Live from Field Service Amelia Island 2019, Sarah talks with Sarah Wright of ResMed, Maria Pallotta of Canopy Lawn Care, and Dr. Marlene Kolodziej of Northwell Health about creating intentional diversity and what the future of field service holds for women.
By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service
I had the good fortune last week of interviewing Paul Joesbury, Commercial Operations Director at HomeServe, for an upcoming episode of the Future of Field Service podcast (his episode will air August 28th, and it’s a must listen!). The conversation produced a wealth of valuable points, and as we prepare the episode for your listening pleasure, I thought I’d start by sharing Paul’s thoughts on what it takes to get employees to adopt new technology.
Paul and I discussed the evolution that’s taking place with field technicians – the younger technicians joining the workforce are not only comfortable with technology but lost without it. “The new technicians coming on are digital native – they were born with a phone in hand,” says Paul. “For those technicians, if a process is outlined cleanly on their devices, it is second nature to them to follow along and use it correctly.” The older generations of technicians struggle, however. “Some of the challenges companies like ours face with technology adoption among older workers would surprise many. You may not think you need to teach someone how to swipe on a device, but in many cases, you do – that’s just the reality of it,” says Paul. In these cases, it is imperative to put a change management strategy in place in an effort to get these workers to truly embrace the tools you’re introducing. “You can’t just impose new technology onto your workforce – it doesn’t work. Imposition causes resistance, and that resistance will inhibit any of the progress or forward motion you’re looking to make by introducing that technology,” says Paul.
3 Keys to Change Management
In Paul’s experience, successful change management and fostering adoption of technology comes down to three factors: need, skill, and will. “By focusing on the need, skill, and will, you can create the buy-in you need among employees to achieve successful technology adoption,” says Paul. Start with the need. Is the new tool necessary? Does it provide value? If this sounds ridiculously obvious to you, that’s great – but the reality is that many organizations make investments and force new tools for reasons besides the fact that the workforce and the business actually needs them. Your strategy must be centered around the needs of your workforce in meeting the goals you’ve set forth for the business. Deploying tools that will provide real value and make their jobs easier gets you on the path to success. You also need to focus on communicating with your workforce on the “why” for the changes you’re making and the technologies you’re introducing. If they understand the root cause for change and have an opportunity to weigh in and feel heard, they will have an easier time stepping outside their comfort zones. Next comes skill. To Paul’s point earlier, you may need to start with training more basic than you’d assume. Pay attention to what employees’ concerns or questions are around and address them quickly and extensively. Think about the full extent of education and training you will need to provide to ensure that your employees will feel comfortable using the new tools you’re introducing. If you encounter hesitation or resistance, take this as your cue to begin again. I know it can be frustrating to spend time, money, and energy on training that seems basic, but making this investment up front will ultimately pay off. If you take the time to focus on conveying the need and developing the skill, you should be able to create the will among your employees to embrace the change. “Your goal is to create the desire within your workers to use the tools you’re introducing, to embrace the changes you’re making within the business,” says Paul. “You can’t be successful without their buy-in, so following these steps and working diligently to create it is really the key to any successful transformation.”
By Greg Lush
My day started in the normal manner — start my computer, go get a cup of coffee, come back to the Windows 3.1 boot screen, enter my credentials and make a lap around the office spreading my morning cheer. The final leg of my journey would be to connect to our local file server and begin my work. However, today was special, I have been asked to explore the Internet. Some of our competitors had been using the Internet for a few years but my organization was, let's say, conservative. Waiting for me was a nice U.S. Robotics modem, a phone line, connected to my computer exclusively. As the modem attempted to connect the Internet to my PC it seemed as if it was teasing me with its odd melody. The suspense was over when I finally connected and greeted with a single rectangle and a "search" button. Now, this was quite an accomplishment. I thought to myself; "can't wait to show everyone else, if I could just locate the file and folder structure, browsing the internet would be a cinch." Yet, the comfortable structure I was accustomed to for so many years was nowhere to be found. Could it be that this new Internet wanted me to just type what I was looking for? What happens if I don't really know what it is that I want? Suddenly my excitement captured earlier turned into anxiety. Is it possible this damn computer and Internet were going to make me feel inferior?
Ridiculous is the thought going through my brain as I typed the first paragraph. Not the story above, as that happened everyday across the world years ago. Instead that organizations still suffer with the challenge employees face between scrolling and searching. Somehow, and I have yet to understand the conditions which cause this phenomenon, when folks walk through their organization’s doors, they seem to mysteriously forget how to search. For me, when helping companies expand their digital enterprises, I will often group users into two buckets, each having their own approach regarding transformation, they are scrollers and searchers.
To succeed in recalling digital collateral in the enterprise you must get your associates comfortable with search. The transformation is a deliberate activity, well-planned and sequenced. In my recent experience, especially with cloud platforms, they can be overwhelming for the user and I like to start with:
Invest the time in search, it may seem unnecessary at first blush seeing as we all search for content, continuously. Yet, each minute spent with internal employees raising their comfort levels will pay off exponentially in adoption and efficiency.
Alastair Clifford-Jones, CEO of Leadent Solutions, joins Sarah to talk through his company’s Service Maturity Model and to give tips on how to get your organization where it needs to be to thrive.
By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service
I was on vacation last week sipping a Pina Colada by the pool (OK, wrangling toddlers is a more accurate description) when I read the news that Salesforce had acquired ClickSoftware. To me, this signals exciting times for any of us involved in the world that encompasses field service. A function that was once viewed as a cost-center, and often an afterthought, is getting its turn to be recognized as the wealth of opportunity it really is for any company.
I’m coming up on twelve years covering field service, and the evolution I’ve witnessed is something that I’ve personally found exciting for quite a long time (if you’d asked me if I’d find “field service” exciting before I happened into it, I’d have looked at you with a blank stare for sure – but I’ve grown to love it). I’ve witnessed a shift – slow at first and gaining speed – in how companies view and utilize field service. Last week’s acquisition, in my opinion, illustrates the fact that field service has arrived. No longer is it an afterthought or a necessary evil, but rather it has become a strategic arm of the business. A path to differentiation, a valuable way to delight and endear customers, an opportunity to grow revenue. Salesforce’s interest in ClickSoftware is validation of just how much potential exists in field service – not just for field service management providers, but for companies ready to embrace what field service can do for their businesses.
This excitement has been building for some time. At this year’s Field Service Palm Springs event, the buzz was different than ever before. Attendees were no longer skeptical of the need to invest to advance their service efforts, but ready to learn how to do just that. They were more excitedly sharing their strategies for becoming more strategic with field service and listening closely to hear what their peers are doing. The companies I’ve interviewed for the Future of Field Service podcast since we began in April are more passionate than ever before about where the industry is headed, the journey their organizations are on, and their personal roles in it all. I’m thrilled to be covering this space and to uncover along with you all the potential that unfolds in the next couple of years.
In light of last week’s news, and news yet to come, I’d urge you to work diligently to educate yourselves on the potential for your organization around field service as well as your various paths for reaching that potential. I’ve always been a staunch proponent of learning from your peers – I think hearing what people in similar positions in other service-based businesses are doing can provide greater value than any other form of content, which is why I’ve worked hard in my career to focus on providing exactly that. There are companies leading the charge in achieving the full potential that is field service – you can find a few examples here and here. Consuming content like this, attending events like Field Service and The Service Council Symposium, and looking for other ways to network one-on-one with your peers are some of the best ways to collect objective insights. As the hype around field service continues to build, which it will, the onus is on you to do your due diligence on the strategy, technology, and change management that will allow you to embrace the potential that exists.
By Laurence Cramp
A customer journey map is a visual or graphical interpretation of the overall story from an individual's perspective of their relationship with an organisation, service, product or brand, over time and across the channels they utilise. The story is told from the customer's perspective, but also emphasises important intersections between user expectations and business requirements.
No two journey maps are alike, and regardless of format they will allow you to consider interactions from your customers'points of view, instead of taking a business outwards focus. They can be used in both current state review and future state visioning to examine the present, highlight pain points and uncover the most significant opportunities for building a better experience for customers. The process of customer experience mapping is a joint activity - the process itself being just as important as the actual artefact. The discussions that experience mapping fosters and the consensus it builds are important building blocks to any future customer experience transformation action. There is no single way to map customer journeys nor is there any one right answer. In this blog we give you ten quick tips to improve your journey mapping sessions.
Tip One - Set clear objectives for the workshop
You need to make these clear for your customer journey mapping workshop (just like for any well run workshop!) Be sure to communicate (perhaps in advance) the focus for the session; your intended timings; the planned attendees and any success criteria for the workshop including the outputs intended. Make sure you have set clear expectations to manage any resistance that may occur in advance.
Tip Two - Set the context
Typically this will be some form of group orientation to the problem space, customer personas and to brief the group on prior discovery and customer research activity. This will help to get workshop attendees aligned to any prior work and ensure they are thinking in the right way for the workshop session.
Tip Three - Form the teams
Dividing participants into teams of four to six and ensure each has a balance of roles, seniority, customer experience and functions. Get the team working together as this will be crucial to your success.
Tip Four - Persona orientation
Focus attendees on exploring the dimensions of the persona (s) to be used as the lens for the customer journey, including any verbatims from real feedback. They need to be aware that this will be lens through which they will conduct the journey mapping.
Tip Five - Starting the journey
Encourage each team to go through the research notes and their understanding systematically and pull out the post-it-note points for each of the customer journey map areas following a well structured process.
Tip Six - Assemble the journey map
Use nominated people from each team to move the post-it notes to a large form template of the customer journey outline. Success here is all in the preparation!
Tip Seven - Consolidate
Depending on how you are structuring your outputs, work together as a large group to consolidate, challenge and iterate the emerging journey map, seeking relationships amongst the findings of each group. Keep a spirit of openness and constructive discussion rather than criticism.
Tip Eight - Finalise
By the end of the session, start to draw out insights and opportunities structured around an agreed (or draft) Journey Map for the nominated persona.
Tip Nine - Summarise
Towards the end of the workshop be sure to review achievements and highlight next steps and how the work will be progressed (whether by the same team or not).
Tip Ten - Sketch the map
Building the map itself will take time. Whether in or outside of the workshop be sure to walk it through with others and iterate and edit as you go. For longer sessions (ideally 1.5 days) the second half day can be used to develop and refine the sketched draft of the map itself. Map the experience from beginning to end and be as comprehensive as you can. Ideally one touchline will cover the entire experience but if this is too complex you can map a touchline for each key customer interaction. Try to think beyond the obvious and look before and after the immediate touch points with your organisation.
Get more help
We love customer experience and can help you to improve how your organisation delivers more customer-centric products, services, processes and technologies. We can help you run your next customer experience programme or we can help to give you the tools and techniques to do so yourself. Why not get in touch with us to find out more?
Joe Pine, Author of The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage and Cofounder of Strategic Horizons, talks with Sarah about how companies can differentiate service (the “what”) by thinking more strategically about delivering experiences (the “how”).
By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service
Field service organizations historically haven’t been known to be very agile, and the reality is that many likely still aren’t. That absolutely must change, though, and in short order. Gone are the days where set-in-stone processes, siloed strategy, and outdated technology can help you just “get by” and do what you’ve always done. Companies that refuse to evolve will simply cease to exist in today’s competitive landscape.
As service becomes viewed more strategically and recognized as a competitive differentiator by wise businesses, the call for agility arises. Becoming more agile may force many service businesses to step out of their comfort zones, but those that hope for a fruitful future are embracing the need to change and working diligently to adapt. Agility must become the lifeblood of the service organization in order for you to thrive in today’s fast-paced, increasingly competitive experience economy. While agility needs to become woven into all you do, there are three major categories for which you need to examine just how agile you are and adjust accordingly.
#1: Meeting Customer Demands
What your customers want from you and the type of interactions they value are evolving quickly and on an ongoing basis. To keep up, you must become more adept at collecting regular data on what those wants and needs look like to determine how you will deliver. Not only do you need to be proactively seeking this input, but you have to be ready and able to act on it and give your customers what they want. This is where agility becomes important. Let’s say your business is home security, and you’ve gathered significant data from your customers that they highly value the ability to schedule appointments online. If you’re asking for this feedback and they are providing it, but then it takes you 18 months to be able to deliver this experience – your customers will become frustrated. I realize you can’t deliver on every whim in an immediate fashion, but the points that are universally important need to be assessed and then executed on fairly expediently.
#2: Operational Readiness
The only way you can quickly and effectively execute on demands you feel from the market is if your business operations are aligned. You need to create a culture where evolving and optimizing processes is more fluid, rather than a once-a-decade exercise that causes all parties involved massive pain. To be able to make ongoing changes and tweaks to business process, you must be sure your entire company is working toward the same core objectives and that your view of service as a strategic arm of the business is shared by top leadership. You also have to manage change so that your employees become comfortable with a process of continual evolution and embrace their ability to provide key insights and opinions on what will help you be successful. To this end, recruiting, hiring, and retention are areas where most service organizations need to adopt more agile practices and work to make wholesale changes to long-standing existing processes to better align to today’s talent pool.
#3: Technology Evaluation & Use
The third core area that needs to become more agile is around technology evaluation and use. Historically most field service organizations have deployed technology using a waterfall approach, but with the changes in the industry as well as the changes in technology, that approach doesn’t make much sense anymore. Rather, you need to look to become more agile both in how you evaluate technologies as well as how you deploy them. Cycles that used to be five or ten years have shortened to mere months (and often are just continual). The need for agility with technology applies, too, to making changes once it is deployed. As you get feedback from users, it should be able to be incorporated quickly. You also need to be regularly assessing your use of the systems you’ve invested in to ensure you are deriving the full value from them and learning how to leverage new capabilities as they are introduced. Keep in mind as you evaluate your need to become more agile that agility isn’t simply speed. Being more agile doesn’t just mean racing along – it means being nimble, not overthinking decisions or ignoring the need to change, and realizing that it’s okay to try things and fail then use those lessons to improve and forge ahead to success.
By Greg Lush
The implementation of cloud platforms in recent years has become, well, a bit pedestrian. Now, the challenge seems to be in experimenting with different approaches to get folks to recognize the value. For many years we have been driving the use of applications. An application-based approach worked, the financial model for software manufacturers and the licensing clarity for businesses was effective. It all started with the box of software, floppies, CDs, and even DVDs. Nobody had any question which app did what — it was crystal clear that Word assembled sentences and Excel crunched numbers. This concept of applications extended into the workplace as well. Remember back when your company decided to deploy a new accounting system? Not a problem. Heck, for good measure, let's throw in an inventory and PO system. Still not a problem, until someone started to talk about integration, or heaven forbid the deployment of a one-size-fits-all Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Suddenly this idea of an abstraction layer between our comfortable applications created confusion and anxiety. When mobile devices started to hit the market and gain momentum, what did we see? You got it, a sea of applications. So many applications and so little value; however, the race to win the mobile consumer and business would be won by the software company with the broadest set of applications.
Much different than today, when one could argue that applications are simply a collection of micro-services bundled together — especially if you are leveraging cloud platforms. All these services stitched together, using the newest form of dynamic integration known as graphing. Set the book down for a minute, open your computer, launch Outlook and compose an email. Heck, send me an email with feedback to greglush@lastmileworkersolutions.com. Now, when you are composing your message, notice the rich text features (bold, italic, formatting, etc.), the ability to drop in a picture or render a small sketch. Yep, you guessed it, these are all micro-services found in Microsoft Word, split up into little functional components leveraged across the Microsoft suite of products. In this example, they surface in Outlook. You can see similar logic within many software manufacturers’ tools. One that comes to mind is the brilliant progress made by Adobe and their Creative Cloud, wow. This behavior is not exclusive to the software giants — you can see, at varying degrees of sophistication, these tools across most cloud providers products. When the graphing term was introduced a couple of years ago, I thought, now that is a silly name. Yet, much like the seemingly chaotic genius of cloud platforms, it makes perfect sense when you consider that literally every feature of any given application may be graphed to one another. Brilliant! Enough of the quasi-technical background, are you ready to change the way that you think about computing? If your brain just jumped to thoughts of which email client to use, then we are not on the same page. Come on, man, think past email and file storage in the cloud. If that is your only destination, then I only have one thing to say: shame, shame. Talk about a great sales job… "Mr./Mrs. Customer, let me move you into the future, we will move your email and files into the cloud. You may proclaim to your clients how forward-thinking you are, phooey." Before I jump off my soapbox let me get this straight, you moved from a networked solution, to a cloud network riddled with variables and latency, and decided to keep business as usual? Have I offended you just a tad? Great, now we are ready to start discussing the solution to this comfortable yet totally absurd stalling point of email and files to the cloud. As mentioned, we MUST change the way that we think about computing, and specifically a transition from apps to outcomes is paramount. Focusing Not Only On Outcomes, But Micro-Outcomes It is a rare event when an organization contemplates an investment and does not discuss the desired outcomes, I get it. Yet, what if you turned the conversation around and started with "what" you are trying to achieve? Staying with the modern approaches from above, take the outcomes to micro-outcomes, small changes within the business which can collectively have significant impact. While this makes sense to many, it is much easier said than done. Context seems to be the biggest challenge when asking the question, how are things going? Subconsciously humans will adjust their responses in conversation to align with common points of understanding between all parties. Thus, when a technologist initiates a business conversation, folks often respond in terms of applications or software, and this will simply not work. Instead, you must encourage discussion surrounding "why" things are happening, good and bad, inside of the business. In my experience, this is a tough approach as our memory recalls only the latest details. When things are bumpy, a discussion about extracting the value of a cloud platform will be deferred. All is working well, our immediate memory says, "we are good" and change is also re-prioritized. The key is to extend past the recent memories to value-packed areas within the business, untapped veins of gold, mined easily with a deliberate use of modern digital tools. In order to transform an organization, where we change institutional habits, a new set of tools must be used. My recent experience suggests that starting with relevant "best practices," or what some refer to as accelerators offer the most comfort. The best practices may be as simple as; sign off approval, or modern meetings. Each best practice, which I refer to as a transformation element, align to high level business groupings; business performance, sales, workforce, margin, and industrial IoT. Certainly, your business categories would be focused on your business and the transformation elements would capture your micro-outcomes. Over time I learned that the number of elements could be a bit overwhelming and do not show expected outcomes before and after the transformation. Thus, a level above the elements was created, I lovingly refer to as transformation triggers (suggesting action). Triggers are based on business conditions such as control field spending, project delivery, sales not selling value, etc. Transformation elements are bundled within triggers helping folks see the magnitude of effort required to alter an existing business condition or challenge. Depending upon the organization, they will be more comfortable starting with triggers or elements, either works. Your goal is to have a conversation which extends past our short-term memory. The trick is to have a different discussion, focused on changing the way that we compute. Driving outcomes, and more specifically micro-outcomes, is the only path to finding hidden profits and undiscovered efficiencies. Remember, everyone can provide what and how, those ready to transform will always start with "why.”
Rudy Goedhart, BI Director at Spencer Technologies, gives some tactical advice for how to make use of your data in a way that will not only improve operational efficiencies but also delight your customers.