sarah.nicastro@ifs.com, Author at Future of Field Service

As service organizations adopt more remote technology, and our world is increasingly connected, cybersecurity has become a bigger deal for this industry. Back in May, I spoke to Charlie Hales at Waterstons at length about security.

I was reminded again about how the importance of cybersecurity is growing for service when I saw the most recent Circle of Trust report from security firm Utimaco. It is based on an international consumer survey, and highlights just how connected everyone is, and how worried they are about their data as a result.

According to the findings, most respondents are worried about data security (more than 80%) and a little more than a third have been the victim of data loss, identity theft or digital fraud. At the same time, more than 66% of respondents own a mobile device and 38% report using smart devices in their homes.

In fact, despite being worried about security, people are pretty enthusiastic about connected devices, particularly smart TVs, virtual assistants, energy saving devices (like smart thermostats), and security systems. Only 26% of respondents felt knowledgeable enough to make informed decisions about digital security.

These insights have implications for field service on a number of levels. First, we know customers are concerned about data security, while they are also being asked to provide their information to more providers on a larger number of devices. This goes beyond just giving your credit card number to Amazon or Target; all sorts of sites and devices are interacting with personal and financial data all the time.

In addition, more people are engaging with smart devices – everything from connected cars and appliances to home security systems and smart utility meters. These non-computer devices are connected to home and business networks in rapidly increasing numbers.

Field service has been at the forefront of taking advantage of what is often called IoT, with machines interacting with operators, other machines, and service technicians over the internet. This connectivity is at the heart of remote service initiatives and puts field service right in the middle of the growing cybersecurity threat.

Some Customers Balk at Network Access

One of the big obstacles in remote service has been connectivity – customers are sometimes hesitant to allow outside parties or vendors access to equipment on their networks, both to protect trade secrets and to ensure internal security. The Utimaco report backs up some of these objections: When asked if they have ever been a victim of data loss, identity theft or hacks related to a smart home device, 41% of US respondents said yes.

For businesses and customers already grappling with their own highly exposed networks, granting access to service providers can seem like inviting catastrophe.

But, there is a safe way forward for field service providers and their customers – and service organizations not only need to take appropriate actions but also become adept at quelling the concerns of their customers.

First, field service providers must make sure their own house is in order by implementing up to date security technology, working with their software vendors to make sure client data is safe, and maybe hiring an outside provider (since in-house cybersecurity talent is hard to come by) to audit their security infrastructure, make recommendations, and deploy better solutions.

If you want to be able to remotely monitor and connect to equipment operating in a customer facility or home, that work on the back end will help prove you are trustworthy enough to have that access. In the case of commercial clients, you may very well have to provide significant documentation around your own security capabilities.

Second, make sure the connected equipment is also sufficiently secured. In the past, we mostly had to worry about computers and mobile devices having onboard security. In the IoT world, connected vending machines, industrial equipment, and home appliances represent potential security threats – not because they hold valuable data (although in some cases, they might), but because they can be leveraged as launching pads for attacks on other organizations. Or they can provide a gateway into an otherwise secure network.

We have already seen some IoT and smart building-based attacks. Back in 2016, the Mirai botnet launched a massive denial of service attack using IoT devices. In Germany in 2021, a building automation engineering firm was hacked and lost control of its building automation system devices. A similar attack in Finland knocked out the heat for two housing blocks in the dead of winter.

Those types of incidents are a good reminder that service organizations need to take these threats seriously and implement the processes and tools that are readily available to safeguard their remote solutions and, ultimately, their customers.

Do you have any experience with cybersecurity issues, or found strong solutions to secure remote service platforms? Reach out and let me know what your experience was like.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour in Paris on May 24th, Sarah talks with Emmanuelle Duchesne, Customer Service Director and Stéphane Dabas, IT Director, both of Culligan, about how they work to create a business and IT partnership that delivers superior customer and employee experiences.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome, welcome. Thanks for being here. Oh, goodness. Okay. Hello.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Hello.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. So we are going to have a conversation about how do we create a business and IT partnership that will deliver superior customer and employee experiences. So that's a tall task to live up to. Yes. All right. So why don't you both introduce yourselves before we get started.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Okay. So good afternoon. I'm Emmanuelle. I work as a Customer Experience Director at Culligan. I'm also in charge of all transformation projects that relate to service. I joined Culligan 13 years ago. I have a financial background as internal controller, internal auditor, financial controller. Then I moved to projects and I was also service director at Culligan so I was managing technicians and back office people. So I have a operational field role and now I'm back into project and into customer experience and that's a subject I really like. Talking about, a little bit about Culligan. So Culligan is a U.S. company that was founded in 1936 so we have a global presence across the globe, 200 countries.

Sarah Nicastro: I didn't realize it was 1936.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah. So what we do, we manufacture, we sell, we install, and we service water treatment equipment. We have B2C activity. We have in France, 200,000 customers in B2C and B2B 80,000. So we have an excellent NP score, 75%. So Mary set up the goal for us now at 80 so we are super jealous, but so we're not so good, but we were proud but we have seen room to...

Sarah Nicastro: You felt good before you got here.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Definitely.

Sarah Nicastro: That's not the goal.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: And also our business model, we have a lot of service contracts. So each time we sell 10 pieces of equipment, we sell nine contracts so we have recurring revenue, that's part of our business model and we set up this 20 years ago. So it's a mature activity. And how do we achieve 75%? It's because of good products, good service, dedicated team, technicians, and back office people. Good process and good tools that Stephane and his team are helping to implement. So Stephane.

Stephane Dabas: Thank you for the nice words, Emmanuelle. So I'm Stephane, I'm the IT director in France in Switzerland for the last 11 years.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah, I arrived before you.

Stephane Dabas: And before that, I was working as a project manager at Accenture for five years and then 10 years at PPG, which is a leading paint manufacturer. It's a U.S. company. You know that.

Sarah Nicastro: Pittsburgh Plate and Glass, right?

Stephane Dabas: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: It's near me.

Stephane Dabas: Yeah. Okay. They don't do glass anymore.

Sarah Nicastro: I know.

Stephane Dabas: It's paint now.

Sarah Nicastro: Paint, yes.

Stephane Dabas: And in that company, by the way, I was for three years responsible for the customer care team. There was no field service activities, but it was customer care. Having said that, so in France we have a team of 15 people, half of them are dedicated to a customer relationship. Customer is Emmanuelle and all the people. It's really key, in fact to have that dedicated people to discuss with the business because as we were saying, in fact, what is critical and most difficult I would say is not the technology, it's being able to listen and from this listening then to create things together. That's one of the key things.

What I wanted to add on Culligan, in fact five to six years ago we had a new owner who decide that there was a pretty good potential with Culligan but we were not big enough. So basically, gave us some money to buy and what we can say today, we are 10 times bigger than what we used to be six years ago. So lot of acquisition, lot of acquisition. And that's already apart from the topic and how we're going to discuss about projects and so on. We, as a company, build all the competencies to acquire, well first assess, see what is available on the market assess and so on. And as IT support we give the assessment of the business and then integrate. Because that requires quite a lot of work, and as an example, I think last year we did...

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Five.

Stephane Dabas: Five acquisitions in France. So it is quite-

Sarah Nicastro: It's a lot of work.

Stephane Dabas: It's quite a lot of work, but it's very interesting. I mean it's better to be in a company that acquire and grow rather than layoff and sell factories.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, okay. So I mentioned I've been in this space for about 15 years and so when I started interviewing people, I would say, generally speaking, the technology decisions were all made or mostly all made by IT. Things were a lot more stagnant than they are now. So we have a need, we evaluate systems, we put a system in place, we'll sit there for the next five, 10 plus years and we'll move on to the next thing. Obviously, that has changed a lot and I would say future field service tends to attract more of a business title or role just because it's my fault. I mean not my fault, but it's probably just because of what I naturally tend to talk about. But I do think that how much that relationship has evolved, I thought it would be really interesting to have a conversation about what that looks like and what it means. So you've both been with the business for-

Emmanuelle Duchesne: We are dinosaurs.

Sarah Nicastro: No, you are not. But tell me I in your own words, how has the relationship between the business and IT evolved in the time that you've been with the company?

Stephane Dabas: I would start even a bit before. If I just shortly, my perception is the following. In the old time, so before the year 2000, basically, we were living in a world that was pretty close. So the technology of connecting systems was not existing basically. So we're in a world that in fact IT was about implementing servers, computers, and system, but it was closed system. So it was better to have a big system than trying to do most of it and run most of the business without problem. And that time indeed was pretty rigid and you were relying very much on the IT if you wanted to improve something. Then, from year 2000, let's say we start to have open systems. So the technology was here say, well instead of having a single system, that was all, I start to build some best of breeds application that could connect to each other and then there was a tendency to look at this best of breed system, say, "Well this does better than my ERP, so I want that one." But that's when the shadow IT started.

So some editors of that brilliant system start to go to the business leader say, "Hey, I can do that for you." "Oh, I love that." "Yeah, but I need to refer to IT." "No, no, you don't need to refer to IT."

Emmanuelle Duchesne: No, don't. Otherwise, nothing will happen.

Stephane Dabas: Exactly, exactly. Otherwise, nothing would happen.

Sarah Nicastro: No, that was definitely-

Stephane Dabas: Which was true at that time, which was true.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Stephane Dabas: So many, I mean shadow IT started and actually was picking just because actually there was brilliant solution that was doing a brilliant job, but there was no connection with the other system. And that's later on when the IT was requested to start connecting the system, say, "Hey, what's going on? What have you done with that?" And it took some time for the IT to relay that they were not quick enough at implementing. They were not, actually-

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Understanding the business need.

Stephane Dabas: The business indeed. Otherwise, would've not been here. And they didn't have the understanding of the technology that enables to connect the systems. So it took quite some time before say, "Okay, having a best of breed system that does that without connection is good, but it does not do all." So we need now to connect and that's when the business and IT started to discuss again. Is a better relationship. I say, "Okay, now we'd better talk to each other and start working."

Sarah Nicastro: It was a little tense at first though.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: No, no, between us it was not tense.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. What's your take?

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Actually, Stephane and myself, we came in, came on board because of the issues between IT and business because I started at Culligan and Culligan France were in the middle of a transformation project that was, yeah, 12 years ago. And nothing was working because what has been designed, it was delivered to the team. The team was only IT, no business people, and when the business people starting using the tool say, "Hey, how can I do that?" "Oh, it hasn't been planned." So it was total disaster. Fortunately, it was implemented just at a pilot region, but it was total disaster. And then I was not working for France and the CEO came, I don't know, he came to me and said, "Oh you want to manage the project?" And since I like challenges, "Oh yeah, sure." So I took over and I think you came in one year after, but in the story they fired the previous CIO.

Sarah Nicastro: And you're both still here so that says so about how you turned it around.

Stephane Dabas: It's a long story.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So all right. So we talked about what changed that made the partnership important.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah. Can I say something?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah. In recent years we saw that IT started using the same customer care processes like surveys, like ticket system. They felt pressure to deliver. Before, you could send a request, and after a month, "Really, so did you see my request?" "I don't have time." Now they've understood that it's a partner relationship. They have internal customers that serve end customers and end customers they pay our salary so now it's completely different.

Stephane Dabas: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So there's more of an aligned objective right?

Stephane Dabas: Yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Everything is oriented toward the sort of customer centricity. It allows more common goal. Right?

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah.

Stephane Dabas: And I wanted to add one important thing to me, which is in fact the old time, let's say very old time, the innovation, we expected the innovation to come from IT, but it was too slow, too far, not strong enough and so on. Today I prefer to have Emmanuelle looking at what is available on the market, what technology is available and that makes sense for the business. That makes sense. Prefer to do that and comes back to us, say, "Well I've seen that and I've seen that." Then we start fighting, say, "You're crazy, you can't do all the same time," but it's good discussion. So really the innovation, what is available in technology is not an IT matter, it's really a business matter and we are working together. So everything related to the business it's...

Emmanuelle Duchesne: And in my opinion, two things. Today, that's just my opinion. Companies, they have pressure on cash and investment where they want to put the money. They cannot wait forever for years like before, unless they're very big groups and they can pay consultants, they can pay a lot of money to...

Sarah Nicastro: No, no, no. You were saying they don't want to invest if things are going well, but you can't not, right? Yeah, sorry.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah. So in my opinion, most companies, they cannot enter two years, three years project without seeing a single dollar before three years. They need to have quick wins. And in my opinion, it's not because it's simple, because it's not expensive that it's not going to work and deliver value. And what we've seen, we have some examples that sometime we're able to very quickly implement things and deliver a lot of value for customers and for employees.

Stephane Dabas: That's correct. That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So we've talked about the evolution and why it happened. Can we talk a little bit about how do you create a productive collaborative relationship? Okay. Because I'm sure when the need first arose to collaborate more, there was some tension, some friction, but we have to work well together. How do you make sure that the business and the IT teams are communicating effectively, prioritizing the right things, making decisions together? Just talk a little bit about what that successful partnership looks like to you.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Just to give you an example, at Culligan each year we have the internal CX months. So the teams from the headquarters, they go on the field and they work with the teams. So that's very good opportunity.

Sarah Nicastro: So every function from headquarters goes into the field with technicians.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: So they go with technicians, they go with back office people and they actually see the real work.

Sarah Nicastro: I like that. Yeah.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: So that's a way to really understand what's going on, what are the challenges and sometimes they realize, "I didn't know you had to enter two times the same data." Say, "Oh, maybe I have an idea." And I love that because that really delivers value. And then the people from the field, they will worship you for that. It's just simple things but then you make their day and their life and their months because it's a game changer for them. And I think it's something we need to even foster more to encourage more to build trust and yeah.

Stephane Dabas: Exactly, and to me, trust is a key word. Building trust is not something you decide. It takes time and you need to make afford to build trust. But once you build trust, you can fight. Actually we are fighting, we don't have easy conversation all the time, but we know each other enough that when we say something, it's not against Emmanuelle or against myself. I know that. It's from the business.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: For the business because we're so passionate.

Stephane Dabas: We are just sharing ideas and opinions. It's normal to disagree. It's positive conflicts and you can have this good discussion only when the trust is here.

Sarah Nicastro: You have to trust each other, but how do you work through those positive conflicts?

Stephane Dabas: Well, first building trust. So building trust again, how do you build that trust? And our President, Florent Carbonneau is a big fan of that. He has spent a lot of time with all these executive committee to build trust. He took us in some exercise and some committee. It was really two hours spending only for the purpose was to build trust, know each other, and capitalize on that. So that's why I'm saying the real exercise you have to do that and you should do that, of course, at the executive team level, but in all teams and together with the business, that's really critical. When do we have conflicts? Well...

Emmanuelle Duchesne: I can't remember the last one.

Stephane Dabas: I do.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Okay.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that.

Stephane Dabas: I do. No, it was, yeah, it was a good one. I will tell you later.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Oh, no.

Sarah Nicastro: I'll tell you later.

Stephane Dabas: Maybe.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah, I think we had a conflict maybe two years ago because I wanted to implement a tool that now has been implemented and is a real game changer for the teams. And Stephane was saying, "No, it's not in the roadmap. The AMA won't like it." And then today you are the best advocate of it.

Stephane Dabas: Hey, no, no, no agree. But again, it was more a matter of resource. Did we have the resource to make it? And it was at that time not, we didn't have the resource.

Sarah Nicastro: So I'm hearing that Emmanuelle is tenacious.

Stephane Dabas: Yeah, you can say that.

Sarah Nicastro: It's such a good trait. I'll tell you a quick side story. So when years and years ago when my husband and I were first married, I asked him a very foolish question. We were in the car and just causing trouble. I said, "Hey babe, what one word would you use to describe me?" So why would I say, I mean you know that's just going to start an argument. I don't know what I was thinking. I don't know what I expected, loving, whatever. And he said, "Tenacious." And I'm like, "Tenacious?" He is like, "No, that's a good thing."

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Stubborn.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Yeah. No, it is a good thing. Okay, so...

Stephane Dabas: I just wanted to add one thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, please do.

Stephane Dabas: Come back on one thing. So you need to build trust, but you also need to find the right people in your team to be able to work together and in both teams. So I'll take you through an example. So we have just started transformation, the new transformation project with Emmanuelle. We're working on that. It's very nice one. Very nice one. Everybody loves it. We had to choose who going to participate in the project, who will be the key players, and especially the business process owners. So we have spent quite some time discussing the people this BPO function, what will be the function, what is the expectation from that role and who will be there and spent really a lot of time.

And I remember the word of our CIO say, "Be careful and be sure to take the right decision. Have the right person. If it doesn't hurt the organization to have this person moving to that position, then he's not the right guy. You are investing when you're doing such a project, you are investing on the long term. Make sure you are making the right decision and the right person on that."

Sarah Nicastro: That's a wise statement because a lot of times, again, going back to, I know we're not talking about disruptive innovation, but just change in general, that tendency not to disrupt the status quo can be so strong that they would say, "Don't take the best person. We need them to keep doing this thing."

Stephane Dabas: Exactly, exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think that's really wise.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: But we took the best person.

Stephane Dabas: No, no, sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So choose the right people.

Stephane Dabas: Yep.

Sarah Nicastro: Trust.

Stephane Dabas: Trust. They need trust.

Sarah Nicastro: And what else?

Stephane Dabas: So, of course, when should the person, they need to be very open. They need to be able to listen, understand, ask questions as you were saying. And you have also to organize this relationship. So it relates to the governance and who is leading what and have a clear view of what is expected from the other party. Of course, it makes sense on what I'm saying, but it is very important also to spend time at the very beginning on clear description of what is expected and the governance model and now governance model, our project, our business driven project, basically, with business case.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: The foresee you were mentioning. Does it serve the customer, does it serve the employee, and does it serve the company performance? We're still missing the carbon footprint.

Stephane Dabas: Yeah. Yes.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Which needs to be more. It's starting. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good. So you mentioned how rapidly you've been acquiring organizations. So that makes me think of a few things, but I mean one is as those folks come in, you're trying to, I assume, bring them onto a standard and get them onto a cohesive system. I'm also thinking about change management, which isn't necessarily a topic we have to get into, but I'm just thinking the pace at which you're bringing new people into the business that you have to handhold into here's what the new reality looks like, right? But from an IT perspective, how does that work with the companies that you're acquiring? How do you manage bringing those people in and getting up to speed?

Stephane Dabas: Basically, depends on the size of business you are acquiring and how far it is from your existing operations. So the latest acquisition we made or the one we made last year, the business model which was pretty different and we keep them on a separate system. Basically, in fact, we roll out the financial system just to be on the same system. But for the operation, they are still running on their system because the business model is pretty different. We are quite company business model was very similar, just talking. It's a data migration basically. You take from their system, integrate them, you run, you have a single system operation and then managing a consistent way for the business is perfect. And sometimes you are making larger acquisition. The merger we did with the Waterlogic, which takes more time because of the size. And here it was a good opportunity for us to review, in fact, our own basically our own strategy.

What I'm saying that, in fact, there was two coincidence. Because of this acquisition, we have many different application across the globe with so many different systems and can become quite a nightmare. So that's fine. So we're at the stage from Culligan side at the stage say, "We need to rationalize that, we need to adopt a standout and have a quick way to roll out that system to the different acquisition." So that was one. And from the other companies, so Water Logic, basically they were about at the same stage. So, they had landscape that was so-so, and they were building an ERP, they were a bit in advance compared to Culligan. A bit in advance in terms of holding out but they were building a sort of core system. I don't say the word core system. And when we opened the book, we realized that, basically, we made the same system choice.

It was surprising, so we had a trial with SAP, it was a total disaster. We decided, we looked at all the things, we tried a bit of Microsoft, was not successful, and we start at Culligan roadmap with IFS and the same thing happened at Waterlogic. So, when we open, even though IFS is not the widest system used in the company, we both made the same choice and the same for the ERP, and the same apply with all the lead to contract system. So we both said that Salesforce is what we wanted to have or when I say we, of course it is a business.

So we realized that we were pretty close. So it was obvious, I mean in term of IT strategy, it was pretty obvious that we will go to the separate, these two main systems. The only thing that is important to keep in mind, also from home, the DNA of Culligan, we want to stay pretty local. So I wouldn't talk about standardization to our CEO for instance, he doesn't like the word standardization.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Stephane Dabas: And I was in the U.S. three weeks ago. He came to the meeting room where I was standing all the IT guys and he had the 30-minute speech.

Sarah Nicastro: No one say standardization.

Stephane Dabas: Say no standardization. For IT guys, "Oh, what's going on?" But basically, his point is the following. What makes the difference is the point of impact. So where is your point of impact with your customers and with your employees? It is locally. It is locally on the field, is at the technical tech level, and who's better than the French management, who's best to decide what is good for your French business? Because in fact, as you understand for Emmanuelle, we have a pretty say local market. We are not paying on the global market. It's pretty local market so keep it simple.

So that's why I don't like the word core system. It's not because you are choosing one single system that you download to have to implement at control level specific process. That's my point. But still, it's quite a challenge. For IT, it's quite a challenge but we manage that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I could get into a whole another conversation because I'm curious, I get the point about letting the local operations stay true to what point of impact they have with customers, with the workforce. Obviously though, there has to be some shared systems, resources, et cetera, right? So I'm sure that's interesting to sort out. So other than the project that's in place to put what we don't like to call a core system in place, what are some of the other biggest areas of focus for Culligan as a business?

Emmanuelle Duchesne: So in our strategy, we are and we want to continue and to grow as a customer-centric company. So that's me, that's my big challenge. It's on my roadmap. So I'm in the transformation project, but I would like really to bring a real customer culture mindset because sometimes you do well customer washing say, but actually in your process, in the people you recruit, you onboard, are you really focusing on customer? So that's really something that is important. And so it's important for customer satisfaction, for customer retention. I don't think we have that today, but for us, it's very important because it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing customer. And if an existing customer is satisfied, it means referral. It means more value, lifetime value so it's very important for us so we're working on that and we are investing in processes and also with AI.

So for me, I'm looking at everything that AI can bring us in terms of data analysis. That's also how do we make good use ethical as well, use of our data, how the business can use it to generate revenue, to retain customers, and of course, employee retention. Because if you have good tools, you have happy employees and you have happy customers.

Stephane Dabas: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Stephane Dabas: So other areas particularly, so where we stand at Culligan, so we believe that in terms of customer portal, so we could go a bit further. So we also already provide the customers’ ability to book their own appointments with the texts. But basically, we almost only do that, which is good. And we want to go a bit further in terms of, so offering, in fact what is key, get your customer engaged with our company is probably what you also at that deal. You want to have your customer engaged so the more you offer to him to self-serve, the more he's engaged with your company and the more he will stay.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: That's also something we want to be better at self-care knowledge database to let the customer manage what I call level zero, level one request and what goes to customer service are more difficult requests. And also the people in customer care, they really need to have the right mindset, which is in place in 95% of the case. But I always like to say you need service. Customer care is not a cost center, it's a revenue generating center. And just keep this in mind and if a customer is unhappy and comes to you, that's an opportunity because you were talking about neuroscience this morning and I read something about that and I thought that was very interesting. When the customer is coming to you with a claim, it's because he has trust that you will solve his problem. So he's scared, he needs to be listened, he needs to have comfort, he needs to get an answer and a solution.

And whatever the relationship you had with him during 20 years, you know, you deliver the service. He's paying for its normal. But the day he comes with a problem, if you are able, he has a negative emotion and if you are able to transform in the positive experience, he will remember on this day, he'll say, "Culligan they are great. I had a problem, they solve it in five minutes, I'm happy." And he talk about that and that's something he will remember in his brain.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. It's an opportunity to create trust and closer relationships. I was also thinking another interesting aspect of how I guess the relationship between business and IT, but also just the landscape overall has changed is this idea of, so you're working on this big transformation project right now with putting the core system in place, but you're already thinking, and then next we want to work on our customer portal and then we also want to work on our knowledge base, et cetera. So I think that's this other big shift is that probably even when you started at Culligan, it was a lot more. There was a big project you worked on that it was done. Now it's a lot of continual improvement, refinement. Looking at how do you get more value out of the technologies you have in place. What do you add on top of that to create more value for your employees or your customers? So it's a lot more of a agile environment.

Stephane Dabas: Yeah, absolutely. There are two things in what you're saying. So first is every time there's new an idea, so we try to identify what is the ROI, what is the value basically, and that has changed from the past. So value creation is really key for any kind of request, change request on a regular basis. Every time say what is the value of that? How much? And it doesn't mean that will not make it, but we have a monthly review of all the requests, basically, depending on the service. And basically, the business is telling us you should start with that, that, that, that, that. So we rank them, of course, and what does the business, the thing that brings more value that will be on the top of the list. Makes sense.

So really working very hard on what is the value creation behind the request. So that's one second, as you were saying, methodology of running the project. So the agile methodology is being used now completely. Yeah, it is adopted. That's what we have adopted as methodology for our project and it has changed a lot for us. So we used to have this project, this cycle where takes long time, month to develop, and there is this tunnel where you see nothing. You have expressed your needs and you are waiting at what point of time say, "Oh here it comes, but it doesn't match what I've said." We all know that. So that has changed a lot and that was very good.

Sarah Nicastro: So when you both think about what does the next five years look like? So we've talked about the evolution of the relationship and what makes it successful today. What do you think the future holds?

Emmanuelle Duchesne: I don't think in five years range. For me, now, we’ve all seen the AI ChatGPT, how fast. So I think if we don't go into these things quickly, we will quickly be outdated.

Sarah Nicastro: Fall behind.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: It's enough to keep pace, not think about what's coming next, is what you mean. It's hard enough to keep up. You're not worried about five years from now.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: Yeah, because who can say? I think if we meet in five years what we said today, maybe in two years it would've been totally different.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Stephane Dabas: And because Emmanuelle is saying that she has a new idea, it's a brilliant idea. There's business case there behind it, and then it needs to be done tomorrow.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: I have too many ideas. Yeah.

Stephane Dabas: We have to adapt.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: It's always bring value.

Stephane Dabas: No, no, I agree. Agree.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: I have a strong business case. Huh? The best in the company. No, I'm just kidding.

Stephane Dabas: No, no. But what do you mean in terms of five years’ time. So what we have to improve in the five years’ time or what we need to improve anyway, first is to adopt all the tools that enables you to quickly integrate solutions. We're saying you have best of breed. So I was talking about Salesforce at first, but at the end, you see there is a lot of small application that do a piece of things and it helps the agility and the fact that to be quick to integrate into integration, we are adopting these tools and you have to insource some of these capabilities because it is crucial.

Second, we have to work on partners and build those strong partnerships with the guy that knows better the technology. So we as IT, we can't manage all the technology, it's to merge there. It's too many, it's different and it's not here. So you need to be sure what creates more value and what you have to in source and the rest, you have to find and select the right partner that will be working with you and the business to create the value. So that's what we are starting to do to reassess, in fact, who are technology providers to make sure to make the right choice. And then once you've done that or in the middle, again, you have to build the trust and the relationship with your partner to make it working efficiently. So that's the thing we are working on to be able to satisfy even well.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: And on the business side, it's not happening within five years, I hope. I want all low value activities to disappear for the business.

Sarah Nicastro: Which I think is an incredibly attainable goal. It's there. It's just, yes. So Emmanuelle, I want to ask you, since you are the other woman in service speaking here today. I want to ask you the question about what are your thoughts on how we bring more gender diversity into our industry? I know I'm throwing you another curve ball, but.

Emmanuelle Duchesne: You are out of the script. No, no. I see more now in the younger generation, you need to trust yourself because men don't want to welcome you. Sometimes women, I always hear that to apply for a job, a woman will wait to have 200% on the skills and men just 50%, they will apply. So I'll know how you call this syndrome, good girl or imposter syndrome, but you need to work on that. And if the women do not have this, you need to have mentors and people pushing them. And in the past, I had a very good boss and he told me, he gave me an advice, say, "Well, you know, Emmanuelle, you will have performance review every year. You will have performance reviews. Good managers, they will tell you what you did well. And they will tell you to focus on that. And you develop what you are best at. And the band managers, they will tell you, "You didn't do this well, well this. So focus on your strengths and that's what you need to do."

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. And oh, I just messed up. But that's all. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

There is a fair amount of handwringing among employers in just about every industry around what to do about the incoming group of Gen Z employees. These young workers (in their 20s to very early 30s) are generally seen as very technology-savvy, but also very difficult to manage.

To evolve with the times, companies have done everything from adopting new perks, flexible schedules, to creating new programs and processes around diversity, ethics, mental health, and employee engagement. On the other end of the spectrum, some companies have dug in around the “No one wants to work” post-pandemic position that “these kids today” are lazy and want to be coddled by their employers.

You can see some of these viewpoints reflected in a recent survey conducted by ResumeBuilder, which found that three-quarters of managers find it difficult to work with Gen Z.

There can be a lot of negativity in this kind of coverage, though, which overlooks some key points. First, this type of generational complaining has been going on for a long time (as this Inc. story points out). Second, these sweeping generalizations about workers of a certain age (any age) are not very helpful. And third, in many cases, meeting Gen Z where they are in terms of workplace expectations makes the work environment better for everybody, while also helping field service organizations recruit and retain young technicians.

But what are some of the reasons that managers think Gen Z is difficult? According to the ResumeBuilder survey, the top reasons were that they lack technological skills, lack effort, lack motivation, lack productivity, are easily distracted, have poor communication skills, and are easily offended.

This was a cross-industry survey, so the first point (they lack technological skills) is one that field service organizations have already been dealing with, addressed with solutions such as developing technicians via apprenticeships, working with trade schools, on-the-job training programs, etc.

As far as the other challenges go, though, a big problem seems to be that different generations are speaking different “work languages,” for lack of a better term. Workers in their 20s have entered the workforce during a time of significant disruption and volatility across pretty much every facet of their lives – political, environmental, economic, and social environments included. They have also watched their older family members struggle as work becomes more demanding and ubiquitous thanks to our always-connected culture, while pay has stagnated and the cost of living (particularly housing) has ballooned.

As a result, younger workers are more likely to put up boundaries around their personal lives and time, while also asking for better pay and a company culture that allows them to enjoy (and maintain) their off-hours. While we do have to be cautious of too many generalizations, I think that as a group these younger workers have also not necessarily bought into the type of striving that their predecessors have valued – the idea that putting extra time and energy into your job is going to provide a path to upward mobility. This can come off as a lack of motivation, but it seems to me that it’s really an indication that the old incentives just aren’t working anymore.

Turning Perceived Weaknesses into Company Strengths

The real question we must ask ourselves is, how can we use this information to create successful Gen Z field service technicians? To do so, we need to focus on turning some of these perceived weaknesses into company strengths. Here are a few ideas:

Invest more in employee education. I addressed technical training above, but younger workers often lack interpersonal communication (or soft) skills – they are used to talking to people via text or online. Develop communication skills training (your older workers can probably benefit from a refresher, too) and put it in the proper context. Your goal is to help people (your customers) solve a problem. Gen Z has an abundance of empathy, which is a valuable commodity when it comes to customer service.

Invest in modern technology. If you haven’t upgraded your service management, scheduling, diagnostic, and/or communication tools for a long time, you are going to have trouble with younger workers that view your IT infrastructure as some sort of antique. Having modern tools in place is going to help your business in general, while also making it easier to hire and retain younger technicians.

Be open to new ideas. Younger workers are much more likely to question and criticize existing policies and processes if they don’t make sense. Forward-looking companies will resist being defensive and appreciate the fresh eyes. Some of those old policies/procedures are in place for good reasons, but others may have exceeded their sell-by date. Your younger technicians are more likely to thrive (and help you thrive) if they think their ideas are given serious consideration.

Examine your company culture. Workplace culture in the U.S. has typically punished people for being human. Taking time off when you are sick, when your kids are sick, or when you need to deal with any type of issue (from an ailing parent to getting your car into the shop) is viewed negatively. For hourly positions, any time off work is time you aren’t earning, and at some companies your use of sick days or other PTO might be held against you when it comes to overtime or promotions.

Is your company like that? It shouldn’t be. During the pandemic, a lot of employees took a hard look at how their employers treated them and did not like what they saw. Your employees (old and young alike) are human, and they need time to take care of their families and themselves. If your PTO policies are reasonable, your employees will be reasonable in following them.

Give respect to earn respect. The survey also indicated that managers felt Gen Z was too thin-skinned and easily offended. But this generation is the most diverse we have ever seen entering the workforce, and their perspective on workplace behaviors is probably going to be very different, particularly in industries that have traditionally been more heterogeneous. For field service companies to thrive in the face of a shortage of qualified technicians, organizations are going to need to recruit more technicians from diverse backgrounds. For those employees to stick around, they must feel respected and comfortable.

New Gen Z technicians are offering employers fresh perspective, adaptability, and enthusiasm for problem solving. The things they are asking for in return – a livable wage, work schedules that give them time to have a personal life, and less toxic work environments – are not unreasonable. In fact, the existing employees who haven’t fought so hard for these things will appreciate them, too.

Do you have experience training this new generation of technicians? What has worked and what hasn't? Please send me your thoughts and experiences.

Sarah welcomes Anthony Billups, North America Vice President of Sales and Market Development at Comfort Systems USA, for an open discussion on some of the historical thinking and practices that are holding field service industries back from success in today’s landscape and what needs to change in terms of a fresh approach.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to have a conversation around some of the outdated thinking and maybe historical binds that might be exacerbating the talent gap, keeping us from moving forward in field service the way that we could or should. So I'm excited to welcome today to the podcast for that conversation Anthony Billups. Anthony is the North American Vice President of Sales and Market Development at Comfort Systems USA. Anthony, welcome to the podcast.

Anthony Billups: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. So before we get into it all, tell everyone a little bit about yourself.

Anthony Billups: Yeah. Man, Anthony Billups, born and raised out of New York City, went to school up in Boston, studied engineering, electrical engineering, and mathematics, went to grad school, Arizona State University, for a degree in applied math and statistics. Wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I was always really good in math, obviously, as well as people interaction, so knew I wanted to work in corporate America, but wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Sold at a lot of different levels. In high school, I sold sneakers. I sold cars in college. I sold houses when I first graduated, so I was always really good at sales, and I wanted to figure out a way to merge sales with the technical background that I had, and I had an opportunity to join the HVAC industry roughly 16, 17 years ago, and it's been amazing.

I've always loved buildings. I've always loved technology and downtowns, obviously, being from New York City, and everywhere I travel, I'm like, "Take me downtown so I can see the buildings and see what it looks like." And even as a young age, I remember traveling with my family and always wanting to see downtown, wanting to see whatever city had to offer. So it makes sense now years later that I'm in a construction, and buildings, and services industry.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's so cool. Just a quick aside, so I'm in Erie, Pennsylvania, which I would be shocked if you've ever been. It's not really a destination per se. It's a small city though, right? And we just took our sons, who are newly eight and six and a half, to New York for the first time the weekend before last.

Anthony Billups: Nice.

Sarah Nicastro: I love New York, love it. I know people that aren't from New York, you either have people love, love, love it, or it's not for them. You know what I mean? I'm the former, but I didn't know how they would react because they've never seen a city that big. You know what I mean? And we had so much fun. They loved it. They got to see a cockroach and a rat, so I felt like we gave them the real experience.

Anthony Billups: Oh, man.

Sarah Nicastro: And you'll find this funny because you're a native. So we were on our way to Brooklyn when we were getting on the subway, and we saw the rat down on the tracks, and my kids also love animals, right? So we get in the train, and we're sitting there, and my son goes, "Mommy, I sure hope that rat is okay." And everyone looked at him like, "What?" It was so funny.

Anthony Billups: Yeah, yeah. The rat is definitely okay. The rat is definitely okay.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'm like, "No, honey, he's under the tracks. The train didn't run him over. He's fine. He's doing his thing." But anyway. Okay, so here's one question I thought of as you were talking about some of the things you did when you were young and through school, et cetera, and then getting into the HVAC space about 16, 17 years ago. How did that initially come about? And what I'm really curious about, because it's going to lend into our conversation we're about to have, is when that entry into this industry first happened, what was your perception then of what the HVAC industry or field service space were?

Anthony Billups: Yeah. No, great question. So I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, and I had a buddy of mine that was... It's always our friends, right? A buddy of mine that was working in the elevator industry, so he worked for Otis Elevators. He had done his co-ops and summer internships at Otis Elevators and had gone back to do that throughout school. So I saw what he was doing as a sales engineer and his ability to connect with customers. I remember he took me to a game. We went to a game with one of his customers, a Knicks game, and I was just like, "Man, you get paid to take customers out and to engage." And even while at school, he had phone numbers of technicians and customers, and people would reach out to him. And just that ability to apply the technical with the personal, I was like, "Man, that's like a dream job. The fact that you get paid to do this just seems weird, right? It seems like it's fun."

So for me, it was more about how can I utilize my skills in an industry and/or profession that I knew nothing of, right? There's not a lot of conversation at the college level or high school level talking about sales engineering, right? You think about all the different type of engineers that are out there. Most of the time they don't talk about sales engineering. So this idea to get an engineering based salary, but also get commission from what you sell. So it was like the best of both worlds. So for me, I wanted to work in elevators because I just assumed that was where I wanted to be, and I was at a conference recruiting. There was a bunch of companies there. I had an offer from Boeing to work as a systems engineer, and I had other opportunities that I was exploring, but I knew I wanted to be a sales engineer.

So at the time, Otis wasn't hiring. United Technologies had owned Otis and both Carrier. Willis Carrier invented air conditioning. A guy by the name of Doug Wiggins, he convinced me that air conditioning was cooler than elevators, and the rest was history. So that's how I ended up in the HVAC space, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, versus the elevator space.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, okay. So one thing I want to point out too is in this conversation, you're in a sales role, but what we're talking about really applies also to service technicians and service sales, really the industries as a whole that make up sort of field sort that are lesser known that people, like you said, they're not talked about as much in high school or in college. When you're in elementary school and people say, "What do you want to be when you grow up," they might not say, usually don't say, "HVAC, field service." Right? They're saying, "I want to be a teacher," or, "I want to be..." the things that are visible to them, right?

So I meant to look before we recorded this today, but years and years ago when I was still with Field Technologies Magazine, I wrote an article that field service has a branding problem, right? And I've done some follow-up on that since, and I can share that with this podcast. Everyone today is talking about the talent gap, right? And I think there's a lot of different layers to what that challenge consists of and what the potential solutions are, right? But one of the things I want to talk about is this idea of that branding problem, that these opportunities, these careers are not ones that kids grow up knowing, being able... I think even for folks that work in the industry sometimes it's hard to articulate what the industry is, what the role is. I know even for me, when someone says, "What do you do," I'm just like, "It's hard to explain." You know what I mean? It can be really hard to come up with an easy pitch or what have you.

So what are your thoughts on that aspect of it? I know when you and I connected to talk about doing this podcast, one of the points you made that I really love that I think correlates is how do we create more excitement around the trades? So why do you feel creating excitement is an important aspect of this, and then what are your thoughts on how we might do that?

Anthony Billups: Yeah, I think the first part on excitement is bringing awareness, right? So I had made the comment that I didn't know anything about call it sales engineering. So I think when you have these exciting careers and these professions, it's important as a leader to go back into your community and to talk about what it is that you do, right? Talk about kind of what is your day in the life, talk about the things that made you excited about the role, right? I travel all of the time for the role, and it's tough from the family dynamic, but personally, I love the ability to be in different places, right? Someone who loves architecture, and buildings, and cities, and I don't want to see the same city all the time, right? I want to be able to explore, and see different things and how it's built, and be a part of that build.

So I think communicating and being able to share what it is that you do is important because what do kids see growing up? They see what's on television. They see what's in the movies, right? The generic, "I want to be a lawyer, a doctor." Maybe you'll hear a couple engineer or architect conversations, but for the most part it's, "I want to be a celebrity. I want to be an influencer on Instagram and an entrepreneur," and all of these other things that are now bubbling up, but the reason behind it is what people see. It correlates to if you're someone who grows up without money, then no matter what you pick, you want to pick something where you're going to make the money to do the things that you really want to do in life, right? And I think that's an important piece that you have to hone in on, right?

I do very well from a financial perspective because it's a career that others are just not flooding to be a part of. So what that does is it not only creates an opportunity for me, but it also gives me a chance to be promoted, to be a leader, to run businesses. So when you have that success, it allows you to take that route, and I think that's what's excited me the most about the industry is it's an old industry, right? Willis Carrier invented air conditioning over 100 years ago, 120 years ago. So this industry has been around forever. So the people that are in it are closer to retirement. We've got a lot of baby boomers that are getting ready to retire, so an emerging industry that will always be around air conditioning, especially when you think about technology and all the things that are coming. You're going to need to cool those spaces. You're going to need to have control of those spaces, so this industry will always be around.

So for me, when I go and talk about it, I talk about thinking about emerging industries that will continue to be around forever. It was around for 100+ years for a reason, and it will continue to be around. So that's important when selecting a career. It's not just the new fad that someone wants to do. It will be around, and then that's how you start to sell it because you talk about careers, not just jobs, and I think that's another piece that doesn't get talked about enough, right? Let's talk about what does your career look like in a services industry in the trades, whether it's a technician and what is that roadmap, or whether it's on the sales and business side, and running operations, running the full business, and leading that business, what does that look like? And here goes a roadmap. So I think that's a piece of it as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, what's interesting to me is I really liked that you used the word excitement, and I agree, part of it is awareness, but I think there's more to it than that, and I think you kind of intuitively understand that because you're in sales, right? But I think one of the challenges as an industry, and I'm talking about field service industries overall, right? Maybe we have recognized that we need to create more awareness, but I don't think we're storytelling. I don't think we're selling it. I don't think when kids are learning about what a doctor does or what a teacher does, no one is in the background pointing out all of the cons, right? They're leading from the front of you can help people, you can make people feel better, you can teach people, right?

So I think one of the challenges we have is, and also when you talked about how you got into HVAC and through your friend at Otis, I think one of the things is as a whole we're not doing a good job amplifying the positives. We're not doing a good job getting creative about how to articulate the things that will draw people in. We're focused on either regurgitating the job descriptions we've been using, or we're focused on giving a list of requirements, not giving a list of opportunities, or incentives, or sharing those stories that will get people excited about, "Hm, I want to look more into this." Right?

And I think there's a number of reasons for that, but I think awareness is part of it, but what exactly we're creating awareness of I think is really important for companies to be thinking about, because we know that the traditional method of putting out an open job and expecting people with experience is just not going to work. So we need to create more interest in order to create excitement, and we need to do that by selling it better, by creating that brand story, right? And then figuring out how we align the right skills to the right jobs. Do you know what I mean?

Anthony Billups: Absolutely, Absolutely. And when I talk at different schools and whenever I get an opportunity to be a part a podcast and communicate, because that's a way for us to tell the story and get things out there, one of the things that I say is, "So what are some of the jobs that are cool? What do people want now?" Right? People want to go work at Apple. People want to work for Google. They want to work for Meta. They want to work with TikTok. Whatever you're using, that's what you want to go be a part of because you see that as being fun, and innovative, and the future, and you want to be a part of that.

So what I do is I say, "Think about what it means to work for Apple, right? First off, think about how competitive, and I'm not talking about working at the Apple store, right? I'm talking about going to work in the Bay Area or at one of the facilities helping design, and build, and whatever it is that you want to do to be a part of that, marketing, whatever it may be. Everybody wants to go there. So the amount of competition to get to these places, and whatever you define these places, right? It could be an athlete. It could be sports and entertainment, right? Think about the competition that wants to go there and how many people want to be a part of that, and how small of the number that make it through."

And then what I say is, "From a services perspective, from a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning perspective, I've done work with Apple." Right? I don't think I'm allowed to talk about that, but I've done work with these Silicon Valley companies, these industries. I've sat in meetings with their strategic growth individuals focused on carbon reduction and focused on better ways to build their facilities, and I walked in through the back door. I walked in through the mechanical room, right? I sold at a level. Now I'm managing and leading at another level. I run the whole business, but now I have teams of people that are there, right? In my book of contacts, I have these industries, these folks that I work with.

One of the biggest projects that I was a part of was a large stadium, the Ram Stadium out on the West Coast in LA. Right? I was on that project. So yes, when I was younger, I wanted to be in the NBA, and then I stopped growing. So I'm 5'9 1/2, and I wasn't going to the NBA. It wasn't happening, right? My game just didn't translate well, so now I have to come up with another dream, but I had a chance to work on stadiums and arenas. So with the love that I have for that, I was able to find that through the services industry, through heating, and ventilation, and air conditioning, through controls. And now I'm in those buildings.

So that's what I talk about to sell, because again, it's easier to get in through the mechanical room than it is through the front door, and I think that's when we want to change the narrative of the profession. We need to start with the end in mind. We need to start where these individuals want to be a part of these industries that they want to be a part of, and if you flash Comfort Systems USA, people might not know what that is, right? I have people sometimes that say, "You work for a pillow company, right?" They don't know, but if I talk about the customers that I serve, and the people that we work with, and the things we're able to deliver, right now, people understand and they recognize. And I think that's where the services and the trade industry goes wrong is because we focus on the task and the things we do and not the customers we serve.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a really good point. And we also talked about what I mentioned earlier, which is this historical norm is you have an open role, you post a job description, you require X years of experience, and people apply, and you pick the best candidate. I mean, that's an obsolete model at this point, right?

So, you had mentioned what we need to do is focus more on finding talent and then fitting roles around individuals versus wedging them into open positions. Can you talk a little bit about what that means and also how realistic do you feel that is for the space we're in?

Anthony Billups: I think it's very realistic. You got to start to realize that number one, the younger generation is not going to come into a position and do it for five years. Those days are over. They're over, right? I'm a grandpa millennial. I was born in 1981, so I haven't been in the same role for five years, right? 18 to 24 months, I'm ready to do something else, right? I'm ready for that next level, that next role, the next opportunity, the next challenge. So individuals my age and younger, that's the mindset. The attention span, the ability to master something at a quicker pace based how we leverage technology is completely different, right? So you have to build a path that is non-traditional, and it sucks because now individuals my age and older, we have to think about doing things differently than when we started, right? What was important to us, and I remember managers when I left my first company in the industry, I loved it. It was my favorite place in the world. Some of my closest friends in the industry were there, right?

I'm in New York City working where I grew up, and I have an amazing team, and the reason I left is I because looked around that group and said, "I am at least 10 to 15 years away from maybe being a manager." Right? Based on the team, the dynamic, and the way things were there. I'm at an event recruiting for at the time another company, right? I'm recruiting for the company I'm a part of, and my passion I'm talking to other salespeople, and a competitor sees my energy, sees my passion, and says, "What is it going to take to get you to come over with us?" And I said, "Just make me a manager." Right? I was vulnerable because I knew I was ready. I had managers that were good, but I knew I can do that.

I was succeeding as an individual contributor, but I was ready to be a manager, right? And I didn't have a roadmap. I didn't have a, "Oh, in the next few months, in the next year you'll be here, and hey, here goes another opportunity. You could go live in this state and be a manager here." That wasn't the conversation. I had no clue what that looked like, and when I said it, I was 29 years old, right? And I'm thinking, "There's no way that somebody is going to make me a manager in this industry when I look around and every other manager, A, doesn't look like me. It's another conversation for another day, another podcast.

Sarah Nicastro: Happy to have it though.

Anthony Billups: And then the age, right? So I was like, "This is not... I'll just throw it out there," and you don't get something if you don't ask for it, right? So when I said that, and the manager, the director of sales for this company, he laughed, and he said, "Is that all you want? The way you're recruiting, the way you're promoting to get people to come, the way you're giving this energy about what you do, and the same energy I give you today was the same energy I was given trying to recruit people into the industry." He's like, "You ready to be a manager." And then it was like, "Where do you want to be? I got an opportunity here. I got an opportunity there," and it was eye opening to me because another company saw the readiness for me to be a manager rather than my own company.

So I think when we go back to your comment about how does it work, I think what we have to do is start, for example, in the NBA, if anyone is a sports fan, nowadays, there's positionless basketball. And what that means is that in the old days, there used to be a point guard, a shooting guard, a small forward, a power forward, and a center, right? And you had these different positions on the court, and your center was normally the biggest guy on the court, so you think your Shaquille O'Neal, and your point guard was your Isaiah Thomas or your Allen Iverson. That was your point guard, right? And it was like these positions, and you got to play these roles.

Now there's positionless basketball. Now when people are building teams, they draft, and they go grab the best possible talent, and then they build winning strategy. They build their plays around the players that they have. And I think that's working in the NBA for teams, and that is how I think we as industries, and corporations, and companies, that's how we need to look. So let's start posting opportunities about the traits you're looking for, the teams that you have, and the team that they will fit in, and the things that you're looking for there. Let's also look at this years of experience area, right? Because somebody may not have an official role in that, and some people don't have the confidence to still apply. So you're missing out on candidates because they're reading something and saying, "Ah, this is pointless." And half the time, large companies are using bots to filter resumes based on certain parameters and buzzwords, right? So you're not even talking to the best candidates. You're not, right? Let's just throw that out there.

You're missing people that are not even applying or who've applied, but based on however you're filtering, you're not even seeing them. So let's focus more on the characteristics, and the talent, and the things that you're looking for to be a part of your team, this mindset of positionless recruiting, and then build around that. And then when someone comes into the fold, if someone meets a Sarah or an Anthony, and they say, "Man, I want this person at my company," then you start to mold and build what that person's career will be. What are the things you want to do? What's important to you? What verticals do you want to be a part of? How do you want to approach this? And then build around that.

And then as you can recruit that way, build your team, and then maybe there's... Man, I got one spot I'm missing. This is something I'm missing. So now you can now look for some of these areas, but again, it's about the qualities that the person is bringing, the experiences that the person is bringing, and not just where they worked at before and the things that we looked at prior when evaluating talent.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, I think that's a good point, and I have empathy for leaders and businesses in the sense that the way it was was easy and convenient when you could hire service technicians that would stay in a role for 5, 10, 15, 20+ years. That made everyone's lives very simple, and it's hard to change, right? We know that. But the reality is the same way that person at that recruiting event recognized your energy, and welcomed it, and made a space for it, if you don't do that with the talent in your own company, someone else will, right?

Anthony Billups: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So the idea of the way it was, the good old days, I think there's still some hanging on to that, maybe not fully, right? There's progress, but it's slow progress in understanding this isn't going to change. We need to adapt, and adapting means really recreating the whole thing from the ground up because it isn't just, "Oh, we should reword this, or we should train people this way." I mean, it's fundamentally revamping the whole talent strategy, recruiting and hiring process, and also retention. To that point, those individuals in your companies, on your teams that have that energy, have that drive, have that passion, you either give them an outlet for it, or they will find that outlet somewhere else.

Anthony Billups: I mean, they're getting the money that's being thrown out there, right? And the opportunities that are there, if you look at some of these services industries, technology is really enhancing the industry. So there's so much venture capitalist money that's coming into these industries, so these startup companies and other groups have the money to go and buy the talent, and they don't want the old regime. They want the new energy, the new regime. So if you got somebody that's an amazing talent, and you're holding them back, and then they get an opportunity to double or triple their earnings potential and their salary, it becomes a no-brainer. And at that point, it's too late.

At that point, you haven't built the roadmap for this... Even if you build the roadmap, you still may lose them, right? If they don't see that vision, right? So it's important, and when I made the comment about 18 to 24 months, there may be some that cringe at that, right? Think about how you read a resume, right? So to your listeners of your network of folks that join in for your podcast, think about how you view resumes, right? What is your unconscious bias? And I'm sure you've said it, right? You look at a resume and say, "Oh, this person jumps around. This person is not loyal. This person hasn't stayed with the company for longer than two years." So think about it not that the person is doing something wrong, think about the company didn't master, because if somebody moves around within the company to a different role, that's something to be said versus going to a completely different company, but I think everyone has a story, and that's changing, right? So-

Sarah Nicastro: Even then it's just sort of an outdated standard, right?

It's an outdated measurement to look at. Same thing with women that have gaps in their resume.

Anthony Billups: Yeah, like come on.

Sarah Nicastro: Just because someone was successful in the corporate world, took 1, 2, 5 years off to raise children, or do whatever she's doing, and now wants to reenter, that knowledge, perspective, experience is not erased, right? So it's the gaps, or I mean, people are taking time off to...

Anthony Billups: Travel the world.

Sarah Nicastro: Not just women, anyone, right?

Anthony Billups: Travel the world. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: To travel, to take a break for their mental health.

Anthony Billups: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: You know what I mean? So it's things like that that are really outdated norms. You're right though. I mean, depending on who's looking at the resume and how modern their perspective is. You know what I mean? You could be missing out on a lot of things. You brought up money though, and I also want to touch on one of the points we talked about is understanding what today's talent values. Okay? And I do think it's important to say it isn't just money, right? And this is a common thing. So I hear people a lot. I was in the UK for our Future of Field Service event in May, and we were having a round table discussion on talent, and there was this guy there that was saying, "I'm just really frustrated because I bring technicians on. I spend all this money to onboard and train them, and then they leave to go make whatever, an incremental more amount of money somewhere else."

Now, I said, "Well, okay." And he was an older white guy, like a lot of people at the events are, and I challenged him a little bit and said, "I highly doubt that they're leaving only because of the money." It's easy to use that as the excuse. Okay? And I'm not saying some people don't do it, but I'm saying if it's an incremental amount of money, and you're providing a really good employee experience, and company culture, and working environment, mass amounts of people would not be leaving for an incremental amount of money. So I just think sometimes it's easy to use that as an excuse to not do a lot of the other things that are important to new hires today, right? Also, same thing I said, they take work, they take effort, they take change, right? So what are some of the things you see in terms of beyond fair pay? What do you think people value most today?

Anthony Billups: I think for one, we've heard this, "People don't leave companies. They leave managers." Right? So I think that manager employee relationship is extremely important, right? What type of development conversations are you having? Where does this individual see the future of their career? Do they think that they can learn, right? The role that I'm in now, I somewhat took a step back to kind of go back into the sales leadership area when I was leading both sides of the business, both sales, and operations, and full general management, right? And from a career trajectory, that's really where I want to be, but the opportunity to come work for the manager that I'm working for and the mentor that I have, it's a no-brainer for me to take a step back and learn underneath that umbrella. It's something that made sense for me because I know that's going to help me in my career as I move forward.

So I think that manager employee relationship is extremely important, and what does that individual bring? I struggled early in my career with having managers that I didn't feel I can learn anything from, having managers that I felt like didn't either know what they was talking about, they were promoted because of relationships, or other reasons, or whatever, and I look at them, and I'm like, "This is not the way to manage." Right? I have done a lot of training, and we conduct training around building leaders, not just managers, and the leader and the manager are completely different. So I think that dynamic is the first layer.

I think next it's about understanding the whole person, right? Do you really want to focus on the eight hour employee, or do you want to focus on the 24 hour person? And I think where you have leaders that focus on the 24 hour person and make that a part of it, they understand that, because you can always go and get an extra 50 cents if you're a technician, an extra dollar, an extra whatever. It's out there, and you can play that game. You can go from place to place and go get an extra 50 cents, an extra dollar, but at some point, you are where you are. At some point, you have to deliver on the task at hand, and then you have life that happens, right? And how does that company participate in the life element of what you have going on?

So I think when you have a leader that's focused around development and continuously communicating to their team about that, because you know the money will come. Don't get me wrong. People are not running around accepting opportunities for less money all of the time because they want to go work at a place, right? I mean, money does play a factor in it, but it's bigger than that, in my opinion, and I think it's centered around development and what does tomorrow look like versus just today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I really like that point about the 24 hour person. I also think the first point you brought up about leaders and the leader and employee relationship is important because in service it's very common for leaders to just... Not just, to be people that have progressed through the ranks, okay? But not everyone that is a strong individual contributor makes a good leader, and so when we use that progression as a reward system just for good performance versus evaluating people's actual ability to lead, we risk putting leaders in place that aren't really good at that job. It doesn't mean they're not good employees, doesn't mean they don't have a valuable contribution.

It just means that they might be lacking what talent demands of a leader today, which again, based on everything we've talked about, does look different than it did 10, 15, 20 years ago where that command and control type environment where it was all more, "Here's your role. You do this, check a box," that sort of thing. It wasn't so much getting to know people, helping develop people, mentoring, communicating, empathy, emotional intelligence. Not everyone is cut out for that, right? And we need to understand that and make sure that we aren't promoting people into those positions that might be great people and/or strong performers, but aren't built for that job. Certainly not doing it just because of the relationship, which also happens, but also even when we are putting people in those positions that are capable, how are we as organizations providing ongoing learning and development to the leaders as well?

Anthony Billups: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: I mean, we think a lot about how we do that with employees coming in, but leadership deserves training and investment in their skills as well.

Anthony Billups: Absolutely. A big part of my role today is centered around that, right? I lead up our training program for our salespeople as well as our leaders, right? And the reason that we really focus a lot of attention there is that we understand the value of our leaders, and if you can teach a leader to not be a manager, but to be a leader and to learn, and a lot of times to your point, you're really good at something, and then people put you in this people manager role, but you haven't been given the skills. When you start managing people, sometimes it may feel like you're a principal at a high school, right? Because sometime the personalities, and the things that happen, and you can't put this person with that person, and you end up dealing with that. And I mean, if you haven't gone through a conversation about crucial conversations and how to handle those, and how to approach those, if you don't understand the individuals that you're managing, and maybe some of the things that they struggle with, you may have a really strong individual performer, but they struggle with their own confidence.

So if you don't know that, and you don't know how to feed their confidence to help them be better in their role, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage. And if you've never been taught about that, then where are you supposed to learn that from? So I think developing and focusing on leaders is absolutely a part to grow and build your business, and to your point, some of the best players are some of the worst coaches, and even evaluators of talent, because they're looking for people that are like them. Sometimes you are just a unicorn in the way you prep, and the way you focus, and the way you work. I mean, I've worked with some people where, man, they dedicate 16 hours to what they do, and they're amazing at it, but not everybody is going to devote that time to get done 16 hours a day to complete the task.

There's some people that's not going to do that. There's some people that are going to put in their eight hours, their six hours, whatever it may be, and they're going to give you the best that they can during that period of time. So does that mean that that's a bad employee? No. That just means that that person is different, and you got to figure out how to coach that person to maximize and get the most out of them. It's not about the hours that you work. It's about what you do with the time and the things that need to be accomplished, and I think that's where we get it wrong, where we pick these great performers, and then not sure why things don't work out or why their team doesn't flourish like the way they flourish. They're teaching people to do things the way they do it, and that might not work, and that's a part of leadership, and in my opinion, higher upper management making the right executive decisions on how to really build a team.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm. The other thing we talked about in terms of leadership is the need to focus more on motivating and empowering today's talent. So can you talk about what does that look like to you, and how is that different than what leaders have historically done or focused on?

Anthony Billups: Yeah, I think it goes back to the 24 hour person. I think if you're helping people develop, a lot of our training is centered around helping people be better individuals, right? Some of the stuff that we do can help you be better at home in your interactions with your family and your spouse.

Sarah Nicastro: Do you have any examples?

Anthony Billups: Yeah, absolutely. So we teach a thing called Sandler Selling, and essentially what it is it is a process, a selling process for when you have a meeting, and a big part of that is kicks off with bonding and rapport, so that you're building that relationship with anyone that you're interacting with, so that you can now feed back into things. When things get tough, you can feed on that, right? And this is for both internal and external relationships. The next part of that is an upfront contract, and the upfront contract component is I'm going to tell you what we're going to talk about today, and think about how that can help you with your family, right? If you put it out there that, "Hey, this is the focus. This is what we want to get accomplished. What would you like to get accomplished? How would you like to approach this weekend? How would you like to approach this task? How would you like to approach this holiday?"

So if you put this upfront contract, so now we're able to talk about what we're trying to accomplish and not have meetings without that. Those are just some of the things that we teach. So yes, it's extremely helpful for your customer. It's extremely helpful for your internal meetings. It's also helpful when you're building with your family. Next, another part of it is really uncovering pain. If you're a salesperson, and you're trying to sell something, no one wants to buy from someone who is over the top-selling, right? If I sit here, and I'm trying to sell you this phone, and it's just like I'm over the top, and I'm like, "Oh, you need this. What phone do you got?" I hate that when you walk through the mall, and they're like, "Oh, what service do you have?" I'm like, "Listen, bro, I am not here for a cell phone. I don't have the time. I don't care if you give me seven phones for free. I'm walking away."

So no one wants to buy from that person. So then we talk about uncovering pain, and real pain, not just the pain from surface pain, right? A pain indicator, right? Oh, some piece of equipment broke. That's a pain indicator. How does that piece of equipment that broke impact you personally? Oh, well, I have to come in on the weekends, and I missed my daughter's softball game because I had to come in, because we have a big event. So now I'm getting down to the personal pain and how it impacts you, and it allows you to ask better questions, to listen more, and then those are the type of things we teach our salespeople, teach our leaders, and then that can help them be a better person. So to me, those types of things from a development perspective are extremely important as we think about our interactions with people that we come across every day.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and I think this is also parallels what I'm hearing more and more of, and I mean, have been for years, but I think, again, the reason we keep talking about some of the same themes we've been talking about for a few years is there's layers of change that companies still need to make, right? So I was saying what you're talking about I think parallels what we're seeing in service, which is a recognition that we need to provide a lot more soft skills training, and communication, and empathy, and things like that, and I think understanding the root of the value in that is important, because it's not a checkbox exercise. It's not something you can send out a soft skills video for people to watch once a year and expect it to have any impact, but again, this is what I mean. There's this, "Okay, do we really have to do that? I don't want to. Okay, yes we do. Let's just do this online thing." Right?

But what are we really talking about? We're really talking about the 24 hour person. We're talking about caring about the people that we employ and wanting them to be better, be fulfilled, et cetera. So I think those are good examples because it's not looking at it in the sense of how can these folks get out and sell harder, and better, and faster. It's how can we provide them skills that are going to help them in all areas of their life, including their role at conference systems?

Anthony Billups: And there's a lot of really good individuals out there that are doing things. I'll give a shout out to someone that I know is out there doing it. A gentleman by the name of Mark Martinez recently wrote a book, and he talks about teaching people how to hit their grand slam, and what does that really mean? And he talks about living your dash, that dash in between when you were born and when you leave, and what does that really mean fulfilling that? So he does this type of training, and he works with companies, and individuals, and churches, and everyone because he's so passionate about it, but I love that because we need more companies looking for people like Mark to come in and do those type of trainings, because that's not just a check the box.

That's looking at the 24 hour person, and now that's feeding into it. And remember, now people will stay, because they're like, "Man, what do they got in line for me? I've never had this type of training. No one ever focused on this. It's helping build me. It's making me better. It's making me more confident at home. I'm going to stick around with this company because they care about me as a person, not just the eight hours, or 10 hours, or 12 hours they expect me to work for them." So those are the type of examples that I think companies should be looking more for to make a part of their training.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I know we're coming up on time. Is there anything we haven't talked about yet that we should mention before we close?

Anthony Billups: I would just say we touched on diversity a little bit, and I think that diversity of talent is extremely important. Our customers are way more diverse than they've ever been, and if you have a leadership team that all looks the same, and that's the panel deciding on who gets hired, or who gets promoted, or who gets... You really have to look at that, right? In order for us to be able to attract talent, individuals are choosing companies that they can see are dedicated to diversity of all kinds. So if you're not walking the walk on your website, and what you deliver, and what you talk about, and all these different things, it don't matter what you do in the interview, right?

Sarah Nicastro: And also though, behind closed doors.

Anthony Billups: Absolutely, absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: No one wants to go to a website and see what they want to see, and then you get in into it and realize it was-

Anthony Billups: They'll just leave.

Sarah Nicastro: Exactly.

Anthony Billups: Then they won't stay if you're not genuine in what you're really doing, if there really is no career path. Sometimes companies do these diversity numbers, right? That became popular over the last couple years, and then you take a real look at it, and it was all entry level positions. So they've gotten to double digits diversity in their entry level positions, but when you look at middle level management, upper management, executives, C-suite, nothing is there. So to me, that's the real proof. And don't be afraid to promote somebody. Don't be afraid to put somebody in the role who's just not ready. That happened to me in my career a couple times, and it meant a lot because I knew that they didn't want me to leave, but they saw something in my energy that they wanted a part of their future. I will help plan for what that future is.

20 years ago, we weren't communicating with cell phones, with email. 25 years ago, right? That wasn't the main form of communication, text messages. So this idea that technology is ramping up things so fast, don't be afraid to over promote, but give the proper training. Give the proper mentors, build the person, build your talent. You don't have to just always go out and grab the talent from other companies because that pool is just getting smaller and smaller. So that would be the piece that I wanted to add that I don't think we touched on a lot, but I don't want to diminish the importance of diversity, diversity of thought into everything that we do when we're thinking about talent and bringing people to organizations.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. And for people that are not addressing unconscious bias, that aren't reflecting on holding on to outdated norms, or thoughts, or beliefs, they're exacerbating the talent gap. I mean, there's so much room to expand diversity in HVAC service, the trades, et cetera, that if you're not really in earnest working to do that, you are fueling your own problem. Not that you should care just because it's the right thing to do, but I mean it's literally missing an opportunity to start closing that gap by bringing people into the industry that historically haven't played a huge role and should. So it's a really important part of the discussion. Like you said earlier, it could be a conversation for another day. I'd love to have you back, and we could get more into it.

Anthony Billups: Absolutely. I love this.

Sarah Nicastro: But thank you so much for coming on and sharing. I appreciate it. It was a great conversation and enjoyed having you here.

Anthony Billups: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. You can learn more by visiting us at Futureoffieldservice.com. While you're there, be sure to sign up for the Future of Field Service Insider, which delivers our latest content to your inbox every other week, so you can make sure you don't miss anything. We also have one more Future of Field Service live tour event this year, happening in Stockholm on October 10th. 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

The ability to successfully perform remote service can have a big impact on costs, customer satisfaction, workforce optimization, and even sustainability efforts. Incorporating remote service into your service delivery mix, though, requires both new technology and what can seem like a big cultural change within a service organization.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to Darren Elmore, GM of Service for printer equipment specialist RICOH New Zealand. I had heard Darren speak at the Field Service Palm Springs event in the Spring and was impressed not only by what he shared related to RICOH’s remote service journey, but also what he had to say about some of the ways company’s tend to avoid innovation (which I wrote about here.) I then welcomed Darren onto the podcast for a chat about how RICOH has successfully increased its ability to deliver service remotely.

Darren said he started thinking about a remote first service approach a few years ago, while observing internal IT support operations at RICOH, where the majority of tickets were resolved remotely. At the time, RICOH’s field service operations were resolving around 25% of EM service requests remotely – and he thought they could do better than that.

He knew intuitively that in many cases, technicians would arrive at a customer site and pretty quickly diagnose a problem based on the equipment model and a few troubleshooting questions. “Well, if you're pretty sure you know what it is and it's not something that requires physical adjustment or a part to be replaced, how about talking to the customer and see if we can resolve it over the phone?” he said.

When the COVID pandemic began, the experiment quickly accelerated into a more formalized push for remote service that has paid off tremendously. As of 2022, the company had expanded from 25% remote resolution to 42%, and halfway into 2023 that rate was already sitting at 47%.

I have talked to a lot of service leaders about the incorporation or expansion of remote service, so I know that adopting new technology (which RICOH did) is only part of the story. Companies have a variety of options, some choosing mixed-reality tools like IFS Remote Assistance that allow for a virtual “hands-on” feel and others using more pared down remote access or even video chat solutions. I asked Darren about the balance of new toolsets vs. new mindsets that are required to really make remote service a successful endeavor.

As you might expect, he emphasizes the importance of change management to succeed from the mindset perspective. Before you deploy remote service tools, you have to talk your team through what you are trying to achieve – the “Why?” of what you plan to do. That messaging has to get to the technicians actually doing the work.

“[T]he mindset has to come before the tool set if you want the buy-in from the teams that are going to be using the tools, otherwise you are just investing in a tool set that metaphorically, it's just going to count the dust and you won't get the take-up that you need,” Darren said.

As a result of expanding its remote-first approach, RICOH has been able to not only save money and improve productivity, but it has also managed to reduce emissions as part of its sustainability initiatives by having fewer truck rolls. Darren also said that remote service has boosted its customer satisfaction scores. “We conduct surveys, post completion of the service request. And in the free text field, we've had some really good comments,” he said. “I remember one not too long ago where we had an end user saying how great it was that they felt they were part of the solution, they were able to actually take part in the resolution. But again, that's us leveraging off the tool set and technology that we're able to do things that five years ago just weren't possible.”

The company’s success thus far can certainly be attributed to its understanding that such a change requires not just the toolset but the mindset as well. And there's more to come. Darren sees a lot of potential in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models for remote service resolution and customer-led self-service. We covered a lot of ground in the podcast, so be sure to listen to our whole conversation here.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Paris, Sarah talks with Marie Cobessi, Director, After-Sales Service Projects & Transformation at Fnac/Darty about how the company prioritizes transformation projects, what’s in focus at the moment, and how we can attract more women to the field service space.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Marie Cobessi, director of After Sales Service Projects and Transformation for... How do I pronounce this?

Marie Cobessi: Fnac Darty.

Sarah Nicastro: Fnac Darty, okay. All right, great. Thank you for being here, Marie.

Marie Cobessi: Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Marie came to our Paris event last year as an attendee and, thankfully, agreed to speak. I was saying this morning we have a drastic shortage of women in the industry at all, but also willing to come, share, and speak, so I appreciate it. Tell everyone a little about yourself.

Marie Cobessi: I'm the after sales and service transformation director at Fnac Darty. Fnac Darty, it's a French omnichannel retailer, it's a European leader in the distribution of cultural goods, leisure, technical products, home appliances, and also services. Fnac acquired Darty in 2016. Maybe before we start, just a little background about myself. I've started my career in consulting, specializing in the retail industry, so for more than 10 years, I was doing that. Then I joined Fnac Darty in 2020, it was to define and launch what we call the "Strategic plan" every day, it's a five-year strategic plan. One year after, I joined the team, leading one of the top priorities of the group, strategic plan, that is the after sales service. I'm very proud to be part of this team.

My mission is to accelerate drastically the transformation, in order to make the strategic plan come true. I'm proud to be part of this team, because we have three key success factors I would like to share with you today maybe. The first one is our teams, everybody's saying that, especially our technicians. We have more than 1000 in-house technicians, so we are very proud of that, and also of the training program we've launched. This, we'll talk about after. The second success factor we have is that we are at the heart of this year's sales strategy of the group. This is good, because we are leading the change for our customers to adopt more sustainable behaviors, so this is key.

The second... The third point, sorry, is that we switched from not only being a cost center, but also profit center via the fact that we launched Darty Max. Darty Max is a unique and unlimited subscription-based service, so it allows our customers to have all their appliances covered. We launched it in 2019 and it has been a major shift in the after sales service transformation. If I resume, we have three key success factors and elements that are assets for us. That is our people, our technicians, the CSR strategy that is key for the group, so that puts into light the after sale service that was a bit on the side before, and the fact that we managed to have revenues and generate revenues.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Those are the three key areas. I'm curious, being in a team that is responsible for transformation and helping really push to achieve that strategy, how do you prioritize what to focus on?

Marie Cobessi: We have a very Russian way to prioritize, so I can share it with you. We rank our project on four dimensions. Basically, what we call "The four Cs." The first one is "Client," is this project helping client satisfaction to grow or is fulfilling a client's needs? The second one is in French, the French word for employee. Does this project help our employees, our teams to focus on what is important for them, and also, does this improve efficiency at the end? The third C is "Cost," does this project help us to reduce cost or to generate revenues or value? The fourth dimension is "Carbon footprint," so does this project help the group reduce the carbon footprint? It's very interesting, because you rank your project, your four Cs, so you give them a score between one and five, and at the end, you have a score out of 20, because you had the four Cs.

If you have a project that is more than 12 out of 20, that is a very top priority project and you can have tangible facts to show it to the executive committee or to your team to understand why this is the top priority project. This is the methodology. To prioritize, also, we need to have the budgets and maybe we can talk about the fact that we have to mix this top priority project with the IT planning, of course, and the budget we have for the year, so we have a roadmap review at the end of each year to prepare the next year.

If we want to launch a top-priority project to use the budget, we need to go in front of the group investment committee and to explain why it's so important. Do we have return on investment, sufficient? For us, it's less than two years, so it's quite challenging, because we need to find either revenues we generate or costs we manage to cut. This is quite challenging, because sometimes it could be a very top-priority project, but the return on investment is not so good, so we need to leverage something to manage it.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good. I find this very interesting. Okay. The first thing I wanted you to talk a little bit about is the subscription model.

Marie Cobessi: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: How did that come to be in terms of the potential it holds for the business and where are you at with that today? How has it been adopted? What do you see as the potential going forward, et cetera?

Marie Cobessi: Yes, there has been a really big shift in our business model and we are not at the end of it. We were before a market leader of after sales service, I think one of the biggest after sales service in Europe, and we had this strong brand identity, the Darty logo you see everywhere. At the end, we were selling traditional two-year warranty for one appliance, for a limited period of time, and we switched to mainly Darty Max subscribers. We have today more than 800,000 subscribers, so it's huge, and we want to reach two million subscribers by the end of 2025. It's not a little subscription service, it's huge. It's a major one in France. For us, it's a bigger way to change the business model. For clients, it's very good, because they don't need to worry anymore, they have everything included. The repair becomes affordable, so it's a big step and, therefore, worthwhile, because before, repairing was not so interesting in terms of money, because appliances are not so... A price that is not current with the repair.

For the group, also, it's of course recurring revenues. This is really interesting, because you have recurring revenues, so you can capitalize on that and you can launch a project on that, but we didn't do that for the recurring revenues. We did that, because we have seen the shifts and the sustainability strategy that we need to go to launch. It's better for our clients, it's better for the planet, and it avoids throwing away products that is no more the... The strategy for tomorrow. Also, we can quote some figures, it's public figures. If you extend one year, the lifetime of your equipment, could be TV, laptop, smartphone, dryer, washing machine, as you want, refrigerator, you save 660 euros per year and you avoid 184 CO2 emissions equivalent of 1000 kilometers by car. Everybody has fridge, everybody has a laptop, so it's really difficult to be a game-changer and do sustainability on that, but if you just extend one year via repair, via also maintenance, you can change the world at the end. The biggest challenge after that was within our team, because people were not ready for this shift. Not at all.

There was a groundbreaking major shift for the team. They were used to deal with claims number, repair files, but not with clients. You said, "Oh," but yes, they come to clients' homes and they do the repair in front of clients, yes, but it was not the client, it was the product they were repairing. Now, it's a client that has a long-term relationship with the technician, so maybe we will come again for another appliance, because he is a subscriber. It's really a shift for them, because it's a long-term relationship with the client they are dealing with and no more just one repair. This is a big, big change. Besides, you have to imagine that, before 2021, repair were decreasing.

I have the graphic, it was like that every year. In 2015, we started to close some repair centers and to decrease the number of technicians by not replacing them and so on. When this shift, from a decline to growth, arrived, it was after Darty Max and after COVID, because COVID's impact was really huge also, we had this growth coming back and nobody was ready for it. We were not dealing with growth, we were dealing with decrease. It's a major shift in the business model, but also a major shift in terms of dealing with decrease and now dealing with growth, so both together.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. I want to talk about a couple areas in terms of the change for customers, but more so the change for employees. You mentioned it was a big shift people weren't ready for, you mentioned earlier the training. How have you tackled the need to get people ready maybe before they really want to accommodate that growth?

Marie Cobessi: There are two maybe ways to answer this question. The first one is that we, as everybody mentioned, try to work on remote assistance, because during the two first years of your appliance's lifetime, we know that half or more than half, even 70% of the breakdowns are not caused by a problem in the product, but by misuse, use, or something like maintenance that is not done, okay? You don't need to replace the spare parts, so basically, you should not need the technician. Okay. It's like your car, we need to change minds of clients, too, to explain that, yes, you have a repair system, but you need also to take care of a product if you want it to last more than five years. It's not the same logic that if you want it to last 20 years, you need to shift the way I'm using it, you need to do maintenance, because if you don't do it, you will not help us in increasing the lifetime of your product.

We want our clients to go online first and to see all the materials we've done for them, so we have more than 300 videos, tutorials, on YouTube. We have the website that is a community, a forum between clients, so you can ask your question and you have the answer right away, or even the answer is already on the website, so you don't need... Via Google, you find it right away. This is an asset for us and, for clients, it's easier, quicker, and worry-free, so it's a clear win-win situation. For the four Cs, it's perfect, because clients are happy, because he has his answer, the technician is happy, because he doesn't want to go to a client just to wash his filter, it's not very... Okay. The cost, because you avoid the cost of the technicians to come, the carbon footprint also.

It's perfect. This is the first pillar, the second one that we worked on, the training program I've talked to before, is an in-house program that lasts one year, during which we take some people that are not technicians at all, and we make them become technicians and have a job at the end. Full-time job. The French state also helps us with that. Now, we are very proud to have highly-experienced technicians, but we know that they are going to retire, so we need more and more new ones. We have now three... No. 30, sorry, percent of technicians that are newbies, so we need to help the generation to talk to each other, to ramp them up as much as possible, because we know that we need three years for them to become fully productive and experienced. This is how we tackle this subject.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. You mentioned earlier the intersection with IT and technology, so how that factors into the strategy and the transformation, how you decide, given what budget is possible, et cetera, what to invest in, how to factor that into the new service delivery model.

Marie Cobessi: This is more about four Cs and the fact that we find a return on investment, so this is really important for us. That's why we launched the first project we launched, the remote assistance. We will launch soon a maintenance project. It's to give clients a report, service history, on when the client bought the product, when there has been a repair, which spare part was changed, when did they do, the client, the maintenance, what can he do as maintenance, because sometimes they don't know and, often, they don't know, so we need to help them. This, we will launch, because it's a top priority as the four Cs. We know it's good for us, even if we invest a bit of money. Also, on remote repair, we invest a lot, because we want our clients to be able to find immediately the solution. Could be alone, could be on the phone with a technician, online with other clients, so this is very key. Also, we work a bit on artificial intelligence, but it's limited for now.

We want to be able to anticipate potential failures, but this is more proof of concept for the moment to say that, in this case, if I have this diagnosis, I know that I don't need to go to the home of our client, I need to do that remotely. The second pillar is the employee journey. It's really important to invest a lot on the employee journey, because we want them, the technicians basically, to focus on repair, avoid focusing on administrative tasks, and so on. We are very proud, also, of a mobile app we developed in-house that helps the technician every step of the way of his workday. It reduces him mental load and it helps him to focus on his main goal, the first-time repair. We want them to be able to first-time repair, the only thing we want from them. We don't want from them other things, so we reduce everything else to have them focus on that.

The last one is the product lifetime extension. It's not an IT budget, because it's not only on IT, it's more on data, but we want to share with our suppliers data on repairs to help them better the durability and the reliability of the appliances we are buying. For example, we push them to have spare parts availability, to even change the manufacturing process for the new products to be more reliable, and sometimes, it's just about difficulties for clients to use the product. It's not about maybe a spare part and so on, just that, and to facilitate that. It avoids phone calls, it avoids clients to have some questions, and it allows them to be happy about the product.

These are the key areas of transformation and then, of course, we have all the IT legacy. That is a big issue for us, because as I explained, it was decreasing the volumes of repair, so we didn't invest at all in IT the past 30 years. It's not only back office, it's also... You will see it on the screen. In repair center, you will see technicians, it's crazy. We invest more, of course, on the road technicians more than in our repair centers, but the technology is really old, not agile at all, and does not support our subscription model. Each time we change Darty Max, we like the service. It's a big, big development inside our IT systems to follow. This is the legacy, so we try to work on it to maybe accelerate the transformation more. This is difficult, also, to convince inside the company of these big investments.

Sarah Nicastro: A lot of different, but very important factors. When you think about, how do you support the new revenue model, how do you continue to improve and refine the customer experience? How do you make sure, to your point, the technicians don't need to worry about anything other than doing what they need to do for the customer? Going back to the question I asked earlier, the prioritization, it gets really hard when they're all very important, right? You have all of these factors in play.

Marie Cobessi: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I want to ask you a couple of questions about your experience as a woman in service, but before we do that, is there anything else we should talk about in terms of the current areas of transformation underway?

Marie Cobessi: No, I've given you the major taglines. For the client parts, what is interesting is, that maybe I didn't mention, we have a very high net promoter score. The highest in the group, more than 80 out of 100, so it's huge for the home repairs. It's really, really high. We value that in the group. Everybody says, "It's fine, the client is very happy." It's difficult sometimes to say, "Yes, but it's not enough." We have a very high net promoter score and we are very proud of that, but we need to better the customer relationship every day. For example, we call back the clients that are detractors, so that didn't answer well to the customer survey. To understand why they were not happy, they explain why, and how can we tackle that after?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Marie Cobessi: It's difficult, because we are in the spotlight in the group. We have this big IT legacy, we have these clients that are very happy if you see the top line, so it's difficult to push more projects and to say, "We need that also." "Why? You already did that." "Yes, if you want to anticipate the next years, we need to do that. It's really important to do it now." Yes, it's complicated.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's great that you have a good net promoter score, but the customer expectations continue to evolve. If you just look at the present day and say, "We're doing good, so I think we're fine," you're going to quickly lag. Yeah.

Marie Cobessi: The client does not rank what he would like. He says, "It was a nice technician and the repair is done, so okay, I'm happy," but he doesn't take into account the rest that he would like or he would have expected on the phone.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mentioned at the beginning that we have a severe shortage of women at these events and I think that's representative of the industry. As a woman in service yourself, can you talk a little bit about what your view is on that topic, and what do we need to do to try and equalize things a bit more?

Marie Cobessi: Yes. On this topic, my position is that women should be more represented at every step of the organization, in service, could be technicians to the management, because it's the only way to change people's minds. If you don't see any woman, you can refer to and say, "Yes, I know that..." We have some women technicians, a few, but we have, say, "It's possible, so you can be a woman and a technician." Then maybe one day say, "Why not me?" We can change things. We need to put, even if it's a few, but to maintain this representation of women and to put them into the spotlight to be able to recruit more women. It's the only way, unfortunately. The first thing, I'm speaking for myself, I prefer to see it like an asset. My peers are only men, of course. When I entered the team, I was like, "Okay, I hope they will not eat me alive."

Like I said, because you have something to put on the table. If you are the only engineer, the only English speaker, or the only mathematician, I don't know, you have directly something to add. This was very surprisingly good news for me, because I said, "Maybe my value is to be not the same as them." It's the same as diversity. If you put diversity, you will have more and more diversity, and then everybody can find space. It's not a disadvantage, on the contrary, I try to say to our government, "It's an advantage, because you can make things change or have a different point of view." I value that more than seeing all the other things. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Is there anything you would say to the mostly men in the room? What do you think? Is there any advice you would have on how to attract more women or recruit more women into these industries?

Marie Cobessi: My opinion is that we need to, as leaders, be a role model on what is work and personal life balance, because sometimes you can show that you are a leader, but you have also a life, that could be your family, but that could be also a hobby, something else. Then people say, "Okay, so you don't need to work all the time. You can have your life." This attracts people that have the same mindset. When I entered top leaders of the group, you don't see that. You don't see people having a really good work-life balance. You are like, "I can't do that, because I don't want to spend my life at work. It's really important for me to have a very interesting work, but at the same time, I don't want to put everything on it."

If I see only people, could be men or women, this is not biggest problem, that are investing all their life in work and they don't have anything else, you say, "Sorry, I don't fund that." I prefer to stay where I am and it's not for me. It could be like anything. It's not only top management, could be a technician, because it's hard. You need to have a long journey and long day, so you need to work hours, so I'm not feeling confident in that. Could be in a store, because you need to work on Sundays, on Saturdays, and could beat up three week later. You're, "No, thank you. I don't want to let you do that. I don't want that ever in life."

If we can show this balance, that we are balanced people with other activities, that helps, as you said, thinking about work also, and we push that, then diversity will come and women will be more confident in doing that. You see sometimes women that they are not the women I want to be. They are people that put everything in their career. You are like, "Maybe it's not such a role model." I don't know if you understand.

Sarah Nicastro: No, I think that's good and it's representative of what a lot of people want more of. Also, maybe there are some people as role models that are putting everything into work, but there may be others who aren't. They're just not showing any other aspects of themselves. This is where, if we can be more human at work, people can connect more to how they could be a part of that rather than just...

Marie Cobessi: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. All right, Marie. Thank you so much.

Marie Cobessi: You're welcome.

Sarah Nicastro: Anything else? Any other thoughts or comments?

Marie Cobessi: No, I think we've done it.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, we've done it.

Marie Cobessi: All right.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you so much, I appreciate you.

Marie Cobessi: Thank you.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

3D printing is one of those technologies that was perpetually on the cusp of widespread adoption, but never quite got there. In the past few years, though, it does seem to have reached a tipping point. There are auto manufacturers and aerospace companies, for example, that are printing parts for their vehicles, and the technology has taken off in some surprising places (like manufacturing dentures).

But in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when global supply chains were shut down, a lot of people began experimenting with these printers to address a short-term problem – part and product availability. That opened a lot of eyes to a key benefit of 3D printing: flexible, decentralized manufacturing in relatively small quantities.

Which is why I have been wondering how field service could potentially benefit from on-demand manufacturing, particularly in industries where wait times on spare parts can degrade service performance.

Is there a business case to be made for field service organizations to invest in 3D printers and create their own spare parts? Short-term (and maybe long-term) the answer is probably no. Even in highly specific applications like HVAC service, there are so many different parts made of different materials, it would be impossible to justify the cost of buying multiple printers just to create a few one-off parts. That doesn't mean that 3D printing can’t help field service, though.

There are examples of companies testing out 3D printing for spare parts applications, but so far they tend to be in industries that rely on in-house mechanics rather than field service engineers – automotive, aerospace, defense, etc. Companies like Airbus and Boeing have reverse engineers and printed parts for older aircraft when parts become obsolete. Porsche also launched a program a few years ago to print custom parts for owners of vintage cars.

In some cases, companies are directly printing the end use part, rather than creating it in a machine shop or trying to find an aftermarket part. In others, they use 3D printing to recreate molds, tools or dyes that would otherwise be extremely expensive to reconstruct.

It is unlikely we would see field service technicians printing parts at a job site – the equipment is too persnickety and (depending on the material) slow. But it could help augment parts warehouse/depot operations for long-tail or obsolete parts. Right now, if a part is hard to get, service organizations are faced with either a long wait time (to find a part, or get one shipped, in some cases internationally) or to create something in a machine shop for large, expensive industrial use cases.

3D printing would have an advantage for hard-to-find parts that can be printed – and not every part and material is printable – or for accelerating the creation of new tooling/molds. Instead of waiting weeks, you can cut that time to days or even hours.

The sweet spot seems to be high-value, low-volume parts with long lead times on either shipping or manufacturing, which would generally limit profitable parts printing to heavy industries.

For example, IMI Critical Engineering, an oil and gas service company, hopes to use 3D printing to help reduce its reliance on stocking expensive, low-utilization spare parts. You can see the benefit here: the parts are very expensive and used in very specific facilities and, although they may not fail often, when they do they need to be replaced very quickly. The company was able to print metal parts that meet industry standards faster than machining them and is evaluating rolling this capability out to multiple facilities. Similarly, Shell Nigeria was able to reverse engineer and print an obsolete seal cover for a mooring buoy at an offshore site, cutting lead time from 16 weeks down to two, and reducing replacement costs by 90%.

On the other end of the spectrum, UK-based Rowse (an electrical and pneumatics equipment supplier) used 3D printing to create a replacement bracket for its label printers that couldn't be sourced anywhere else. Printing the bracket saved the company the expense of having to buy all new printers.

Most field service organizations do not operate machine shops, though, and probably don't have the engineering expertise on hand to create a part from scratch. There are third-party manufacturing service firms that do have that equipment and expertise, though, and FSOs struggling with increasing spare part sourcing issues might want to start talking to their suppliers about solutions that leverage outsourced 3D printing where it makes sense (mainly for obsolete parts that won't raise any intellectual property concerns or issues with manufacturer agreements).

Even though we may never see 3D printers in the back of technicians’ vans, printed spare parts might be one way that suppliers and manufacturers can help the field service industry address supply chain snags, parts shortages, and reduce long wait times.

Do you have experience with 3D printing spare parts, or other novel ways to solve parts shortage issues? I would love to hear about them.

In a session from the Future of Field Service Live Tour stop in Birmingham, UK, Sarah talks with Ged Cranny, Sr. Consultant, Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe about how Konica Minolta is stepping up to face the realities of why, when, and how service delivery is evolving by putting in place a remote-by-default approach.

Sarah Nicastro: Ged, welcome.

Ged Cranny: Nice to meet you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. All right, go ahead and get comfortable. So we're going to talk about Konica Minolta's remote by default mission and plan of attack. So as I mentioned this morning in one of my trends is this idea of how much opportunity there is to really evolve how we're delivering service and what that looks like. So that's what we're going to focus on. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about yourself?

Ged Cranny: Yeah, I'm Ged Cranny. I've worked for Konica Minolta products since I was 17 years old. I saw an advert in the paper and thought, company car, didn't like driving my dad's car. It was in Allegro if you're old enough to remember what one of them is. And came into an industry that stopped me going in the RAF, if I'm honest. Found out that from my view of the world, people were lazy in this sort of organization and loved the fact that I was traveling around the Northeast as a photocopier engineer.

Worked my way up through the company I worked in, which was a dealership and they were bought by a very large American company from Florida and found some wonderful people who saw some good in me. Spent a lot of invested time like your last speaker was talking about. Give me the opportunity to run the UK or to work with the teams within the UK. And then Konica came literally out of the blue and just offered me a job to bring everything into a hub. I think one of your first speakers was talking about buying lots of different companies, but you needed to have a hub to bring everything in.

So my talents in the American company were helping buy companies and bringing them in. So this is what they wanted to use. I believed it was a five-year job and I would do that for five years and go do something else. I managed to last 21 years, 22 years, and I was leaving Konica Minolta and in my six months of leaving, head office in Europe asked me would I become a consultant. I hate the word consultant, but that's the senior consultant that I am now.

My job is to work with the 27 different leaders across Europe and help them with operational performance analytics. And then this IFS project came up and in 2017 I really bought into... We'd had shift left, everybody's had shift left where your accountants have started this thing about it's expensive to have engineers go in the field, let's get rid of lots of engineers by fixing things over the phone. We've had IoT since the '80s, it was a product in the manufacturing area to age the machines really fast so we could see them aging and see what they would look like after five years by all the sensors. And somebody in marketing went, "It should be really good to get the meter readings." So we spent a lot of time doing that. We started to get a little bit brighter. Reporting got a little bit better. So we were able-

Sarah Nicastro: Did you notice how when you said brighter the sun-

Ged Cranny: Did it?

Sarah Nicastro: ... lightened up the whole room?

Ged Cranny: I just thought it was my eyes.

So we were able to start utilizing our data for predictive maintenance. And I've got a really great boss, Andre, and he suddenly came up with this remote by default. About 2017, I was still leader in the UK then. And I really bought into it because it was a story you could talk to. Engineers shift left, they were suspicious. They thought this is getting rid of us.

Remote by default, you started playing to their technical brains, i.e. what can we do? What's the art of possible? And when you started sitting down and talking default, it's not a sort of Brexit 51/49 type vote. It's got to be in my brain, maybe I'm just a bit weird, but 60% plus fixing. We're coming from like 20%, 25%. So how do you sit down with the engineers and say, "What are we going to do? We've got an aging workforce." 2017 my average age of my engineers was 48. I listen in to this call still in the UK and each week somebody is having an anniversary. And generally if you get over 20 years, he's one of our engineers. When you get over 30 years, it's definitely one of our engineers and we're now getting 40 years.

What are you going to do with that talent? They carry huge cases around. They drive around, they go out in the rain. The UK's not the best place for sunshine, so they're out every single day carrying around. So people getting to sort of my age, we've come through the biggest growth in our finance, understanding our financial benefits, house owning. So these guys are going, "Wow, actually I'm going to go and be a grandad. I'm going to walk away because I don't want to do this." But when you start talking about being on a service desk and using their talent and then talking to the new generations in a different way and utilizing different terms, and that's why I'm excited to do this.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's awesome. So it sounds like you're telling me.... Your journey at Konica made me think of the quote, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." And here you are. So one of the things I want to talk about is when we talk about remote service, I think one of the initial reactions is people tend to think remote only instead of remote first. And that can cause some panic or some trepidation. So can you talk a little bit about, when you say remote by default specifically, what is the aim? What are we looking to accomplish in using remote service?

Ged Cranny: So create the different options that our customers need to interface with us. So not only are our engineers aging, so is our customer base, but also we've got the younger customer base coming through who don't use paper. Funny enough, we use paper. They don't want... They've been brought up in a world where instant fix, so my app doesn't work, instant fix. I think somebody said, "Switch off, switch on, and the world comes back to life again." They're not waiting for somebody to wake up at eight o'clock in the morning, have a service desk and make a call. They want their complaint in there and then. They want somebody to give them a message to say that the engineer is being booked or they want some fixes coming back towards them.

So it's not just about building the desk, changing the attitude. It's about working with your customers and understand your customers' attitude. I always warn people, as my son was growing up, I realized when he was about 16 that when he got to 40, as a printing business, we had a problem. He's 40 next week. So you suddenly start to, all the things that I could see him doing, no paper, instant, wants to fix, wasn't interested in having thousands of CDs about the house. He wanted everything on his Pod. He wanted to be able to access it and if them access points weren't there, he wanted instant fix. Didn't expect what was happening in the world, how many servers were creating this and how much CO2 he was creating. He just wanted it.

That's the thing that we have to start. We have to start with how do you interface with your aging population? How would you with the late '80s, '90s people and definitely, definitely how would you interface with the 2000s? Because they're now arriving in the workplace. They're not the influencers, but they will be in 10 years' time. So start thinking now about how them people interact. If you've got children and they're finishing university now, start watching what they're doing. Start understanding how they're interacting with the world because they interact differently than I interact with the world, but you've got to create the opportunity for all these pieces.

So when I say about remote first, we found out that let's get our desks. Have we got them right? No, not yet. We've got to get our knowledge bases. Well, when you start talking about knowledge bases, the first thing our accountants did was go, "How many people can we get rid of? Because we've got a knowledge base.? And I went, "You can't." So if you've got 10 people on the desk, the 10 people on the desk have still got to work. But we need to take four of them to teach the baby to understand, to get it into junior school, to get it into senior school, to get it to university. And when it gets to university, guess what? Its thirst for knowledge doesn't reduce, it actually gets bigger, but so does the need to teach it. So as much as you think that you will replace people, I think you'll create new rules and different ways of working.

And then we also found out that... I work for a manufacturer, Konica Minolta. The factories output products that deliver, if I'm talking about the print side, they deliver print. The service organization delivers outcomes. So they're two different things. So talking back to the factories and definitely the change in the customer attitude with the pandemic, i.e. the biosecurity, we don't want people onsite, opened the doors for us to be able to go back to Japan and say, "Look, it's great. Your products are fantastic. They're well-made, but we need to have more customer interaction. The customer wants more interaction and we have to be able to support that."

And now what's come out of all of this is smart hands. Somebody was talking in one of the meetings I was in about you bring more diversity by bringing the smart hands piece, then you bring more enlightenment to everybody so that we can be more diverse. And instead of just sticking with let's have white males as our engineers, we suddenly sit around and say, wait a minute. 25% of most of the engineering jobs, if you break it down, are actually technical. The rest of it is getting ready, being prepared. Understand your customer, talk to your customer, listen and all the tools. Not being funny, and I might just get stones thrown at me as some people have already threatened, but the female population are 10 times better than the male population at doing that. And I'm not being sexist. If I get thrown off-stage, do it now.

Sarah Nicastro: I mean, I'm not going to throw you off-stage for saying that. No, I think it's a good point. And in one of the breakout sessions, we also had some different discussions about how when we start thinking about how service delivery is changing, we can start to think about the creation of new roles and then that can broaden the types of people that ultimately we can have working in the organization. Can we talk a little bit, Ged, I want to talk about what are the technological components to this, right? So when you think about how you're enabling the workforce differently, how are you doing that? What combination of things are you using for the remote by default? And then let's talk a little bit more about the impact on customers and the impact on the organization.

Ged Cranny: Okay. I'll start the journey with the customer, if you don't mind.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure.

Ged Cranny: And then I'll bring it back through to the engineer.

Sarah Nicastro: I can tell, Ged, you're going to start wherever you want to start and that is perfectly fine. This reminds me of Mike Gosling.

Ged Cranny: Go on.

Sarah Nicastro: You're fine. Last year in London, I think I probably only had to ask you one question, and then a half an hour later I said, "Well, thanks for the break, Mike. That was great."

Ged Cranny: He's actually the person who brought me to come here today.

Sarah Nicastro: Well, there you go. Yeah.

Ged Cranny: I enjoyed that session so well.

You've got all of your portals, but your portals that you built early, which we did, were built about what we wanted and not what the customer wanted. So we've had to address the portals and how the portals interface with different people, and that's an ongoing process. Then we had to link the knowledge bases and we had lots of different knowledge bases from lots of different countries with lots of different ways of interpreting it. So we've needed people to sit there and start to make them knowledge bases. We've bought tools. So we bought a ticketing tool because the need for our IT services was completely different from the print services and it was a multiple level jobs. So we might have five days or even three months of work with multiple touch points. And the SAP system couldn't do it.

So we'd already invested in a ticketing tool. That ticketing tool allows us then to start breaking out from there and making the service desk more transparent, more open, and with more flexibility to do different parts, but also link our desks, our portals, our knowledge bases together. The discussions with IT were hilarious, if you've got a sense of humor, but everybody's going in different lines. So we had a different project going, which was called SPSC, and that was literally aligning all the different areas of which would be the master system where we would make data lakes. And as much as it all sounds mad to you at the present moment in time, because it did to me as a techie, sitting with the IT people, they've hidden places, they've got your databases in one place, got your knowledge pools in another place, and then trying to bring all that work together and then link it to the cloud was really, really difficult.

And then it became really obvious we needed a field service enablement tool that absolutely delivered 100%. Because if the desks were going to interrogate, whether by looking into the back of the machines with the predictive maintenance, whether they did it by talking to the customer, whether the customer had gone through our knowledge bases and then got sick and wanted to get an engineer there, we had to be better than 85% right, which in service organizations, 85% right, that's okay. It's not in the world we live in anymore. So we found IFS and we linked that and we started a process by getting 27 different countries to align their processes. That's why I have a sense of humor, if I'm honest.

Sarah Nicastro: I bet.

Ged Cranny: It's not like America where everybody speaks the same language. When they get angry, everybody reverts to their language. I'm sure I heard my name a few times with derogatory words coming into it, but we managed to get a bunch of advocates to agree that this was the process we would work. We used that to go out and we invited 15 different companies to come and see us. Of that, we took five through to RFI and we found the tool, or we feel we found the tool that will deliver for the long term. The difficulty I found: culture eats technology or even strategy for breakfast.

So we spent five months on the interfaces. We spent three weeks talking in pandemic over teams to people about the changes, the effects that this would have on the team. And when we launched, everything was fine. We missed the middle management, we didn't get the middle management piece. And I think it was said by our last person on the stand was if you middle management's not there, they don't push. So somebody pushes back, somebody sees his push, but somebody pushes back, somebody pushes back.

So again, sit down, take the time, listen to what's being said about understanding what the people do for a living. The tool will deliver how the tool wants to win and how you set it to win. So think about your SLAs, think about how it fits right back in that journey to the service desk, to the remote by default and what you're going to do, what's your outputs, how is it going to work? So we linked IFS to SAP, SAP links to ServiceNow for the ticketing tool. And then we've got the portals through ServiceNow, but everything revolves around SAP within our business.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I had a podcast maybe a couple of months ago with a woman who is a neuroscientist, and we were talking about the neuroscience of change management and it was really interesting and I was just thinking about how you said the culture part and how that's often the toughest part and then the focus on middle management. But one of the points she made that I really, really liked is simple, but it's just that we have to remember that resistance to change, it's like a physiological response. So the point being it's not abnormal, it's not uncommon, it's not even avoidable really. You can mitigate it, you can minimize it, but you have to expect that because that's just kind of human response. So I think that sometimes when you're introducing a big change and you get that initial resistance, you can panic or feel like, are we doing the wrong thing, or get frustrated that that response is coming and let that cloud how you work through it. But really we need to remember that that's just very, very normal and plan for that and help people get to the other side of that.

Ged Cranny: I think when you do your testing, you do your testing in a laboratory, four or five incidents, 20 incidents. When you're opening up and the full day comes and I go to somewhere I don't like to go to, I heard it last year in London and it was something that resonated in my small brain was if they don't like going to King's Cross, tell them they're going to King's Cross. Sorry. And the reason being is you've got to stick to the targets that you set, but people have got to understand the why of what you're trying to achieve. And as much as we spoke about the system of giving one call at a time and the benefits of giving one call at a time, you're going to go here, but we're going to work you home, which the system did.

What the system did also was it sent them at eight o'clock in the morning to somewhere maybe an hour and a half away because it was already working for the last call of the day. And what happened was that you had a culture of actually I get my first call, I'm going to pick three different incidences. I'm going to do what I want to do and I'm going to do it in the order I want to do it. And actually I'm going to take the kids to school. Our break-fix starts at eight o'clock. By 11 o'clock, 70% is in there. 70% of our work is break-fix. So with two and four-hour response times, guess what? You've got to be rolling towards these things and you've got to be thinking really, really quickly. So the fact that these people were suddenly being a little bit more stricter, they realized and the realization, they never calculated that realization until it became 100% of their jobs. And I think even doing it slowly wouldn't help.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So just to recap here, you knew going into this that remote by default means to solve as many issues as you can remotely and to have technicians as informed as possible when they do need to go onsite, but that you were not going to resolve every issue remotely. It's just a matter of not wasting trips to go out and basically diagnose or to do things that could be done remotely. So that's one part of this. And then you put IFS in place to make sure that the work you are doing onsite is optimized. I know you mentioned that with the nature of Konica's business, this was sort of something that you knew at some point was going to become necessary. You needed to take that inefficiency out and maximize productivity. How would you describe the impact to customers of the remote by default approach?

Ged Cranny: Before pandemic, because of the way the contracts were, because of the way for 20, 30, 40 years, we've dealt with our customers, quite often you would get, "My contract says you will come to site. I'm not interested in helping." It changed very, very quickly.

Sarah Nicastro: During the pandemic.

Ged Cranny: It actually changed just... As the pandemic started, I was explaining to somebody earlier on today, offices were being shut because somebody came into the office, they had COVID, so they had to shut the office down and anybody who was in the office had to go and self-isolate because there were the rules. So people suddenly realized about the biosecurity of their offices. And so the attitude changed. So it was more, "We don't want an engineer to come to site, we want you to fix it. What can you do?" And we've had all of the IoT, we just didn't use it. We didn't have the tools in the background to use it.

So as I said, as we came through 2010, 2015, we started to build the data mining, the data lakes to be able to start doing predictive maintenance, to start being able to predict where we needed to put parts around the UK so we don't have thousands and thousands or millions and millions worth of pounds worth of parts just sitting in the back house. So putting them in the right places. So it's aligning all of these different things. But then it was some of the bigger companies, they were really ready to embrace these sort of things. And the smaller companies were very much, "My contract says this." We do a lot with government and it was very much, "Our contract says this because that's the ABC that we play to." Then playbooks have been changed. And the more that we have our quality meetings with people, the more we've shown them the benefits of what we've been doing, the more we're able to expand on that and show them that, look, actually this is a different way, it's a better way. And we're going to put smart hands.

So we would send an engineer from Germany to one of our security camera systems to change a modem. As bad as I was an engineer, even I can change a modem. So how much fun would it be if you organized the IFS tool to be able to organize the specialist in the desk, the engineer, smart hands, to go onto the site, save the flight from Germany, me to work in, I'll say York for you because you'll know where that is. Me to do a job in York, which is 30 miles for me to drive. I arrive onsite, the system tells the specialist I'm arriving onsite, the specialist then helps me. Legally I've had all of the training that keeps me legal, but then the specialist is able to see what's happening and then he will complete the job. I'm just the smart hands onsite.

Again, it brings in more enablement, it brings in different ways of thinking. It brings in different ways we can train people. And it also brings in the opportunity that we can have more of a gig workforce because that's a big area we've not tapped into, which is the gig workforce. And that's something we put into our tender with all of the people who came for the field enablement was the ability at some point in the future to be able to tap into that gig economy.

Sarah Nicastro: A couple of points I just wanted to come back to real quick before we wrap up is, so we talked this morning about organizations that are on the servitization journey or are delivering outcomes. This idea of how much is remote versus how much onsite doesn't necessarily matter because it's just the outcome. Companies though that aren't delivering outcomes, that are still delivering service, whether that's through contract or whatever the arrangement is, can sometimes be deterred by that objection of, no, the contract says you'll be here. So that's what it is.

And again, I think we need to think about how to shift that conversation to a value-based conversation. And we don't necessarily naturally do that because the conversation has always been a time and materials conversation. But I think there's just as much argument for organizations, any organization to leverage this technology. I think we need to get more comfortable pushing back to, well, would you prefer resolution in 30 minutes or in X amount of hours or days? Again, the same way we talked about in the servitization session, maybe you lead with the companies, to your point, that are more open to that and focus on those first and worry about some others later.

The other point of that though is you mentioned the business review sessions. One way we need to remember to offset less time onsite is by more insight, more information. So it can't just be that the value you provide becomes less visible. It's less visible in terms of a technician being there. But you need to then take the data of here's how many failures were avoided, here's how many issues were handled remotely, here's what that equates to in terms of uptime of your equipment, et cetera. Give them back the insight that represents the value that you used to accomplish by sending someone onsite. So I think it's just, again, thinking about how we shift that narrative and the different ways to represent remote value in a way that will resonate. Because we know that it's there, it's just a matter of its new and it's different.

Ged, last question is, what do you think... Well, I have a couple more, but we only have time for one. I'm going to ask you two though. What's the biggest lesson you've learned so far and where do you see this going in the future? So what do you think the future is of remote by default for Konica?

Ged Cranny: First one, biggest issue, culture eats strategy for breakfast. And spend-

Sarah Nicastro: I would've bet you would say that.

Ged Cranny: Yeah, I think you would. Spend more time. You can speak to people and they will nod their heads, especially in a large group because everybody else is not in their head. So 90% of people will nod their heads. Explain to people what the changes would be, but the why and what the benefits are. But not just the benefits to the company, the benefits to them, but also the negatives of if you don't and what problems that brings. But also if it brings opportunities, try and bring the opportunities to the front. What is it? What does it mean to Konica Minolta and where do we go?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So what do you think of the future of remote by default, what does that look like for Konica? What will happen next?

Ged Cranny: We will start getting the portals and the first point of contact to the customers a lot better using the new tools that are available with the IoT that we have back to their machine. So linking the IoT from their machine back into the conversation, linking it into the AI that's talking to the partner, if it's beyond them, back into the desk. But learning and feeding that back in. We are working on harmonizing three desks across the world, but not taking out the local desks. So we've got the local desk linked for nine till five, but then what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that the global desks take on more of, I think somebody called it the boring work, where you push the red button and you push the red button. So all the automated work is going to go into three desks so that we can do 24 hour, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That's where I see it.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Exciting stuff.

Ged Cranny: Hopefully.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for coming and sharing with us.

Ged Cranny: Sorry for talking too much.

Sarah Nicastro: Appreciate it.

Ged Cranny: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you.

Ged Cranny: Sorry, I talk too much.

It’s important for companies to create diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs – particularly in industries that have traditionally skewed very white, very male, or both. At the same time, DEI tends to draw a lot of criticism from a number of fronts. Some people think these programs are just a bandaid or corporate whitewashing; others think they aren't necessary at all.

While I’d never agree the effort isn’t necessary, some of these criticisms have points of merit – and it's because, regardless of intent, many DEI initiatives are poorly planned and executed. To gain some insight on an effective way to approach DEI, I interviewed Dr. Randal D. Pinkett, author of Data-Driven DEI. He is the co-founder of BCT Partners, and author or co-author of other diversity and business management books. He is an electrical engineer by training, was the first African American to receive a Rhodes Scholarship at Rutgers and was the winner on Season Four of The Apprentice.

Your new book is called Data-Driven DEI. What is the significance of data to a DEI effort?

Data represents to DEI what an instrumental panel represents to a plane. Long before there were instrument panels, people were able to fly planes. It was significantly harder without the instrument panel. Instrument panels have made the journey more efficient and effective at every step along the way. Similarly, improving DEI can be achieved without data, but it is significantly harder. Data makes the DEI journey more efficient and effective at every step along the way.

You say that any effort to mitigate bias and grow inclusivity must begin with people. What do you mean?

Organizations don’t change. People change. Therefore, any effort to transform organizations with more diverse representation, more equitable practices, and more inclusive cultures, can only be achieved by transforming people. If you don’t change; if I don’t change; if we don’t change, then the status quo remains. That is why the primary audience for Data-Driven DEI is people – anyone seeking greater DEI in their personal and professional life – and the secondary audience is DEI managers, leaders, executives, and champions responsible for the DEI efforts at their organization. The book provides a roadmap and the website (www.datadrivendei.com) provides free tools, templates, metrics, resources, best practices, and case studies to embark upon a personal DEI journey or an organizational DEI journey.

For the skeptics, can you summarize the business and personal benefits of DEI?

The business benefits are myriad and have to do with:

Win the competition for talent – Businesses that have a strong commitment to DEI are better positioned to recruit and retain skilled workers in today’s marketplace.
Strengthen customer orientation – When you understand and embrace the diverse dimensions of customers and markets, you are best able to capture them.
Increase employee trust, retention, engagement, satisfaction, and performance – There is strong evidence that diverse teams increase employee satisfaction and reduce conflicts between groups, improving collaboration and loyalty.
Improve decision making and fostering innovation – Research shows that while diverse teams take longer to achieve cohesiveness and make decisions, they make better decisions.
Enhance the organization’s image – Incorporating a strong DEI agenda will improve your organization’s image to employees as well as customers.
Improve the financial bottom line – Several studies have found that corporations that embrace gender and ethnic diversity on their leadership teams outperform their competition financially.

The list of personal benefits is even longer and includes:

Enhance personal growth – Diverse relationships with people from different backgrounds and perspectives positively challenge you to move beyond your comfort zone into your growth zone and become a better person today than yesterday.
Expand diversity of thought (cognitive diversity) – DEI enables you to tap into the diverse thinking of others to make better decisions, generate better ideas, improve problem solving, and foster greater innovation.
Improve health and wellness – Research has found that individuals with more diverse relationships had a lower risk of mortality and experienced less cognitive and physical decline.
Enrich learning and performance at school and work – Diversity of all kinds is generally associated with positive learning and performance outcomes.
Mitigate biases and negative stereotypes – Exposure to diversity can ameliorate negative stereotypes and biases people may have about people from different backgrounds and perspectives.
Enlarge network of relationships – Workers with more diverse personal relationships are better at building a racially diverse network on the job.
Increase range of opportunities – Having a larger and more diverse professional network will lead to higher-performing teams and present a wider spectrum of opportunities.
Achieve career success – Research has found that individuals with relationships that are rich with opportunities to connect people that would otherwise be disconnected, receive more positive evaluations, earlier promotions, and higher compensation.
Expand civic engagement and positive outcomes for others – Increased exposure to diversity is positively associated with civic engagement.

In Data-Driven DEI, you lay out a five-step approach to creating measurable and impactful DEI initiatives. The first step involves an assessment of your current reality. Why is this such an important step?

The five-step cycle in Data-Driven DEI is comprised of the following steps: (1) DEI Inventory (perform an assessment), (2) DEI Imperatives (establish objectives and goals), (3) DEI Insights (leverage promising and proven practices), (4) DEI Initiatives (determine strategies and measures), and (5) DEI Impact (evaluate results). It is a never-ending cycle. Assessment is the first and most important step because it helps you to establish a baseline for where you are along your personal and/or organizational DEI journey. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you are going. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Ultimately, your DEI strategy will only be as good as your DEI assessment.

How can people and organizations determine if their DEI initiatives have been effective?

Data-Driven DEI embraces a strategic planning framework, OGSM, which stands for objectives, goals, strategies, and measures. It is a method that guides people and organizations through a DEI strategic planning process:

Objectives represent broad and overarching aims such as “To become a more inclusive leader.”
Goals are the specific, quantifiable, and qualifiable metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each objective such as “Increase my rating as a ‘bridge builder’ on the Intrinsic Inclusion™ Inventory from ‘growing to ‘mastering’ within the next 12 to 18 months.”
Strategies represent the initiatives, activities and actions that will be taken to fulfill the objectives and achieve the goals such as “Establish a book club to read, Intrinsic Inclusion: Rebooting Your Biased Brain by Janet B. Reid, Ph.D., and Vincent R. Brown.”
Measures are the specific, quantifiable, and qualifiable measures to gauge progress against each strategy such as “Complete the book within six months and host four book club meetings to facilitate dialogue and deepen learning.”

Goals allow you to know if you have been effective in accomplishing your objectives (i.e., outcomes). Measures allow you to know if you have been effective in completing your strategies (i.e., outputs). Clearly defined objectives, goals, strategies, and measures enable people and organizations to gauge progress, measure results, and demonstrate impact and, above all, engender accountability.

What’s the biggest misstep you see leaders make in their DEI efforts?

The biggest misstep I see leaders make in their DEI efforts is remaining on silent on DEI issues due to fear. They are afraid of saying the wrong thing or insulting others or being labelled a racist or sexist and the like. My advice to leaders is to find your voice on matters relating to DEI. You must educate yourself and have command of DEI just as you must educate yourself and have command of other disciplines such as finance, marketing, sales, and operations. Take baby steps to slowly find your voice in safe spaces and smaller groups and very soon you will be able to exercise and amplify your voice in more challenging spaces and larger groups. It’s OK to make mistakes as you can recover from them. It’s not OK to remain silent about DEI issues that, if addressed, promote dignity, humanity, and respect for all. This reminds me of the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who once said, “We will not remember the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.” A leader should never be a silent friend, but rather, a vocal and active ally.

Sarah shares a synopsis of the topics discussed at the Future of Field Service Live Tour 2023 stop in Düsseldorf on June 21st.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today I'm going to be sharing with you a bit of a recap and summary of the fifth out of six Future of Field Service live tour of events for 2023, which we just wrapped, which was in Dusseldorf, Germany. I can't believe that five out of the six events have passed in sort of a flurry of activity and look forward to our sixth and final event, which will be in Stockholm on October 10th, but had a great time in Germany and a really good lineup of speakers, really good attendance and very engaged audience. So let me share with you a little bit of what went on.

So the first session we had of the day was a session on embracing the power of remote capabilities to create modern service delivery models. This was with Nina Li, who is the senior director for Global Enterprise Operations Center at Johnson Controls. So Nina talked a lot about some of the changes that Johnson Controls has made in centralizing its remote capabilities to really start to dig into creating synergy in the customer experience and in the service delivery model of how remote is used, how it compliments and ties in with field service capabilities from a global standpoint. So it was really interesting to hear how they're looking at this, what they've done. She talked about the fact that these centralized remote centers give service technicians some really good opportunity to kind of start a new phase of their careers. That's where a lot of those employees are coming from.

She talked about how to, well, first we talked about why remote is so, so important for Johnson Controls, how it impacts the future of the organization in terms of just being effective and also working within the context of today's talent realities and then also how it impacts both Johnson Controls and its customers in terms of sustainability initiatives and the benefits that exist on both sides.

So we also talked about how teams are interfacing with one another and how the company is working to make sure that the service experience is seamless for customers. We talked about some of the misconceptions that arise when we talk about remote so employees being fearful that it will replace their jobs and customers objecting to the idea of people being onsite or visible less and how Johnson Controls is mitigating those things. And Nina said at the end of the session in response to a question from the audience, the reality is if you're not investing in remote and figuring out what this looks like for your organization, you may very well be out of business in a couple of years. And I think that's a really good point. This is an area of immense opportunity for service organizations and I think it's very much the way of the future. So that's a very good piece of advice to heed.

Next up, we had a session on bringing service into the DNA of a historically product-centric business with Lucas Rigotto, who is the Chief Service officer at GEA. And Lucas shared a lot what his journey at GEA has looked like so far. He's been there for around nine months, and how big of a mindset shift it is to really ensure that service is top of mind and has a voice in an organization that traditionally has been very, very product focused. So he talked about the huge potential that service holds for GEA and the realization of that potential at the top, how important that is to be able to really undertake the change that he is leading within the organization. And really, we talked a lot about how that type of mindset shift and evolution is such a people-centric thing.

So Lucas spoke a lot about how he is spending time with teams, how he is making leaders all the way down to frontline employees feel a part of the shift that's going on. We talked about how incorporating service into a company's DNA does not have to mean that you omit or overlook or deprioritize your product legacy. It's simply a matter of complimenting that and really just talked about some of the things that are challenging, but also some of the things that he is very excited about.

We broke out for some great round table discussions on some of those topics. And then in the afternoon we had our next interview session was on embracing the full potential of cloud-based customer service. That was with Razvan Nanciu, who is the General Manager of CSSD at KYOCERA Document Solutions Europe. So Razvan really talked again about this idea of eliminating silos within the customer experience and looking at service holistically to make sure that functions are working together, to make sure that the customer experience is again, seamless, intuitive, that companies are getting insights that are valuable to them as a part of the overall value proposition. He talked a lot about sort of the commercial side and what goes into considering how you sell service when service is evolving significantly for an organization, making sure that teams are educated and equipped to have those value-based conversations.

And I think another important point that Razvan made is that there are so, so, so many technological capabilities that are really ready today to be leveraged and that it's important to start with a strong foundation, which KYOCERA did with IFS, but also to be pushing to avoid complacency, to continue to leverage automation capabilities, AI capabilities, to continue to refine internally how effective and efficient you are and externally, continuing to evaluate how you can grow and expand your value proposition and continue to get close and stay close to your customers.

Next up, we had a session on how a predictive approach to spare parts boosts service efficiency with Ivo Siebers, who is the Senior Vice President for Global Logistics at TK Elevator. So some of you may remember that Ivo was not too long ago on the podcast and talked about this project that TK Elevator has undertaken around spare part business excellence. But I think it was a really interesting conversation, obviously sharing what they have done in terms of using predictive capabilities and automation and really making the most of today's technologies in terms of its spare parts business. But there were a lot of elements of this conversation that could be applied to any area of the service business where you're looking to increase automation, become more predictive, really reduce manual efforts. So TK Elevator's story around its spare part business excellence project is really impressive. Before this project technicians had parts available for about 20% of cases, and with the new system and really just being in the early stages of the new system, they're already at 80% availability. So very impressive.

Ivo spoke about some of the elements that maybe surprised him a bit on the journey. So the idea of individuals, humans tend to maybe overshoot on how well optimized we think things are versus the reality, how important data integrity is when you're looking at anything related to predictive analytics. Also, the idea of, again, change management. So he also spoke about facing the emotions from some team members that if they're going in a predictive path, would that impact jobs. I think this is a recurring theme that we need to be very aware of because we sort of spoke at the event that as leaders in this space who know the realities of the talent gap, that's not really even crossing a lot of minds, but for people on the frontline who feel that maybe their knowledge or skills will become redundant if they don't have that reassurance that they are still needed in even a different capacity, that can be quite concerning.

Our last interview session was on balancing today's business needs with preparation for the future, which was with Helge Bruemmer, who is the Global Field Service Manager for Global Service Operations at Alfa Laval. And what we talked about here is really the tight rope that all service leaders walk between meeting the present day needs of the business, including putting out fires that would impact customer experience, hitting business metrics and quarterly annual goals with also looking ahead and putting time into innovation, transformation, service evolution, et cetera.

So Helge shared some of thoughts on how and why that is so challenging and also maybe some of the things that we need to consider to do things differently. So whether that's having a team dedicated to the longer term or making sure that people have the time and ability to look longer term, making sure we're focusing enough. One of his points was on not only the talent topic, but on continual improvement of talent training development. So it was a really good conversation that I think everyone in the room related to because to some degree everyone's walking that tightrope.

We had a couple more round table discussions in the afternoon and then a quick summary and some cocktails and networking. It was a great day. I have been a little bit rundown with all of the travel, all of the events, but this was such a wonderful note to press pause on.

I feel like I repeat this a lot, but some of the feedback I heard is that people just feel so much less alone when they're in a room of their peers and understand that others face the same or very similar challenges. People comment on how much they have in common and how surprising that is when they're in a room with people that are in very different industries of their own. People told me that they were inspired by points that were made, attitudes people presented, thoughts that people shared, and I've said this before, but I just feel so thankful to be in a position to bring folks together. To me, that's what it's all about. I enjoy writing articles and recording podcasts, but there's nothing about what I do that I love more than building community and helping people in similar roles come together in ways that they can stay in touch and help one another. So it was a great event from that perspective and greatly appreciate our five wonderful speakers and everyone that joined and made the day a success.

As I mentioned at the beginning, we only have one event left for 2023, which is in Stockholm, October 10th. So if you are in the Nordics or can get there for that event, go ahead and head to the website to register. I'm sure it will be wonderful. You can also register for the Future of Field Service Insider so that you are getting the latest content delivered to your inbox every other week. Make sure that you can peruse the articles and podcasts and stay up to date on anything relevant to you.

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.

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