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

After some agonizing, Sarah recaps the top ten podcast episodes of 2022 so you can be sure you hit all of the highlights.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro.

Today's episode is our annual look back, if you will, our top 10 of 2022. This is an exercise that for me, gets increasingly harder as the years go on. Looking back through the podcast episodes that we've released over the course of the year makes me really proud of the content that we're creating, and the variety of topics that we're covering. I'm incredibly grateful for the guests that are willing to come on and share their stories, their perspective, and their insights. So selecting 10 of all of the episodes of the year is no easy feat. And this doesn't necessarily mean that these are the 10 best podcasts or my favorites, I couldn't pick favorites. But they are what I think is a really good representation of what Future of Field Service is about.

And for folks that haven't been following along for a while, often I hear them say, "I love your podcast, but I never know which episodes to go back and listen to, because there are so many." So my hope is that doing a top 10 gives people a starting point if they want to go back and listen to some of the episodes that we've put out this year. All of that being said, these are in no particular order. These are just what I would list as the top 10 episodes of 2022. Okay, so here we go.

The first one on the list is Episode 150, and it is featuring Shannon Tymosko, who shares her story about transitioning to the trades in a pretty significant career change. Shannon's story is really, really cool. She in her late 20s, decided to become an apprentice electrician, and she talks a lot about why and how she made that decision, what that journey has been like.

She talks about some of the aspects of having a career in the trades that she just loves, and some of the challenges that she faces as well. One of the things she talks about is battling self-doubt. And so I think that this episode is really enlightening for folks that are pondering how to get more women into service, into the trades, to really listen to Shannon share her firsthand experiences and think about what some of the appeal is for women in a trade career. But also some of the challenges that are very real.

The next episode on the list is Episode 170. This episode is Why and How Service Should be Prioritizing Sustainability, Now, with Rainer Karcher who is formerly the global director of IT Sustainability at Siemens. Rainer actually joined me at the Frankfurt stop of the Future of Field Service Live Tour. And we had a chat there on this topic, but then later recorded a episode specifically as well.

I like this episode a lot because sustainability is a topic that we know is very important, that we need to be continuing to push ourselves to take action on. I've had some people ask questions about exactly what does service have to do with that? How does service factor into the sustainability discussion? And what are some of the ways that making changes in service operations can have an impact on a company's sustainability initiatives?

In this episode, Rainer and I talk about some of those different ways, and we also talk about some different motivations for putting more emphasis on sustainability. He is someone who is deeply, deeply passionate about the topic. And of course, hopes that many others are, for no reason other than caring about the world in which we live.

But we also talk about some of the other aspects, some of the other drivers of a focus on sustainability, which includes things like customer decision-making, and importance to customers who decide which brands to work with based on those companies sustainability goals and actions.

We talk about investment criteria, and how sustainability is becoming a bigger criteria in investors and which companies they decide to work with, and a number of other things. So it's a really good episode to reflect on, not only the importance of sustainability and creating better strategy, and taking more action in 2023, but also some of the examples of how service has an impact.

The next episode is actually a two-part episode, so this is cheating a little bit. It's episodes 149 and 151 on, Meeting the Demands of Modern Leadership with James Mylett, who is the SVP for U.S. Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric.

James is someone I've known for a number of years. He is someone who when you meet folks that work for or with him, you know he is genuinely and authentically a very good leader, and you get that sense from him. I was really interested to have this conversation with James about what it is that he feels makes a strong leader in today's world, and what are the things that he practices that he works on, that he prioritizes, et cetera? It became a two-part episode because the conversation was so good that I didn't want to cut it short, and luckily he was able to spend the time talking with me and sharing with me. So we made it a two-part episode.

We tackle a lot of different things in the two episodes, everything from empathy and authenticity. One of the points that James brings up that I really, really appreciated is his focus on root cause analysis. We had a conversation about how a lot of leaders, particularly in today's business climate feel a sense of urgency to make decisions quickly, and to react fast, and to follow their gut. There's nothing wrong with that, but James talks about some of the really important learnings that can be missed when you react so quickly that you don't first really understand what it is that you're reacting to, or making a decision on. So really great conversation on leadership. I definitely recommend taking a listen to both of those episodes.

Next on the list is Episode 155. This is on, The Fine Art of Problem Solving, with New York Times bestselling author, Amy Herman. I loved this conversation. It was different, and that is why it's on the list. Amy is an author and thought leader who works with clients to use art to help them solve problems, to think more creatively, to think outside of the box, to look at things differently, and understand different points and perspectives in a new and unique way.

I love this conversation because it is different. I think part of my job is to make sure that we're not sharing the same information over and over, telling the same stories. So I like being able to bring in different concepts like this to discuss. But I also think field service is at a point right now where generally speaking, we do really need to get a little bit more creative and think differently. There's a lot of change happening, and I think the companies that are reacting best to that change are forcing themselves to not stay tied to legacy thinking, legacy behaviors. And they're really getting comfortable being uncomfortable. And so this conversation with Amy is really interesting one, and one that I think could benefit a lot of organizations in broadening their minds on how to innovate and how to solve problems in a new way.

The next episode on the list is Episode 167 on Husky's Move to Predictive Service. This episode is with Tony Black, who is the president of Service for Husky Injection Molding Systems. This is also a really interesting conversation and one that I was impressed with, because the evolution that Tony talks about in this episode is one that quite frankly, a lot of companies are struggling to execute on. It is theoretically what many, many organizations are working towards. But in reality, a lot of companies, I think are struggling to see the progress that Husky has, and to make some of the organizational and fundamental changes that the business has made that have allowed it to really transition.

Tony talks a lot about why this move was necessary, but then the how? How has Husky evolved? What technologies have they put in place? What new skills are required? What does it change with how they work with customers? There's a lot of really valuable insights in this episode for organizations that are looking to evolve to a more predictive or outcomes based service model. I definitely recommend having a listen.

The next episode on the list is Episode 172. This is on Scaling Innovation to Drive Business Impact with Top 10 Global Thought leader Frank Mattes. Frank also joined me at the Frankfurt Future of Field Service Live Tour, and then we recorded this podcast after his session at the event. And the points that he makes in this podcast discussion are so incredibly helpful in really thinking about how organizations need to structure themselves, and operate to meet the demands of the day-to-day business, but also ensure they are putting enough emphasis on innovation.

There are some points that Frank brings up that I think break some common myths around what it takes to innovate as an organization. There are some analogies he uses that really just make the concepts very easy to understand, and think about really good insights that I think could help a lot of organizations, that again, are knowing they need to evolve, but really struggling to figure out how to get the wheels in motion.

The next episode on the list is Episode 186 on DELL Eliminates Siloes for an End-to-End Service Approach. This episode is with Bob Feiner, who is the senior vice president of Dell Technologies Services. This is a conversation about how Dell Technologies has restructured its services organization to be commonly aligned around the customer experience, and around customer satisfaction. In doing so, there was the elimination of silos, and really the reduction of risk of an individual function within service doing extremely well. But ultimately a negative customer experience because another function or the handoff in between those functions wasn't cohesive and consistent. So again, this is an issue that a lot of companies face, which is restructuring the business to embrace customer centricity truly. And to ensure that from a service perspective, the customer is having a very unified and cohesive experience with the business, which means setting common goals around what that looks like, making sure that insights are shared, and readily available across teams and functions. Again, there's some really good practical insights within this conversation for organizations that need to work on eliminating those silos and creating a more cohesive customer approach.

The next episode on the list is Episode 181. This is on, 6 Ways to Address Employee Burnout with Darcy Gruttadaro, former director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health.

So Darcy came on to speak about burnout specifically because it is an area that the Center for Workplace Mental Health is focusing a lot on. It's obviously something we see in here in the news, it's something that our team's may be struggling with, something that we as individuals may be struggling with. It's something that is universally challenging at the moment. I appreciated her coming to this episode, not just to talk about the topic theoretically, but to provide these six very practical ways that companies can dig in and make a positive impact. We talk a lot about how some of the focus on mental health that needs to happen. It doesn't need to be these ornate programs, or these costly initiatives. It can be things that are quite simple, that have a really big impact.

Those of you that listen to this podcast regularly know that mental health is a conversation that I think is very, very important. I selected this episode because it is one that focuses on a specific area, burnout, and gives some really, really tactical advice for companies to go away and make changes that will have a positive impact. So, have a listen and also keep in mind that the Center for Workplace Mental Health has a lot of resources that are free for organizations and individual leaders to use, and those are resources that everyone should be taking advantage of. You can find all of those workplacementalhealth.org.

The next episode on the list is Episode 184. This episode is on Koolmill's Cool As-a-Service Story, probably the corniest headline that I wrote all year, but I just couldn't resist. This episode is with Alec Anderson, who is the managing director of Koolmill, founded the company. And this is such a neat story on so many levels. So first of all, I admire Alec's passion about what he does, so, so much.

Koolmill is a piece of equipment for rice milling that is unique and differentiated in its industry. Not just on the machine itself, but also the business model which is, As-a-Service. I never thought that I would find rice milling such an interesting topic. But Alec’s passion for what they do and how to overcome some of the challenges in the industry, it's just super cool.

Now, what makes this episode interesting though isn't just Alec’s passion. There are some really valid points to this story about the benefits of an As-a-Service model. Some of the challenges in going to market that way especially in industries that traditionally have been very CapEx focused, some of the benefits that As-a-Service brings in terms of making innovation more accessible to customers, and a positive environmental impact. And also one of the things that we get into in this episode is really the democratization of innovation, that choosing to leverage this business model allows Koolmill to take part in. So very, very interesting episode and a lot of really good insights to glean related to advanced services and As-a-Service models.

And last but not least, rounding out the top 10 is Episode 173 which is on, Why the Future of Service Depends on Putting People First. This is an episode from the Paris Live Tour with Jean de Kergorlay, who is the digital buildings service director for Europe at Schneider Electric.

Jean has been with Schneider, I think over 30 years, and in services, I think all of if not the majority of that time. I love that being in a digital business, and having a lot of experience in the industry, he will summarize his thoughts on where we need to go next, related to making sure we continue to put people first. I think that's a really important reminder. He gives some really good specific examples on why that is and how he's looking at that.

But a really good reminder for everyone that digital is important. Technology is an incredible enabler. But at the end of the day, service is a people business and we need to keep that in mind and make sure that we are prioritizing the humanity and the human centricity in this space. That's the top 10. I hope you will go back and have a listen to any that you missed.

A huge thank you to not just these 10 guests, but all of the guests that have been a part of the Future Field Service podcast this year and been willing to share their stories. I genuinely appreciate each and every one of you. And also a big thank you to you, the listeners for joining us and taking part in our community. We appreciate you as well.

You can find any of these episodes by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com, or on your favorite podcast platform. As always, the Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS, and you can learn more at ifs.com. Thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

At Field Service Europe, Tim Burge of Aquant shared some findings from the company’s recent Service Intelligence Benchmark study. One insight he shared stood out in my mind, which is “if all employees had the knowledge and skills to perform like the top 20% of employees, service costs would be reduced by 21 percent.”

Based on the discussions at the event, companies aren’t nearly where they need to be when it comes to having a modern and effective knowledge management strategy for field service. Compounding that fact is the sheer volume of frontline employees within service who are approaching retirement age, presenting a significant risk to organizations in loss of incredibly valuable knowledge.

Knowledge management is defined as “the process by which an enterprise gathers, organizes, shares and analyzes its knowledge in a way that is easily accessible to employees. This knowledge includes technical resources, frequently asked questions, training documents and people skills.” While the concept of knowledge management isn’t unique to field service, there are some challenges specific to field service that make it uniquely important to get a better handle on:

As mentioned, there is a large quantity of very knowledgeable workers nearing retirement age and a huge risk of losing their tacit knowledge
The types and volume of insights needed by frontline workers in field service has expanded as customer expectations have evolved and grown
Digitalization has made information more accessible, but has also in many instances caused data overwhelm without quick and easy access to the insights really needed at any given time
An inability to retrieve the necessary knowledge in an accessible, digestible format in real-time when it is needed causes costly return visits and negatively impacts customer satisfaction

In the coming year, with cost pressures on the rise and frontline workers leaving the industry and taking valuable insights with them, improving our focus on and strategy around knowledge management must become a priority. For service success today, having access to meaningful insights is just as important for a field technician as having their toolbox or the correct spare part.

Knowledge management is often discussed with three types of knowledge in mind: tacit, implicit, and explicit. While most organizations have strong documentation of explicit knowledge and processes for distributing it through training, manuals, etc., we need to consider how well (if at all) we are capturing and making usable the implicit and tacit knowledge of the frontline workforce.

Automate Knowledge Capture

At the event, numerous attendees shared frustrations around getting the frontline workers to agree to document their insights or “offload” their knowledge in some way. And I don’t blame them! It’s cumbersome for an employee with years of experience and countless interactions that have culminated in that tacit knowledge to try and distill it down into some sort of manifesto.

If we realize the imperative to improve knowledge management, we then need to consider the best approach. As much as possible, we need to find ways to capture and leverage knowledge as it is being organically used and shared among the workforce – this reduces the burden on any one individual to spend (non-productive) time documenting or downloading. You likely already have technology in place that you could be deriving these insights from, such as:

Your field service management solution
Augmented reality or video collaboration tools
Help desk interactions
Many others!

Before you ask an employee to spend time documenting or sharing their insights, be sure you are embedding the wisdom already being shared within your organization. You may have areas where you find you have gaps to fill, and then you can get creative about gleaning additional insights from some of your most experienced technicians.

This is one of the examples of AI use that makes me chuckle at those who say, “one day, AI will take the jobs of the field technicians!” Doubtful, particularly when many companies aren’t even putting to good use AI to make accessible some of their knowledge. We have a long way to go! But knowledge management is a perfect example of where AI can play a practical and very impactful role within field service – an area that you need to be putting a concerted effort into mastering.

Sarah reports in from Amsterdam to share some of the insightful conversations that took place last week at Field Service Europe 2022.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I am recording this episode in the beautiful city of Amsterdam where I was this week, last week once you're hearing this, for Field Service Europe. It was a great week, a great event. This is an event put on by WBR, so the same conference organization that puts on Field Service, Palm Springs, Field Service East, which some of you may be familiar with. So this version of the event, Field Service Europe, hasn't happened since fall of 2019, and it was really heartwarming to see the energy at the event and how happy people were to be back together here in person. So I had the privilege of being at the 2019 event. That was my first time speaking at Field Service Europe, and I think people were just very, very glad to be back in this setting, engaging face to face, talking to one another, learning from one another, so it was really nice to see that happen.

There was a lot of great content. It was spread over two days, and I'm going to recap here for you all, some of the key points. So I wrote an article which we'll publish or did publish on Monday, talking about the opening keynote presentation that Jean-Claude Jobard from Marmon gave. I know Jean-Claude. He spoke at the Paris Future Field Service Live Tour event, and I absolutely admire his passion for service. He really, really loves this space and loves what he does, and those of you that know me know that that's something I can really resonate with. So he gave the opening presentation, and I don't want to say too much because you should read the article, but one of his key messages was that right now, service really has no limits. It's just up to your willingness to drive change, and I really, really liked his message.

It set the stage very well for the content that followed over the next two days, and if you want to hear more what he spoke about, go back and take a look at the article from Monday. So I'm going to go through some of the key points and talk a little bit about some of the sessions that I was either a part of or sat in on and some of the things that were brought up that I think are worth sharing here with you all. So one of the topics of course that was discussed quite a bit throughout the event is around talent and resourcing. There was a panel discussion featuring Louise Morton from Baxi, Xavier Bertrand from Boston Scientific and Sven Müller from SMA. It was a great discussion and I thought they did a really good job of reinforcing some of the points we all already know are important, but also bringing up some new food for thought.

One of the points that Lou from Baxi shared that I thought was really, really good is that the skills and capabilities we're going to need from talent, even in three years’ time, is significantly different than what we are actively looking for today, and we need to make sure that we are thinking about and strategizing around and planning for that now so that we don't find ourselves even further behind by focusing only on the historical types of talent that we've been looking for. So that obviously ties into the discussion around how the role of the field technician is changing, which ties into the conversation around remote service and self-service and advanced services. So there's some interconnectedness among some of these themes, but I think that is a really important point to be getting a bit ahead of what the talent is that you are going to be needing, not just right this moment, but in the years to come.

She also spoke about how she's seeing a really big focus on work life balance. So I think someone had asked about salary and how big of an issue that is, how competitive it's become, et cetera, and obviously the panelists all acknowledge that it is indeed important. But she mentioned that, for her, it is important, but the work life balance topic is equally important. So part of what they're doing is looking at how they can really expand their employee value proposition in that area. One of the things that Xavier said that I really liked is that he said, "I only see opportunity here because service has never held so much value." I love that point. I share that perspective, although I also realize that I am not the one in the role of having to find talent right now today.

So totally acknowledge that, but I think it is a very true point, and that goes back to the ways that service is evolving and what that means in terms of the potential that there is to really change the skillsets that we're looking for to really cast a wider net and be able to include a lot more types of folks, types of skillsets than we have before. And then Sven made a very good point, I think, around leveraging third party technicians or outsourcing some of your field service work and saying that we shouldn't be thinking about it as outsourcing. We should be thinking about it as a partnership. So I think that is a really good point as well. And part of the panel discussion was also around making sure that, and we've talked about this a bit in our content on future of field service as well, making sure that we aren't focused so heavily on recruiting and attracting new talent that we aren't focusing amply or equally on retaining talent. So that was a really great conversation.

There was a couple different panels on that topic and a lot of good discussion. Lou from Baxi moderated a round table, and there was a lot of conversation there about how to improve diversity and how to really become more creative in what and how things are being done so that we can solve some of these challenges. The second big topic, again, not a surprise, is around servitization and advanced services. There was a really good session with Ravichandra Kshirasagar, I'm sure I'm not doing that justice, Ravi, I'm sorry, from Schneider Electric, Claire Keelan from Johnson Controls and Rajat Kakar from Quickwork. And in that conversation, Claire actually brought up the fact that at Johnson Controls, they're three years into the advanced services journey, and she said it is still a conversation around culture and mindset every single day. So I think that's a very important point to emphasize. There's a couple discussions we had. I had a fireside chat with Perry Leijten from Andritz also around servitization, and we talked about how significant of a mindset shift, almost a company identity shift, that is.

So I think Claire's point is that isn't a point that you acknowledge and sort of grapple with one time. You need to do so continually along the journey, and she also brought up the point of seeking your evangelists and being willing to recognize the people who really just will not come along on the journey with you. So I thought those were some really, really good points. Ravi talked about the need to achieve clarity around your intangible value. Such a good point because again, most of the companies that are on the servitization journey are coming from a legacy, a deep rich legacy often, of being a product provider, a seller of things, and it is just a really big change from selling things to being able to articulate well and resonate that intangible value. And he also made the point of, "Not all of your customers are going to be ready for advanced services when you are ready to start introducing them, so start with the customers who are and build momentum that way."

Just looking at my notes. And then in my session with Perry from Andritz, we talked a lot about some of those same things, the mindset shift. We really talked about how the idea of delivering outcomes, it's based on trust and trust starts with making sure that you are consistently executing on the basics before you start to expand your value proposition, and I think that is an incredibly important point as well. And then another really good point that Perry brought up is, "Data is not a differentiator. What you do with the data is what can be a differentiator," so I think that's a really good point as well. Another big topic, again, no surprises here, was around remote service. So I actually moderated a panel with Marc Robitzkat from Ecolab, Jonathan Zur from Xerox, Nicolas Teyssot from Fives and Jörgen Remmelg from XM Reality. Really good discussion. One of the things that I really liked is that each panelist is using augmented reality, merge reality type technology in really different ways.

And so it was a good way to illustrate for the audience the different use cases, business cases, for the technology and what those look like in the real world today. So Nicolas spoke about how Fives is using augmented reality for training to speed the time to value of its new hires and to make sure that even when they go out into the field, they have access to that internal expertise and internal support. Jonathan talked about how Xerox is using the technology to really increase customer self-service to reduce travel. Jörgen talked about how they have a lot of customers who are using the technology for pre-installation or pre-service inspections so that those clients can maximize their first time fix rates, and Marc spoke about how Ecolab perceives remote service as part of its overall shift in customer value and business model. So really good different examples of how the technology is being leveraged.

There was some discussion around, "What should the dialogue with customers be when you're introducing remote service? How do you manage change?" and I think a general agreement that there is still yet a lot of potential in the realm of remote service to achieve a lot more with the technology. The fourth major topic I wanted to recap for you was a great conversation on the industrial metaverse. This was a session posted by Rajat Kakar featuring Ivo Siebers from TKE, Erik Lapre from VMI, Martin Fischer from Zeiss and Zoltan Gal from ABB. And the three technologies or things that they spoke about in this session were first, the metaverse, which I think there was a general agreement among not only the panelists but the event attendees that it's come up in conversation. It's something that folks are beginning to think about but not yet taking action on, so I think this is a topic that we will see more conversation around in the months and years to come.

The reason the thinking and the starting to factor how this fits is important is obviously because they talked about how embedded it is for the younger generations and needing to get our arms around that. The second point that was discussed was around AI, and so there was a point made that, I can't remember which panelist, one said, "We're making exponential investments in AI but still evaluating where it actually drives real value," and I think a lot of companies could agree with that statement. Rajat actually brought up the point that he feels we've barely touched the iceberg of potential in terms of AI because the instances that are being leveraged or do exist are single environment use, single company use, and there's really this interconnectedness of data and intelligence that could completely expand the impact of the potential of the technology. Excuse me.

And then there was a conversation as well around digital twins and determining the best way to leverage that technology to different companies' advantage. I think one of the good points that was brought up there was to really work closely with R&D and provide some specific direction on what you want to learn and how you want them to investigate, but really kind of relying on that function to do some of that work. So those were some of the key topics that we talked about at Field Service Europe. Again, it was a great event. There just seemed to be really an overall sense of, honestly, excitement about the potential that exists in service right now, and I think a real sense of positivity around some of the change, which sometimes, we tend to resist change. We talked about that a lot or we feel burdened by it and it was really refreshing to be in a group of, I believe, there were between 250 and 300 attendees that were really just very excited about the things going on in this space despite the fact that there are some real challenges at the moment.

So that was really nice and it was a great week. It was great to be here and excellent to connect with some of the folks that I was able to meet and build relationships with since the last Field Service Europe and throughout the Future of Field Service Live Tour this year. So really good stuff. Again, take a look at the article that ran Monday on Jean-Claude's opening keynote. He had a lot of really good perspective that he shared that I tried my best to summarize. And be sure to check out the website for more, futurefieldservice.com. Stay tuned on LinkedIn. We will soon be announcing the dates for the 2023 Live Tour and some other exciting things are coming. So stay posted and as always, appreciate you all tuning in. The Future of Field Service podcast is of course sponsored by IFS. You can learn more at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

At Field Service Europe in Amsterdam last week, Jean-Claude Jobard, VP EMEA at Marmon Link, gave one of the most impassioned keynotes I remember listening to. He stated in his introduction, “I love service. Service is my life – I’ve been in this industry for 36 years.” As someone who is also quite emotionally connected to my work, his genuine statement really resonated with me and I believe with many others in the room, too.

Jean-Claude went on to talk about his belief that service has no limits – but that there are ways companies are limiting themselves. He began by discussing some of the change that has occurred since March 2020 – recapping of course Covid, but also Supply Chain disruption, mass exits in the job market, inflation and economic turbulence, the energy crisis, and even war. You may be thinking, wow – what a depressing speech! But it wasn’t. Jean-Claude was quick to point out how crisis has made service stronger.

This is where his excitement for the potential that exists in service comes in – and that excitement is contagious. It’s really cool to see a leader who, even after 36 years in their industry, is so bullish on the amount of opportunity that is on the horizon. Jean-Claude isn’t dissuaded by the idea of change; he’s emboldened by it. And that was really the crux of this keynote – it was a battle cry of sorts for service leaders to stop reacting to change or resisting change and begin embracing and driving it.

It’s Time to Hit the Gas on Areas of Service Opportunity

Jean-Claude went on to discuss some of the areas of service that, on the surface, have changed since Covid began. But the question he begged is, “what has really changed?” In his view, not as much as we like to think. The areas many point to as having gained traction, he feels, are more of a reactionary change than an intentional, and therefore longer-lasting, change. Here are some of the areas Jean-Claude reflected on to consider how much opportunity remains for those willing to take the initiative:

Remote Service. “We saw an uptick in use of remote support when Covid hit, but use eased when travel began again,” says Jean-Claude. “Its use has increased, but it isn’t embedded yet and this is an area we need to push because there’s immense potential.”
Advanced Services. “I don’t think there’s been a significant change here – companies on the journey continue the journey,” he says. “But we know that delivering outcomes and sharing risk is important to customers, especially in times of uncertainty. We
Resources. “Has it ever been easy to find field service resources?” Jean-Claude asks. “No. If you look at job descriptions from 20 years ago, are they different? How are we making this industry attractive to new hires? Today’s FSEs are more Customer Service Engineers. We complain, but we really need to change how we market, treat, and reward these jobs. We should also be examining the possibilities that exist to share resources among companies. Why not?”
Sustainability. “There has been no significant change here overall,” says Jean-Claude. “We’re still sending technicians all over the world, we’re not helping customers reduce energy consumption. Remote capabilities play a huge role here, and so does reducing energy consumption, remanufacturing, and recycling.”

As Jean-Claude said at one point, “We’ve learned that what we thought to be impossible in March 2020 is possible now.” Rather than ignoring that knowledge in favor of complacency, Jean-Claude’s message is to become excited about what we’ve proven we can do and harness that excitement into forward momentum. Service has no limits, except for those who choose to sit still.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour in Austin, Sasha Ilyukhin, SVP of Customer Service Operations at Tetra Pak talks with Sarah about why and how the company is putting more emphasis on human centricity in its service operations.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I’m your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today’s podcast is a session from the Austin stop of the Future of Field Service Live Tour. It features Sasha Ilyukin who is the senior vice president of customer service operations at Tetra Pak and we are talking about the need for more human centricity in service. Sasha talks about how he came to recognize as a leader that he and Tetra Pak needed to focus more on human centricity, and also how he and the company is doing so, some of the initiatives that they have underway to put more focus on their people and their people’s experiences as part of Tetra Pak and delivering services to Tetra Pak customers. I hope you enjoy.

So, we’re going to talk about prioritizing human centricity.

Sasha Ilyukhin: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: I’m really excited for this session. I think it’s a very important topic. And before we get into that though, tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role, touchbacks business, and the scope of what you are responsible for.

Sasha Ilyukhin: And before I even get into that, I wanted to thank you so much for bringing up this topic because I think it’s so important. It rarely gets brought up in these conferences for field service or any of these sort of digital transformation conferences, et cetera. And I think it’s extremely important because all of us are probably struggling in one way or another with human centricity, putting the humans first before the business. So thank you very, very much for bringing up the incredible topic.

So a few words about me, I have a background in food science and food engineering. Have my master’s degree from Purdue University. I joined Tetra Pak 21-plus years ago in field service. So I was with toolbox in hand and traveling around fixing stuff. And then had a bunch of leadership jobs here in the States, in Europe, and now back to the States. So now I run our service operations business in America, so North Central, South America.

Tetra Pak, for those that may not be familiar with us, we are big in food and beverage. We’re a privately owned company, almost 70 years old. And we make equipment to make food. We make packaging material that runs on that equipment. And then we have service business that wraps around the equipment and the packaging material that we have. So I work for the service end of the business.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. I think we talked about this a bit at our Frankfurt event. So if any of you are not aware, this is the last in a series of live tour events that we’ve done. And so, what we talked about is the fact that I think we’re in a bit of a reckoning right now related to this topic because… So when I started in this space, all of the conversations centered around cost cutting, cost cutting, cost cutting, right? And I’m not saying that that’s still not an important thing to keep track of, but obviously, there was a shift of perceiving service as a profit center versus a cost center. And then following that became a hyper-focus on the customer experience, which makes sense.

So how do our customers feel about us and what’s their experience, what’s their impression, what’s their satisfaction level, et cetera. And while we were so hyper-focused on that, I think we overlooked the connection of employee engagement and employee experience to an extent and the direct impact that has on our customer satisfaction objectives.

So now I feel like we’re almost taking a step back as… I’m generalizing as an industry and saying, “Okay, so customer satisfaction is still incredibly important.” But now we realize that for us to have the biggest impact there we can, we need to take into account how do our employees feel in a variety of different ways, which is what we’re going to talk about today.

So I agree, it’s a topic that isn’t talked about enough, but I have a feeling it’s going to be more and more so because it’s just something that people have to dig back into and address.

So let’s start by talking a bit about company culture because I think it’s a very important part of this, but something that can be really hard to bolt down because no one’s going to say, we don’t have a great company culture. Everyone’s going to check that box. So, how would you describe Tetra Pak’s culture and how are you taking that and working on reinforcing it or representing it in the service organization?

Sasha Ilyukhin: So yeah, no, culture is extremely important. And as we all know, Peter Drucker said once that culture eats strategy for lunch. We have a decent start at Tetra Pak because we come from a Swedish heritage, so we have a lot of Swedish culture ingrained in the company. And Swedish culture is sort of high work ethic, but also very, very high focus on family, on wellness, and the balancing the time. So it’s American with that flavor of family time.

And it’s very typical for us to see, like when we go to Sweden, it’s almost like you see the bats here at sunset, you would see employees there at 5:00 PM. So at 5:00 PM at Tetra Pak, the doors open and just everyone floods out. Now, it doesn’t mean that people don’t connect later and so on, but it’s still, it’s very important to have that balance. So that’s a good start.

I mean, we don’t pretend that we know how to really run the best company in terms of human centricity, but we try our best. We have a brand promise that focuses on food, people, and planet. And so, people is really one of the three big legs that we say, “Okay, we as a company, we want to protect food, protect people, and protect the planet.” So that’s the starting point.

Now, when we look at how the culture is transforming, I just came across recently, there was an article by BCG Henderson, it was called Beautiful Management, I actually shared on LinkedIn. And I thought it was a brilliant article in a sense that where the industry is changing from the standard Fred Taylor’s scientific management, where we look at KPIs, balanced score cards and how we do, to how do we drive empathy, how do we drive engagement, how do we drive innovation related to that?

And Max talked about entrepreneurs. How do we drive that entrepreneurial spirit within the company to drive innovation? How do we drive that people collaborate to each other and drive change in the business? So to make it the full circle, that links to business resilience because business… I’ll make it a case here, that business resilience, you cannot achieve that without actually focusing and achieving human centricity. So your business will never be resilient because at the end of the day, it’s a service business that I run and service business is all about people. So it’s people talking to other people.

That’s what I tell my leadership team as well. I tell them that we’re not Tetra Pak working with Coca-Cola, we’re Sarah working with Sasha, or we’re Mike working with Fred, and so on and so forth. So it’s all about people interactions. We need to keep our people happy in order for our customers to be happy.

Sarah Nicastro: So, when did your current focus of prioritizing and reviewing, focusing on human centricity kick in and why? So what are some of the catalysts?

Sasha Ilyukhin: So, we ran a normal company for a while and we started to realize that all of a sudden we have, for example, our turnover rates are becoming higher. So we’re losing something in our company, we’re losing somehow the attractiveness for the people because all of a sudden… I mean, our turnover is still in single digits, but it doubled in the past three, four years.

So that was kind of a wake-up call for us and we’re like, “Okay, we need to do something different and not just continue to be a normal, above average company. We need to do something special here to retain people, to attract talent.” That was the wake-up call.

Sarah Nicastro: And I commend you for that because I think a lot of people could look at that doubling and just say, “Well, it’s because of the pandemic and the surrounding issues.” And sort of almost take a defeatist stance of, “Well, it is what it is, so what are we going to do about it?” And instead, you’re taking a more proactive approach of, “Okay, so these are the facts, and regardless of what external factors are weighing in, we need to sort out how to do better.”

So let’s talk about the fact that this isn’t a concept. I think one of the reasons you said at the beginning, this doesn’t get talked about a lot. I think one of the reasons for that is that people view it as sort of this woo-woo, touchy-feely, human-centricity type thing. But that’s really not the case. I mean, it is proven that companies that have better employee engagement and employee satisfaction have better results.

And so, what are your thoughts on how you balance this focus? Because I know you as a leader genuinely care, but also with the realities of how it will help the business.

Sasha Ilyukhin: I think it’s well proven to your point. And it’s proven with actually a peer-reviewed research. So I came across, there’s a research by Brown and Lamb in 2008, which is quoted everywhere. But that research established a very, very strong correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. So there’s a direct correlation, unquestionable.

What’s interesting in that research is that there is no correlation backwards. So you can have very satisfied customers, but very disengaged employees. And that I find very, very interesting because you can drive customer satisfaction different ways. I mean, with price promotions, with supply chain, service levels, whatnot, but our focus is how do we keep our people engaged? I want my team to be happy with the jobs that they do. And I actually, I don’t mind if people actually leave the company because they’re not happy. So if they want to go and do something different, we had a couple of people, one left to study, another left to run a personal business, a family business, which is great.

I mean, if that’s what their calling is, I don’t want them to stay. I want them to do what they want to do. It also comes back to the types of leaders that we have because that was actually another interesting piece in that research. They had something that they called moderating variable. So what is the highest moderating variable in that ES to CX relationship? And the moderating variable was supervisory support. So it’s one on ones, it’s having basically good leaders.

So what we’re doing there is we have a mandate in my team. So on every person that we hire… Max talked about character. Character, I totally agree, 100%, it’s extremely important. Every single service tech or service engineer that we hire, I have the director for that unit sitting on that final interview. That’s mandatory. We don’t proceed forward if that doesn’t happen. I sit on every single interview for every leadership job in my team. So all the service delivery manager, I don’t care what that level is and of the leadership, every single leadership job, I sit on the interview and I’ll make time for it.

Also, we do the same for exit interviews. So we want to make sure if someone’s leaving, we want to make sure to understand why they’re leaving, because that’s a good learning for us. We can put some actions in place to say, “Okay, maybe we missed it in this case, and let’s do it better next time.” So these are some of the actions that we’re taking to try to drive that engagement.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it’s a really good point because oftentimes when senior leaders decide to put a focus on human centricity, company culture, employee engagement, any of these types of things, they rightfully want to understand how the frontline employees feel and how they can improve that.

But sometimes, the middle management layer gets overlooked and to the detriment of the mission because you can be very committed to wanting to improve that frontline experience but if you have middle management that is disengaged, unsatisfied themselves, or not competent in the ways that you need to deliver the experience you’re intending, that mission is sort for not. So I think it’s a really key point that you’re focusing efforts there as well.

All right, so how have you prioritized which areas to focus on?

Sasha Ilyukhin: So, when we started to go beyond what I would call it a normal company or wanting to be just a normal standard company out there with benefits, and medical, and dental, and all this other stuff, we started to look at… Of course, we had some consultants helping us and we started to look at things like… We’ve implemented, for example, parental leave, for example, for both parents, including adoptive parents. We implemented flex hours and we wanted to implement flex hours for the field service as well. So because typically, if you implement flex hours in the office, then the field service people start to complain like, “Yeah, these guys in the office, I mean, they get to do everything.” I mean-

Sarah Nicastro: Now, can I interject and ask how you did that?

Sasha Ilyukhin: Yeah. So-

Sarah Nicastro: Like what that looks like. Because I think it would be good for people to hear a real example because this is an area, just as an example that comes up when you start talking about employee engagement and human centricity. In field service specifically, you run into a lot of people that say, “Well, that’s just not possible because of the nature of the operations or the work and we need to get creative in looking for solutions.”

Sasha Ilyukhin: That’s exactly the point. So what we’ve done is we looked at the types of contracts that we have and luckily, a lot of the service contracts that we have… Actually, have people at customer sites for a fairly prolonged period of time, whether that’s installation, or doing services, or doing production support, and so on. So we’re not the type of business where our service tech would come for a couple of hours and just leave. So we’re typically there for longer time.

So we started to promote these kind of flexible contracts, meaning that you agree with your customer, how you want to support their operation, and I don’t really care if you come morning, evening, weekend, no weekend… I mean, the service techs actually plan it themselves. We don’t even look at that. I mean, we just leave it for them and their customers to figure this out.

Then we look looked at also travel. Travel is a big thing in service, and I think it’s the highest waste. Also, I mentioned we’re big in sustainability of service as well, and that’s the whole different big topic to cover. But travel is one of the biggest offenders in sustainability, meaning CO2 profile and so on. But travel is also the biggest waste of time and our customers need to pay for that. They don’t like to pay for that. So then it becomes of like, “How do we minimize travel?”

And we minimize travel by proactively relocating people, by establishing regional hubs. So we continuously analyze like, “Where are the jobs are?” And we put the techs with the right capability there in that area. We proactively relocate them, we pay for that relocation, and we find ways basically to bring people to specific areas where the travel is very, very minimal. Then they can plan their own time. So that gives them flexibility.

So it just takes a little bit of that type of creativity, but it takes a lot of effort. I mean, it’s simple to explain, but I have 542 service engineers, it’s complicated in terms of how we plan all that. I mean, in terms of how do we plan all of that, right? But when we put the effort there, it actually pays off quite a bit. And customers appreciate that as well because I’ve heard from a lot of my customers like, “Hey, I don’t have to pay for travel anymore. That’s perfect.”

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So I interrupted you, but we were talking about areas of focus and flexibility, and then… Okay.

Sasha Ilyukhin: Okay, so then other diversity and inclusion, a big thing. So we now started also a big program. We call it “Speak Up for Inclusion.” I have a problem in my team and the problem is actually male-female distribution. So in my leadership team, it’s 45-55. So I have 45% female, 55% male. One level below that, it’s 82-18. So I have 82 male, 18 female. One level below that I have almost 96-4. So 96% male, 4% female, huge problem.

It’s a huge problem because when the teams are not diverse, and even in that sense it just becomes a very alpha male type of culture, it’s more difficult to drive things like empathy, it’s more difficult to drive things like innovation. So we see it firsthand that the teams that are more diverse, we see much more engagement, significantly higher levels of engagement, and we were putting a lot of effort to actually build that pipeline. But it’s difficult in field service, extremely, extremely difficult.

So that’s another big area. Then mental wellness also. Right before COVID, I don’t know who had that idea, but this was a corporate program, but right before COVID, we started with this program that’s called, “It’s Okay Not To Be Okay.” And first, it was seen as a formality, like every company has some sort of a mental wellness hotline and whatnot, but we didn’t believe when we looked at the statistics of that and the types of help that people were getting, and we just realized, “Wow.” I mean, that’s extremely important as well, and meditation, Max mentioned meditation.

We also have things like these sort of what we call detox videos. It’s an interesting practice that was introduced to us by Arianna Huffington. She spoke at one of our events, and it’s a two-minute video that… I mean, all of these Gen Zs and Gen Xs, I mean, they can create it in five minutes, and you just put together a bunch of pictures of things that you really like. So maybe your family or places that you like and so on. You put it against the music background that you really like and you make it two minutes long.

And when you’re stressed out or you have three, four meetings in a row and then you just need to relax or in field service, when you’re in a tough job, the customer is just on you all the time, step out, take five minutes and look at that video, breathe in, meditate. It helps a lot. So that’s another thing that we put together.

Safety, safety also is another big priority for us. And we operate in the cultures sometimes where… And I’m not talking necessarily US, but when I visited Guatemala, man, I mean, the type of things that I saw there in terms of safety, you wouldn’t believe, right? I mean, people are running completely unsafe production and with open machinery, all kinds of bypass, safety, et cetera. And our field service engineers were always complaining to us, what can we do? How can we influence this? So we told them, we said… I mean, beyond the normal stuff, take two minutes for safety and so on, we said, “You don’t have to work like this, so please stop and demand the conditions, and then we’ll raise it up, escalate it to your leadership. We’ll make sure that the conditions are safe.” And actually, slowly but surely, things are starting to change, which is encouraging.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So let’s dig into a couple of these in a little bit more detail. So when we think about engagement and really recognition, I know you have a firsthand perspective because you were a technician at one point yourself. So what are some of the things that you’re doing related to making sure that those employees feel valued and recognized and that sort of thing?

Sasha Ilyukhin: So, I’ll start with recognition is the best is what we find as when it comes from peers, customers, from the line manager. So it’s people-to-people recognition. I mean, we have formal programs, we have on-the-spot awards, we have annual awards.

We actually have a very nice program that we put in place called “Field Service Excellence Award.” And what that is, is that we select a bunch of people from every region. So we have 12 people participating in that. We send them to our headquarters every year, and then one of these teams wins a trophy. And that trophy is like a mobile trophy. So it comes in its own suitcase. And the commitment that we take is that this trophy then travels around all of the regional offices that we have, and people get to actually speak to their peers, to their friends, they can actually take it home. We don’t mind. I mean, they can take all kinds of selfies with it and promote it, do whatever you want. And it’s a fairly sizable, it’s a big trophy. We get to keep it for almost a year and then we have to send it back. So when one region wins, it’s a big thing for us.

So recognition is very important. The other type of… There’s non-standard recognition. So continuous education and learning is… People don’t see that as recognition, but I think it’s one of the instruments that we can recognize people with. And then just giving them access, an opportunity to get another degree, to learn. So we started with things like LinkedIn Learning with EdCast, and so that’s actually also an interesting learning right there. When we opened up these programs to our employees, we saw the engagement going up very quickly, and then it just sort of tapered off because people get exhausted.

And I mean, you’re all familiar with LinkedIn Learning, I mean, you go there and it’s like drinking from a fire hydrant. I mean, it’s, “Where do I go?” For every keyword, there’s 1.5 million trainings. So what we decided to do is we decided to curate and we decided to put together these what we call learning journeys. And in the learning journeys, we curate basically for specific jobs, specific positions that we have in the company. And so, if I’m a service engineer and I want to be a project manager, there’s a learning journey for me. I can go on my own pace, and I can basically do that. And it’s not only LinkedIn learning, but it’s also I get a chance to maybe spend some time with a project manager. I get more engaged with installations and projects all of a sudden. So I get to practically do things that I want to do in the future and get a feel for it.

And we don’t mind if they try it and they don’t like it and they say, “Well, that’s probably not something for me,” that’s actually the best kind of thing that we… So instead of putting them in that position and hoping that this is going to work, I mean, we can try it in this coaching mode and see if that works. And if it doesn’t, they can go back to the field and do what they want to do.

Sarah Nicastro: So, I think a lot of times when we talk about human centricity, people kind of separate it from digital transformation and technology, but really technology can play a big role in human centricity because if you think about the fact that it’s either helping or it’s typically a point of dissatisfaction, so it’s rarely somewhere in between. So, how does technology factor into your overall strategy?

Sasha Ilyukhin: We all learned the hard way during COVID, and you can get really exhausted with technology. Zoom, and WebEx, and Teams, and whatnot, I mean, you can get really exhausted with that, but it comes down, I think to employee experience. So we see technology as how do we enhance the employee’s experience. And when we implement different types of apps… So we have apps for field service, IFS, right? I mean, we have apps for safety, we have apps for learning, et cetera, et cetera. When we look at that, we look at does it really enhance the employee experience? Does it make their life easier or is it just another thing that we’re implementing?

I have a case here, I have a story where on the HR side, we had a case where we almost ended up with two apps for reporting hours. And that was not a good thing, but because one part of it comes from invoicing for customers, another part of it comes from internal processing hours, et cetera, and we stopped that. So we stopped that, we said, “No, no, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Yeah, it’s convenient, it works nice, it fits with our systems, it integrates, but we can’t do it like that.”

So this is one of the examples where we really need to curate technology as well. But technology certainly helps. I mean, it certainly helps. And EdCast, I mentioned EdCast for these personal journeys where we have these go-to’s and people can look at it from… We have this 70-20-10 principle, so 10% formal learning, 20% coaching, 70% on the job. In the classical, in the olden days, it used to be like you take the training 10% and then that’s it. You go on the job, you do your 70%. However you do it, it’s your thing, okay?

We want to make sure that people are actually going through that journey at their own pace. That’s one of the biggest learnings for us as a team, as a company. And one of the biggest learnings for me is one person can get a skill very quickly, another person, it takes them a little bit longer time, and again, we don’t mind. So they take the learning, they go into the coaching mode, and in the coaching mode they may realize, “Well, I don’t know this as well as I should.” So they go back to learning, they retake it again, go back again into the coaching mode. And these are the types of non-linear learning journeys that we want to promote. That’s a good recognition as well, because we give them the time to do this, we recognize that they need to take that time to learn.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, I think it’s important to think about the impact of technology because if you put yourself in the shoes of the field technician, one of the things that’s going to make them automatically unhappy in their job is to arrive to do what they need to do and not have the information they need, the help they need, or to have some technology that is incredibly cumbersome and distracts them from the work they’re there to do. So it does, I think, have an important correlation.

I think the other thing is, I know Tetra Pak is in the midst of a service transformation. So focusing on human centricity in parallel or even in advance of makes change management a bit easier, rather than what companies often do is dig into change management as a result of that transformation, then find themselves in a human centricity conundrum because they start to uncover some of the issues.

So if you’re being more proactive about it can make whatever change you encounter, whether it’s technology-related or otherwise a bit easier because you have some of that foundation. So what is the feedback been from your teams so far? Have you heard any gratitude? Has there been any skepticism? What have you experienced?

Sasha Ilyukhin: We’ve heard all kinds of things and you can’t make everyone happy, but we want to make their life as easy as possible and make sure that our team is engaged. I just talked here this morning just over coffee about returning to the office. So we now have this program of returning to the office. We did the survey and the team split exactly 50-50. It’s not even 49-51, it’s 50-50. So some people are ready and eager to come back, some people are not, so we have to accommodate for all of these needs and find these interesting compromises with flex time and so on and so forth. Same goes for the field service.

What I would say is formal programs result in formal response, and it all comes down again to the leaders, to the types of leaders that we have, what they do. They need to be in the field, be with their people. I mean, I’m doing a lot of traveling, just visiting with customers and service engineers. We have road shows coming up, I will be in every single road show there. I think it’s important. It’s important to listen, and it’s important to act on what we hear from the field and how to make the life easier for our service engineers.

So again, it comes back to listening and empathy as well. There is research that I’ve seen that 80% of people would switch jobs if they don’t feel empathy from their leader. And when it comes to Gen X, it’s more like 90-plus percent would switch jobs. They don’t care about the pay, they don’t care about the benefits, they want relationship, and that I think is the key to it all.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, Sasha and I were talking with a group of other folks on a virtual focus group that we had on this topic, and that point came up about the balance between process and formal programs, which are important. You need to set some structure and you need to be thinking about how to scale certain things that are working, et cetera but also personal touch.

I think if you’re focused… If a company wants to improve human centricity by only focusing on the formal process, you’re really lacking a super important piece of the puzzle. So I think that’s a really good point. I also think it’s a good point about… You said you need to always be listening. And I think that’s the other thing is this isn’t a focus that you dig into, you make improvements, and then you move on. It’s something that needs to just become a course of continual improvement and adjustment.

So that’s where I think the process is helpful is the process of engaging and listening so that you have that insight into, “Okay, how are people feeling? What are they liking? What are they not liking?” To your point, you cannot make everyone happy, but I think there’s a lot of lift that comes from just being authentically engaged and being willing to listen even if you cannot and will not address every piece of feedback. So I think that’s really important as well. Any insights or lessons learned since you started this that you think those here today would benefit from hearing?

Sasha Ilyukhin: So, some of the lessons learned, I think Max told also about this is, again, I come back to the types of leaders that we hire and making sure that you don’t have any sort of toxicity in the team. So when the person becomes disengaged, you better catch it early before it actually happens and either fix it or get rid of them. If they become toxic, I mean, they talk to customers, they talk to peers, they talk to their families, it’s not good. It’s not good for them, not good for the company, not good for customers. So that’s one thing that we’re working really hard on is to make sure that… Is that we have the kind of engagement across the team.

Second is you don’t look at the averages because we were so blinded by looking at average utilization, average overtime, average travel. And when we benchmarked all of that, it’s like, “No, everything is fine.” And then when you look at an individual level, so all of a sudden, that average 80% utilization becomes… For someone, it’s 98%, so they’re totally overworked and burning out. For another person is 60% or 50%, and they’re sitting at home some days and probably also feeling bad because they’re like, “Why am I not needed? Why don’t I know things that are required for the company?”

Over-communicating, so during COVID, we’ve learned that skill very well. I don’t know how many one-on-ones, I have hundreds one-on-ones literally during COVID time, I don’t want to count them. But it’s important to over-communicate, it’s important to also… Anonymity, it’s okay. So when we have our events, what we call “Let’s Talk”, which are like town hall type events. We use Slido and we actually say, “Yeah, anonymity is fine, because that’s how you get the genuine feedback.” We never filter anything. So it’s like, you can put your name there, you don’t want to put your name there, that’s okay. And that’s how we get the most feedback.

And of course, being out there in the field as well, and in some ways easy to just sit in the office and trying to be this mastermind, but it doesn’t work. So being in the field, doing the Gemba for those that are in TPM as well. Go Gemba is a very, very nice principle there. It’s seeing something firsthand. And I would say also driving personal accountability is very important. That is something that we are now as a company also transforming into. We are a, again, Swedish heritage, and Swedish heritage is very collaborative culture. So we used to have everything is by consensus, so all the decisions are by consensus. So we could discuss something to death until we get to consensus. So now it’s like, “No, we want to drive quick decisions. You may disagree but commit.” Okay, we do the Amazon thing, but we take personal accountability.

So if you take a decision, you’re accountable for it. That people actually find very rewarding because all of a sudden, it’s not like, “No, it’s because of him or because of that, et cetera.” No, you take it, you run with it. And if you’re successful, great. If you’re not, we take it as a learning, learn from it, and do things better next time.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. What’s next?

Sasha Ilyukhin: What’s next is what I just mentioned. I mean, we have this entire program, we call it “Amplify, Simplify, Empower, and Adapt.” So these are the simple behaviors that we want to actually add to our culture. A lot of it is around empowerment, delegation, personal accountability, and so on and so forth. And a lot of that comes back then to resilience, business resilience, and how do we become more adaptive as a business, more nimble, faster, we listen, we act as fast as we can.

We just had a very nice presentation from a professor from IMD School of Management. His name is Arturo Bris. And he talked about that the times are changing, so he called it the era of ignorance. And his point was that before, we all used to have these, what we would call black swan events. So everything is normal and for five years, and then all of a sudden comes the black swan, or what we would call it a tipping point or disruptive innovation, and all of a sudden, you need to be prepared for it and so on.

And he said, now, he calls it Heffalumps and Woozles. So for those of you familiar with Winnie the Pooh, these were the fictional characters that came to Winnie the Pooh every night in his nightmares. And he said, “Now, is the time of Heffalumps and Woozles, because they come to us every day.” So we had COVID and then after COVID, we have this terrible war with Russia invading Ukraine, and now we have supply chain issues, and now we have Monkeypox. And it’s like every day you wake up and then there’s a couple of other things, just add them, okay?

So the point is we need to be resilient, nimble, move fast, take accountability, and all of that comes down to human centricity because we all rely on each other as a team. If we don’t have good people around us, good, engaged people around us, then the business is doomed.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that point, because you’re right, resilience depends on connectedness, not just as a business but as people, right?

Sasha Ilyukhin: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for listening. I hope enjoyed the session with Sasha from the Austin stop of the Future of Field Service Live Tour. We will soon be announcing information on what the 2023 Future of Field Service Live Tour will look like. So, be sure to stay tuned at www.futureoffieldservice.com for more. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter….

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We know that delivering excellence in the moment of service is crucial in achieving customer satisfaction, but what exactly goes into making the most of those moments? Honestly, quite a lot. Today’s customer expectations are no small feat to deliver – they want seamlessness, simplicity, personality, reliability, peace of mind and much more.

To stay focused on achieving service excellence and delivering a standout customer experience, it’s important to think both about how you can make incremental improvements but also how your service value proposition will need to evolve to keep pace. I’d suggest you focus in on these five levers, because they represent some of the biggest areas of opportunity for customers looking to differentiate through service.

Lever #1: You MUST Master the Basics

If standout service is your goal, you must run before you walk. There’s no shortcut past mastering the basics of service excellence. Today’s customers won’t tolerate long appointment windows, late arrivals, and repeat visits. They expect far more from their service providers, yet many companies have yet to master the basics – and often this is because they’re trying to rush ahead to more advanced transformation without first setting a strong foundation.

Begin by ensuring you’re fully leveraging your service management solution to capture accurate data, arm field technicians with all the knowledge they need on site, dynamically schedule and route your workforce to maximize utilization, execute on-time arrivals, and increase first-time fix. Ensuring you have nailed the basics prevents you from making customer missteps that are unacceptable in today’s service climate, but also sets you up to add more sophisticated layers of capability successfully.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour in Stockholm, Berit Hallgren, Program Director at Tetra Pak shared, “We have a clear vision where we want to go, but we need to do that in a step wise journey, always putting the customer and employees first. We went a bit wrong 10 years back, it was all about the ‘cool’ stuff, but what will you do with the cool technology if the backend isn’t working? And that’s exactly what happened. The transformation we’re doing now is really to get the foundation in place for the future and then we can build on that.”

Lever #2: Respect the Correlation Between Employee Engagement and CX

I saw Elizabeth Dixon of Chic Fil A present at the Service Council Symposium in September, and I really appreciated this quote from her session: “Your Customer Experience is the overflow of your Employee Experience – it will never be better than the experience your teams have working for your company,” she said.

The field technician of yesteryear and the field technician of today are very different. Today, your frontline workforce is the face of your brand. They are the ones you’re relying – depending – on to execute your customer experience vision. Are they engaged? Satisfied? Companies who are getting it right have realized that we must ensure our workforce is satisfied if we aim to deliver a competitive CX.

There are many contributing factors that go into employee engagement. Technology is one – if it is cumbersome, viewed as a draw on their time versus the enabler it should be, engagement will suffer. Employees appreciate having a voice in what tools are selected and how they are used – and they often have insights that benefit not only their end experience, but the company’s initiatives.

But this lever goes far beyond technology use to more deeply rooted and often philosophical company and leadership elements. Everything from company culture to management style to communication methods to recognition and appreciation factor in. As the field service workforce continues to change, and companies quite universally struggle to recruit talent at the pace they need to, putting ample emphasis on all of these elements of employee engagement is an absolute imperative.

Lever #3: Focusing on Outside-In Innovation

If you’ve ever felt like your organization is beholden to its legacy, you aren’t alone. It isn’t uncommon to get stuck inside the box – sometimes habits, processes, and even assumptions can get in the way of a truly stellar CX. Even with the best of intentions, if we assume we already know what our customers want and need, we may miss the mark. Outside-in innovation is really important in delivering customer satisfaction, not only today but into the future.

Let’s look at four factors to keep in mind about innovation:

It must be clearly defined within your organization so everyone is working toward the same objective
Service innovation often means business transformation when what’s changing in service impacts the value proposition, go-to-market strategy, or revenue model
Companies too often narrow their view of what’s possible – look outside of your own industry and remove restrictions on creative thinking
Customers, not your company, define value – and today’s customers value outcomes

While you should innovate outside-in, you must also innovate inside to keep pace with what’s demanded. Many customers today value outcomes more than they do individual products or services. Delivering outcomes is an evolution that depends on not only customer intimacy, but infrastructure.

Take, for example Rema Tip Top who is migrating to outcomes based on the needs of its customers. As Thomas Moser, Head of Product Management for Digital Solutions points out, companies often cannot meet the modern demands of customers, like delivering outcomes, without investing in technology that enables new capabilities.

“The functionality of the IFS platform is what allows us to execute on our claim to keep our customers’ systems up and running. Further, it allows us to maximize the efficiency of our service delivery through the intelligence and automation build into the system,” says Thomas. “We can’t accomplish this evolution by selling service packages and offering manpower, because with manpower alone is far too expensive to meet outcomes. By monitoring the condition of our customers systems and then using the intelligence and optimization within IFS when manpower is needed, the value proposition of outcomes becomes achievable.”

What each of your customers wants and needs from you, and how you’ll get to delivering it, is different – but the need to innovate with their perspective at the forefront is universal.

Lever #4: Focus on (Truly) Becoming a Trusted Advisor

To this dismay of many a marketing organization, “Trusted Advisor” isn’t a status you can simply claim – it is a reputation you earn with your customers. If you think about building up to that status with your customers, the first concept that should come to mind is – you guessed it! – trust.

But what does it take to build trust?

For some external perspective, PwC reported in its Trust in Business Survey what respondents said were the top drivers of trust in company (asked of both employees and consumers). The top responses were:

Accountable to customers and employees – 50%
Clear communications – 48%
Admits to mistakes – 40%
Delivers consistent customer experience – 39%
Appropriate employee compensation – 32%

To deliver that consistent customer experience, it takes intimate knowledge of their business, the ability to collect and analyze data that is relevant to their business AND the expertise to translate that analysis into simple, actionable insights they can benefit from. It also takes trust.

For many of our customers, achieving trusted advisor status is the next level of innovation they are focused on beyond delivering outcomes. Having that foundational, single source of truth plus customer intimacy and deep knowledge of desired outcomes sets companies up to consider what insights they can provide that will progress them to be viewed as a trusted advisor by their customers.

As Klaus Glatz, Chief Digital Officer of ANDRITZ states, the role of the frontline is imperative – and so is arming them with technology that enables them to act in the trusted advisor role. “Field service is key in our mission to expand and build upon our service offerings. Downtime wreaks havoc on our customers, and better managing our service operations is critical in minimizing and preventing that downtime,” he says. “Furthermore, equipping our frontline workforce with more sophisticated technology allows them to take on more services responsibility, create greater trust among customers, and act as a business advisor.”

Lever #5: Master Continuous Change

Jack Welch said, “When the rate of external change exceeds the rate of internal change, the end is near.” It can be overwhelming, but change isn’t slowing – we must learn to keep pace.

Companies who excel are embracing this fact. They are learning how to manage change more adeptly within their organization and with their frontline and are working to create a culture where change feels like a shared experience versus a directive. They are creating more agile processes around strategy setting and decision-making and they are using today’s technological capabilities to remain informed, to leverage automation, and to assess opportunities for growth.

Mike Gosling of Cubic Transportation, who has helped lead the company in the transformation from break-fix to outcomes-based service, has a great outlook on continuous improvement. “This journey is one of continual improvement. If you pop the champagne and put your feet up as soon as you hit your success criteria, you’ll fall back below quickly. When you master one area, you keep watch of it and move on to another,” he says. “You constantly assess where you are and where you’re going next, and out of this process is where the new innovative ideas are born. But you must be in a constant state of assessing and looking ahead.”

Elizabeth Dixon, who previously led Strategy, Hospitality, and Service Design at Chic-fil-A Corporate and recently authored the book The Power of Customer Experience: Five Elements to Make an Impact, joins Sarah to talk about what exactly it is about those companies who are known for their standout customer service.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Welcome to the Future, of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be talking about five elements of exceptional customer experience. We know customer experience and customer satisfaction are top of mind for every service organization. And I'm excited to be joined today by Elizabeth Dixon. Elizabeth spent 20 years in leadership at Chick-fil-A and is now the executive director of the Trilith Foundation. She's also recently published a book and I found her doing one of her keynote speeches at the Service Council Symposium in Chicago in September. Elizabeth, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Elizabeth Dixon: Thank you. I'm so glad to be here, Sarah. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I'm excited to have you. So before we get into some of the elements of customer experience, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your background, your journey, anything you would like to share.

Elizabeth Dixon: Well, I'd love to. My favorite things in life to talk about and the people to spend time with are my best friend and husband, John. And then we have two little kiddos, seven and nine. And so they are so much fun and full of life and energy and so that takes a lot of our time and our hearts right now. And then when it comes to me and my gifts and what I love to do, I love to create new value. So a lot of times that's entrepreneurship. It's creating unique businesses and then a lot of times it's been intrapreneurship, it's creating new things, it's refining processes within broader organizations.

And so I love doing anything that's going to impact people's lives and make a difference. And like you said, I got to be at Chick-fil-A for about 20 years and then just a few months ago, our chairman, Dan Cathy called and said, Hey, I want you to come and work for me on some new projects. So it's been an absolute blast to use those gifts of creating new value and doing it in a totally different context in a creative and film industry. So it's been a total blast.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, very cool. And I think that creating new value is a really good way to frame what service organizations need to be thinking about today. So when we think about the customer experience, we often think about expectations we need to live up to, but we really should reframe that to thinking about new ways to create value and look at it as an exciting opportunity instead of something that everyone is tasked with. So you were the principal lead for strategy, hospitality, and service design at Chick-fil-A. And I'm sure in that role you had a lot of experience, like you said, creating not only new value but refining things that were existing within the business and always looking for ways to do better. You're passionate enough about customer experience that you wrote your book, which is titled The Power of Customer Experience: Five Elements to Make an Impact. I'm curious, what inspired you to write the book?

Elizabeth Dixon: So, I had a lot of great resources. I was surrounded by incredible mentors. There are incredible books to read when you're thinking about the actual design and the strategy behind customer experience. But one thing that I found there was a need for was being able to have a book for the frontline employees, not necessarily just knowing what to do because that can change based on the industry, but truly understanding the impact that they could make, that there was purpose and a paycheck within their job.

And I found that when brands were able to make sure that the frontline employee understood that there was meaning in the moments that they were creating, that they actually had the power to cause customers to love or hate a brand, those were the companies that won. And I thought, man, what if we could have a resource that would help the frontline employee make that connection for themselves and then ultimately help the brand do well? Because you can design a great customer experience, but if it's not brought to life on the front lines the way that it needs to be, nobody wins. So that was the hard part of it was like, what if we could do that? And what if we could help the front lines recognize the impact that they could have? Not only would brands win, not only would they win because they would be more fulfilled within their jobs, but also the customers would win and we'd be able to have a culture that's a whole lot nicer.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. And that was one of my favorite things about your presentation in Chicago was really reinforcing that message that whether you are working for an organization that changes people's lives or whether you are a leader in a different type of business or whether you are a frontline employee, we all have the power as human beings and individuals to make a difference and make an impact on people. And I think that's a really good message to reinforce. I know for myself, when I was in grad school, I had plans or intentions to get into non-profit work. That was kind of what I saw myself doing. And then life took me in a bit of a different direction and for a while I had to reconcile this feeling of if I went into the corporate world, I was missing that opportunity to do something philanthropic or to have make a difference in that way.

And then I realized, no, first of all, your career doesn't define all of you. It's a part of you. Secondly, so I do volunteer work on the side, so that's one way I can kind of scratch that itch. But what I've also learned over time is I have an opportunity every single day to make a positive impact on people's lives. Whether that's colleagues, customers, people in the industry, we all have that power no matter what our role or title or industry is. And so I really, really loved that message. So thank you. All right, so I don't want to spend too much time on the five elements because I want people to go ahead and find you and find the book and read the book. But if you can just run through them for us at a high level just so people kind of understand the things that you're touching on in the book.

Elizabeth Dixon: Absolutely. So there are five really principles and each of them have a definition and stories and application for how they show up. But these are the five. The first one is to choose your mindset. The mindset above all things is where we have to start because our mindset determines what we get. The second is to create our culture. The customer experience is simply an overflow of the employee experience. So we have to focus on what is the employee culture that is going to then overflow onto the customers. The third is we have to know our customer. We have to know so much about them, what they want, what they value, what they want next, what role we play in their lives in order to bring those experiences to life. The fourth one, we have to define our differentiator. What's going to set us apart as an industry, as a business, as an organization?

And then we have to make sure that we are staying fresh and on the cutting edge of how that's going to evolve into the fifth principle, which is to pursue innovation. So the book is really written for that frontline employee, for these five elements to come to life. And actually I'm working right now on the sequel that compare with it that will be for the leader around how do you truly accelerate your customer experience in the seat that you hold as the leader? And when you pair those together, when that leader is looking into the future, there's a great quote. "When your memories exceed your dreams, the end is near."

We have to constantly be thinking about what's next and not let our memories exceeding our dreams for what's next. When the leader is thinking about how to accelerate and grow and become better so that you can become bigger and have the frontline employee recognizing the role they play and how their mindset, the way they impact culture, the way they understand the customer, that they bring to life that differentiation and then the way that they're pursuing innovation on the front lines is critically important for us to be successful and win in the customer experience space.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. And it definitely takes both sides. I think that there's sort of a transformation going on in leadership and in company culture that is really a recognition of the need to be less possessive and more collaborative. I mean, there's kind of like this old school leadership mentality where it's a lot of taking credit for success and just a very individualistic type of role. And I think that's really changing because there's a recognition that there's so much knowledge and capability within the entire organization that needs to be harnessed. So there was a number of points you made during your presentation or of anecdotes and stories you shared that really struck me. And this is where for me, I've been doing what I do for quite a long time and I've been at conferences like the one we were at so many times. And there are obviously themes that are consistent.

So customer experience is a theme that someone's always talking about, right? Because we know it's important. So to me, it's often the stories that stand out because that's what makes a presentation like yours unique and memorable. Okay. So the first thing is the point you made that I just think is such an important point to park on for a moment, which is the fact that companies need to remember that their customer experience is the overflow of their employee experience. So let's talk a little bit about this and how you sort identified that fact in your own work in your career.

Elizabeth Dixon: The first part that really caught my attention, it was actually Horst Schulze, the founder of the Ritz Carlton, I was very blessed to be mentored by him consistently for a year. And I admire and respect him and his wife Sherry so much, and they've remained friends. But during that mentorship, there was a season where I was talking to him about leading and lagging indicators, pre and post kind of indicators around customer experience. And one of the things that I love about him, and he has an incredible book, Excellence Wins. He has this ability to take very complex, sometimes overwhelming elements and make them very, very simple. And it was in a conversation we were having where I said, all right, well Horst, what is it that I need to look at that's going to be a measure that I'm going to see drop before our customer experience is going to drop?

Because nobody wants to get to where the customer experience measures are dropping because you've lost it. It's too late. It's really hard to pull it back, especially when you're a really big organization. And we've seen those organizations that whether it was a leadership change, whether they got to the top and were number one and were exhausted by that, and they kind of pulled back a bit. When their experience started to drop, a competitor swooped right in and took over. I said, so what is it? What is that leading indicator I should look at? And he said, "It's the happiness of your people. Simply."

And this light bulb went on for me of whoa. So often we talk about the lag, we talk about that thing that actually is just that overflow because you're doing something else really well. And that's not to say that we don't have to be prescriptive and detailed and super intentional about the design of the customer experience. We do.

But if we're only doing that, we'll never get to where we want to be because all of that is the overflow of healthy, happy, contented employees who are in a great working environment. So that was the moment where it was a light bulb for me of, man, we spend so much time talking about this, but if we're not focusing on the cultural elements of what's happening in our organization, those are the leading indicators that when we start to see scores going down that I'm not satisfied in my job. I don't feel cared about by my boss. I don't feel like I'm able to bring my whole self to work. I don't see that I'm able to accomplish my purpose in life here in my job.

And some people might be listening and they're like, oh, all that sounds so fluffy. But to the individual, it's not. They will be fully harnessed when they're able to bring their full self to work and they wake up to go fulfill a purpose. People don't jump out of bed just for a paycheck, they jump out of bed because there's a purpose, there's a clear path for growth and development. And they got to be paid too. So those were the light bulb moments for me of these are the leading indicators. And if we don't obsess about the leading indicators, we're never going to have the lagging scores that we talk about and want and will ultimately help us get to where we want to be as an organization.

Sarah Nicastro: So, here's interesting about this to me, and I think you'll find this interesting too, how it relates to the audience of this podcast. So, Ritz Carlton is known for exceptional customer experience, Chick-Fil-A as well, to be honest, I mean that's one of the reasons people love Chick-fil-A. My pleasure. That pleasant, good vibes you leave with when you go through the drive through. So those are both though customer service centric industries, so consumer-centric industries. And so when you compare that with some of the other types of organizations that would be listening to this podcast that are in sort of traditional field service industries.

So whether that's commercial service or even residential service, but you would think of a appliance repair person or a home security installation or utilities, whatever that is, they are often organizations that traditionally haven't had that expectation of really focusing on customer experience. So what I've recognized in my we'll say 15 years in this space is when I first started in this career, every conversation you had with a field service organization was around driving cost reduction because that was the focus. Field service was seen as a cost center. So it was all about just maximize efficiency, productivity.

Then the world of consumer experience including brands like Ritz Carlton, Chick-Fil-A, but also things like Amazon and Uber. All of these different things that have happened in our personal lives over the last 15, 20 years started to creep into the expectations customers have of all types of service organizations, even those that traditionally haven't really been that customer-centric, customer experience type situation. So what I think is that, or what I've seen, is that companies recognized now we see field service as a potential profit center if we focus more on the customer experience, we look at how to create more value and not just have a break fix transaction, et cetera.

But I think many of them became so hyper focused on the customer experience that they never really connected that dot of the employee experience. So I think right now the industry as a whole is sort of taking a step back because that recognition is coming into play of wait, we can't really accomplish this customer experience, customer satisfaction objective we have without considering the experience and the emotional engagement of the frontline workers that we ultimately rely on to deliver whatever brand promise we are trying to create.

And so where that acknowledgement in a company like Ritz Carlton came a long time ago, I think in field service it's really just begun. So companies are having to dig back in and reflect on how do we evolve our culture, our leadership style, our processes, our technology use, our soft skill building, our training and development, our career path-ing so that our employees are happy and bought into the mission that we are trying to achieve. So it's really interesting that point you're making that you were helped to recognize by your mentor I think is a point that in our space a lot of people are just coming to and kind of thinking, oh shit, okay, if we need to accomplish this, we really need to look at what is happening inside because we can't just force it. What are your thoughts on that?

Elizabeth Dixon: I think it's exciting. I think it's exciting because what it comes down to is humans and people treating each other well. And when we do, we love it. We talk about it to other people. I had some furniture cleaned. That's not an industry that you're like, when I get my furniture cleaned, I just feel like I'm treated like a queen. No, I mean, it's like ugh. People are having to come clean something that you didn't want to have had happened, whether that's a child sculpting something or a dog doing whatever. And so I had these chairs cleaned and this young man, Joel was amazing.

He was so thoughtful, he answered all my questions. He was very courteous for how he was going to bring the equipment into the house. I remember it. And you know what I did? I sent the link to a bunch of my girlfriends of, "Hey, if y'all need to get anything cleaned anytime soon, this company is amazing. Why is this company amazing? Yes, they got the stains out of my furniture. But Joel. Joel's the reason that it's amazing for me." And when we can have consistent Joel like experiences, and we can do that in industries that aren't expecting it, that is ripe opportunity. I mean, think about gas stations. Sarah, have you been to a Buckee's yet?

Sarah Nicastro: No.

Elizabeth Dixon: You got to go. I'm telling you. When you think about a road trip and you think about driving down the interstate, inevitably someone in the car at some point is going to have to use the restroom. And the last place that you probably want to stop is your typical gas station. I mean, I remember one time, I'm not even going to go there. You just don't want to stop. And so Buckee's heard that, and they've been around for a few decades, but have really recently super intentionally focused on the biggest pain points. You pull up to these. I mean these are plazas, they're like the shopping center of gas stations. They have so many pumps for you to pull up. They've said they wanted to design it so that everybody felt safe, which isn't always the feeling I have at a gas station, but I was in one a few months ago and I'm telling you these bathrooms are pristine.

They have staff that are constantly making sure the bathrooms are clean. They have art, like art for sale on the walls. I walked into one of the restrooms and there were two ladies that was in good old South Georgia and they're like, honey, I think that would look perfect in your baby's nursery. You should buy that. And I'm like, who buys art in a restroom of a gas station? At Buckee's, you do. And you walk out and they're like, "Bruce, get on the block." And they're chopping up fresh meat. Who would've thought when you can do something around the experience that causes people to be surprised and you're in an industry where people aren't expecting it, that is go time. That is so exciting because you can disrupt it. You can set the standard, you can be the standard for what it can be.

So when I hear you say that, I personally get really excited because it means that, one of the companies listening is going to go game on. We're going to accelerate this. We're going to win at this. And when you do, you get to be the Amazon, you get to be that name that people associate with being the best. And then once you are, you just got to keep pursuing innovation in a way to know what your customer wants next, just like Jeff Bezos has done to go got to stay scrappy, stay at that front lines of what's next and how can we deliver it more effectively than anybody else.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now another point you made that I really liked is you were talking about differentiation and you made the point that if it isn't consistent, it isn't a differentiator. So do you have any advice for people on how to land on what is their opportunity for differentiation, but also something that they can achieve consistently?

Elizabeth Dixon: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times I think the things that our organizations are really unique at or really good at, we can start to take for granted because we've either focused on it for a long time or it's come so naturally to us. I think we can do that sometimes as individuals too. The natural gifts that we have, we can kind of take them for granted a little bit, like I thought everyone could do that. So I think the first question to help is what is it that we uniquely can do better than our competition? What are those levers that we have that others don't? For Chick-fil-A, it was back in 2008 and there was a massive recession happening and one of the unique strengths that we had was our people. And it was in that season that Truitt and Dan Cathy decided let's really emphasize that.

Let's use what we uniquely have better than our competition and let's find a way to elevate that. So what is it that you uniquely can do better than the competition? And then what is it that uniquely can do that's going to add more value than your competition can? So often you referenced this earlier, it's really natural to, in our organization, start thinking about how do we reduce costs? I think where it gets dangerous, that's good. Where it gets dangerous is when we start extracting value from what the customer is going to receive. When we start removing services, when we start removing the quality of the products that we're offering in order to reduce those costs. Because ultimately we're extracting value from the customer. The more we can think about how do we be more efficient, more streamlined, how do we reduce costs by making things easier on the back end so that we can add more value to the customer. When we're thinking about how do we add value, and I don't necessarily mean it has to come at a cost.

When you think about some of the simple things that some brands do. At Nordstrom, they might walk around the counter to hand you your bag. At Chick-fil-A, they say “My pleasure.” That doesn't have to cost a lot to add more value, but there can be behaviors that are going to add value that your competition isn't as uniquely positioned to be able to do it. So those are the first two questions. And then the last would be around the moment, how do we define the moments that are creating our experiences? And in the book I outlined three major types of moments that I think are important to unpack. The first is signature moments. It's like the Nordstrom or the Chick-fil-A example. It's kind of like your signature of your company. It's unique to you. Everybody consistently does it, but it doesn't have to cost more.

The second are surprise moments, the ones that just catch people by surprise. And there's some fun examples in the book. And the last is solvable. When something happens, something goes wrong, whether you caused it or you didn't cause it, you just inherited the problem, what do you do with that? And a lot of individuals don't want to step into a problem with a person, but the great brands are going to be the ones that say, oh, I see your problem and I'm going to come alongside you, and I want to help you solve that. So what is it you uniquely can do? What is it you uniquely can do that's going to add value compared to your competitors? And then how do you break down those moments of signature surprise and solvable to be able to add that value to your customers?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. So this next question, it might be maybe unfair way for me to ask for a little sneak peek into the next book, but you talked in your presentation about expanding curiosity. And so I think this is really important and I guess I sort of pair curiosity with creativity. And so if you think about some of the evolution within the folks that listen to this podcast, there are organizations that I spoke of, I think there hasn't been a lot of room traditionally for curiosity and creativity. It's just kind of been here's what we do, here's the process, follow it, be efficient, boom, we're done, right? And now we're entering this era of more creative thinking around how do we create more value? How do we evolve our value proposition? How do we change maybe how our brand is perceived or what our identity is, et cetera?

And so I know you said that the book we're discussing is more geared toward the frontline employee. I personally think that the frontline employees have plenty of creativity and curiosity. I just think they've stifled a lot of it because it hasn't been accepted or nurtured by leadership. So my question is, how do leaders within these organizations foster the ability to welcome more curiosity from their frontline employees?

Elizabeth Dixon: It's so good because when we can unlock that, it's unlimited potential for the future. And I think you're exactly right. I think it's very natural that creativity gets stifled. Number one, it gets stifled from when we're children and we're taught to color inside the lines and do it this way and sit and learn, et cetera. When we're young, the most curious person is a four year old girl asks the most questions imaginable. And I have a seven year old and sometimes my husband and I are like, seriously? Could there be more questions? But if we can lean into it and recognize that those individuals who are naturally curious help us be more curious. And here's the thing about curiosity and creativity, which is so exciting, is that creativity is the ability to understand what is. Acknowledge it, recognize it, and also to anticipate what could be and merge those things together to get to a meaningful result.

And I think when we are overwhelmed, when we are stressed, when we are at capacity, it's really hard just to accept and understand what is. And I think what can happen in a lot of our organizations, and I don't think it's intentional, is that we feel overloaded. And when Curious Carl comes along with, I've got an idea, we want to shut that thing down because we see it as a threat. We don't see it as an opportunity. We see it as a threat to the status quo. We see it as a threat to our full plates. What else? How can I handle something else? But what's amazing is that the frontline employees typically are going to be the ones who come up with the very best solutions and they can anticipate the problems faster than anybody else. Why? Because they're dealing with it. And they're the ones who are thinking you know how we could do this better?

And so if we can go ahead and in that moment when someone comes along and says, "I have an idea," and we want to be like, shut it down, the best thing as leaders we can do is to just say, tell me about it. Open up the space. Give enough oxygen in the room for people to share the ideas that they have. We don't have to act on it, but let's at least be able to talk about it. And once we can talk about it, if we can then move to the place where we can actually have a system and a process for collecting pain points and solutions and making those connections better, and finding those people who are great at identifying the pain points and finding the solutions and put them in positions to be able to do that more often, then that's the next level.

And then the third level is where we can overtly celebrate curiosity, where we can overtly celebrate finding problems that need solutions and where we can take risk. And risk means we're not going to nail it every time. We're going to fail. And being able to celebrate actually pursuing those risks, knowing that sometimes this is what is important. Sometimes what we thought could be the solution for a problem, it's not going to end up being the solution, but it could spawn 10 other ideas that could be game changing within our industry. So there has to be enough room and it starts with us at least just responding with tell me about it, instead of trying to shut curiosity down and push away an idea that ultimately could change our industry.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that. Okay, so I mentioned at the beginning that one of the things that I really appreciated about your presentation is the reminder that we all have the power to make positive impact and leave an impression on people's hearts and make a difference. You shared a story about Jim and that was kind of what hit that message home for me. And I'm just hoping we could leave the audience with that gift of that perspective as well. So if you don't mind sharing that story, I would love it.

Elizabeth Dixon: I'd love to. So this story is a great applause to Starbucks. And I heard this story from the former president of Starbucks, Howard Behar, and it's a story about Jim. So Jim visited his local Starbucks daily. He went literally every afternoon and he ordered the same thing each time. It was a blueberry muffin and a coffee. And eventually the team at Starbucks, the baristas, they all got to know Jim and he'd come in the door and he would be greeted enthusiastically. And they even went out of their way to start writing notes on his coffee cup and on his muffin bag. And sometimes the muffins would go faster and they would set aside a blueberry muffin for him because they wanted to make sure when he came each afternoon that he would get his drip coffee and his muffin. And he lived across the street.

And so he would come over from the nursing home where he lived, and one day he didn't come in and they were perplexed like, where's Jim? It's afternoon, like he's supposed to be here. And so they said, "Hey, when it slows down a bit, let's go take his blueberry muffin and drip coffee over to him." And so a few of the team went over and they walked in and they said, "Hey, we're here to bring Jim his coffee and muffin." And they shared that with the receptionist. And the receptionist looked up and she had a tear streaming down her face and she said, "Jim died last night." And the team was like, what? They went back and poured out the coffee and threw away the muffin. And they were also disappointed because Jim had created a special culture within that team because of who he was.

We all have that space where we get to show up and make a difference in people's lives. And Jim did that for the team and they were bummed, like they lost Jim. And the next day, Jim's daughter came into Starbucks and she said, "Hey, I want to introduce myself. My dad came in here a lot in the afternoons." And they're like, "Jim, you're Jim's daughter." And she said, "Yeah." She said, "We're having a time for my dad, a funeral for my dad tomorrow. I'd really love it if you guys could come." And the manager figured out a way to organize the schedule so that that team in the afternoon could all go and honor Jim's life. And what's amazing is as much impact as Jim had on that team, they had no idea that when they walked into that funeral, there were three large round tables, like those large round tables that you sit at a banquet with eight or 10 other people.

And those three large round tables were filled with every bag and every cup that they'd written a note to Jim on. They had no idea that his afternoon time in gave him so much life because he got to interact with them and he knew how much they cared about him. And what's so powerful about making an impact on people's lives is its synergistic. And when we get to pour into somebody else, whether it's just a smile and I hope you have a great day, whether it's taking a moment to help somebody out, they feel better and we feel better. And it all starts to cycle around. And I think out of all the things going on in our country and our world, I think we could use a little bit more of that with each other where we just take the time to say, "Hey, you know what? You matter and I want to make sure that you know that by the way that I treat you today." And we get to do that in our jobs and it gets to make a really big difference in people's lives.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I love that story and I think it's such a good reminder to us as individuals that the things we maybe do without thinking much of it can mean so much to someone else. And also it's a good reminder for leaders of looking for ways to empower your employees and give them the space to be themselves and make those connections because those are the things that make such a huge impact. So I love that story. Thank you for sharing it. I know we are out of time. Last question is just where can folks find the book?

Elizabeth Dixon: Oh, Amazon, the Power of Customer Experience right off Amazon. You can get the ebook version or hard back or soft back. And then on my website, ElizabethDixonSpeaks.com, there's a great video series that you can do with your teams to create a book club experience. There's a user guide and then seven videos that you can do to set up conversation. So everyone can read the book and then have seven segments where you have conversation. That's where the real power comes, is when you can start taking these principles and ideating together, what could this look like for us? What does our mindsets need to be? Where are our opportunities to improve our culture, et cetera, et cetera. So those can be found on the website, ElizabethDixonSpeaks.com.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Everyone check it out. Elizabeth, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it.

Elizabeth Dixon: Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at the Future of FS. 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

My lucky streak of relatively smooth travel this year ended last week with my trip to Austin to attend Field Service Connect. Despite a delayed arrival, the event was enjoyable. This is one of WBR’s intentionally small sessions, which creates a lot of lively dialogue. I am sometimes asked if I ever bore of attending these events, and the dialogue is what allows me to answer that question with an honest “no.”

I know the mainstage topics by heart, that’s true. And there are times where I feel a deep urge to really shake things up, which I try to do in my own way. But the dialogue, the side conversations, the layers of detail are where I find the really interesting nuggets that keep me engaged, invested, and passionate about where this industry is headed.

So, what stuck out from Field Service Connect? I had an opportunity to host a roundtable discussion on opportunities within service to drive sustainability and moderate a panel alongside Roy Dockery of Flock Safety, Haroon Abbu of Bell and Howell, and Curtis Novinger of P3 on what it takes for businesses to create a digitally focused identity.

Driving More Sustainable Service

The sustainability discussion raised some good points of consideration. Participants mostly reported their organizations as having a “medium” level of focus on sustainability, but all agreed that the level of focus will inevitably need to increase in the next few years. Some of the top-of-mind topics for those who participated included:

That while environmental initiatives are getting more attention, they haven’t yet begun to factor into decision making
Putting practices in place to measure and track environmental impact – only two of thirteen companies participating do so currently
Awareness of looming changes in policy and regulatory pressures. The US lags behind Europe in how sustainability is being measured and improvements driven, but nearly everyone expects that will come soon
How to lower waste and improve recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing
What role remote service can play in alleviating unnecessary travel and reducing carbon footprint – and the challenges of adoption, customer acceptance, and how to monetize remote service vs. traditional break-fix
How Servitization lends itself to more sustainable product and service practices
Greening of fleets – discussion around how practical the use of electric vehicles currently is for commercial fleets in terms of availability, cost, infrastructure to support, and practicalities of how employees would access and use

Overcoming the Burden of Digital Debt

During our panel discussion, we focused a lot of the discussion around a metric that Curtis had shared in his morning presentation from McKinsey stating that 70% of digital transformation efforts fail. In considering why this is and how to combat common missteps, we talked first about how investment decisions within the businesses are made. While most decisions are driven by either an opportunity to reduce cost or increase revenue, there’s a category of investments that need to be made of necessity and/or disruption.

This brought up the topic of digital debt, where Roy shared that at Flock Safety, they have an issue of having almost too many tools in use, some of which aren’t effective. Taking the time, and spending the money, to streamline, improve, and re-introduce technology is something companies often don’t do because they see those dollars as already spent and a thing of the past. While that’s true, if your existing systems aren’t effective and driving value, you cannot simply forge ahead or layer new things on top – you must face the burden of that digital debt and do the work of creating an effective digital stack.

We also talked about the role of leadership in driving success with Digital Transformation and other forms of innovation. Haroon spoke about the importance of having leadership who is technology adept, but not to the point of being too technically “in the weeds,” who also deeply understands the business and it’s needs to work on creating a true digital strategy and roadmap as well as owning much of the process and continual improvement. Businesses who are investing in leaders to drive innovation, versus expecting leaders with responsibility for the day-to-day business to also find time to innovate, seem to be much further ahead. This also helps in breaking down siloes, which is one of the most common reasons digital transformation efforts fail.

These were just two of many excellent topics discussed at the event. Sessions around AI, augmented reality, As-a-Service, attracting talent, company culture and people centricity, effective communication and much more rounded out the agenda and gave today’s service leaders an opportunity to share what they’re learning, working toward, and struggling with.

Sarah talks with Danielle Waterworth, VP- NA Dealer & Customer Solutions and Global Maintenance & Service Development at CNH Industrial about how the company is segmenting and evolving its service offerings, what advice she has on leasing assets, how to add value to a dealer network, and more.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we are going to be digging into some of the specific considerations and items that go into strategy when we are thinking about asset intensive or asset centric service. I'm excited to be joined today by Danielle Waterworth, who is the Vice President for North America Dealer and Customer Solutions, as well as for global maintenance and service development at CNH Industrial. Good grief. That was a mouthful. Danielle, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Danielle Waterworth: Thank you. Thank you. And it is a mouthful. I have to always remind myself of what it is every time that I'm talking to someone.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was a lot to get out, but I think that might have been the hardest part for me of the whole podcast. So, all right. So Danielle, before we talk a little bit about some of the aspects that are top of mind for you in an asset centric service organization, just tell everyone a little bit about yourself, your role and what CNHI does.

Danielle Waterworth: Myself, I grew up in central Illinois on a corn and beans and livestock farm. And so I was the prototypical farm kid who was looking for her place in the industry. And with that went to the University of Illinois, majoring in Ag Finance, and eventually found myself at CNH Industrial. So CNH Industrial, I've been here for 19 years, almost 20. What we do is we are an ag and construction equipment manufacturer, but it goes beyond that. It's more than just being that original equipment manufacturer. It's a full suite of everything that you would need from a captive finance company to aftermarket parts and services. We operate through our dealer network globally, but we are there as a partnering role to support those agriculture and construction customers out in the industry.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Okay. And so you mentioned being a farm kid, and I know when we spoke in preparation for this discussion, you mentioned that, that influences a lot of the passion and conviction you bring to what you did or what you do. So a lot of people from your family went into the industry from the context of actually farming, and you are still involved, but in a different way. So how do you think that influences or factors into what you do within your role day to day?

Danielle Waterworth: Well, growing up in it, I saw the struggles, I saw the passion, I saw the pride. The ag industry is a very proud industry with a lot of good people in it. Very, very early on, I was very engaged with everything within our family's business, but I slowly started figuring out that I was more interested in the global concepts of agriculture, the business side, and really took that to another level when I went for my degree and found there were so many more opportunities to give back into agriculture that wasn't necessarily in a production ag environment. That shapes me on a daily basis. And I say that for sure because on a daily basis I'm engaging with my family as they're experiencing agriculture from everything for what's going on with the markets and the commodities, the industry to the equipment that they run. So I get that whole protection of making sure that our customers are first always as a first and foremost, do what's right for that customer. And I take that farm kid mentality with me in my day to day job.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Well, it's interesting when... And I'm sure this can be reflected in other industries as well, but just thinking about the scenario you're in, your customer is your family members. And so a lot of people talk about customer centricity, but that drives that concept home in a totally different way. So, that's really interesting. Now, part of the reason that your title was such a tongue tire in the beginning is because you do have a dual role. So can you just briefly describe for folks what the two sides of your responsibilities are within the organization?

Danielle Waterworth: Absolutely. So within North America, the role that I hold is from an agriculture perspective for everything I would say back office dealer and customer support. So from a day to day traditional model, we're talking warranty, technical support, service training, maintenance. Those are the places where we cover from a service, and then you combine it in on the parts side with dealer, parts support, you get that holistic picture of just taking care of the normal day to day run. Where it gets fun is combining that very traditional model of operating and that annual basis, what are you going to combine with the global role, which is more a strategy play that goes into services and maintenance development of where are we going to go with our tools in the future of the aftermarket for parts and services?

And so with that connected and non-connected digital tools, we're talking about the utilization of remote assist, we're talking about the selling of non-connected services and the tools that enable that from extended warranties, maintenance inspections of our machines, all the way into the connected services team, which looks at how do we enable the activities that need to occur within our tools? Now that we do have these digitally connected machines, how do we utilize that information within our asset libraries on our machines, within incident management for our dealers and customers, and in the control rooms in which we're starting to really heavily invest for a better look at what's going on with our machines?

Sarah Nicastro: So it's really interesting because you have a foot in both the present and the future, and to some degree a lot of people do in the sense of they're responsible for maintaining today's business while also thinking about what's changing and evolving and how an organization should innovate. But I think with some of the conversations we are having around how service is changing, there can be a tremendous distance between that present foot and the future foot. So for CNH Industrial on both sides of your role, you're intimately involved in the way the traditional business is executed today, and you're also looking at how things are evolving and how service may be consumed or delivered or what customers ultimately need from the company in the future. So can you tell us a little bit about what you're observing and the trajectory that the company is on in that continuum of everything from traditional to what the future might look like?

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah, I think we come from a model that was very iron based. Go sell the machine, go sell another machine. And I think that our industry is evolving to understand that the true way you're going to continue to keep selling those machines and retain those customers is really on the service that you provide. It's a big piece of what we call uptime, but we need to take a look at it of not just from the quality of the machine that you're purchasing, but you're really trying to provide them with packages or options as a customer base that can give them an assurance, especially we will lean on my ag presence again, but in the ag industry, you're dealing with weather, you're dealing with situations that things are going to come up from a time perspective.

And it's really important that when they're in the field harvesting that they have that assurance that their machine is going to perform, or that they're people behind them that are going to enable that to occur. So we look at not just selling them an asset anymore, but the whole captive finance model, base warranty, extended warranty. How can we make sure that we're looking at you and your dealerships from a maintenance and inspection perspective before you go into a planting and harvesting season, which are their heavy times of use? So it's looking at that in that holistic picture, and that really starts defining how you go to market versus your competitors.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And there's a lot of interesting elements here because on one hand you're talking about giving customers options and flexibility, and on the other hand, often customers want simplicity. We just need it to work when we need to use it sort of thing. So do you have a feel for where customers are at in terms of do they want more options and choice, or do they want more cohesiveness and simplicity in the overall offering?

Danielle Waterworth: I'm going to quote one of my favorite dealers who says, "We need to keep it simple, but we need to provide options." And so you start putting those two things together, it's like, okay, what does that mean? But I think what it is, it's that whole aspect of if they were going to design the perfect situation, what does it look like? Are they more comfortable providing their own set of service on their machines? If so, maybe they're just looking at, Hey, what can we do from a parts perspective? Then there's those other guys that are managing those larger fleets and they're like, I want somebody to provide that assurance that, you as a dealership can make sure that you're looking at my machines for me on a biannual basis. You want to lock it in.

And so we have to look at that perspective of it's up to the customer and what they're comfortable with and what they're looking for, but we have to enable those options when we're selling that machine. We have to provide them as an opportunity and explain to them what it is that they're buying. Where are you going to get the most value out of the different solutions that we provide?

Sarah Nicastro: And so you're saying explain more of that upfront.

Danielle Waterworth: Correct. I do think-.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think-.

Danielle Waterworth: ... front sell, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's part the, I don't want to say identity shift because that's not always the case, but you mentioned you're at a point where you're differentiating through service. So if we understand that as an organization, then we start to see the importance of having more of those conversations up front as part of the initial sale instead of as an afterthought of, okay guys, we sold them the equipment. Now somebody come in and tell them what we can do from an aftermarket perspective, or what happens if something breaks or if they want this assurance or that assurance and presenting it more as the overall value proposition instead of two separate value propositions

Danielle Waterworth: For sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Does that make sense?

Danielle Waterworth: We see it in the industries in which we buy stuff today, just in our consumer, you buy packages and then they're constantly reminding you of what it is that you actually purchased to get the most value out of the money that you're spending. And those are touch points as well. So it's very important from that, that the dealers keep that relationship with the customer. We work and we go to market through our dealer network. They keep that relationship that is the health of our industry and for us at CNH Industrial.

So we want them to have those touchpoints, those opportunities to engage with the customer. And that can come from those reminders of maintenance all the way to we're seeing something that's going on with your machine. We want to see if we can schedule some time to take a look at it just based on what we're seeing with the connected unit. So I think there's also a place with the used market too. As you're buying a machine, a trade in that you're taking from somebody else, there's a place in there from an assurance perspective of I want to make sure that this machine is being taken care of on a go forward basis. And giving them options is a good thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So options is a good thing, but do you foresee a point where you would just be selling and delivering uptime?

Danielle Waterworth: I think there are some things that are going to be what I have started calling innate. They're just assumed to be a part of the machine sell. I don't know if the market has necessarily defined where all of those things lie today. So we're going through some of that as an evolution of what is included with the machine versus what is an upsell. I would say in the next three, four years, you're going to see a lot of change in our industry in that regard.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, it's interesting. I was just having a conversation yesterday to prepare for a panel discussion I'm moderating at a field service event in Europe at the end of the month, and it's around remote service capabilities. So like you mentioned, remote assist and tools that can be leveraged to reduce onsite service necessity to allow more customer self-service to even when onsite service is required, prepare a bit ahead of time so that the first time fixed rate is higher, et cetera. And one of the biggest discussions we had as a group is how does that fit with business model? Because in a traditional service business model, then a lot of organizations are being asked the question, Okay, well if you're saving money because you're not coming here as much, then my service should be cheaper versus when they're delivering the outcome or the uptime or whatever that looks like for the industry, that's the value the customer is paying for. So the how isn't as important as the what? Do you know what I mean?

And so it's an interesting conversation to think about in terms of how the technological capabilities that are helping organizations like yours and others evolve how service is delivered. How do we invest in those in a way where the organization isn't ultimately penalized because the customer just sees it as a cost savings, not an additional capability that's tied to the value proposition. Does that make sense?

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah. I'm just trying to relate it in our industry. And I think that the thing that is a little different within agricultural network is there's a very strong tie between that customer base and that dealer. They start to see something, their immediate call is that engagement with the dealer. I think that there are places where from a protection perspective, we want to be able to provide some information to a customer in regards to their utilization. If it's going to lead to a potential breakage, forewarning is a good thing. I think that there are places where we need to enable quicker service, and we can do that by providing better linkages between the customer to the dealer in what they're experiencing. And that is a different type of service call. So you're going to see some changes probably in our industry that may occur because of that.

But the biggest thing of whether it's the customer, the dealer, the dealer to us in providing some kind of an assurance of what's going on with their machine is we need to be there to provide the quickest response we can to a customer because it is so important that when they're using that machine, they're using it for some revenue producing purpose.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Danielle Waterworth: So that ultimately has to drive a lot of the decisions that we make and find a way to weave in that whole customer dealer OEM model.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. I had a gentleman on the podcast a few weeks ago, I'm going to send you the link after, because I think you would find it really interesting. So they have introduced a product in the rice milling industry, and they are going to market with that exclusively as a service. So there's some uniqueness in what the machine itself does and how it's different from the existing technology in their space, but then also the go to market strategy is entirely different than the other organizations. And part of what he and I spoke about is how being the new entrant makes that a lot easier versus having any legacy as a company that you're always-.

Danielle Waterworth: Trying to figure out how it fits.

Sarah Nicastro: ... Having to balance what has been and what was versus what do we need going forward, and how do we get everyone's mindset on the same page? How do we change, even if it's revenue recognition or whatever that looks like, there's an existing system and process and infrastructure that has to change. And he's saying, I'm not saying it's easy, but I'm saying it's a lot easier than if we had to evolve here. We're just coming in and having the conversation. So it was an interesting perspective.

Okay. So I want to shift gears a bit, Danielle, because one of the things that, and I believe you tell me if this is part of your former role, I don't know if it's part of your current role, but we talked about the leasing and financing of the equipment. And I thought that was interesting because when we do talk with organizations that are considering or trying to go down a path of moving to that as a service, delivering uptime versus equipment scenario, that's one of the discussions that becomes interesting is moving from that CapEx to that OpEx model. And so in your experiences on the leasing side of the business, I'm just interested if you learned anything that could be good food for thought for folks who are thinking more about how to lease equipment to be able to roll that into a NASA service offering versus selling it outright?

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think one of the things that CNH Industrial does really well is cross-pollination. I mentioned, I'm an Ag finance major. I spent 15 and a half years with the captive finance company. And one of the last roles that I did have was in asset remarketing and leasing. And most definitely moving from there to the parts area to now to service. You take pieces of your prior roles and you're like, well, how does that fit in? And one of the biggest benefits that I could see from a leasing model is if you do start to lock in that whole maintenance plan, that extended warranty is yes, one good thing that we've always had. But if you start locking in maintenance and inspections, all of a sudden that asset, which is your company asset, that's going to come back to you at some point in time. Now you have a better understanding of what's going on with that asset, how it's performing. What's going to be the market value when it comes back, and I need to remarket it back through my dealer network?

It's just a way of making sure that you're retaining that value against that residual. And I think there's rewards to that too. If you are well maintaining a lease, reward culture needs to come into that. And it just provides that overall assurance, not just to the customer of what they're getting as far as when they're returning that lease, but then also to the captive finance company is what that machine looks like and what's going to be the potential value when they try to remarket it. Most definitely all of those things start aligning as far as how do they all work together.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. it's a really interesting piece of that overall conversation. Now you're also responsible for product support, and one of the things that you have put a big focus on is really maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of managing incidents. So can you talk a little bit about that initiative?

Danielle Waterworth: Well, we're working on it. I will say we're working on it. From a North America perspective, it was one of the biggest challenges that we had coming in this year of really improving on the pain points that people were experiencing and the product support process. And that being from when the incident comes in from the customer to the dealer, dealer puts in an incident to us, and then eventually we're going to get them that solution back of how they're going to fix that machine. When we go through that process this year, we went and we utilized our business systems mentality. We started looking at it from a lean perspective and did a whole value stream mapping of what's going on in that experience and found clusters and clusters of pain points, pain points that could be addressed, but they just needed to put some effort and focus to them.

Whether it's simple things more that are more in the area of knowledge and quality, how we onboard new employees to support in that product support nature, continuous education, how we educate with our dealer network of how to build a better dealer incident coming in so that I can give you a quicker response out. So whether it was knowledge or priority or prediction, just search-ability of our tools, we're starting to attack the different clusters of pain points that we're having. And we're doing that through a kaizen mentality where we're just continuing to invest back into our culture of being accountable and changing things for the better, but then also for our dealer network and providing them a better experience.

And I think that this is going to be a long process, but it's a fun process because you come out of a week with change, immediate change of how you're going to do something differently or documentation of policy manuals of how you're going to now behave. So it's just been a fun experience for us to go through this year, and I look forward to bringing it into other teams that I have within that North America market.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Now, it makes me think, Danielle, that's one really specific example of taking an opportunity to improve that experience and ultimately relationship with your dealers, which then ultimately improves the customer experience, because you make it easier for the dealer, the dealer then is making that customer resolution simpler. Knowing that you go to market through the dealer network, and that at the end of the day, those customers who know your brand know that through your dealers and those relationships. Are there any other thoughts you have for listeners on how to make that relationship the best and most productive it can be when a company is going to market ultimately through that intermediary party?

Danielle Waterworth: I think we're all going through that right now in that the biggest thing that we really quite frankly, have to be thinking of all of us is that next generation of technician. We provide that support of that service and training once they've hired that service technician in providing those standards that we, hey, you want to achieve level one, level two master from a perspective of fixing our machines, being that technical expert. But the first step, quite frankly, is finding those next generation of employees. But it's little less than two years ago, we started an initiative called Top Tech. And while we're not out actively finding these kids, we're still working with our dealer network, CNH Industrial has taken a focused effort to say, we're going to help support that initiative by championing the whole aspect of these are good paying jobs, these are jobs that you can take back into the regions in which you want to live in. If you want to stay in your hometown, there's a dealer next door.

And trying to find and make those connections, give our dealers the tools that they need to go and help recruit those individuals, make those connections to those local vocational technical programs that maybe we have a stronger relationship with to grow that next generation of CNH Industrial dealer technician. But then just trying to make those ties and linkages also with youth programs that are out in the United States and within Canada that have a higher correlation to kids that want to work in ag and construction. And so we've really put a focused effort into top tech this year and the last in building this program and continuing to work with our dealers on what's next, what else could help you.

Sarah Nicastro: So part of that is helping create better awareness of the jobs in the industry. And you do that through, I think you said you speak right at schools and whatnot about some of those opportunities. So part of it is that sort of thing. Can you give any insight on what the tactics are that have worked in helping them identify and then attract new talent?

Danielle Waterworth: The earlier that you can get involved, the better. So if you have those opportunities to engage in those high school programs, it's better. If you get in there and you provide them those day to day sit in the life experiences, I think it starts to change their ideas of what these jobs are. They are not dirty jobs. These are air condition, climate controlled service technician jobs for the most part anymore of where our industry is going. And there's a lot of flexibility in that to just try to find those opportunities in our network because they are in such demand. So the more you provide that insight into what that job looks like, the more they can start to see, okay, this is something that I could be interested in. What does it take to go in this direction?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. And I think your point about the earlier, the better. You also mentioned high schools themselves. You mentioned vo-tech, you mentioned community, just programs and extracurricular type things that are a fit. So also thinking about just really trying different avenues and see where you do get some interest or make some progress. But this is a really good area to consider in terms of a very specific lift for the dealers in an area of need, but ultimately something that also, again, impacts your customers because you can train and enable those technicians, but you need technicians to train and enable to provide the service.

Danielle Waterworth: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So that's a really, really good point. Now, Danielle, you mentioned to me when we spoke that you are very metrics and analytics focused, and that that plays a role in all that you do. Are there examples you can provide on how you apply this to your decision making and how you manage your teams to make sure that you are achieving the results that you want to achieve?

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes into this whole lean mentality that we're trying to take on. But because you don't just live that first week in that kaizen and then it stops, you have to continuously assess where your metrics are going, find the next level of issues that you need to go and address. And that goes to the whole root cause problem solving. So we utilize our metrics a lot. We're starting now heavily into technical support to look at cycle times first response, just trends that we have going on with certain product areas during different times of the year or within different regions. And this allows us to have fact-based decisions in regards to where we need to invest

So we can start to see trends that are coming in and it'll allow us to make better decisions of, well, we're getting a lot of, I would call them struggling incident types for this certain product types. So where are we sitting at from a service technician perspective of how many people have been going through the higher level courses? And I think that, that's just allowing us to make smarter decisions as an organization of where we're going to invest our time and our money. And really helps us also promote to the dealerships, here's where we're investing, here's the results that we're starting to see. Because you want them to be believers in what you're doing as well. They have to be, otherwise they just think, Danielle's gone through the whole year, what has she done? So I think it just helps provide that value back to everyone, your employees, your dealers, which are your partners, and then hopefully your customers start feeling it as well. You actually start turning the tide through metrics.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. And I think when you talked about the work you're doing around incident management, I like how you said you're looking for those clusters because that's how you're identifying that first opportunity for attack or resolution. What will give the most lift? Where are the areas that are surfacing the biggest need so that we can have the biggest impact by solving those? And I think using that data driven approach is the best way to make sure that you are doing that in a way that will really help.

Danielle Waterworth: It takes-.

Sarah Nicastro: So I'm curious... Yeah, that's a good point. It's probably why I'm not that way. I very much lead with emotions and it has its benefits too, but you have to balance it all out.

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm just personally curious about this. We didn't really talk about it, and I realize that's because this podcast obviously is more about service across a bunch of industries. It's not an agriculture or farming podcast, but as a farm kid, I am curious just what, going on within the world of agriculture, what is most interesting to you about trends in that space right now?

Danielle Waterworth: You can go on and on about the globalization and what's going on just within all of the countries and instability, but I think that for the most part, you're always going to have something like that, that you're going to be dealing with. You have globalization, you have mergers and acquisitions. Technology is starting to get rooted more and more and more. It's not just because I'm talking about connected services. We're talking about robots and machines, and the sustainability of agriculture. And so how do we.... Our methane tractors that we're producing now. We're trying to take what is best out of technology that's going on just in other industries and find ways of mixing it in to the ag and construction environment. And it's such a fast-paced activity, it's just exciting to just keep up with it, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? So I'd say that those are the biggest things that are going on right now that are just really driving a lot of change within agriculture.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, Now, I wanted to ask, we were talking about the connected service and the non-connected service and all of the things that are really a work in progress in terms of how does the modern value proposition work, what does that all look like, et cetera? And for an organization that is asset intensive and does have that need to protect your customer's ability to operate when they need to, which is their livelihood, et cetera. So much of your role is to really simplify a lot of complexity, a lot of complexity. And I think it's complexity that is almost multiplying by the minute when you think about digitalization and technology. And there's so much good to all of those things, but they do add a lot of layers of change and things to sort through, et cetera. So when you think about how best to simplify a complex asset intensive environment, what comes to mind in terms of how to navigate that?

Danielle Waterworth: What's the value? What's the value of the sell? At the end of the day, you can design the perfect widget and think that it's wonderful, and then if you haven't figure it out though, how it's actually going to be utilized and acquired into the market. That's the key point, that should drive everything that you do. How is this actually going to provide value back into your customer and dealer base? And if it's not, then you need to go back to the drawing board because it's probably not something that you need to spend your time in. It's not going to provide any additional value to them. It's probably not the right thing to be looking at.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think there's something to your analytical practices in terms of, it seems like part of the key has to be constant prioritization of what will provide the greatest outcome. So with the customer in mind, but knowing that at any given moment, there's probably dozens of projects you could take on and help your team lead that would have a positive impact on the company, on the dealers, on the customers. But then how do you prioritize those? Because you can't do it all at once.

Danielle Waterworth: You live in an agile environment. I can tell you that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah.

Danielle Waterworth: Within the two streams that I have, I have basically 10 different functional areas, and you can sit down at the beginning of the year and you can plan these are going to be the things that we're going to do this year, they're going to make change. But if you don't touch that until the end of the year again, you've already failed. So you have to continue to adjust and readjust and get feedback back from your customer and your dealer base, your internals of what are they seeing? How, with what is going on to what you were saying before in the industry, how is that going to impact what we said we were going to go out and do? And you have to adjust numerous times.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. Because you never know when there's going to be a different need or a new need or a reprioritize need that needs to shake up your plans. That makes sense.

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah. Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. I've enjoyed talking with you. Do you have any other thoughts or comments for the listeners?

Danielle Waterworth: No, not today. I have plenty. I love my job if you can't tell, so I could go on and on and on.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. It makes me happy to see people that are passionate about what they do and enjoy the ways that they're able to make an impact. So I'm happy that you have that in your day to day life, and I'm happy that you were able to come and share a bit with us. So thank you.

Danielle Waterworth: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. You all can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at the Future of FS. 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

IFS recently published its State of Service 2022 Global Report, which surveyed 400 CIOs, COOs, VPs, and Directors of Operations, Field Service, Digital Transformation, and Information Technology across Manufacturing, Service Provider, Telecommunications, and Utility Organizations in 24 countries. I had the opportunity last week to reflect on some of the State of Service 2022 report findings on a live webinar with WBR, but I also wanted to share with you here some of the points that stood out to me most.

The first point is how respondents describe the top competitive differentiators in service. Companies across industries have recognized that service has a powerful impact not only on customer satisfaction but also competitive differentiation. What did respondents feel contributed most to their competitive differentiation, though? Companies reported that technological superiority has become a deciding factor (29%), followed by CX (26%) and operational excellence (18%).

What’s perhaps most interesting here is that the last time this same question was asked, in 2018, technological superiority was ranked fourth – and it’s now first. We know that when well-embedded and adopted, today’s technologies help companies master both operational excellence and CX. It has an immense impact on both of those points, which is why I think its capabilities as a differentiator are ranked first in responses.

These areas of technology superiority, operational excellence and CX are all intersected – and it would be highly unlikely for a company to be strong in one area without being strong in the others. Companies are learning that technology-enabled service delivery is key to meeting today’s customer expectations, which include the operational excellence that leads to on-time arrivals, first-time fix, and knowledgeable frontline workers.

The Top 5 Issues Facing Service Organizations Today

So, what stands in the way of companies achieving competitive differentiation? According to survey respondents, here are the top five issues facing service organizations today:

46% struggle to meet customer SLAs
40% are struggling with a lack of skilled workers
37% struggle with change management
37% are dealing with outdated or insufficient service management technology
29% are grappling with how to create as-a-service offerings

How do you relate to this list? Maybe you feel some solidarity.

There are a number of factors to consider in solving each of these challenges, but since this is an IFS study let’s stay on the technology topic for the moment. No, technology can’t singlehandedly solve each of those challenges, but it certainly plays an important role. If you take, for example, IFS’s Planning & Scheduling Optimization solution, it directly impacts three of these five top challenges – by maximizing efficiency, it helps combat the skills gap by maximizing utilization of the existing workforce. With its self-learning and dynamic scheduling capabilities, it considers a wealth of criteria to ensure you meet customer SLAs by eliminating unnecessary travel, increasing first-time fix, and leveraging automation.

And for companies like Cubic Transportation Systems, tools like IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization are setting the stage for the creation of new service offerings. You can read here about how Cubic has successfully migrated to delivering outcomes-based service.

Upcoming Areas of Technology Investment

The challenges companies are facing are reinforced when looking at the top areas of focus when it comes to technology investments across respondents:

Remote Assistance Using Augmented/Virtual/Merged Reality
Wearables
Knowledge Management
Simulations
Scheduling Automation & Optimization

Personally, I’m really excited to explore more the potential that Remote Assistance/Augmented Reality brings when it comes to the challenge of recruiting talent. Not only can the technology have a significant impact on how companies train new employees and offer them expert support on the job to speed time to value, but I believe in the coming years we’ll see significant development in remote service as a first response, reducing the burden on the frontline and eliminating unnecessary on-site visits.

Roel Rentmeesters, VP of Digital Transformation at Munters, describes the potential of remote service well, “When you want to reduce downtime, you cannot permit yourself to send a technician who goes on site, has to travel for two hours, does a diagnosis, comes back, orders a part, goes for a second time to fix it. You don’t have that luxury anymore,” he says. “Remote Assistance can help reduce downtime, because that technician that did one visit during the day, using remote technology can maybe serve 20 customers that day.”

Top of Mind for 2023

So, based on where we are – where are we going? IFS asked survey respondents, ‘Over the next 12 months, which will be key areas of focus for your service business?’ and identified three clear top initiatives:

Sustainability
Updating Legacy Service Management Systems
Leveraging Emerging Technology

I think numbers two and three are quite self-explanatory based on what we’ve already discussed – and the need is likely exacerbated by economic turbulence and a recognition of the improvements in efficiency and productivity that can come from a technology investment.

In terms of sustainability, I am happy to see this was listed as number one. While there’s ample reason to put better emphasis on sustainability strictly for the sake of our environment, we’ve discussed on the podcast several other reasons companies need to be putting more thought into this area. There are regulatory pressures that are heightened already in some regions and will be ramping up in others, and there are also concerns around investment decisions – some investors are putting sustainability into their criteria. It’s also important to consider customer preferences and opinions – in many industries, customers are now demanding visibility into a company’s sustainability initiatives and choosing where to spend their money based – at least in part – on that insight. And finally, there does exist for some service organizations the ability to develop new offerings around sustainability to help your customers with their initiatives – creating a new potential revenue stream.

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