings, you need to realize you're not going to be selling those to the same people that you sold your traditional products and services to, so making sure that you know factor that into your process. Another part of what came up is making sure that you wisely select the first company, or the first couple of companies or customers that you work with on your offering. So how you pilot it, find folks that are a little bit more innovative in their own mindset that you can really partner with to make that offering a success before you start to position it to some of those that are maybe a little bit more skeptical or resistant to change.

So that was the first session. The second session was a conversation with Adam Barrett, who is the Operations Director at Mitie Fire and Security. And Mitie is, like many organizations, facing a lot of challenges related to talent scarcity. They're having a hard time recruiting and retaining field technicians, and they are working on looking at that from the perspective of over the long term, how do they bring more people into the industry, create apprenticeship programs, et cetera. But in the short term, Adam spoke about their need to really focus on maximizing their resource utilization. So they had some pretty inefficient processes in place related to how they scheduled, dispatched, how the technicians ran their daily, weekly, even monthly routes and workload, how information was exchanged, duplication in data entry, and things like that.

So again, it's interesting we tend to think of all of these, what's the latest and greatest things? Everyone wants to know, "How do we use ChatGPT?" But it's important to reflect back and make sure that there aren't some really fundamental inefficiencies taking place in your business, because that can be a really good place to start. So Mitie has deployed the IFS Planning and Scheduling Optimization solution, and Adam of course spoke about the pretty immediate and significant increases in efficiency, reduction in travel, ability to redistribute schedulers and dispatchers, those sorts of things.

But one of the things that I thought was really interesting about his session is he spoke about the impact that planning and scheduling optimization has had on the workforce's emotional wellbeing, and almost from a mental health perspective. He was explaining that the processes that were in place before, there was a lot of, not only a lot of wasted time, which in retrospect was probably quite frustrating for folks, but a lot of back and forth, and sometimes even technicians that would place blame on a scheduler or a dispatcher of, "Well, why would you send me here?" Or, "I don't want to do that job."

And he explained that taking some of that stress away, so taking those one-to-one interactions and opportunity for disagreement away, but also taking away the responsibility on the field technician to really juggle this huge workload where now they're just given one job at a time, it's always the next right job for the overall matrix of their SLAs, et cetera, has really reduced the stress on their employees and also allowed Mitie to give them some flexibility by factoring in to the planning and scheduling optimization solution this employee wants to start their day at this time, this employee wants to make sure that they are back home by this time, the solution can factor all of that in so that they're able to give some flexibility to their employees that has helped with change management.

So if there's an employee that wants to take their kids to school every day and they want to start their day at 9:30, Mitie is very supportive of that and they can factor that into the solution. If there's an employee that wants to be home by a certain time every day, same thing. I thought that was a really interesting and probably under discussed aspect of how we can use that technology to create some value for the employees.

The third speaker that we had was Venkata Reddy Mukku from Bruker Nano. Venkata also was on the podcast not too long ago talking about his commitment to people first leadership, and giving some specifics around how he accomplishes that. So he came to the event to share some of that story with our audience as well. To me it was such an important session because you can tell that there's this divide right now in service organizations where some are really embracing this mentality, they're understanding that we can't only be looking at customer experience, we need to be considering employee experience and making sure that our employees are engaged and satisfied. Not only is that imperative from a recruiting and retention standpoint, but it's truly the only way that we can accomplish the objectives we have to differentiate our business and grow through service.

So there's this group of companies, I think a growing group of companies and leaders, that have recognized that and are working really hard to put actions behind it, and then there's more of an old school group that is still really hanging on to that control type of leadership, how do we ring every last ounce of productivity out of people? Really not looking at people as people, but looking at them as resources or assets, and I think that divide was pretty clear in some of the discussions, at least that I was a part of at the event. And so I think sharing perspectives like Venkata's is so important because I really think he represents a growing group of leaders that are embracing today's realities and really leaning into what modern leadership looks like, and I think the leaders and the organizations that can do that are going to be leaps and bounds ahead of those who are holding onto the way it's always been, so really great session.

Next up was Ged Cranny with Konica Minolta. Jed came to talk about Konica's remote, what they call remote by default mission and how they're putting that in place. So Ged's been with Konica for a long, long time and had a lot of insights to share about how the business has evolved and the necessity for the business in really looking for ways to work smarter. So one of the things we talked about here is this misperception sometimes that when we start talking about remote service, the goal is to move entirely to remote service. With Konica, and with many others, that's not the case, they're not trying to get rid of field service or move to a remote only type of service environment, but they are looking to make sure that they are resolving simple issues remotely, making sure that they're maximizing first time fix, so using remote as a way to make sure that the technician that does need to go on site knows exactly what they're going to do and has any parts, tools, skills that they would need to resolve that issue when they're there.

So really, again, similar to Mitie's stories, taking a lot of those inefficiencies out of the business and just essentially modernizing what their service delivery looks like. So I think it's a journey, Konica is on a journey that a lot of companies either are on or will soon be on, because when you think about the intersection of customer expectations, talent shortages and talent evolution, and the technological capabilities that are quite readily available today, it just doesn't make sense to continue operating in a way where you're going onsite just to triage, and then going back to do a repair, or just not leveraging what's available.

And then the last session of the day was Adam Rodda of Bosch and Russell Masters with Amey, who did a session together with myself on change management. So what are some of the challenges with change management? We know it's important, everyone always says that that's the one area they wish they would've spent more time on, or that's the area where they got off course. If they look back like what's one thing you would do different, change management. But while we know that, it continues to be under prioritized. So we talked a bit about why that is, what some of the challenges are, and we talked about the need to really make employees feel involved, to really listen to employees and take their input and put it to action.

We talked about personalizing the why. We talked about making sure that you are doing pilots and early adopter programs so that you can get some real world input and feedback before you try and roll a solution out to the masses. We talked about leaning into power users and having them help with communicating the change to everyone else. So we talked through those things.

The part of the conversation that stuck out to me the most is really around this idea of we tend to think of, or have historically thought of change management as this project-based or program-based thing. So it's tied to, okay, we have this change coming, we need to make sure we're managing it, and there's this temporary focus put on communicating around that change and getting people to accept it. But in today's landscape, change is really ongoing. It's continuing to amplify, it's continuing to speed up, there's not really a point in sight, or probably in our future, where we're go back to more of a stable or a stagnant type of environment.

So with that being said, I think one of the most important parts of that conversation was around, do we need to stop thinking about it as change management? So stop thinking about it as this temporary thing, or this thing tied to a project, and start thinking more about how the topic itself ties in with leadership and company culture and really a mindset and processes and a culture of agility and flexibility and continual improvement. Because that's really what companies are focusing on today, whether that's through technological innovation, or whether that's through development of their value proposition, it's not really a finish line you're crossing and then taking a break from, it's something that's ongoing. So I think we need to really start redefining how we talk about change and what that looks like within our organizations.

It was a great day, it was at a venue called The Compound in Birmingham, which was a really, really cool space, and big shout out to Joanna Darby and the team that does all of the logistical planning for these events, it was really well put on, I think the attendees enjoyed themselves and enjoyed the ability to take some time away from their daily lives and come together as a community, which is something that I always am happy to see.

So that's a little bit of insight on what happened in our UK event, next up is Paris, and then we have Minneapolis on June 15th, Dusseldorf on June 21st, and Stockholm on September 7th. So if you're able, I hope you'll come and join us for one of the events. If you're not, you can always find content on all of these topics by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there make sure you sign up for the Future of Field Service INSIDER so that you can get a recap of our content delivered to your inbox every other week. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS, you can learn more by visiting ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Across sectors, companies are grappling with labor shortages, shifts in how, where and when people work, and a spike in retirements and quit rates in a number of critical professions. In field service, one very large group of people (the Baby Boomers) are retiring, and younger employees are entering the workforce with very different backgrounds, skills, and expectations.

The reality of more open positions than available workers has led to an arms race in perks and salaries to attract and keep employees. What is less discussed, though, is the thinking and evaluation companies are doing around what skills they want those new workers to have. A shift in priority from technical skill to softer skills, including communication, attitude, and teachability, is taking place according to many service leaders I speak with.

There was an interesting piece on The Hill earlier this year about the increasing importance of soft skills or social skills across different industries. LinkedIn reported that soft skills were featured in 78% of the jobs posted globally over the last few months. You can read the article here, but the overall theme was that when it comes to hiring, focusing on what potential employees know is going to be less important than how they approach the job and solve problems. How do they cope with uncertainty? Can they show empathy? Can they work collaboratively with clients and coworkers to address challenges?

The need to focus more on soft skills relates to something I have touched on in a few past articles and podcast interviews – vulnerability. In this case, though, customer vulnerability is the focus. Service technicians and customer support personnel are working with clients when they are in a vulnerable state, whether the customer is a homeowner with a broken furnace or a plant manager who had to shut down a line because of a problem with a machine.

To really deliver great customer service, technicians need to be able to read the room, so to speak. What is it the customer really needs? Fixing the immediate equipment problem is usually at the top of the list (and that should always remain a key focus, of course), but there are usually other priorities on the client's mind, too. In the case of the homeowner, maybe they are expecting out-of-town guests, or they are worried about heating their house during a big storm. For the plant manager, they might be under pressure to deliver a big order ahead of schedule.

Whatever those underlying needs are, they cause emotions that can lead service to fall short if not navigated adeptly by service personnel. This can mean something as simple as listening, acknowledgement, empathy, and clear communication. Sounds simple, right? What makes soft skills hard is that they can be far more challenging to “teach” than technical skills. And, according to many that I’ve interviewed recently, they are skills that many younger workers entering roles really lack.

Differentiation Hinges on Soft Vs. Technical Skills

What exacerbates the need to improve your team's skill sets around the non-technical aspects of service is that the advantages you may have around technical competency, scheduling/dispatching optimization, or diagnostic capabilities are leveling off. As service becomes more digitally focused and more of your competitors adopt the same service automation technologies, there are diminishing returns when it comes to competitive advantage based solely on technical skill. As such, now and into the future, your ability to differentiate through service will increasingly depend on your reliability, those interpersonal interactions, and delivering customer insights.

So, what types of soft skills are we talking about? There are a variety, and some needs differ based on the structure and scope of the frontline worker’s role (which is also changing, but that’s a topic for another article!). But while it may seem elementary, you should start with the basics of on-site behavior – think of anything necessary to ensure a customer feels respected and well cared for during a visit. This can include where to stand when ringing a doorbell, practicing polite client interactions – especially when a customer may be frustrated, and awareness of any missteps that could make a customer feel uncomfortable, unheard, or unappreciated.

Communication is key. Your technicians should be trained to keep clients informed of their service status – what the diagnosis is, how they will fix it, how long it will take, and what progress they are making. Answer questions as quickly and thoroughly as possible and follow up if there are any outstanding issues (like a part being on order). It’s one thing to have a service visit end without resolution, but another for the customer left wondering what the next step is.

Empathy is also incredibly important. You can’t really teach how to have empathy, but showing empathy may take some work, particularly in industries where technicians have been trained to be laser focused on the mechanics of fixing the problem at hand.

Be sure you are also encouraging curiosity and active listening. This is important in avoiding miscommunications or missed expectations and can also lead to uncovering new customer needs. Technicians should be skilled at asking customers what they want/need, making sure they understand their answer, and continuing the dialogue until a customer’s needs are fully uncovered, understood, and documented so that they won’t need to be repeated at another point in the customer journey.

Remember that fostering soft skills of managers is important, too. Many existing managers came from technician roles, so may have the same lack of these skills that’s evident in a generation of workers for which they weren’t nearly as important. Your technicians need good managers; they are going to have a hard time delivering friendly, empathetic, and competent service if they are exhausted or stressed out. If your scheduling, technician workloads, or performance measurement metrics are out of balance, that will eventually lead to a drop in service quality.

It looks like a lot of companies are already doing the hard work of fostering more soft skills. A McKinsey survey from 2021 found that the majority of companies were doing more skill building than prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As I mentioned before, this has also come up in a lot of conversations with service leaders and consultants – including in my conversation with Venkata Reddy Mukku at Bruker Nano Surfaces & Metrology, in this piece about the role of leaders in service transformation, and my article from last year on mental health and the workplace. This shift in how organizations are hiring and what skills they are trying to identify and foster may be a challenging one, but I am excited to see the impact it has on what the future of service looks like.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what skills (hard, soft or otherwise) you are looking for in your next generation of service technicians and leaders and how you are upskilling or reskilling your more tenured teams.

Sarah welcomes Tony Ulwick, strategy expert, innovation thought leader, author of Jobs to be Done: Theory to Practice and What Customers Want, founder, and CEO at Strategyn, to share why he views innovation as a science.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. We talk a lot on this podcast about outcomes-based service, today we're going to be talking about outcome-driven innovation. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Tony Ulwick, who is a strategy expert, innovation thought leader, author of two books, Jobs to Be Done: Theory to Practice, and What Customers Want, as well as the founder and CEO of Strategyn. Tony, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Tony Ulwick: Sarah, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So anything to add to your bio? Do you want to talk at all about your background, your journey, and any context for folks?

Tony Ulwick: Sure. I think talking about how I started my interest in innovation is interesting because it came out of necessity. I was working for IBM at the time, this was back in the 1980s, and I was part of a team that was going to change the way people did home computing. It was a bit promising, it's a product called the PC junior. The only problem with it is the day after it was introduced, the headlines in The Wall Street Journal read, "The PC junior is a flop." And it was. And it got me really wondering about how a company like IBM, with all its vast resources, could invest in something that turned out to be a flop. And the funny thing was, but not funny, the horrible thing was it took us a year to reconcile that it was a flop, pull it from the market. It was a billion dollar failure.

So we got to be very interested in thinking through, well, how can we avoid this? I didn't realize at the time that this was a problem that existed across every company, I thought it was an isolated incident, but it's not, of course. And I've spent my career working through better ways to innovate and creating an innovation process that would help you conceptualize products that you know are going to win in the market before you start developing them instead of finding out after you launched them that they failed.

Sarah Nicastro: It's interesting though, a lot of the conversations that I take part in or hear around innovation we talk about the fact that failure is a part of the process. So was it that it was that far along and that big of a failure that you felt some emotion around? Or I guess what are your thoughts on failure being a learning opportunity, not something to completely avoid?

Tony Ulwick: Well, the way I like looking at it is if you fail, certainly you're going to learn something from it, but why wouldn't you try to avoid failing? I don't believe that innovation has to include failing, because you know what you're trying to do when you're innovating, you're trying to create products that will, in our terms, help people get a job done significantly better. So if you've come up with an idea that doesn't do that, then why would you pursue it? Or if you can prove that the concept that you came up with does get a job done a lot better, well, that's going to give you the confidence of knowing that it's more likely to win in the market.

So there's some very basic things we could look at here to help avoid failure. One thing I find interesting is even to this day a lot of companies don't consider innovation to be a process, which I find interesting. And of course the innovation success rates are quite low, and it's just assumed that failure is part of this and you can't turn innovation from an art to a science, there's just too many unknowns, there's too many variables that can't be controlled. And this is the thinking I've been through for the last 30 years, what are all those variables that are causing failure and how do you control them? Because if you could, you could turn something that seems random and unpredictable into a scientific process, and that's exactly what we've done.

Sarah Nicastro: And we're going to obviously talk more about that, but you mentioned the art and science aspects. So to you, is it a combination of both?

Tony Ulwick: Not really. It's definitely far more science than art, because the way I like thinking about it is once you know exactly where to focus your value creation efforts, in other words, once you know where people are struggling to get a job done very precisely, and once you know that, you can come up with solutions that will address those parts of the job. We rarely... I'd say never, we have never run into a situation where companies say, "We don't have any ideas." People don't say that. They usually say, "We have so many ideas, we don't know which ones to pursue." And so now we're doing idea management and they think about innovation as an idea management exercise. I don't think about it that way. What I think about it is more like a problem solving exercise where people are struggling to get a job done, let's figure out how to help them get it done better.

So if we know precisely along what dimensions they're struggling, we can focus our creativity on those dimensions and solve them. A quick example, we've worked with Bosch helping them enter a North American market, and once we identified the top 14 unmet needs in the marketplace, it took them just three hours to conceptualize a new circular saw that addressed all those unmet needs. And as they said, "Well, it's not as if we hadn't had these ideas before. The problem is we've had thousands of ideas before. We just didn't know that these 14 in this combination was the magic win."

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So I want to go back. I feel like I jumped over my first question. So let's go back there before we go ahead, because I always have other things come to mind and I'll get us off track. So let's start with making the decision to focus on innovation. So can you talk a little bit about if an organization, if a company wants to focus on innovation, what's necessary to do so in terms of mindset, leadership, any of the factors?

Tony Ulwick: As we often say, to be great at innovation, you need a great innovation process. This is true of any business discipline. If you want to be great at lead generation, you need a great lead generation process. You could run that. I think there's 140 some odd business processes that are common, it's true of everyone, which means you have to treat innovation as a process. Again, as I mentioned earlier, half the population believes innovation isn't a process. Well, that's problematic. So if you think it isn't, then you're not really going to work very hard to try to turn it into something that's filled with discipline. So the first step in taking on innovation is to recognize that it is a process, and that often requires a different mindset. The mindset shift is generally a shift from a solutions first orientation to a problems first orientation. So a lot of people that believe innovation is not a process, believe that innovation begins with ideas.

And then you take those ideas, you go prototype them, test them, get feedback from customers, iterate on the product, go retest, and you go through this iterative process until hopefully eventually the product that you've come up with addresses the customer's needs to the degree that they want the product. Well, that is a very, very expensive way to learn customer needs. The other approach is a problems first or a needs first approach where the goal is to understand the job the customer's trying to get done, break it down into its component parts, understand how they measure success along each step of the way, and figure out where are they underserved in getting the job done. All this can be done with precision. And as I mentioned, if you know the top 14 or 15 or 20 unmet needs in your market, then you can focus on them very specifically and help come up with a solution that helps people get the job done a lot better.

So I think just that mindset shift and knowing that that's possible is the first step. I'd say the second step is then getting everyone on board with an innovation process that aligns people and the organization. So everybody can be rowing in the same direction, focused on value creation, and so they're not debating what market they're in or who their customer is or what a customer need is, but if they agree on all that, then they can sit and debate what is the best solution for my customer to solve that particular problem. So it's a transformation, you're shifting a mindset where people don't agree on what a need is to the entire organization agrees on what the needs are which you're unmet, and now we're debating the best solutions. That's where you want to get the organization.

So I should mention, Sarah, we've done a lot of research on these very specific questions, and we find that in over 80% of product teams, they don't agree on the best way to define a market. They define a market as a product or a technology or a geography or a vertical or a persona or a use case or so on. Over 90% of product teams don't agree on what a customer need even is. Is it an exciter, a delighter, a feature, a value driver, a specification, a requirement, a pain, a gain? And we've heard all these terms used interchangeably as if any input into this process is going to yield a great result, and of course that's not true.

We know that over 80% of product teams don't agree on the best way to segment markets. So they segment generally around personas, use cases, demographics, psychographics, attitudes, and these are all done as proxies for segmenting around unmet needs, because the goal of segmenting is to find groups of people with different unmet needs, but companies don't segment around unmet needs because they can't agree on what a need is. So it's this combination of factors that's causing companies to go off track. So if you could align your organization around a common language of what a market is and what a need is, so you have a common language of innovation in a process that leverages that insight into something more predictable, that is half the battle.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So we're talking about the how of innovation, when we think about what are the best areas of opportunity for any given company, what is the advice you would give someone on how to find the areas of innovation that will yield the best results for their business?

Tony Ulwick: And that's a great question. Not only do you want them to yield the best results, but they have to be within their capability set as well. So there's two things happening here. You want to figure out where's the customer underserved in areas that we can address? That's more or less the question you're trying to answer. And to figure out where they're underserved, that is where the outcome-driven innovation process comes into play. And again, I've alluded to identifying the precise underserved needs associated with getting a job done, focusing on those, of course, that lays out what I'd like calling the most efficient path to growth in problem space. So in other words, here's my opportunities in priority order, in problem space, but I may not be able to solve them in that order because I may not have the capability to address that top need or this other need or so on, so you're going to have to come up with solutions that you can address that will put you on the most efficient path to growth from a solution perspective.

But there are some general rules of them that we follow that lay out the best ways to grow, and it's always growing from the core, because this is where you have the greatest set of capabilities. So most products get only part of a job done. You could be a kettle maker, for example, and a kettle's used heat water to a desired temperature, but people are using a kettle to maybe prepare a hot beverage for consumption. It's part of a bigger job. So the market isn't the kettle market. The market is a group of people who are trying to prepare a hot beverage for consumption. So if you take that as an example, you can grow from the core. You can say, "Okay, I'm a kettle maker today and I can focus on heating water to the right temperature better than anybody else." And that's a good starting point. Take your core, take the thing that you're doing, and do it exceptionally well. In other words, satisfy all the unmet needs associated with getting water to the right temperature.

Once you've accomplished that, you can look adjacent. You can say, "Well, what's the step that comes before heating water to the right temperature, and what is the step right after we've heated the water to the right temperature?" And say, "Well, can I get more of the job done?" These appear to be adjacent markets, but they're really part of the market as the way the customer defines it, because they're trying to create a hot beverage for consumption. And then, of course, if you can get the entire job done on a single platform, that is the next expansion to growth. And it's often common to see a kettle maker, for example, get disrupted by a company that gets the entire job done, like Keurig or Nespresso, where they have their machines that get the entire job done in a single platform.

But you can see that trajectory coming years away. 20 years ago, you could sit there and know that, well, people are heating water, but they're trying to create a hot beverage for consumption, and you could envision the solution to the future and figure out, well, how are we going to get there step by step over time? So that's more or less the formula I like thinking about that works really in every company, that's the most efficient path to growth for me, problem perspective and from a solution perspective.

Sarah Nicastro: Can you talk a little bit more about the outcome-driven innovation methodology?

Tony Ulwick: Sure. So the approach is broken into five steps. The first step is to define a market, but not as a technology or a product or a use case or persona. We're going to define the market as the group of people trying to get a job done. So it could be consumers who are trying to prepare a hot beverage for consumption. Sounds simple enough, but oddly enough, it isn't. A lot of companies don't want to define the market around a group of people getting a job done. They'd rather define it around a geography or a persona or a use case and so on. So if you have that debate within an organization and people can't agree on what market they're in, it's going to be hard to go take the next step in the ODI process, which is to uncover the customer's needs.

Now here we're going to define needs a little different. We know people are getting a job done, so we can break that job down into steps and figure out how do people measure success along each step of the way. So in the case of the kettle maker, minimize the time it takes to get the water heated to the exact temperature, minimize the likelihood that it cools quicker than it should cool, minimize the likelihood of overheating it to make it too hot. Now, there's very specific metrics that you can use to make sure you're getting that part of the job done perfectly, we call those statements the customers desired outcomes. They're solution independent, so they're not tied to a product, they're stable over time as the job is stable over time, they're unambiguous, they're knowable and discoverable. There's no such thing as a latent outcome, because we often talk about latent needs.

We say, "Customers don't have latent needs. They only have latent solutions." They can't envision a microwave, they can't envision the automobile when they're riding horses, you've heard all those arguments, but they do know what they're trying to accomplish. Those jobs stay stable over time. So focusing on outcomes from that perspective gives us a long term focal point and a value map for, or a map of value creation, I should say. The third step is then to figure out, well, which of these needs are unmet? And to do that, we put surveys together that go out to some portion of the population, it may be 1200 or so consumers of kettles, or Keurig machines, and we would ask them to tell us how important is each of those outcomes and how satisfied are you with your ability to achieve the outcome given the solution that you're using today? So what we're looking for quite specifically is where are they struggling in the job given the solution they're using.

And we can plot this out mathematically. So we've created what we call the opportunity algorithm that takes the importance of the outcome and then subtracts the importance minus the satisfaction. And so if a need, an outcome is really important to most of the population, but most of the population is dissatisfied with it, well, then we would say that's an unmet need, so we can figure out which needs are unmet and to what degree. And with that, then we can focus on the needs that are most underserved in a market. The next step, which is extremely important, is to recognize that in most markets people don't agree on which needs are unmet. This goes back to marketing 101, there are always segments of people with different unmet needs. It's true, we've proven it over and over again. Having said that, how do you discover those segments? Again, by segmenting around personas, or use cases, or demographics, psychographics, attitudes, behaviors, they're all proxies for doing what you should do, which is to segment around the unmet needs.

So once we know what these needs are, maybe half the population wants to minimize the time it takes to get the water heated to the right temperature, and they're unsatisfied with that. Maybe the other half says, "I want to minimize the likelihood of exceeding that temperature and getting it too hot." People disagree on what's important and unsatisfied. So you'd want to know that so that you can create products or maybe different products for different segments that will satisfy their unique unmet needs. Again, it's marketing 101. It's just hard to do in practice.

And then the final step is to take that information and build out your strategy. The first step of that is what we call the innovation strategy, which is picking what segments do we go after and which element needs to be targeted. In that Bosch example I mentioned much earlier, there was one segment that had 14 unmet needs in the market, and that's where Bosch focused its attention. They said, "In order for us to win and differentiate against DeWalt and Makita, we're going to go after that segment, address those 14 unmet needs, and position in this matter." Then comes to product strategy. How do you do it? I know what I'm going to go target, I know what segment I'm going after, what features do I have to have on my product? And it could be hardware features, it could be service features, it could be software features that can come to bear to help customers get the job done better.

And in the end, what you've done is you've created a solution that you know is going to win in the market. And how is that? Well, because the feature set that you've generated is tied to a set of needs, and you know those needs are the most unmet needs in the market because you've done all that research, and you know that by satisfying those needs, you're going to get the job done significantly better. And we have a threshold too. We say, "If you can get the job done, about 15% better or more, that's the tipping point."

Now, if you come up with a product that just satisfies one unmet need a little bit better, nobody cares. Would you switch from your favorite brand of anything if a new brand got a job done 1% better or 2% better? And the answer's generally no. So if you can reach that threshold, that's the tipping point. And the trick, of course, is if there are 14 unmet needs in a market like Bosch discovered, the question isn't how many of those needs do we address, the question is how do we address all those unmet needs so we can make a big difference?

And I think it's that mindset shift that makes a difference as well. A lot of companies stumble along and have to go through incremental improvements, product iteration after product iteration as they discover one or two unmet needs, but to the customer they're never getting the job done a lot better, so they can't go with an upcharge in their price and execute on a differentiated strategy. They're stuck more in a sustaining strategy, adding features, maybe even adding costs, but not really increasing their profits. So that's a dangerous position to be in, and you can overcome that by understanding all the unmet needs in a market upfront and going after quite a number of them. So you're looking like you're creating a breakthrough solution, it's a radical solution compared to what existed before, because it's gotten the job done so much better.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Now, you mentioned earlier the difference between innovation and I think you said idea management, and so we talked about how sometimes these innovative ideas pick up a bit of momentum, but then get to a certain point and just fizzle out. So for companies that are looking at ways to innovate within an existing business, our audience, like I said, is typically looking for ways to evolve and transform from a service perspective, what is the trick to taking those ideas and really getting them to scale, and have an impact on the business?

Tony Ulwick: Well, you're assuming they're good ideas, but when you're going down this idea management path as your approach to innovation, generally there's not just two or three ideas, there's thousands or at least hundreds of ideas, and somebody's responsible for evaluating them. So how would you even evaluate an idea? So the first thing you'd do is you'd say, "Well, is that idea in a market that I want to be in?" That's how we approach it. We'd say, "If that idea is addressing a group of people trying to get some job done, who's that group of people? What is the job they're trying to get done? Do we want to play there?" So that's the first test. Assuming the answer is yes, then you'd take the next step and say, "Are people underserved in getting that job done? And can we help them get the job done better? Do we believe we can't? Do we have the capabilities?"

If the answer is no, then you don't want to go play there. If the answer is yes, then you go to the next step. The next step then is investing in understanding what are the unmet needs in that space. And as I've described the ODI process, figure out precisely where the customers underserved, so you can come up with solutions that will address getting the job done significantly better. Now, it may be that the original idea that you had really does the trick and it gets the job done a lot better, or it may be that it's getting part of the job done well and that you need to enhance it so you build on that idea so it turns into something that will get the job than 15% better or more.

But what we're doing here is we're trying to move this ideas first mindset into a market first mindset. In other words, don't start by saying, "Hey, I have a thousand," or I think in Bosch case it was 10,000 ideas. I know IBM at one point had an ideas database of 100,000 ideas in it. What do you do with all that? So what you'd rather do as management in an organization, instead of saying, "Everybody have lots of ideas and we'll figure out which are good," what you want to do is say, "We want to go after this group of people who are trying to get this job done, and here are all their unmet needs." Now, organization, go out, figure out ways to satisfy those needs, and we can be successful in those markets, that's how it should work. And so organizations who are becoming outcome driven follow that kind of thinking, pick the markets that you know are attractive, that way you you're playing in the right ballpark. Where to play, ODI helps figure out how to play to win, and then you can go on to be successful from there.

Sarah Nicastro: So the piece about identifying the unmet needs makes perfect sense. What I'm wondering though is a little bit more about the process of... Let's take the Bosch example. So with Bosch, they had this group of people for whom shared this 14 unmet needs, and they decided that was a good fit for them strategically to go after. So what happens then from that decision to keep them on track through execution?

Tony Ulwick: That's a great point because teams can easily get derailed once they start developing products and go off track. I think the beauty of having a set of metrics like these outcomes that we talk about to guide your decision making process and the trade-off decisions that you make through development are absolutely critical. Like in the case of Bosch, people are trying to minimize the likelihood that debris flows up in their eyes when they're making a lengthy cut, or they're trying to minimize the likelihood that the extension cord gets caught on the piece of plywood as they're leaning over, making a cut. There's very specific things. So if you know those are the metrics, that helps guide you even in development, so all the way through launch. So you can conceptualize the product up front that you know is going to win, but it's only going to win if it satisfies those outcomes.

So it's often the case that when we go into development, we turn the concept into a product specification or product requirement that gets acted on with this added information, and we can even add to it, minimize the likelihood of the debris flying up in the user's face. Well, what is the likelihood of that happening? Is it 100%? Does it always happen? Does it happen half the time? And you can quite literally measure it. Engineers can set up an experiment and say, "It used to take this amount of time to go to get this part of the job done, and now it takes this much time. We've made progress. It's measurable."

Sarah Nicastro: I guess I'm trying to think through this in the service context and a service example, because obviously a lot of that is far more intangible than product specifications and some of those types of measurements. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Tony Ulwick: Sure. So let me give you an example. We worked with an agriculture firm that made seeds and fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, a bunch of products, and we studied the job of growing a crop. That's what growers do, they grow crops. And we studied that job from beginning to end, understood all the metrics they used to measure success when getting that job done in a solution agnostic way. When we were done, there were about 50 of the 150 outcomes that related to service-oriented solutions, they had nothing to do with pesticides and herbicides, they were really more along the line of getting help at the right time, or having things show up at the right time, or things like that, that can't really be solved from a hardware standpoint, they can only be solved from a service standpoint. But they also discovered another 40 or so outcomes that related to information flow, which lent itself to software solutions or digitalization as it became digitalized farming. There are many outcomes that growers were underserved with because they didn't have the right information at the right time.

And then, of course, a whole bunch of needs related to the hardware products that they already made as well. So by studying the job at that broad level, from the customer's perspective, it takes you out of that mindset as to whether or not you're a hardware company, a software company, a service company, you're a company that's going to help people get the entire job done. The entire job generally requires all three types of solutions, some hardware solutions, some software solutions, some service, not always, but you should think along all those fronts. Most hardware companies certainly can find opportunities to find underserved outcomes that could only be solved by services or by software, so it's great for them to move in that direction. A lot of software companies don't like moving into service or hardware because it's much more complicated, lower margins impact, valuation, all that type of stuff. But generally, it makes good sense for a hardware company to go into services and to go into software even, because it can help with their growth and valuation.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. So we've talked through a couple, but if we think about what are the most common mistakes you see companies make, and what's your advice to avoid those? What comes to mind?

Tony Ulwick: The biggest mistake is failing to recognize that innovation is a process and that it can't be turned into a science. The biggest mistake is thinking that it's impossible to hand over a set of needs to a product team that are complete, that points out precisely where the customer's underserved. I think companies are still on this ideas first mindset and struggle to break out of it, and it's pervasive. Like I said, if half the companies believe that innovation isn't a process, or those that do believe it is a process think it's all about ideas management as opposed to uncovering needs and discovering solutions that address them, that's the biggest mistake.

And that's where the mindset shift has to come into play. And we've been at this for 30 years, we've certainly changed some minds over the years, people see that this works, it intuitively makes a heck a lot more sense, but behaviorally it's very hard to change the way people want to approach this, because it's really fun having ideas and getting people to rally behind your idea, and seeing it get developed, seeing it come to market, all that is super fun, but it's not much fun when it fails. And I think if we start with the end in mind and know that we are creating solutions to help people get a job done better, we can prove to ourselves that the idea that we had will get the job done a lot better before we start developing it so we don't have the IBM PC junior mistakes.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. Tony, tell everyone where they can find more information on you, the books, and the work that you do.

Tony Ulwick: Sure. So our homepage is strategyn.com, it's strategy with an N on the end of it. That is one location. You can contact me directly at ulwick@strategyn.com. And there are two free books available as well. Well, it's the same book. It's available as a ebook and as an audiobook, and that can be found that jobs-to-be-done-book.com with all hyphens, jobs, hyphen, to, you get the idea. So that's available there for free download, and that should set you on your journey to develop a new mindset about innovation.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. All right. Well, Tony, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights with us. I appreciate it.

Tony Ulwick: Sarah, thanks so much for the opportunity. I appreciate it as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely.

Tony Ulwick: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks. You can learn more and find more at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to take a look and sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider. Also have a look at the Future of Field Service live tour dates, and be sure to register for the event nearest to you. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter. And the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Technology enabling remote service is fundamentally changing how and when service is delivered – and as you may have gathered from the headline, I firmly believe it's going to play a bigger and bigger role in service moving forward. To be clear, I don’t believe the traditional field service visit will ever completely disappear, but I do think relying on only traditional methods of delivery (customer calls with issue, technician visits to diagnose, repairs or perhaps has to return to repair) is a practice that will soon put a number of service organizations at a competitive disadvantage.

A lot of firms were forced into some flavor of remote service delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, using software to remotely diagnose or even remedy equipment failures, leveraging online video to support customers or other technicians, and in some cases implementing augmented or virtual reality (VR) tools. We learned that these capabilities provide some compelling options for making our service operations smarter rather than always trying to work harder to keep up.

Yes, remote service also raises some questions that can give service leaders anxiety. How do you maintain the personal connection with customers in this environment? Is it going to cost technicians their jobs? How reliable is it? Will customers pay for it if they don't see a tech in their building? While valid points, answers are being found at a rapid pace and many companies are committing to a remote-first service model.

In last week’s podcast, for example, I spoke to Steve Goulbourne, the Global Service Program Director at Mettler-Toledo, about the company's experience with remote service, its disruptive potential, and how he is responding to some of those concerns.

Mettler-Toledo began embracing remote service during the pandemic because they needed a way to take care of customers without going on site. Because of the types of equipment the company services, remote-only interventions are often not feasible. While software fixes can take care of some problems, a technician still usually needs to install a spare part. However, as Steve describes it, remote service at Mettler-Toledo is really a way for technicians to arrive on site for that spare part install better prepared and informed about what the job will entail. They are using the technology to arm technicians with enough knowledge to maximize their first-time fix rates.

Repeat Trips Compound Talent Shortage Woes

“We can actually see what's happening versus a traditional triage where you're asking questions,” he said. “This can really allow us to fully understand a situation before a truck rolls and then we can make sure that we send the right technician with the right skills and the right spare part to try and make sure that we get the equipment fixed the first time. That's the most important to our customers because that increases their uptime.”

At Mettler-Toledo, like many others, the first truck roll has traditionally served as a diagnostic/triage visit. In some cases, the technician can’t even start the repair during that initial visit. That's a costly way of doing things, and can lead to some disappointed customers when the first technician on site tells them to expect a second visit, with a completely different engineer and a different set of parts and tools.

“Those second visits, they drain capacity,” Steve said. “And I think when we listen to the voice of the customer a lot of times … technicians always get very high scores in terms of customer experience, but actually scheduling and finding time to be able to do the work is a challenge. So if we can improve the capacity by reducing those unnecessary second visits, I think that definitely helps.”

Saving those second visits doesn't just help with first-time fix rates, uptime, and net promoter scores; it also reduces costs. Depending on the industry, each truck roll can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Remote service also helps with the service sector's current talent challenge by more efficiently using technician time. In an era where there is a shortage of qualified service engineers, it’s not hard to make an argument for maximizing resource utilization by reducing unnecessary site visits.

Steve also pointed out that younger technicians entering the workforce not only expect to see better use of remote and mobile technology (which, as digital natives, they have been raised using), they also want to minimize their time on the road. In some industries, technicians may spend several days or even a week at a remote site diagnosing and fixing a problem, and a lot of that time is often spent waiting on parts or information.

Using remote service tools to minimize time on the road puts service jobs more in line with the work/life balance these younger workers are looking for. “If we can get better resource capability and resource capacity because we're using these tools, it means we can plan more effectively,” Steve said. “By planning more effectively, we can make sure that that person does nine-to-five hours, or whatever they may be.”

We covered a lot of ground during our discussion, so I would encourage you to listen to the entire podcast here to find out more about how Mettler-Toledo is using remote service to improve operations. As for the question of how long until traditional service delivery is dead; it’s hard to say – but the business case for embracing a remote-first approach is very strong and I expect we’ll see a lot of stories similar to Mettler-Toledo’s in the coming year.

Sarah welcomes Stephen Goulbourne, Global Service Program Director at Mettler Toledo to discuss three major areas of impact that more sophisticated remote service capabilities are having (and will continue to have) on service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about three ways remote capabilities are significantly changing service. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Steve Goulbourne, who is the Global Service Program Director at Mettler-Toledo. Steve, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Steve Goulbourne: Hey, thanks, Sarah. Great to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Okay, so before we get into our discussion, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and Mettler.

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, hey, so I'm mechanical engineer by trade. So I guess found my way back here. Had a few years in sales, you could argue, perhaps crossed over to the dark side into sales. I thought that was the easier place to be. It turns out it actually wasn't, but I had about eight years in sales, including some time with Mettler-Toledo in a product leadership role. But for the last 12 years or so, I've been a service leader here at Mettler-Toledo. So I guess a good mix of that commercial and service leadership experience.

The role that I have today, I guess is largely defining a strategy for service, implementing that strategy and then executing that strategy with our global operating unit. So certainly not a one-man operation. Lots of stakeholders and lots of people involved. Mettler-Toledo is the world's biggest weighing and measurement equipment company globally dispersed across five divisions, encompassing lab, industrial, product inspection, retail and process analytics. So quite a broad reach and industry, but actually very linked in the way that we work.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. So I think the discussion we're going to have today, if there's a few key trends or areas of innovation that I'm most excited about or to see how they sort of play out in the industry, this concept of the growing capabilities that technology allows for remote service I think is really, really interesting because fundamentally it has the potential to really change how and when services is delivered. So I think it's a change that will translate over into roles and a lot of other aspects. So we're going to sort of talk about some of the different technologies that play a role in this augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and how these remote capabilities are really having this disruptive impact on the way we traditionally think of service delivery. So we're going to talk about three major areas that are evolving, but before we get into those, can you just talk a little bit about how the pandemic for Mettler spurred a lot of interest in these different capabilities?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I think it's an interesting one, the remote service piece. I think it'd been around for quite a period of time and as we know in the service space, there's always the latest and greatest that's been brought to market and remote was something that I think a lot of people knew about and a lot of people had been investigating and looking at for obvious reasons. I think there was some significant benefit there, but there probably wasn't a real driving need to go ahead and start a new tool and start with a new tool and really, I guess in some senses complicate what was a working model and then of course came along the pandemic. And I think one of the very few positives that came from that was it really forced a lot of organizations into adopting those new technologies. And the biggest one being that we had to find a way to, in the early stages of the pandemic, to provide service to our customers safely in terms of the technicians and of course our customers.

But primarily our focus was on our technicians finding a way to help fix people's equipment or at least diagnose issues with equipment without going to site, which was practically impossible without remote tools. And so I think ourselves, a lot of the industry really went and moved quickly towards those remote tools. I guess it was the nudge that we needed to implement it. And I think from that point on, it's been a little bit of a rollercoaster ride for everybody as there was a lot of adoption. And I think then probably finding our way to do this as we go, which is it is suboptimal, it's imperfect, but the pandemic certainly pushed us towards that. So as I say, I think I take that as a positive. It showed how quickly the organization can adapt, showed our resilience in a very difficult time and really allowed us now to implement a tool that that's having a real stronger profound effect in how we provide service to our customers.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think one of the points you made that's interesting is when there were a lot of restrictions in place and/or a really high level of concern around safety, it was to your point, you're nudged into what can we do remotely? Let's do that. And then as things normalized, you mentioned the rollercoaster a bit. So I think what happened in some of the other company I spoke to is once things normalized, it was, "Okay, well let's just go back to how we were doing things before," and maybe a little bit of resistance and then strategically thinking about, okay, so when we needed to do everything this way, here's what we could do. But rather than going back to what was, what's our sort of intentional strategy around remote service? And so then it becomes not out of necessity, but what works for the business and for the customers in the new world.

So I want to talk a little bit about your opinion on how these capabilities are forever changing service delivery. So like I just said, it would, I think, not be wise to just go back to the way it was, but we also discussed that specifically for Mettler-Toledo, and this is where the topic of remote service starts to vary a lot from industry to industry, company to company. But you mentioned that there really isn't a high likelihood of a lot of jobs being resolved entirely remotely, but there's a lot of insight that you can glean from these technologies that can really transform what that service looks like. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I mean, maybe just really quick, just to drop back into the previous question. I think what's quite interesting when you implement a technology like this, you go through the change management piece and you're right to say I think there was concern, pushback, perhaps it's something new, something different, and that's a normal reaction there. But obviously the pandemic just didn't allow us any time to go through that change management, why we're doing this, this is the benefit it's going to have. It was almost a case of within two, three weeks, "Hey, we have a remote tool, we're going to use this." So there's a way to find way through that. But you're absolutely right also to say that we just can't simply say, "Well, let's go back to as we were." Looking at it, this was the nudge that we needed. So yeah, I mean if we think about the remote tools and how they are changing service, I'm certain, it's not only Mettler-Toledo where that successful fix rate remotely being high, even to 50% is really unheard of and it's probably in the low single digits in terms of getting that fixed.

And that's probably due to the fact that oftentimes this is electromechanical equipment and certainly in our case it's electromechanical equipment with the use of hardware and software. And so of course from that perspective, that makes it challenging. I think where we have the opportunity to do an intervention with software, that significantly increases to the levels where you would expect. But I just think with the kind of equipment that we manufacture where we have moving parts, hardware, software, it's often required that the spare parts is needed and consumed when that occurs. And I think that it's more important to us to make sure that we're now fully understanding the issue with the use of the remote tools.

We can actually see what's happening versus just a, I guess a traditional triage where you're asking questions, this can really allow us to fully understand a situation before a truck rolls and then we can make sure that we send the right technician with the right skills and the right spare part to try and make sure that we get the first time fixed, that that's the most important to our customers because that increases their uptime. And of course from a business perspective, that allows us to reduce our cost to serve. And so I don't think we were disappointed that we weren't fixing things remotely all of the time. I think we went into that with our eyes wide enough open to know that that would be the case. So it's certainly had a different impact, but for sure there are still cases where we are able to fix something remotely and that's hugely beneficial both for us and for the customer.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think it's just important to, for organizations to be aware of the different areas of impact. It's not just about solving these issues remotely. It can also be about gaining enough knowledge to maximize first time fixed. There are situations where these same technologies are being used because companies want to allow customers to do more self-service, you mentioned the fewer truck rolls you have the lower cost to service. So there's these different measurements of success with these same tools that you can really match to your business. I think often there's some misperceptions when we talk about remote service first, I think people tend to think that the goal is remote only or remote as much as humanly possible, rather than just remote first or remote as a tool to really understand and examine what's going on. But then also knowing that there really are different use cases and different potential benefits and picking what best fits each service operation.

So you're gaining a lot of knowledge. You mentioned when it's a more software related issue, sometimes you are able to resolve remotely, but when it's not, you're maximizing your ability to repair on the first visit because you what you're getting into per se. So I feel like when you explain this to me, it sounds like objectively makes sense, why wouldn't anyone be doing this, right? But there's still a lot of question and debate that I run into about, I would say particularly augmented reality. Is there really any use case for it? And I'm always like, "Yeah," but it seems like there's some skepticism, some cautiousness. Do you have any thoughts on why that is and some of the reasons why there's maybe a little bit of lag in adoption?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think it's one that probably has lots of answers and going to be, I guess, unique to the circumstances of some of the people and some of the organizations involved. I think cost typically is a strong consideration and particularly to your point of will we really get the benefit of this? And of course when you're investing any kind of funds into new tools, well you really have to have an ROI and you really have to understand where that's going to work. And so I think if people look at the low likelihood of a fix remotely using the tools as we've just discussed, then yeah, I can understand that. But I think it's kind of changing the view a little bit and having people understand that if the first truck roll becomes the triage where you go and you see what's wrong and you understand what's wrong, you assume that the technician has the right skills and the right spare path, but oftentimes don't.

You then want to be moving into what I call a necessary second visits and that first visit being only to do a triage and really I guess old-fashioned way of doing things, it's also a very costly way of doing things. And we talk about reducing the cost to serve for the business and increasing customer satisfaction. And that's actually the very opposite of that. And it becomes quite challenging then to explain to customers that we're going to come back perhaps with a different engineer in a different spare part. And so those second visits, they drain capacity. And I think when we listen to the voice of the customer a lot of times, and again, not unique to Mettler-Toledo, I think in the industry, technicians always get very high scores in terms of customer experience, but actually scheduling and finding time to be able to do the work is a challenge. And so if we can improve the capacity by reducing those unnecessary second visits, I think that definitely helps. And so I think if you think about it differently from a cost perspective, that's one thing.

I think the other considerations is then how you integrate the tool. And so again, I think at the beginning we spoke about, this came quite quickly, a lack of change management there, the how and when to use that and the process is to support it. That's a further challenge and it's something else to consider. And then finally I think how you monetize this to really ensure that you get that ROI if you don't consider the first piece that I spoke about. So I guess there's a number of questions there, and I think a lot of people have adopted the technology and are probably still scratching their heads and asking those very same questions when they've spent the money. Now how do we really get to leverage that? And I think we spend a lot of time doing that, and I think we've been pretty successful in answering some of those things because it became more changing the view and thinking about those unnecessary second visits, avoiding those, making sure that we get a first time fix for our customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Because we're talking about the cost to serve, which is important, just the wasted time really of having this whole first trip just to find out what's going on and then having to have someone go back. Obviously you mentioned there's the implications of customer satisfaction, right? They're still waiting for that uptime. I also think what's interesting as a part of this conversation is how it intersects then with sustainability because all of those unnecessary second visits are wasted truck rolls and unnecessary carbon footprint as well. So that matters more to some than others, but it's an undeniable aspect of the benefit of adopting this sort of approach.

Before we move on to the next point though, I want to go back to the monetization part because I think this is a really big sticking point for organizations and what I'm curious about is how you're dealing with that. So I'm going to ask that question first and then depending on your answer, I might have a follow up.

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, again, I think monetization has been, again, shifting the focus of how you consider monetization. And I think there are different ways to look at that. I guess the most traditional way is what revenue we generating from having this tool. So what's the ROI? What additional dollars, what pound, euros, whatever it may be, are we bringing into the business because we have this remote tool? And I think it's again, maybe shifting that perception a little bit around what that monetization is. And to me it's the monetization becomes we're saving those second visits, we're not going to unnecessary second visits, we're improving uptime for our customers, which improves our net promoter score, happy customers spend more. So that's one way of looking at that.

I think then if you consider, again the monetization piece, do we only have this for our contract customers, are non-contract customers able to have access to this? Of course, we want to remove the volatility of a service business by getting as many of our customers onto a service contract as we can, of course the benefits for customers as they can plan their spending more effectively. So there's lots of reasons to do that, but we want to be able to have some differentiators into our service contract.

And now if we start to include the ability to do remote service, that's adding value to a service contract, and then if we can see a deeper penetration of our installed base on contracts, that again becomes that monetization piece. But it's perhaps not the model of charging for an intervention at arbitrarily $500 to do an intervention on a job by job basis. And so I think that's still something that the industry is kind of wrestling with a little bit and in some ways where we were, but I think we feel as though the monetization comes from perhaps non-traditional route and you look at the reduced cost to serve and the differentiation of a service contract and deep penetration because of that, that becomes that monetization piece.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. So you mentioned that this idea of that first visit being the triage is just really sort of an outdated way of conducting service. I think this second aspect, how do we monetize this? What's the revenue model, is a really interesting piece that is going to continue to evolve as we go forward because we know that today's customers value outcomes more than they do products or even services. So this idea of whether that's delivered in a contract or whether some companies are getting to the point of a truly servitized model where you're charging per use, per uptime, that sort of thing.

Once you get to that point, it makes the conversation a bit easier because it doesn't matter how you achieve that outcome, it's just the fact that you are achieving it. I think for companies, which still today is the majority are not in that servitized model, it does raise some questions of, okay, well if we're lowering our cost to serve, then how do we make that money? If customers are used to paying us for our time and materials, then how do we evolve that? And I think it can be challenging, but it's a really important question to be working through, right? Because do you think there's no going back from that, right? I mean it's not like we're going to just decide we don't need to figure it out.

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I use the term, and I'm certain I haven't coined the phrase, I'm sure I've picked it up from somewhere or put it together from somewhere, but I think you said as well, we need to focus upon is outcome based pricing here, and it's the outcome that the customer wants their issue resolved and always reminds me of that old story or the old sales story where a guy goes into the hardware store and says, "I need an eight millimeter drill." And the guy says, "No, you don't." He said, "No, no, I need an eight millimeter drill." But he said, "No, you don't." He said, "No, I don't why you keep telling me I don't." He said, "No, you need the hole, you need the eight millimeter hole." And so I'm saying millimeters as a European there, I should have probably said, I don't know.

But for the Europeans that watch this, that kind of makes more sense. But I think they want their issue resolved first time just as quickly as they can. And if we fix something remotely using an AR or an AI tool, we've met the needs of the customer and outcome's the same more quickly. And I think the trick is here is to try to stop customers fixating upon the fact that a technician didn't come to site. And that's where the perceived value is because isn't. The outcome is where the value is. And so if we can stop the customer's fixating on a customer feeling as though a technician on site, that's why the value is we saw him, he came, he had a tool bag, he connected his laptop and he fixed that. Ultimately you're probably 24 hours down the line, but the outcome's the same.

And so I think again, it's that kind of paradigm shift in terms of not only how we monetize this, but also how customers view this. And I think a lot of customers are there, but a lot of the traditional customer base still thinks that if they're paying for something, they actually physically see someone if they don't, it's hard to comprehend. And so yeah, outcome-based pricing I think is something that we need to continue to push here. This is simply a better way of doing things. And I think a really great point you made, and people mention to me all the time where I'm talking about reducing cost of services, the green piece of that as well, reducing carbon footprints, something that we absolutely have to focus on as an organization, but also as an industry.

Sarah Nicastro: I think there's a couple components to this. One is this value-based narrative, and I think this is a big part of the challenge for people because I agree that I think customers are there. I think customers get it. I think the struggle really lies more in a company's challenge to have external conversations about internal tools. I see this a lot where it's like, "Well, we're implementing remote service so that we can reduce truck roll." Well that doesn't mean anything to a customer, it's great for you. But it's this idea of I think people would fear this conversation less if they felt more prepared to speak it in the terms of what matters to customers. Like you need the confidence of saying, "Yes, Bob isn't going to be on site, however we're able to resolve this issue for you in one hour instead of 36 hours," or whatever.

And not externally sharing the internal benefits, but rather focusing on what the customer value is and having that be a part of the conversation. So I think that's a really important skill or growth area that people need to focus on. And it kind of comes with this progression of service as a profit center. I mean, historically when it's a cost center, you probably didn't have a marketing function that was helping with what's our service value proposition. It was sort of an afterthought. But if it's going to be competitive differentiation for the organization, then you need to invest in refining that message and making sure that teams are skilled in delivering that message.

I know another piece of this with outcomes specifically is oftentimes you need to be engaging with someone different than you sold the transactional model to. So that can be another piece of it as well. But I think it's a really interesting part of the conversation. It's sort of this old school mentality and this old school way of conducting business and just getting up to speed, not only in the technology, not only in the operations, but also the communication, et cetera.

Yeah, the other thing I was thinking of too is this idea that how do we replace that feeling a customer gets from someone being there in these opportunities where we're doing remote service? So I was moderating a panel yesterday with Tetra Pak and TOMRA talking about servitization, and one of the points that we talked about is customers don't actually just want the outcome. They do, they want that peace of mind that you as an organization are going to make sure that my X, Y, Z is always working, but they also want the insight and the reassurance and the validation that you're doing that. So I also wonder if part of the removal of as much in-person visibility can be accomplished through different ways of providing that insight. So I think it's interesting to think about not only from a messaging standpoint, but in our communications with customers, how can we replace some of that onsite triage that's wasteful for everyone with different types of touchpoints that reassures them that we're still there as much we care as much, et cetera, et cetera. Does that make sense?

Steve Goulbourne: It does, and I think it's quite interesting in the sense that we talk about in the industry and certainly Mettler-Toledo being technicians of the trusted advisor, and they're definitely people who customers have that relationship with, and in many senses the technicians consider them, their customers not necessarily Mettler-Toledo's customers. And we spend a lot of time making sure that the technicians soft skills meet the needs. And that's very easy face-to-face. I think they're very comfortable in that face-to-face scenario, the hard skills being the, excise me, technical skills. But how does that translate when you're doing something like this, something remotely where you lose that interaction. Are we really looking into each other's eyes when we're talking and explaining something technically well, but we're kind of looking into a camera. And so yeah, I think it's a very valid point of how we give the customer that feeling of confidence that whether this person's on site they're doing this intervention remotely, those soft skills may be coming to even more focus and we really need to make sure that everybody's comfortable with how we're explaining this and how we're doing this.

And so yeah, I still think that that's something that will continue to develop and grow and soft skills remotely. Maybe that's a whole new thing to consider as well as this develops. But it's definitely something that relationship a technician has with a customer. And in many cases, certainly for us, that customer has known that technician for a lot of years and there's a deep trust there. If this is perhaps not their usual technician, it's remote, will they get that same feeling of that this is going to be worth it and if the way that when Bob came to site, this is the way that he did it. And so I think it's an important part and it's one that we need to consider greatly and deeply as we move forward with this.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. All right. So we talked about how remote is changing the way we can actually provide service, and then we talked about how remote is creating an evolution in how we monetize service. The third piece that we talked about that we think will be greatly impacted by these capabilities is around talent. So we know that this is a big challenge for companies across geographies and industries. Can you talk a little bit about how for Mettler-Toledo, what does the talent challenge look like for you and how do you see these things intersecting?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I think if you start to consider the remote tools really how that positively impacts talent and retention, it can feel perhaps a little bit tenuous in terms of saying, "Well, remote helps us there, how does that work?" But I think one way that when I considered this is that the industry in general, I think you're seeing a shift now in age profiles with Boomers starting to leave the workforce. Gen X is aging, I include myself in that one there, meaning more millennials are at the core of the workforce and now the numbers of Gen Z is increasing exponentially now as well. And so those generations have different needs, different requirements, and I know we're kind of into some HR, maybe blue sky thinking, and a reference that gets a little bit tenuous.

But one of the things that millennials or Gen Y talk about, and one of the big areas that the research has done, and there's a ton of research here, and Deloitte even have a survey every year that goes out that provides a lot of insights, this generation doesn't necessarily like to be staying away from home and doesn't like to say on Monday I leave and I come back on Thursday night and I've done a huge amount of work. They're actually what they like to do. They're digital natives, so they like to be using these digital tools to improve.

So if we are using AR tools to reduce those unnecessary second visits talks also to the carbon footprint reduction, definitely something that this generation is rightly very concerned about. But if we can get better resource capability and resource capacity because we're using these AR tools, it means we can plan more effectively and by planning more effectively, we can make sure that that person does their eight till six hours, nine to five hours, whatever they may be. And then they're home in the evening with their wives girlfriends, whatever it may be, families at home of an evening, they're not staying in a hotel, which is something that the more you read about this topic is something that something that's really important.

And so I think it adds that layer of more benefits to the people and also to the organization. If we're reducing overnight stays, that of course reduces the cost of service. That's kind of a secondary piece, but we keep coming back there. We're a business that has to run profitably, but if we can do that and then also satisfy the needs of this generation, I think that that's all the generations coming through. I think that that's a positive. So as I say, it's a little bit tenuous, but it's just another way in which that we're able to use the power of those tools to provide just a little bit of a different organizational side to the business that hopefully means that people want to continue working in this industry and format.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other thing is the power of a tool like augmented reality. When you think about the changes in the workforce, you could have an older, very experienced technician that maybe doesn't want to be out day to day anymore, connected to a handful of newer, greener technicians remotely, literally to the point where they're over the shoulder really seeing what they're seeing, giving them direct coaching, move this, do this, et cetera. And that isn't a one-to-one relationship that can be a one to multiple, so the idea of being able to speed time to value of new employees because you have the confidence of them being coached or mentored by someone who has more experience, I think is really interesting as well.

It always surprises me when there's questions about the value or the fit of this technology. It just seems so obvious to me because when we talked about eliminating those triage visits and you have this fear sometimes, well remote's here to take jobs, there aren't enough people to do the jobs. You know what I mean? So the jobs aren't going away, you're just working smarter. There's still plenty of jobs to be done, it's just you're not wasting your time. I mean, there's a big difference. So it's interesting if you think about what we talked about earlier and this idea of using remote capabilities where it makes sense, but how the role of the frontline technician may change. What do you think that could look like in a few years time?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I think that we're in the very early stages of certainly the AI technology. And so yeah, I try and think about we're definitely going to see further advances in technology, further adoption of remote and AI type tools. But I don't see a time where a field service technician, somebody that has to go and change a particular part. It's one thing to have maybe the removal at some point in the future, machines are thinking themselves and saying, Hey, this is broken. Somebody needs to go and fix that. So I think it's still so early in that technology cycle. AI is always in the news recently, and anyone that's had any kind of interaction at all with chatGPT, kind of terrifying on one hand, but also really, really exciting and others. And so the development of this I think is while it's here, I think we're still wrestling with where, the how, and when to use this.

And I don't see a time probably in my working lifetime where we'll not have service technicians that need to go and undertake a repair. It just may be that whole triage piece becomes redundant, which in some senses is not a bad thing. That's kind of what we're trying to do with the tools today. But I think the way that the industry is moving, there's still a time where having an actual service technician is an absolute requirement. So to your point about the removal, I don't think this technology is going to remove jobs. I think it's just going to make jobs that little bit more straightforward, more simple for the technicians, and of course the customer is going to need more efficient, more effective fixes and even higher uptime than we see today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, this is one of the areas that interests me most about how our industry is evolving. I totally agree with you that I don't think there should be this fear of field service jobs being eliminated for all of the reasons you said. What I do wonder though is you know, mentioned earlier the increasing importance of soft skills, and then we talked about this idea that there's, as there's some increase in remote resolution or remote even triage, there is less face time. So then does that need to be offset somehow with a different type of customer interaction? And so this is the part I think is really interesting, whether we take our frontline workers and I think advance what we've mostly done so far, which is try and augment their technical skillset with soft skills.

Or at some point is there more of a segmentation of work and maybe a blurring of some lines where there's a technician that does the technical repairs, but maybe there's some sort of customer service manager, customer relationship role that it's not the same as wasting time to go on site for a triage appointment, but there's maybe a quarterly business review where there's more of that trusted advisor relationship. This is the part I think will get interesting because I'm a firm believer that the capabilities that we have technologically today are really impressive, definitely underutilized, which gives a lot more potential, but I think people still value human connection above all right? So not only do I think there isn't a point where there aren't field technicians on site, but I think the relationship with customers is always going to be important and there's always going to be some human element in nurturing that. So I think the way that can be done through service and what that looks like going forward is really interesting.

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I mean, I think what you're saying is you can see as things progress, the AI tools kind of taking the fault finding piece and somebody just goes to site just to do exactly what they get a report kind of spat out, we're kind of in Back to the Future territory, now I imagine what it will be like in however many years, but I do think that that's the way that's going. But I think if you look at how service businesses typically are built, you often have a core that's quite a small core of the kind of expert level technicians that know a lot of the equipment and have a lot of tenure. And so they've got a lot of experience, but the reliance on those more experienced people is high. And there's only so many of them, and there's only so many pair of hands available to a service business to be able to do that.

And actually you get to a point where those people are kind of become burnt out because that that's where all the deep technical questions come, "Hey, we've got a problem. We don't know what this is. Can you dial in? Can you call whoever it is on site?" And so I think the more we get to that machine learning that kind of says, "Was it this, was it that, was it this, was it that? We recommend this" and actually it keeps learning and you say, "No, that didn't fix it, but this did," then it says, "Oh, okay, next time I'll consider that." So I think it's still quite a way into the future. I think service, field service is still quite conservative for good reasons in adopting some of the technologies, but I think for sure that's where it's heading. But I think that that's a positive. Again, I don't mean to raise any alarm for anybody there at all.

I think it's just going to be more beneficial for technicians, it's going to make their job easier. They're going to be able to get to a site and just affect that first time fix and make the customer happy, which is always what a service technician generally wants to do. So I think that's where it's heading. But I think as we've seen with the adoption of the tools so far, it's a little bit slower, certainly I think, than the people that are working on these AI and AR tools. I think they wish that we would be a little bit better at finding ways to use this more effectively. But I think it's heading in a good direction with lots of benefits of both. And I don't see a time, as I say, in certainly my working life or I mean my working life that we'll see anything get anything different as it becomes easier.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you think about when you look at how things are changing or what the future holds that either falls into the challenges category or things that you are excited about?

Steve Goulbourne: Yeah, I think probably one of the limitations of these tools, and they're things that are here today and are a challenge, and I think one of the big things that we hear is with a lot of the AR and AI tools, you have to have a good wireless infrastructure. And the infrastructure of organizations for internal use is often there and it's very, very strong. But externally, it can be a little bit of a challenge. And I think the reason for that is the inherent risk of cybersecurity. And I think that that is around as day-to-day we see it day-to-day big stories, people being quite rightly probably the most paranoid people in the organization with good reason. And I think that continues to be one of the biggest risk factors for organizations. So I think as we advance with digitalization, that fear of cybersecurity, which is absolutely right right now, I think is also holding back some of those advancements a little bit as well.

And as I say, perhaps some of the infrastructure needed to use these tools, you simply need a good wireless connection or a wired connection to stream video at the right level to be able to annotate on the screen and talk about those things. So I still think there are some limitations there and some big concerns around cybersecurity.

I remember a conversation I had a number of years ago with one of our larger customers, and he was getting really frustrated. The guy was getting real frustrated, "Hey Steve, why do you need to send a technician to our site? Why don't you just log in and do that?" I said, "Hey, that's great. That's absolutely what we wanted to do. That's music to my ears. Let's do that. I'll get our IT people to talk to your IT people, and we'll connect that." Safe to say it died a death immediately when our IT people, "Well, we need to connect to this." No way. You're not getting anywhere near it. So I think that there's a lot of progress need to be made around infrastructure, and I think there's a lot of thought goes into just how these systems interact safely and try and offset some of the concerns, absolutely the right things to be concerned about in terms of cybersecurity. But I definitely see that as being perhaps a limitation today and need some certainly brighter people than me to answer some of those questions.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. That's a really good point. Okay. So you mentioned 12 years as a leader in service. What would you say is the biggest lesson you've learned in that time?

Steve Goulbourne: I say this somewhat lighthearted, but service is hard. I think that I referenced I was in sales, and the reason I moved to sales was I was a mechanical engineer by trade. I worked as a service technician, and I saw the salespeople and I thought, they just drive around in a nice car, they take people out for lunch and pick up orders and they get paid more than us. And so that's really where I want to go. And so the reality was it's totally different. So that I was a national sales manager as well, and I saw both sides working in sales as a salesperson and then also the management side. And it's difficult and it's challenging, but actually I think it's not even close to service. There are so many moving parts to a service business. If you consider supply chain, the people involved, the customers involved, there's so many things there.

So service is hard. I think that was probably the biggest thing. Without even touching on service is intangible, if you've got a product, I can sell you that product. I can loan you the product, you can work with the products, it'll do all the things that I told you to told you it would do through the features and benefits. Service is intangible. And so I think that adds a layer of complexity and makes it more difficult. But I think probably the biggest learning is people. People is at the core of what we do with service. It's not just the hard skills, the technical piece that we touched on, it's the soft skills both from the technicians on site, but equally the salespeople, the back office people in most cases, customers are in need of help and support. They're frustrated or agitated or feeling as though in some way or another the organizations let them down and they need our service.

And so people are absolutely the core of what we do. And it was actually one of your articles that I read where you were talking about total experience, and it resonated really strongly. We've, for the last three or four years, really focused on customer experience, the voice of the customer and net promoter schools. But over the last few years, and again, I think the pandemic showed us with the great resignation and the focus on recruitment and retention, we need to look at everything and not just necessarily focus on the voice of the customer. Hugely important and has been hugely beneficial. But the TX piece I think that you spoke about is there. And so, yeah, service is hard. People are at the core of what we do, and that's really where I think a lot of our focus needs to go now is on that total experience. So yeah, I've learned a lot. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm glad I made the move into service from sales, didn't think I would. Despite being an engineer, despite having worked there, [inaudible 00:46:48].

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's a good point that it's hard, but what that makes me want to ask is what makes you stick around then?

Steve Goulbourne: I think it's the fact that it is hard, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Steve Goulbourne: And it's never boring. In any level of service, every day canon often is different, and I think there's still lots of challenges and lots of things to address, lots of ways that we can improve how we work, why we work, the work that we do, both for our customers and importantly for our own people. So yeah, I think there's that. That side of me kind of thinks I like the fact that it's hard, and I like the challenge of service. Would I be comfortable and satisfied in a job where it's pretty, not that many are, but where, you don't feel as though there's going to be a challenge today, literally any given day, at any time of the day, a curve ball can come your way, be it internally, external, a new entrance of a competitor, a new product, whatever it may be. So it keeps you thinking. And so yeah, I think the fact that it's hard is the piece that keeps me engaged and keeps me motivated.

Sarah Nicastro: And you have an opportunity to help people every day internally and externally, right?

Steve Goulbourne: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's great. Well, Steve, I really appreciate all of your insights and you coming and having such a great conversation with me. So thank you very, very much.

Steve Goulbourne: No problem. I'm sure there was more we could have spoken about as well. But yeah, hey, they're really important topics and hey, I always enjoy listening and watching the podcast and learning. I think it's always, we said it's hard and it's nice to see you get so many great leaders on here and you can learn so many things. So yeah, enjoyed it. Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you, and always happy to have you back for part two.

Steve Goulbourne: Look forward to it.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insiders so that you get the latest content delivered to your inbox every other week. You can also take a look at the schedule for the 2023 Future of Field Service Live tour. We have events coming up in Birmingham, May 17th, Paris, May 24th, Minneapolis, June 15th, and Dusseldorf, June 21st, Stockholm, September 7th. So if you're in any of those areas, we would love to have you join us. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

With service organizations deploying new technologies at a rapid pace to stay competitive and improve their customer experience, we must be sure to fully examine the security ramifications of those digital transformation initiatives. With every mobile device, mobile app, smart device or Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint, you are bringing greater intelligence into your business; but you are also introducing new vulnerabilities to your networks.

When it comes to connected field service, cyber security should not be an afterthought. Small and mid-sized companies are as much as three times more likely to be targeted by cyber criminals (you can read more in this Forbes article). If you think your regional HVAC service company can’t possibly be on the radar when it comes to cybercrime, you need to think again. Increasingly, criminals are launching ransomware and other types of attacks against all types of companies (there have even been attacks against regional utilities and school districts). If you have data, it can be stolen. So how do you ensure that while you are driving technological advancement, you’re also mitigating cyber security risk?

Charlie Hales is the Managing Director at Waterstons, an Australian business and technology consulting firm. Charlie joined us at the Future of Field Service Sydney event and spoke about how service organizations can leverage new automation and intelligence technologies while still keeping their company secure against cyber-attacks. I asked Charlie for a follow-up discussion to go into more detail about cyber security and field service, and you can read about that discussion in the Q&A below.

What are the biggest cyber-security risks that service-based businesses face today?

Charlie Hales: With the move to remote working during COVID and advances in technology to monitor and manage systems remotely there has been a push to do more with less, including implementing remote access technologies. Some of this was implemented quickly without looking at best practices from a security perspective; this has actually made companies less secure and added vulnerabilities to the service-based business and the clients they’re supporting. If you work in the infrastructure sector this is even worse with new legislation to ensure better security implementations and data management in place. So, all companies should review what they do in this area to ensure cyber security is factored in. This doesn’t need to make access harder, to be clear, which is what some people think. The technologies available these days to protect businesses are great and can keep the access seamless but also secure.

As companies seek to increase connected assets, incorporate more automation, and drive more predictive models, what needs to be top of mind from a security perspective?

Charlie Hales: Everything that is connected to a network and the Internet adds a new vulnerability to your environment. This does not mean you shouldn’t use this new technology, but it does mean you need to implement and manage it correctly. Also, there is a misconception that everything needs to be updated 100% of the time, but this is not the case. You should do so for critical infrastructure and anything storing your data but items like printers, smart IoT, CCTV, etc., can be updated less often as long as they are on a separate network with no access or very limited access to the network connected to your critical systems and data. This network segregation between IT, OT and IoT is crucial, along with access controls and information management.

Automation also comes with benefits as well as risks. Automation is great for companies that want to implement it for repeatable tasks; they just need to think about where human elements need to be added or where monitoring should be implemented to ensure this automation isn’t breached. For example, if the automation usually pulls in data from a process to help with new orders and there was a big fluctuation in order volume, this should be flagged to check that nothing is amiss.

What’s the #1 mistake you see companies make related to cyber security?

Charlie Hales: The #1 mistake is that companies think cyber security is an IT problem. IT teams are great, but they are not cyber experts and shouldn’t be expected to be. Cybersecurity needs to be built in at a board level (they’re ultimately liable if something happens), factored into corporate risks and managed and driven through the business accordingly in partnership with the Cyber and IT experts.

Over the next five years, what changes will most impact how companies need to approach cyber security?

Charlie Hales: In Australia, we will see data management and protection. With recent breaches throughout Australia there will be a move to implement things similar to GDPR across Europe.

Globally I see more collaboration defining what can/can’t be done and managed (and by who), and recent examples include the likes of ChatGPT and TikTok. What you can use where and what data can be stored where is a hot topic at the moment, and I only see it getting bigger.

For companies looking to better understand the topic of cyber security, what resources do you recommend?

Charlie Hales: There is so much out there. A couple of examples include academy.attackiq.com and udemy.com. They have some great videos for CISOs as well as other videos for various roles in the business. But where I would start is to engage an expert to work with you in your organization to understand your business and what risks apply from a cyber security perspective. If you support infrastructure, you will have very different requirements than a manufacturing plant. What you need to do and what business risks you can accept will be very different. A general solution for all companies is not the answer. Understand what is critical to your business and then apply appropriate cyber security around that.

Given the shortage of IT staff in general and cyber security specialists specifically, how can service organizations make sure they are properly addressing their security needs? What options are available?

Charlie Hales: There are many cyber security consultants out there so find a partner you trust to work with. That way you can actually get a multitude of skills for less than recruiting an in-house team. If you are a large organization, you will likely want someone internally to manage your cyber risks and program of work, but you don’t need all resources in house. That will be cost prohibitive at the moment. You can get multiple part time staff members from a provider with varying skills for less than a full-time person with expertise across multiple areas.

Any other comments?

Charlie Hales: Don’t think that cybersecurity is a massive issue that’s too hard to look at, or that a breach is something that won't happen to you. It will. What are the biggest risks to your business, customer data, production line, internal designs? You need to protect them. Find an expert that can understand your business to advise you about where you can add the best cybersecurity protection for your organization. That way, when an attack does happen you can recover quickly with little impact to your business and your clients.

Sarah shares her observations from the 20^th anniversary of Field Service Palm Springs, which she attended last week. She also summarizes the “5 Lessons We’ve Learned in the Last 20 Years That Will Help Forge the Future of Service” that she presented in her keynote.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. So this week, I was at Field Service Palm Springs. I wanted to record this onsite, but I ran out of time and you can tell by my heavy sweater that I'm back in Pennsylvania. But it was the 20th anniversary of the Field Service events, and I'm sure some of you that listen have attended before. They have Field Service Palm Springs, a Field Service East event, which typically used to be in Amelia Island, last year was in Hilton Head. There's Field Service Europe, and then they have a series of Field Service Connect events in different areas. And so it was the 20th anniversary. I was asked a couple of times and was racking my brain to try and remember what was the first year I attended. I'm thinking it had to be 2009 or 2010, I certainly don't remember for sure, but it's been quite a long time.

And when I first attended the event I was typically one of two, maybe three, women at the entire conference. So that's certainly something that sticks with me because I remember, and I shared this a bit this week, the first presentation I ever gave, and it was horrible. It was horrible. I was very nervous and certainly some of those nerves came from being in a room where I was the minority. So we've come a long, long way. The attendance this year was really good and certainly consisted of a lot more diversity. So there's a long way to go. We're not where we need to be, but one of my observations was just looking around and thinking about how much that aspect has changed in the time that I've been attending.

I really enjoy this event every year, not only because it's in a beautiful setting in Palm Desert, which is nice to look at out of the windows, you're not spending a whole lot of time enjoying it per se, but it's a really nice backdrop. But there are people in this industry that I have now seen year after year for over a decade, and it's given me an opportunity to build some really great relationships. And it's always nice to see those people and have a chance to catch up. And it's also nice to have an opportunity to meet new people every year. So it's a great event, and the attendance was good this year, the energy was good, and I think it was a really great 20 year celebration for WBR and the team that puts the Field Service events on.

When I think about the progress the industry has made, it was representative to me in the diversity in attendees. Now, if someone from outside of our industry walked into the event, I'm not by any means saying they would take note of how diverse the crowd is. We're not necessarily that far, but comparatively speaking, I guess is my point. The other thing in terms of progress though that stood out to me is the topics being covered. So this year it felt like there were a lot more conversations related to leadership, to employee engagement and company culture. And those things to me show that service is becoming less of a silo and more a foundational aspect of the business because when service is or was a silo, it's easy to just focus on more of the operational things, and that's what this event used to be primarily about.

But as service becomes perceived as more of a path to growth, those other aspects start making a bigger and bigger difference because the responsibilities you're giving to your team are different. The, not ability, the responsibility you have to create a culture where innovation can thrive becomes a consideration. Obviously, there's a lot of conversations about talent. And I think that's not only because companies are struggling to find talent, but also because the type of employee field service organizations want today is different than it used to be. They want people that are more self-starters, more entrepreneurial in spirit, more empowered, more creative, and that's something that just demands some of these other changes when we think about leadership and things like that. So I really enjoyed hearing about that.

There was a session on the first day of the event from Darren Elmore of RICOH, and that session was primarily about how they are incorporating a remote first service approach, which I'm hoping to have him on the podcast to talk about. But he also talked about five essentially excuses that companies use to not innovate. And I shared a recap of that in our article on Monday. And I really liked that portion of his presentation even on its own before he got into their journey with remote service, because that's where we are. We're not necessarily talking as much about how do we incrementally improve. We're talking about how do we innovate and how do we evolve to what the next generation of service and field service will look like. So I love that. On day two, I think, yeah, day two, Charles Hughes with High Wire gave a presentation on the realities of employee burnout and the responsibility leaders have in creating better work-life balance for their teams and for themselves.

I thought it was a great session, and I also think the fact that a topic like that is on the agenda is just representative to me of progress and evolution in the space. Josh Zolin was at the event, so Josh was on the podcast before, I should have looked up the episode number. He wrote the book, Blue is the New White, he is the CEO of Windy City Equipment, and he took over his family business and he is a huge advocate and evangelist for the skilled trades. And he gave a very powerful presentation on day three talking about how we use stories to paint a better, sometimes a different, sometimes just a picture, to people about the opportunity for careers that services represents. So that was, I think, a really great session as well. So there was some great things that took place, and I gave a very short keynote presentation on day two.

I took the opportunity with the 20th anniversary theme to talk about if I were to step back and look at my observations in the time that I've been in this industry, what are the five macro lessons from the last 20 years? So really we'll say 15 years. I haven't quite been in this space 20 years, but what are the five lessons that we have learned that will really need to remain top of mind as we forge the future of service? So for those of you that weren't able to be at the event, I thought I would go through what I shared and share some of that with you. So going back to Josh Zolin's point on day three about the power of stories, I mean, I talk about that a lot. For those of you that listen to this podcast with any regularity, that is really the premise of this podcast. It's sharing the stories of service leaders, what's on their mind, what are they working toward, what are they grappling with, what lessons have they learned, et cetera.

And I think the fact that I am in a position to hear those stories, day in and day out, over a really significant amount of time at this point, because it's stories they stick in my mind. And so there's a quote, "If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten." It's Rudyard Kipling, and I really, really like that quote and like Josh, I am a big believer in the power of storytelling. And so when I think about reflecting on the years I've been in this space and what were these macro lessons that stood out, I'm sort of consolidating a lot of different stories to present to an audience about what are those core themes. And the reason that I can pull those together is because there's a lot of different stories that stand out that really illustrate some of these points. So let me share with you the five lessons. So the first one is service is a path to brand differentiation and revenue growth.

So I'm sure to some folks, that sounds very obvious, but when I started in this space, that was not an obvious statement at all. Service was perceived as a cost center. All services that I was talking with folks about were very transactional. The revenue model put a lot of focus on speed and efficiency versus value or customer experience, which meant that the workforce, the emphasis was really on productivity and technical skill versus things like soft skills and the customer journey, things like that. So it's one of the most fundamental shifts that I've witnessed in my time in this space, this recognition that service holds so much power in terms of our brand identity. It really is an ability to differentiate your business and a path to grow revenue. And I think most organizations that I speak with today have learned that lesson. They've had that recognition.

However, I think when it comes to taking that lesson and turning it into capitalizing on that potential, there's just still a lot that can be done. So there's so much more opportunity for organizations to put a focus on service, to use it, to create that brand experience and that differentiation, to move toward outcomes-based models, to leverage technology that exists today to be more predictive and to really transform the value proposition that they offer to customers, which can lead to new types of digitally focused and digitally driven offerings. It can lead to new lead to new service models and new revenue models. I think there's still a huge amount of opportunity for co-innovation with customers.

So it's a lesson that I think most have learned, but one that we need to keep thinking about because the potential that exists, the potential that this lesson could teach us, is only limited by the restrictions a company puts on itself. So that was the first one. The second one is the frontline worker is a powerful position. So tied very closely to the first, but here's where I think in terms of the continuum, the recognition of service as a path to differentiation came first. The recognition of the role the frontline workforce plays in doing that came after and for some, is still a work in progress. So historically, employees were viewed as assets, and the focus within organizations was more so on controlling them, getting them to comply with whatever change was happening, getting them to execute on the job that the company wanted them to do.

There wasn't a whole lot of acknowledgement between that correlation between the employee experience and the customer experience. And again, I said this before, there was more focus on technical aptitude versus the incorporation of soft skills and how that changes the customer relationship. So when you think about that evolution combined with the challenges companies face today around talent, this is an area where we really, really need to be thinking about that frontline worker is a very powerful person in terms of our customer experience and our brand identity. So what does that mean in terms of what that role looks like, what their experience looks like, how we treat them, all sorts of things. So we know that we can't exceed in our goals for service growth without the frontline. And as our service delivery evolves, the frontline must evolve with it. And the way that we treat our frontline workforce, the way that we leverage that position, the way that we empower them, et cetera, has to change as well.

I think a big part of that is moving beyond that inclination to want to control, and instead focus on what it takes to empower those workers and create more of a sense of ownership. So that is number two. Number three is technology when applied well is a great enabler. So this is obviously another very clear lesson we've learned. However, the point I talked about here is that, again, if you look back to when I started, a lot of the interviews I did were companies moving from actual paper to their first generation of a field service management solution. I would say that's very, very rare today. Most companies have been through that evolution, and they're now moving to their second generation, third generation and beyond of their service management systems. The technology though, has come a long, long way in terms of the sophistication and the functionality and the capabilities that exist. I mean, it really is impressive what technologically speaking, is possible today. I think what is happening is that a lot of the organizations are catching up to being able to use the capabilities that exist today.

So I think as organizations, there's a lot of layers of change that come in to digital transformation. And so I think we're at a place where really the technology providers are a bit further ahead than, not all, but some of the organizations in terms of really putting the internal change in place, refining workflows, all of those different things, to make sure that they have a good really well working foundational service management solution in place before they start to look for ways to augment that. So when you think about some of the more advanced capabilities that are in use today, augmented reality, machine learning, AI, all of those things, they all have very attainable practical applications for businesses today. And you see certainly some organizations that are ready to leverage those capabilities and are doing so with incredible success. When I look at the industry as a whole, I think there are also a lot of organizations that are catching up to being able to put those tools in place and really leverage them to their full capacity.

So there's been a lot of change, and certainly there's a lot of variety from business to business on where people stand. But there's just this idea that the technology has changed so much that some organizations are still trying to move beyond maybe a first or second gen solution to a more modern solution that's fully functional based on today's standards, and then leverage some of the more sophisticated capabilities. The companies that try and rush through that foundational step and they're on maybe an outdated or a poorly deployed foundational system, and then just try and layer in these new capabilities, tend to see issues in doing so. So it's just one of those things where it is a great enabler. It's not only a great enabler, I mean it's really, really just a necessity for today's businesses. It just needs to be handled in a way that aligns with business objectives.

So that was number three. Number four, the most successful companies change before they have to. I skipped ahead of myself. I guess going back to the technology point, the main point I wanted to make is that while there are so many powerful capabilities that exist today, they're only as powerful as an organization's ability to manage change. So I guess that's the conclusion of what I was trying to say. The companies that have gone through the school of hard knocks in managing change and coming up with a good way to do that, they're a bit ahead in being able to implement some of the more advanced technologies today. There are other companies that are still working on managing that change well so that they can leverage everything that exists today. So all right, onto lesson four. The most successful companies change before they have to.

So again, when I came into this space, things were really stable, maybe even a bit stagnant, and then things started to progress at a far slower pace than we've seen in recent years, but we started to see changes in our consumer lives from a technology standpoint. We had the introduction of the iPhone and Amazon and all of these different things that really started to put pressure on customer expectations across any industry, even those that are not really consumer centric. And so digital transformation has changed our ability to have always on constant real-time communication across the organization and with our customers. And that has just snowballed the amount of change that has taken place. Of course in the last couple of years, we've had a whole lot of other things that have forced organizations into other degrees of change, and the reality is it really isn't slowing down.

It's only getting faster. So there are companies that embrace that reality and have reconciled the fact that they need to be a lot more flexible, nimble, agile in how they work. And there are some who are still maybe looking back with longing on what was 15 or 20 years ago. So I think the message here is, you don't want to be forced to change. You want to be making the decision to do so before it becomes a necessity. Again, Darren Elmore from Rico had a great message within his session that I shared some of in Monday's article, but this idea that you want to do the disrupting, you don't want to be disrupted. And I think complacency is really at odds with creating competitive advantage. So we need to get comfortable with that reality. We need to be thinking outside of the box, looking outside of our own industry for inspiration and information and really thinking about from a company culture and leadership perspective, what are we doing to create a culture of innovation and eliminate fear of risk or fear of failure.

So I think that's a big opportunity for the industry going forward. Number five, we must prioritize people first and profits will follow. Again, when I started out, this was all very cost center conversation. It was very just like I said, employees as assets. It was very cut, cut, cut, minimize, et cetera. And that maybe worked for the place that businesses were in then. But today, with the opportunity for service as an opportunity to differentiate and to grow, we need to think a bit differently about how we juggle that or how we strike the balance and how we think about not just short-term objectives or the quarterly goals, but the big picture. This is true in how we treat our customers as people and how we focus on building better relationships with them and understanding their needs, to a degree where we can innovate from the outside in. And it's certainly incredibly important when we think about how we engage with our employees, our talent, our people internally. So I'm not saying this in the sense of profits don't matter, numbers don't matter.

They absolutely do. I just think that the companies who are focused solely on that are taking a very shortsighted approach. And I think that there is a lot of ties in with this lesson to the realities of what's important to attracting, attaining, and retaining talent today, what customers value from the companies they do business with in terms of its authenticity, it's commitment to them and to its people, et cetera. So I think this is a big trend going forward as well. And again, how that ties back to company culture, individual leaders, et cetera, will be really interesting to watch. There's another quote I shared that says, "The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge." So I think there are certain situations where these are lessons that have been learned, but maybe not applied as much as they can be. So that's why I wanted to reflect back on some of them because I think they're not only representative of the biggest changes I've seen, not only attending this particular event year over year, but just thinking back on all of the conversations I have and all of the things that I've witnessed.

They're representative of that change, but they're also really five of the keys to unlocking the potential that exists as we move ahead. So that's what I shared in a much faster manner, by the way, at the event, and I hope that you can take some value from that as well. So it was a great event. If you haven't had a chance to read Monday's article that talked about some of the points from Darren Elmore's session related to embracing innovation, please have a look at that and stay tuned. Hopefully I'll have an opportunity in the coming months to get some of the folks that I connected with at the event to come here and share their stories with you firsthand. So that's it for now. You can find more at futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider so that you don't miss any of our weekly articles or podcasts.

Also, make sure you take a look at the live tour schedule. We have events coming up in Birmingham UK on May 17th, Paris on May 24th, Minneapolis on June 15th. Yes, June 15th. Dusseldorf, June 21st, and Stockholm, September 7th. So if you are near any of those areas and would like to come and join us for a day of conversation and connection, I would love to see you. All of the events are free to attend. You can register for the location nearest to you on the website, so futureoffieldservice.com. As always, the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. Thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I spent last week in sunny Palm Springs, California for the 20^th anniversary of WBR’s Field Service event. Despite wracking my brain to remember which year was my first, I am not quite sure if it was 2009 or 2010. What I do know is that this year’s event looked a lot different from my first – we’ve come a long way. I’ll share more of my thoughts from the event, as well as a look into the keynote I delivered, on this week’s podcast. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a bit of one of the sessions from day one that resonated.

Darren Elmore, GM, Service at RICOH traveled from New Zealand to Palm Springs to talk about RICOH’s approach to adopting a remote-first service model. I am not going to get into any details around that story because I am hoping Darren will soon share it himself on the podcast, but in his presentation, he began with talking a bit about how service organizations need to embrace innovation. I couldn’t agree more (as you probably know!) and the point was reinforced throughout the remainder of last week’s event – what was once a fairly stagnant industry has changed immensely, and that change is only snowballing. Companies who get comfortable getting uncomfortable will be those who make the highest profits, attract and retain the best talent, and create impactful customer loyalty.

But as we know, change is hard. In Darren’s presentation, he shared five reasons he hears for not innovating (aka excuses):

#1: We’re successful today. As he said, “Success today doesn’t guarantee success tomorrow.” Yes, it can be hard to choose to disrupt successful smooth sailing with innovation, but the alternative is to remain in your comfort zone until disruption finds you – and creating disruption versus reacting to it is a better position to be in.

#2: We’re too busy. Everyone is busy in some way; that’s no reason not to take a strategic view of your business. Staying focused only on today’s fires ensures you’ll be surpassed by competition that does the necessary work of determining how to balance the needs of today’s business with creating the business of the future.

#3: Customers aren’t asking for it. Darren shared the famous Henry Ford statement about customers asking for a faster horse, not a car. Innovative organizations don’t wait until innovation is requested or demanded, they look for ways to create new value that customers will be excited about – and appreciate not having to ask for.

#4: We tried it before, it didn’t work. Efforts of innovation rarely succeed on the first try; failure is part of the cycle. This mentality is fear-based, and a fear-based culture is at odds with innovation. What you tried before is irrelevant beyond what you can learn from that failure and it’s certainly no reason to avoid trying again. And again.

#5: Innovation is risky. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “no risk, no reward.” And it’s true. Playing it safe will get you mediocre results, at best. Risk is necessary at times, particularly when it’s calculated and intentional. And one point Darren made here that I love is that this isn’t just about the risk of innovation to a business, but the personal risk of innovation to the leader spearheading it. But we need to shift our thinking around risk to not being perceived as only a negative but also a potential opportunity.

I’m looking forward to hopefully having Darren come share with you all more of his story of personal risk in the journey RICOH is on in remote-first service, and I’m also looking forward to sharing more with you on Wednesday’s podcast about last week’s event. Stay tuned!

In a session from Future of Field Service Sydney, Sarah talks with Jordan Argiriou, Director, Service Solutions APEC at QIAGEN about how the company is channeling its service focus to navigate current economic conditions.

Sarah Nicastro: So what we're going to talk about is some concepts around customer centricity and this idea that right now everyone is facing some sort of economic realities, turmoil, et cetera. And so I mentioned earlier that historically, service was seen as this cost center where it would be like, "Okay, well where can we cut? We'll cut here." And I think companies with the recognition that it is a profit center need to find ways to be cost conscious without it negatively impacting the employee experience or the customer experience. So we're going to kind of talk about some of those elements a bit. But before we do that, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and Qiagen.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. Hey, so I'm Jordan Argiriou, as everyone can see. I'll start with the personal side. I'm married, a father of three beautiful kids. That's the gray in my beard, everyone I think can all relate.

Sarah Nicastro: There's barely any, so they must be well-behaved.

Jordan Argiriou: No, it's true. They're not too bad. I've worked, initially started out as a service technician slash engineer, and that was with an Australian company, very small. Moved across to a company called Biolab, which some people may recognize in the room. Quite a large Australian company for biotechnology and within that space. Biolab was then acquired by Thermo Fisher. So I was there approximately 10 years. And now with Qiagen. So started off as the Australian Head of Field Service, or Australian New Zealand Head of Field Service. And now I look after service for APEC. So Director of Service for APEC.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Okay.

Jordan Argiriou: And been with Qiagen 10 years this year.

Sarah Nicastro: Now would everyone here be familiar with Qiagen

Jordan Argiriou: I don't know. Is anyone here familiar with Qiagen?

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. This, yeah, so maybe talk just a little bit about what the company does.

Jordan Argiriou: So we are a leader in biotechnology, again. Molecular testing, research from the life science academia side, clinical testing. Something that people may be familiar with, quite obviously, is COVID testing. So we have the robotics, the instruments, the kits, the consumables. So end-to-end, sample to insight, a solution for the customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So when we're facing economic turmoil, I think this gut reaction can be to look internally immediately and start looking for, "Okay, where can we cut? How can we cut," et cetera. Let's talk about how there's another way to do this, which is Qiagen's approach has really been to look externally and to use this as an opportunity to connect with customers more deeply in a different way and do a lot more listening. So tell us a little bit about this idea of resisting that urge to just cut, cut and to really take that conversation externally first and learn what customers' changing needs are.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. I mean, look, and I think we're all facing the same challenge. We heard it with the round table discussion. The post COVID effect of having to do things very differently versus what we traditionally did, is obviously still in effect somewhat today. And it's going to continue because it's something that we've now become quite accustomed to and we've adapted to and we've changed, the whole world's changed in how we're working.

However, I think we all do a lot of listening. Through, across the whole service industry. Again, from your presentation this morning, from the discussion, there is a lot of listening going on as to what the customer needs, wants, would like to see for the future. I think what we've done differently or what we have done differently is assemble teams internally. So both actively listening, actively surveying customers, asking them what they want. We all do that. That's traditional.

What we've done now is to put together teams globally from very different diverse backgrounds that wouldn't typically be on that sort of team and ask them to create a solution for the customers. Also, in conjunction with that, asking the customers to be part of that pilot, trying it out. The advantage we have here in APEC is that we work with a broad range of markets. So we have some that are very, I guess still emerging and in their infancy, where we have the country we're sitting in today of Australia where it's quite a mature market. So we have a good stretch between the two to know, "Okay, this is working there, it could work here." Something that we might overlook in Australia by saying, this is what's always worked or this is what traditionally works in the mature market. We may be able to adopt something, an idea from an emerging market that we could implement here today.

And that's what we've done in terms of listening to the customer. So it's continuous improvement. And that's again, normal for most industries that we're looking at here today. However, adding that extra component of the internal people saying, "Okay, this is what we know works, but what else could we do?" Again, specifically Australia has a lot of good best practice that we could adopt in the emerging. However, they have a lot of new technology that they might adopt quite quickly that we would be more, "Let's analyze it, let's test it, let's look at it. So that's working today for us."

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, do you have any examples of... with the customer listening you do, and the way that you've built those teams internally, like new offerings that have come out of that? So we saw this during COVID, and there's different industry examples. So for instance, there's a company that we work with in the restaurant industry. Well, restaurants were closed. So at a maximum they were doing some volume of takeout business, but a lot of them were shut down. And so obviously if your livelihood is servicing that equipment, there can be some panic. But they look for ways to help introduce new, maybe even temporary offerings to help keep the equipment. They can't just let it sit, either. So just really getting creative about as the customer's needs change or as the economic landscape changes, how can you get creative and adapt?

Jordan Argiriou: So one of the initiatives we undertook was to look at, so not so much implement in each country, but to look at the customizing of our offering to each sort of market: what their conditions asked for, what the customers needed post COVID, or during COVID, post COVID, and then to come up with a customized solution that would fit that country or region. It sounds quite simple, but it's actually quite difficult to do because each country and region has all these different needs and there's north and south and there's different types of agreements and products that they want. So we've come up with a semi customizable approach to service.

The other thing we did as well, actually, just to add to the answer before, was to survey our sales team across the region and globally as well, and ask them, "What products are you comfortable selling? What works for you?" Again, sounds simple, sounds something that you could do anytime. But post events, post coming out of that COVID environment and not being able to have a touch point with the customer, or a very forced touchpoint where they didn't really want too many people out on site in their laboratories, specifically for healthcare providers. So we asked the sales team, "Hey, what are we doing? What are you comfortable selling? What would work?" And that in conjunction with asking the customers with the offerings we came up with, we've come up with some fairly customizable solutions for customers.

So like a subscription service instead of going for the whole agreement because of the economic pressure. Various other products that we are starting to put together now to be able to offer them some relief from the economic pressure, but at the same time keeping their operations running as they were before.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think sometimes if we look at it in terms of opportunity instead of challenge, in an economy where customers have their own cost consciousness, sometimes that can be a good thing for service. I mean, if you manufacture equipment assets, organizations are looking to extend the life because they don't want to make new CapEx investments. If you can offer these new arrangements as a service, that might not be what you have done or maybe an ideal, but it's a way to think outside of the box.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: What I'm curious about though, Jordan, is when I hear customized, I think that being at odds with scalability.

Jordan Argiriou: That's true.

Sarah Nicastro: So how do you strike that balance between customizing offerings to the customer need without it becoming unsustainable for the business?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. So the word customized is quite appealing to the service industry and to customers because they're thinking, "Great, I get this end-to-end solution, I can prolong the life of the instrument, et cetera, and I'm getting exactly what I would like." However, as you said perfectly, it becomes quite challenging for a company to be able to manage the customization per product, firstly, per market, per economy, per everything. So it becomes quite a challenge when you're presenting that sort of solution, because you know that the next step is to customize even further. And you'll get to a point where you literally can't do anything more. And the customer's going to say, "Well, you've run out of ideas, or, "this is now the new norm that I can ask for whatever."

So we do have a limitation in terms of customizing. So you have your base agreement and then you can add on and things like that. For future scalability, I mean, it's going to become a world where we're going to have to customize our offering for the long term. However, there has to be an end point. Otherwise you're going to end up spending a huge amount of money. Well, not just money but time, effort, employee engagement with the customer just trying to figure out which customer has what, which it's quite a difficult process.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I think this is interesting. It kind of bleeds into one of, I guess another of my favorite conversations. You can tell, I happened into this space and now I'm such a nerd about it because I'm like, "Oh, I love talking about this." But what this makes me think of to some degree is not that there isn't any actual customization to what you're offering, so I'm not saying that., but I do think we have this whole conversation right now about what is the narrative we're creating with customers? What is the dialogue we're having with customers? And how is that maybe different or how different does it need to be from the dialogue we're having internally? Okay. So what I mean by this is customers want to feel that you are customizing your solutions to their needs, but that doesn't necessarily have to mean that every solution is completely customized to their needs. It can mean there's a menu of standard customizations, et cetera.

So there needs to be this acknowledgement that the way we talk about things internally is not always the way we should be talking about them externally.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So I have this example, one time I was talking to this gentleman... He was so frustrated and I felt so badly. He's like, "Well, we've invested in IoT and no one will buy it." And I'm like, "Because they don't care that you've invested in IoT. They care about what value-

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: ...that provides." But the reality is we struggle a lot with taking the innovation that we're doing as a business and turning that into a value proposition that resonates with what our customers want. So I guess in my mind, I'm thinking part of it is like, yes, I'm sure there is some customization, but there could also be more perceived customization than actual customization.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. And you raise a good point. The value proposition is probably the strongest part of that customization. If you can't deliver an end-to-end solution for what they need, and like you said, you invest heavily in technology in terms of their accessibility remotely. A lot of customers might just see it and go, "That's great. I'm not going to use it."

Sarah Nicastro: Or, "Great, well that's saving you money because you're not on site, so I'll pay you less."

Jordan Argiriou: Yes, correct. Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: This is another one of my favorite conversations. Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Yeah. What this makes me think of is I had this conversation once with a gentleman from a company in the US called Spencer Technologies, and he used the analogy of, hopefully this makes sense, if you go bowling with children and you can put the bumpers up, so like bumper bowling, the customer just thinks that they can... But really you're keeping them in the lane you want them to be in.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Hopefully I'm making sense to everyone. So you're finding ways to meet this customer demand to have more flexibility, more customization, personalization of offerings. If you think about where we're headed, we talked quite a bit this morning about the world of delivering outcomes. What do you think is coming along?

Jordan Argiriou: I don't think there's going to be an end to the customization. And again from this morning, from the round table, one of the comments was, and I think it was yourself that made the comment, that the next generation coming forward, the generation following that, they're all now accustomed to having things immediate. They're having at their fingertips. They're wanting that sort of interaction. As they become consumers, managers, leaders within businesses, they're going to adopt that same idea. No matter the cost, because it's going to become... it's already become the norm in their world. In ours, it's starting to seep in. It's here, but we're still, I wouldn't say resisting, but we're still being realists about what we can do and what our capabilities are.

But by the time they enter the landscape as, like I said, either employees or consumers or leaders, that is very much going to become everyday life. So we're going to see a lot more of this. In my opinion, a lot more. So that customization, the digitization, it's going to become normal. So if you think about it, with any sort of piece of technology that you own, you can customize it to be you. But again, it's within those bumpers that you have that. However, moving forward you can see it's becoming a lot more open-ended and you can completely customize what you're doing with that bit of technology, which I think will translate into us as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. I think it's also interesting when you think about this conversation of delivering outcomes, ultimately a customer wants more to be able to rely on you to do something they don't want to need to do. They just want the peace of mind. However, we don't live in an age where anyone's comfortable trusting entirely that you'll deliver that. Meaning they don't want to be hands-on, but they want to at any point be able to look at a dashboard, a real-time visibility into the fact that you're doing what you said you could would do for them. So there's this, I think, parallel need of, "I want you to do it. I also want to know at any given time how you're doing it, what's going on, what the status is, et cetera."

So let's talk a little bit about talent and what you see there. So whether it is being agile and adapting to economic challenges and being creative, or whether it's hopefully that normalizing and moving towards this next phase of delivering outcomes. How do you see the role talent plays in that? And how are you navigating that?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. So I think that there's a, yeah we spoke about it earlier today, with talent retention not only being around a career path, not only being around incentive and conditions, but more around the diversity, the sustainability, all of those factors together. And something that I truly respect of our company, of Qiagen, is they implemented very strong type of diversity targets 14 months ago. Which in my opinion were probably perceived at the beginning to be a checkbox. I'm just being blunt, and this is my opinion here.

Sarah Nicastro: We're all friends here.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. But it was perceived that it was something that we needed to do as part of a corporate responsibility.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure.

Jordan Argiriou: However, come to this day today, we have seen these initiatives and programs that we're running really be part of our everyday lives. So they've actually, our executive team has done an extremely good job of number one, correcting gender diversity across leadership. It's an extremely... I mean, the company at the moment is probably 50/50 gender roles on either side. A lot of leadership where typically it was governed by, service leadership as a good example is typically male dominated because that's who's-

Sarah Nicastro: Because they progressed through... yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Come through, right. But I would say now our global service team is more or less 60/40, which is a challenge in itself to get to that number. But we've found really good talent within our marketing side, within our financial side, within our... Even from our global product services side that actually run our third level support. And we've introduced that. So in terms of retaining and attracting, the activities that Qiagen have put in place some time ago have really paid off today because we are attracting the right people now. We are attracting a stronger group of people applying for positions, because they're seeing a pathway no matter... Where you're located where you are, you can have a pathway forward if you want to move into that space.

Otherwise, even if you want to stay within your own space, there's lots of lateral moves you can make within the organization. I think one that pops into my head now is post COVID everyone was talking about the... What's the word? The great resignation and people moving on and shifting and everything else. Our global head of HR at the time said, "No, it's actually the great re-imagination because we want to offer, instead of moving along and going to the next place, we want to offer lateral moves for people." So is it, if we can't offer you what you really want in the future in this position, then we can think about a different pathway.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: And really mixing it up and allowing people to go into country, taking on different roles. It's actually been a very positive experience. And when it comes to service, we're doing the same thing in the region. We're changing things up. We're looking at the traditional structure differently. Not having the traditional service manager, supervisor, engineers. It's changed quite a bit in the past, I would say, three years for us.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that perspective of the great re-imagination.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I had a conversation recently about how so much of the potential in service is about how you perceive it. Because each of these challenges is also an opportunity, but you have to push beyond the realities of the problem. And that's not to say they are not real problems, but you have to get over perceiving them only that way to be able to see that opportunity that lies beyond there. I love that. Danielle, I'm assuming it's uncommon for a company to start DEI as a checkbox exercise and then realize, "Oh wow, this is actually really benefiting us."

And again, not to spook out our internal organization but all credit, in my opinion, goes to our CEO for really driving all of... I mean you've got that whole sphere of diversity and there's a lot of tags in there, but he's really driving that forward, and that's the next phase for us. Because again, traditionally male dominated, traditionally very structured sort of org charts that you would see and think this is how we're going to move forward. But all of that has changed and it's actually been an extremely positive shift for the company. So it's amazing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I hope you don't mind me sharing how we met.

Jordan Argiriou: Course not.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So Jordan and I met a few years ago, and I think I reached out to you because you had attended Field Service Asia.

Jordan Argiriou: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: And I wasn't there myself, but I was looking through the folks that spoke at the event and I reached out and said, "Hi Jordan, I have this podcast, I'd love to have you on." Et cetera. So anytime, I mentioned at the beginning, my goal is to be the voice of the industry. So that means I don't have an editorial calendar, I don't believe in them. I think there is not much value in my content if I'm driving an agenda. So my goal is always just to connect to people in the industry and chat with them to understand what it is that they are really struggling with, learning from, passionate about, and then help them frame that into a conversation that will help others. That's my job.

So we set up this sort of introductory chat, very informal. And here is this tough guy from Australia and I'm like, "Hey Jordan, so here's what the podcast is, blah, blah, blah. So if you were to come on, do you have in mind what you might want to talk about?" And he was like, "Mental health." And I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I love this." Right? Because you don't often hear that from a man or in field service, I mean. But-

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: ...a lot of this stuff. So I want to talk about this a bit. Because at that time we were in the midst of COVID, and so there was a lot of things you were facing as a leader with very real struggles that your teams were having. But I mean, in reality, we have barely navigated out of the COVID climate into all of these other crises.

So as human beings, I think most of us have faced some really, really tough points over the last few years. And I think we're foolish as leaders to not acknowledge that our employees are human and have had the same. So I just wanted to bring this into the conversation. Because I think when we talk about company culture, creating a psychological safety among our workforce, this vulnerability, this openness, mental health and making sure our people know that we care about that aspect as well is very important. So can you just maybe share a little bit about how you saw the gap in that not really being something that was being addressed or supported? And some of the ways that you put focus on that?

Jordan Argiriou: Yep. I think there's two sides to that. So I'll share my side and then what the company actually did post, or during and post COVID and what we've set up for the future. Recognition of what was going on was truly that we were all going through the same thing. We all faced the same challenges, the same frustrations. I think us in Melbourne probably had a little bit worse than other people. Anyway, being the most locked down city. Just slightly.

But I think that highlighted to me, it was conversations we were having with people such as Carrado leading the service team here in Australia, other staff in the region leading service teams, they were still in the field. So specifically for service, yes, everyone was struggling on the outside. The service engineers were still expected to get in their cars, to get... If I think of India, to jump on a train where they could cross borders, where there was very strict control.

It all impacted the teams dramatically. But they would be exhausted at the end of the day. Not physically, because they've only gone out for one job because there wasn't much going on. But mentally they were thinking, "Here's another checkpoint, here's another thing where I'm going to get asked to produce papers." So all of that and on top potentially becoming sick because you're in that environment where there are COVID cases right next to you-

Sarah Nicastro: And who do you have at home?

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: That you need to protect.

Jordan Argiriou: You've got your family at home, you've got your children. The impact on the kids who were locked in as well with not being able to go too far, et cetera. So from that, we started having different discussions, started thinking differently about how we deal with the teams, what we can do for them. Are there little things we can change every day to make life easier for them?

These are small changes, but for them, they were enormous. Things like reaching out. I mean, Carrado, probably one of the better ones who's also quite passionate about mental health honestly. I'm not talking him up because he's my colleague, but it's more-

Sarah Nicastro: I don't mind.

Jordan Argiriou: No, he's very passionate about it. So again, staying in constant contact with them, asking if they're okay, "Do you need a day? Do you need something else? Can we provide something for your family to be able to be a bit more comfortable during this time?" So we did all of that in the region. And it actually ended up that we retained, I think we retained everyone. I think it was one or two that moved on to other companies though. So it was a natural progression, but we did retain the entire team.

The second part of this is though, what's come during and post COVID is that Qiagen has set up a lot of global user group... Or not user groups. Global collective groups. There's one called, and we put a Qia tag in front of everything. So there's Qia Thrive, Qia Diversity. So there's ones that cover general parenting throughout the pandemic, general parenting post. And now just being a parent, being able to juggle potential economic struggles that are happening for everyone. And country. And then, there's a lot of talks that happen, live face-to-face discussions.

And from those groups, we then come up with initiatives that roll out into the company. So the most positive part for me is that the senior leadership or our executive council are actually a part of all of these groups. So they're sponsoring these groups. I am part of the Qia Thrive group as a global leader in there. And again, things that we talk about, the initiatives that come out of it... and it's all stuff that we are all contributing to. So these aren't topics that we're going, "Okay, they're on this list, we need to address them. There's economic pressure, there's..." These are topics that are coming up in discussion, and if they are considered to be quite critical, then we move forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. So I think there's a couple things I want to say. So going back to the podcast conversation we had, we talked about some of the things you were doing at that time. And just to maybe paraphrase a couple points, I think it really, there was no magic bullet to making it a focus in the business. It was really about treating every conversation as a human conversation and starting with, "How are you? Are you okay?" Looking, sharing vulnerably your own status so that people know it's okay to also share.

So a lot of times there's these big issues and if you're not a mental health expert, it can seem daunting. Like, "Well, how do we accommodate for that?" But when we're dealing with people, it's really, intent is so important. Because I think if you come from a place of genuine intent and people feel that, that in and of itself helps tremendously. But just normalizing the conversation is something I think you said, "You can't just have a retreat once a year that's like a mental health guest speaker, whatever. It needs to be part of the day to day."

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think that's really important. I also think when we talk about how this topic ties in with the overall talent conversation, a lot of times we say, "People are our most important asset." but they're not an asset, they're people. And people don't want to be perceived or treated as an asset, they want to be treated as human beings. So keeping that perspective and making sure you're connecting on a human level, you're not treating people as a line item on your balance sheet is also important.

Jordan Argiriou: I think as well, there's an aspect to when you've got a team of leaders under you or reporting to you. Under you, sorry, is a bad term to use. Reporting to you. I think you need to remind them to stay grounded. Because quite often a younger, and this isn't the generalization, but a younger leader who has progressed quite quickly can sometimes perceive their team as like, "Okay, I'm in charge now. This is what I'm going to say. This is how it goes." And then they get so caught up in the everyday and the challenges we're facing now with expenditure pressures at a high level, particularly we don't want to pass that down to anyone so we deal with it within our sphere. However, that person that gets caught up in that pressure and then forgets the human side of reporting. So this is where it comes back to having to coach them to remind them to stay grounded. I was in those shoes one day, some time ago. If you don't stay grounded, that team quite quickly disrespects you because you're prompting the disrespect.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: They don't respect you as a leader.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think that's a really good point. With the economic pressures that are reality right now, it can be really easy to unintentionally pass that burden onto the frontline.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: But at the end of the day, that isn't their responsibility. And so making sure that you don't negatively impact the morale, how they feel about their roles, et cetera, just because the organization itself has these pressures, I think it's a really important part of the discussion.

So I mentioned earlier this idea, going back to the topic of just navigating the need to be cost conscious without sacrificing employee experience or customer experience, what opportunities do you see to better leverage or expand leverage of technology to work smarter instead of harder and to look for ways to help?

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. I think we heard it this morning that the connectivity, the remote connectivity into the instruments, which is something that we're now investing in quite heavily. So any new instruments will come out with some sort of connectivity and pre prompt to us that there is something wrong. However, the other side is that we are now looking at solutions that will enable us to be able to repair or offer some sort of fix, post sending someone out. So that impacts both, not just the employee, but also... Sorry, not just the cost saving to the company, but also the employee. Because there's less stress on them to be able to have to go out and repair this instrument physically versus being able to do some sort of a remote repair or it can be done elsewhere.

And that, again we heard it at the round table, that the remote connection is something that we're all trying to do. Is it what our customers want today? Not everyone. I think within our space they are asking for it more and more because they want less interaction physically-

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: ...and they want operations to be as smooth as possible. So moving forward, I mean this is going to be the next step. Within the space we work in, the biotechnology side, the healthcare side, this is going to be that next level. To be cost conscious as well, it can be a heavy investment at the beginning. But if you've got everyone aligned, then if you see an outcome that's going to be positive, and again, get that feedback from the market, get the feedback from internal, get the feedback from our engineers as well as to where that should go, then that's where we'll head.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree. There's a ton of potential in remote. And I think that it's goes back, it's maybe the best example right now of how the value proposition to us as an organization and the value proposition to our customers are two very different things. And they have to be articulated differently. If you can speak about it... It's not about saving truck rolls to them, because all that translates into is, "Let's pay you less."

Jordan Argiriou: Correct.

Sarah Nicastro: It's about faster time to resolution, right? So it's making sure the narrative matches the appropriate party.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. And I think what you said before about being more customer-centric, that's something that in my opinion, was lost somewhat during COVID. Not because we weren't still customer-centric. We still wanted to keep them online. We'd wanted the lowest downtime possible. However, we also tried to do it in a way where it was the most efficient way and we had to be there quickly and in and out. It was very rushed at one point. Then we got used to the idea of having to do it. Or by used to it, we had to do it. We adjusted.

Now that we've come back, I feel as though, and not just within the service space, but other companies that we see have taken that on board and kept it, but the customer centricity isn't there anymore. It's more of a transactional, the relationship isn't there because they're not on site as often.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: So changing the scope of an engineer to be more than just the person who turns up and fixes it, they already have a relationship but you can improve on that as well. Giving them different skills.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Again, keeping it customer-centric. So again, and then if you think about a cost in the long run for a company, I mean if that engineer is selling that second, third, fourth instrument, fantastic. Right? I mean...

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: No reductions, I'm just saying.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. No, for sure. All right, any final thoughts or comments for folks here?

Jordan Argiriou: No I think, look... Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for coming.

Jordan Argiriou: I appreciate it. And thank you for everyone for turning up and offering valuable feedback as well and having good conversations. But in terms of what we've just discussed, I mean, if we don't... Okay, so on the mental health side, if we don't stay on top of it's going to just consume us. You're going to lose talent. You're not going to be able to retain the right people. If you don't structure your organization to offer engineers and others a pathway to where they want to go, it doesn't have to be specifically up, sideways, wherever. Just offer them something that is a bit more tailored to them and feels like you're listening. Then I think overall, the customer centricity, the savings and everything else will cover themselves because you're looking after your people.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, thank you.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

For the past seven years, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Field Service Management software has served as a touchstone in the industry, helping field service organizations select technology to improve operations and giving software providers a gauge of how they measured up to their competitors.

But going forward, companies will need to look elsewhere for guidance and validation of their technology investments. Back in January, Gartner informed the vendors participating in the Magic Quadrant that it will be retired report after the 2022 edition with plans instead to transition to a Market Guide format expected to launch later this year.

Why the end of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for FSM? Gartner cited several reasons, including the fact that many of the vendors assessed in the report have achieved what they describe as a “high level of functional parity,” and that vendor movement from one position to another has been slowing.

The quadrant divides vendors into four categories – Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries and Niche Players. In retiring the assessment, it seems Gartner feels that companies like IFS (which has been ranked as a leader in all seven reports) are consistently strengthening their position in the market while improving their technology, and that vendors in other categories have found a comfortable lane that they don't seem to be expanding out of any time soon.

While this “high level of functional parity” may mean the end of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for FSM, it doesn't mean innovation isn't continuing. Field service remains a dynamic market that demands a high level of execution when it comes to optimizing and automating workflows.

In the final report (which you can access here), Gartner notes that the estimated revenue from packaged FSM software licenses, cloud subscriptions, and maintenance reached $3.51 billion in 2021, an 18% increase from the previous year – and did so during a period of economic instability and a global pandemic. There were product improvements across all 10 of the critical FSM capabilities identified by Gartner, and in the ability to deliver great customer service.

Gartner identified a few key trends in product development, quite a few of which we have discussed in previous articles and podcasts:

Augmented Reality: Gartner says that all of the vendors in the evaluation now have augmented reality solutions to enable video collaboration and live guidance in the field, and a lot of customers are using these capabilities to work with technicians for diagnostics and support.

Sustainability: This is a big buzzword in a lot of industries, but in service the focus has been on energy efficiency. Some organizations are at least partly cost-justifying their FSM investments through reduced fuel consumption thanks to better routing, for example. The software helps companies reduce truck rolls and keep driving distances and idling to a minimum.

Knowledge Management: This functionality keeps growing in importance, particularly given the high number of retirements and overall shortage of technicians. Some FSM packages are providing features that help better record insights from actual service visits and leverage artificial intelligence to curate and provide easier access to those insights for other technicians.

Self-Service: Again, with fewer technicians and call center staff being asked to shoulder more work, the trend toward customer self-service portals is also accelerating. Customers can initiate and track work orders, pay for services, and even initiate some diagnostics using these products.

So, what’s next? In the final report, Gartner touches on some needs that will likely influence further FSM software developments over the next few years, including the use of machine learning and natural language processing to mine service data, cross-organizational collaboration, new regulatory guideline support, better subcontractor integration, built-in integration with other platforms (like ERP, digital twins, and knowledge management), and more advanced analytics.

It'll be interesting to see how Gartner will continue watching the FSM space through its Market Guide but moving forward it may be a bit more difficult to get the same kind of comparative look at how the software tools are evolving. To stay up to date on how IFS is addressing the needs of service management and beyond, visit ifs.com.

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