Author: sarah.nicastro@ifs.com

AI in Action: Less Chasing Trends, More Creating Value | UNSCRIPTED

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February 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Labor Shortage Remains a Major Challenge – What’s Your Strategy for Tackling It?

February 3, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Labor Shortage Remains a Major Challenge – What’s Your Strategy for Tackling It?

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

As we kick off 2020 with a lot of talk about service transformation, migrating to outcomes, and how to leverage technologies like AI, there’s a need to revisit a topic that remains top of mind for many service organizations: the need for new technicians. According to a recent Forbes article, America is facing an unprecedented skilled labor shortage – the Department of Labor reported in January 2019 that the US economy had 7.6 million unfilled jobs, but only 6.5 million people were looking for work.

While you can’t control this challenge, you do need to have a strategy for how to handle it. This means examining your company’s processes and methods for recruitment, hiring, and retention and thinking about what you need to change to adapt. Here are five areas to consider as you face this hurdle in 2020:

#1: Find ways to influence early. Gone are the days of posting open positions and having qualified candidates line up. You’re going to have to work harder than that now. Moreover, you need to think about who you actually need to influence, and in most cases, this is young adults of high school age – and some would argue even younger (as well as to a lesser degree, their parents). This is because much of the trade labor shortage is due to kids feeling that college is the “only” option for them. Companies that are having success with recruiting have adapted and have found ways to get in front of these kids to show them the potential the trades offer – to plant the seed that there’s more than one viable path to success. This can be done through career fairs, working directly with schools to come and speak or put on a sponsored event, advertising around schools, thinking about venues and activities that kids those ages would be frequenting and brainstorming how to get a message there, and so on. But the key here is that getting your message in front of a 30-something candidate is starting too late – to really impact this issue, you have to influence early.

#2: Recognize – and emphasize – how service has changed (and is changing). With all of the ways service has become more customer-centric and technology-driven, the job of a technician doesn’t look today like it did five or ten years ago. The perception these younger candidates have about what the work of a service technician is may be outdated, and it’s very important to message around what service looks like today. It isn’t just turning a wrench – it’s being a customer service expert; it’s utilizing soft skills and consultative selling; it’s using technology like IoT, AI, and AR. These are changes that your older technicians may have met with resistance, but your younger prospective candidates may be excited about.

#3: Work harder so you can hire smarter. Just as the days of posting jobs and having candidates line up are gone, so too are the days of being able to hire experienced technicians – there simply isn’t enough of them to go around. You have to work harder for talent today, period. This means focusing on hiring for talent, skills, and potential rather than experience. You need to seek out the characteristics and traits that you know are ingredients to success with your company, and then do the work of training those employees on how to do your particular flavor of service. The technical part is trainable – the demeanor, drive, and inclination is not. Set up mentorship programs, develop deeper training courses so that you can equip a good candidate with all of the knowledge needed to do the job well rather than trying – and failing – to hire employees that already have that knowledge.

#4: Use technology to your advantage. The talent problem becomes more manageable when you begin making better use of your resources, and in some instances then need less of them. Arming your technicians with tools like AI and AR can alleviate some of the more menial tasks and enable those resources to focus on the bigger jobs. You can also use AR as a way to further leverage the knowledge of your older workforce by having a technician nearing retirement age train up multiple new employees remote from a back office. The opportunities are really limitless but looking for how technology fits into the equation of solving this problem is critical.

#5: Value and utilize your resources. Given the drought of new talent, it is important to look beyond your recruiting efforts and put equal attention on what you’re doing to retain your current employees. What’s the state of your company culture? Do your employees feel engaged and empowered? Do they have career progression plans to keep them happy over the long term? Without confident answers to these questions, the recruiting efforts you’re focusing on are for naught. As you bring new employees on, what’s your onboarding experience like? Do they feel welcome and valued right away? These are critical considerations. If you’re putting in ample effort here and have a happy and engaged workforce, you can also call on them to assist in your recruiting efforts by putting referral programs in place.

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What to Expect when you’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

January 31, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

What to Expect when you’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

By Tom Paquin

Back when I was an industry analyst, I ran a study to benchmark the strength of the service workforce. Through my research, I discovered that service companies expect nearly half of their service workforce to quit in any given year.

We could easily spend hours speculating as to why that is, and there are certainly some identifiable trends, like an overall aging workforce, that help explain these numbers, but the underlying truth is clear: Service companies expect to have to re-train half of their employee base.

It may seem like the logical approach is to tackle these issues as they arise, but forward-thinking firms know that’s a losing battle. Building a new employee base on the foundations that caused half of your employees to leave is not the answer. If you’re in a position where you’re losing somewhere more than 25% of your staff every year, there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way you hire, promote, and retain your talent.

Fortunately, there’s some truly inspiring stories across the industry of companies and individuals who are finding ways to rethink their hiring and retention practices. We’ve discussed this issue many times before, and from that, we can start to build a playbook for keeping your company together. Here are some key recommendations to help mitigate technician churn:

Consider your job listings carefully. What are the requirements for an entry-level technician? Do you expect to pay a new tech $30K, and also expect them to have three to ten years’ experience? You need to work with the workforce that’s actually out there. Back when I was sourcing for new IT technicians, I would call anyone who could spell “resume” correctly, and I’d set up an in-person with anyone who could tell me the difference between a hard drive and RAM. In IT service management that works, but it wouldn’t work in heavy equipment manufacturing, where you need to come to the table with a base set of skills. For that, it makes sense to target your listings towards the appropriate technical schools and apprenticeships programs. Not enough students enrolled in these programs? Well…

Build an apprenticeship program. Offer a one-year apprenticeship to, for instance, graduating High School seniors. Teach them the skills they need, and at the end of the year, make an evaluation with them about whether or not they should continue. Research shows it’ll be about 50-50, but you’re growing a crop of talent who won’t leave after another year, and after five years, your talent pool will be overflowing.

Hire for a mindset, not a skillset. In his two podcast appearances, Roy Dockery has discussed the great work he’s done hiring armed service veterans to technician roles. He, at vet himself, understands that skills and tools can be taught, but the right constitution is intrinsic to the right employee. Take your five highest-performing technicians and think about what makes them who they are. Ask them for referrals. Bring them into the hiring process. Consider their background. The goal here is to foster high performers. You won’t win every time, but if you are thoughtful about the trends that define a good, long-lasting employee, you’ll start to see positive change.

Consider the Technician Journey. Are your technicians happy? If you think that’s a silly question, guess what? You might be the reason why they’re leaving. Any job requires fulfillment to foster retention. Are your metrics exclusively punitive? Do you positively incentivize around things like NPS scores and upsells? What does the technician career path look like? To that end…

Consider a mentor program. One thing that I will always believe is that when you offer someone responsibility and respect their knowledge, they’ll step up to the plate. Therefore, the benefits of a mentor program organically extend to brand new employees, who learn the ropes (and the politics) of their job, and helps to inspire tenured employees to think about their career in new ways and sell it to a new audience.

Think carefully about technology. What a vague statement, but hear me out—Technology cuts both ways. For instance, there are so many great knowledge management utilities meant to bring technicians up to speed, which is great if you’re still seeing high turnover, but alternatively, throwing new service technology at technicians without seriously considering how they actually do their job increases the likelihood of losing otherwise strong talent. It’s a delicate balance, certainly, but it’s one that the right technical partner can help you manage with ease.

With anything, technician retention isn’t a one-and-done prospect, and a consistent review of hiring and retention practices will mean that you continue to mitigate turnover with smart business decisions. With the right plans in place, you can bring in new blood that improves your turnover rate, but more importantly, your overall business.

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An Overlooked Aspect of Customer Engagement

January 29, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

An Overlooked Aspect of Customer Engagement

Sarah talks with Linda Formichelli, Founder and Creative Director of Hero’s Journey Content for some practical tips on how best to engage with your customers and prospects using content marketing.

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January 27, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

Cubic Transportation’s Outcomes-Based Service Success

January 27, 2020 | 6 Mins Read

Cubic Transportation’s Outcomes-Based Service Success

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Service organizations across the globe are painstakingly aware that the historical break/fix service model is no longer satisfying customers. Rather, customers are demanding outcomes – uptime, peace of mind, and results. The adaptation necessary to meet these ever-increasing demands is no small feat, which is why we see plenty of companies struggling to evolve. There are those, though, which have tackled this transformation with steely resolve and are leading the charge in delivering what today’s customers want. Cubic Transportation Systems is one such example.

Cubic Transportation Systems (CTS) produces and markets public transport fare reading and payment systems for the transportation industry around the world. If you can’t envision what this means, think about the Oyster card used within London. From the moment you purchase the Oyster card, to using the ticket vending machines to add credit, use the card to go through the gates, have the right fare taken from your account, and the smart calculations done in the back office so you are capped the right amount – all of that physical technology and software processing is done through the CTS system. . “Our history of creating and implementing payment and information technologies for the world’s most renowned transportation authorities and operators has taught us that to promote progress, you must create collaboratively – with your technology partners and your customers – and foster a culture of innovation within your company,” says Matt Cole, President of CTS and Sr. Vice President of Cubic Corporation. “We are committed to not only helping shape the transportation landscape, but are prepared to lead, envision and enable industry disruptors. Our technology platforms are designed to factor in the unknown, allowing our systems today to be relevant years down the road.”

This type of company mission and culture promotes the type of transformation service organizations are faced with conquering today. But while company-wide buy-in on this philosophy is a great head start, it still doesn’t make the journey easy. When you look at the practical illustration of what it takes for CTS to deliver this sort of innovation to its customers, it takes a significant amount of strategy, enablement, and execution to bring that commitment to life. Mike Gosling, IT Service Platforms Manager at CTS has been instrumental in the company’s journey to outcomes-based service.

Before Migration Comes Mindset

Success with outcomes-based service starts with mindset. CTS recognized that its customers were committed to improving the experiences of their customers, which put pressure on CTS to find ways to deliver even higher levels of service – or outcomes. Rather than the historical “call when it breaks and we’ll come fix it,” it becomes a matter of almost-constant uptime. Rather than push back on this demand or remain blissfully ignorant to the shift in customer expectations, CTS adopted a positive mindset and set out to determine what needed to evolve within the organization to be able to meet these needs.

This meant letting go of legacy thinking, and legacy processes. “It’s fairly straightforward to examine your processes and uncover what needs to change, but you also have to consider that you need to examine the legacy thinking that exists within the company as well – that is harder to identify and also harder to change,” says Gosling. “It’s just human nature to want to stay within your comfort zone, and it takes effort to take your entire workforce along on this journey and help them understand why and how things are changing and get them to buy into the mission.”

Gosling points out that while the process of weeding out legacy mindset can be challenging, it’s imperative to success. “Take the time to get to the root of what they’re thinking and saying – overcome their concerns rather than dismissing them,” he says. “It takes bravery to overcome this legacy thinking, but you have to be brave and work through it or it will hold you back from your future.”

Setting and Sticking to Success Criteria

Once you feel the right mindset is shared among the entire workforce, the next step is to create very clear success criteria so that you can gauge your success or failure in providing the outcomes you’ve promised your customers. “If you don’t have clarity on what success looks like, you’ll never get there,” says Gosling. “The criteria need to be very specific, and realistic but challenging.”

When CTS embarked on the outcomes-based service journey with its customer Transport for London (TfL), the local government body responsible for the transport system in Greater London, the process for setting these success criteria was to carefully examine the service contracts, top to bottom, and set the criteria for hitting those requirements. In this case, the number one criteria is system uptime, followed by three others.

“Once your criteria are set, it is imperative to stick to it – use it as your why,” says Gosling. “There will be plenty of scenarios in which you’ll be tempted to veer off course and make decisions that aren’t tied to the success criteria, but you have to remember that if you set your success criteria well, anything that deviates is a distraction from what matters most.”

Selecting the Right Toolset

CTS knew it couldn’t deliver the outcomes customers like TfL expect without relying on technology. “Technology is the path to delivering outcomes-based service,” says Gosling. “Adding field engineers to meet the demands of outcomes is not reasonable – technology is critical in today’s service landscape.”

To achieve its success criteria, CTS relies on IFS Field Service Management (FSM) which manages work orders, parts and assets to contracts, warranty, invoicing and billing. FSM gives CTS much needed visibility of what’s being done in the field. CTS also uses IFS Planning & Scheduling Optimization (PSO), a real-time scheduling and optimization software that uses AI and advanced algorithms to deliver the optimum schedule. “PSO is a phenomenally powerful tool,” says Gosling. “It is key to use delivering the outcomes our customers want in the most efficient way possible.”

CTS is also working to integrate Dexda, a machine learning-based event management tool, with FSM and PSO to incorporate IoT data from its equipment and move to more predictive service. “This will allow PSO to respond to events we think are going to happen based on empirical learning,” says Gosling. “Beyond enabling predictive service, however, it will also provide a wealth of valuable business insight on our products that can be fed back to engineering.”

3 Tips for Your Journey to Outcomes

On the journey to outcomes-based service, Gosling has learned three lessons that serve as valuable advice for those on this path. First, remember the importance of change management. This comes at the beginning of an initiative, but all along as well. With PSO, for instance, it was important for CTS to providing ongoing coaching and change management. “With a tool like PSO that self-learns and adjusts, there are times that are gut instinct for a scheduler that’s not accustomed to the technology to want to intervene,” says Gosling. “You have to manage this change and fight off those urges when they aren’t necessary. When manual intervention is necessary, you need to handle exceptions with consistency and document the outcome so that it can be factored into the workflow.”

Second, don’t try to avoid mistakes; they propel you forward. “When you’re innovating, mistakes will naturally occur,” says Gosling. “Making decisions means making mistakes. Mistakes are a learning opportunity that all too often are avoided when they shouldn’t be. As a leader, it’s important to set the example by owning your own mistakes and communicating clearly with your team about what happened, what was learned, and what will be different next time.”

Finally, avoid “that’ll do” thinking at all costs. “This journey is one of continual improvement,” says Gosling. “If you pop the champagne and put your feet up as soon as you hit your success criteria, you’ll fall back below quickly [or you need more challenging success criteria]. When you master one area, you keep watch of it and move on to another. You constantly assess where you are and where you’re going next, and out of this process is where the new innovative ideas are born. But you have to be in a constant state of assessing and looking ahead.”

Since CTS started its journey to delivering outcomes, and with its focus on mindset, metrics, change management, utilizing technology, and continual improvement, the company has improved uptime by 20 percent. Delivering outcomes is the future of field service and it’s inspiring to see a company that has successfully tackled such a major transformation.

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The Road to Servitization in Product-Oriented Businesses

January 24, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Road to Servitization in Product-Oriented Businesses

By Tom Paquin

Recently I was hit by a peculiar targeted advertisement: A major automaker’s car subscription service. My interest being piqued, I clicked on the ad. From where I was standing car subscription services have always existed, and were called leased vehicles, and after some puttering around their very snazzy new website, I inferred that at its heart, this “subscription” was a millennial-oriented rebranding of that concept.

As I dug deeper, though, it became increasingly clear that that was only partially the case. In addition to the car and registration that typically comprises the totality of a lease agreement, this car company’s plan included:

Guaranteed pricing
Insurance
Vehicle maintenance
Annual upgrades

Feeling aspirational, I selected a luxury vehicle, and was given a monthly payment that, when taking into consideration the fact that you’re getting insurance and service included, with the option to upgrade after 12 months, seemed like a perfectly reasonable price.

We can discuss the environmental ramifications of this all another day but from an economical sense, this seems like a win-win. Customers who want it get a virtually worry-free car, no negotiations, no tire replacements, no insurance wrangling, and annual new car smell. The automaker gets an engine for customer loyalty, service control over their own vehicles to ensure consistency of parts and labor, and the ability to provide services like insurance through a third-party at bulk pricing, thus forming a key partnership.

This, at its heart, is true servitization. Sure, the car company is packaging and delivering a commodity, but the value is in the feeling of security that accompanies the sale. Car buying tops every list of most stressful purchase processes. Alleviating that stress is a service with minimal overhead and maximum value. It is servitization at its most effective, and if executed as well as it looks, could keep customers coming back for a long time.

If we can make servitization work with cars, we can make it work with virtually any industry, but it’s not without its caveats. There are a lot of places along the value chain where things can go wrong. Any industry that combines a product with service needs to think very carefully about how it manages every aspect of its brand. Here are some very important questions to ask as you start to consider servitization.

Are products delivered through dealer networks?

Let’s use an iPhone as an example, here. iPhones are sold through Apple retail, where the entirety of the sales and service process can be curated. iPhones are also sold through cellular providers, big box, and electronic retailers. When rolling out its servitized plan for iPhones, Apple had to decide whether to offer the iPhone upgrade program exclusively at its own retail stores, or externally, and chose to keep the entirety of the process in-house. This was a safe, if unambitious move.

Some product companies don’t have the luxury of a direct-to-consumer presence, though, so they have to work with dealer networks not just for sales, but also for service. Because of that, standardization of the parameters of service contracts, parts management, and service delivery are imperative to getting servitizaton right. Does this mean making all of your dealers adopt the same service management platform that you have? If it’s an automaker, then possibly, but if it’s Best Buy, then you’ll need to think about how to approach that in order to centralize data. Work with your implementation partners on the appropriate plan.

Is the service managed centrally, is it franchised, or is it done independently?

Just like the products themselves, it’s important to consider how the actual service system with which you work is handled. If you have a service infrastructure in place, is it self-sufficient, or is it bolstered by independent contractors? Do you want independent contractors involved in service delivery? If not, how can you incentivize consumers to go to first-party service centers?

Alternatively, if you have nothing but independents, do you have the means of managing them internally? What utilities are you using to facilitate that process? Do customers manage service and assets internally, and are assigned external service workers, or does information live in dozens of separate systems? There’s obviously a right and a wrong way to do this, and the tools are out there to centralize all of these processes. You owe it to your brand to get it right.

What does the long-tail service lifecycle look like?

This is where you make the business case for servitization. Perhaps you have an extremely long product lifecycle. We see businesses with products from 1955 in their clients’ possession, which completely changes the meaning of an upgrade cycle. In an instance like that—what are the service touchpoints, and how do you appropriately monetize those touchpoints?

In businesses with shorter product lifecycles—one to ten years—are there opportunities to keep customers tied to your ecosystem in the long-term? Many businesses have rightly concluded that service contracts represent a swift, easy, and cheap way to do just that, but you can’t just deliver service, of course. The service needs to be good.

It’s unclear whether this automaker will succeed with its all-inclusive approach to car buying, but it represents a pretty interesting test case in the way that businesses are thinking about products for their consumers. Especially in low-margin industries, service bundles provide the sort of profit cushion that could really make a difference. And when executed well, servitization can be what sets your business apart.

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Driving Diversity in Field Service

January 22, 2020 | 1 Mins Read

Driving Diversity in Field Service

Sarah is joined by Sara Gleave, IT Project Manager at Morris Jenkins to discuss the company’s successful approach to creating greater diversity among its workforce.

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The Hurdles To Achieving AR ROI In Field Service

January 20, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

The Hurdles To Achieving AR ROI In Field Service

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

According to ABI Research, the total augmented reality market is estimated to reach over $100 billion by 2024, at an average CAGR of 75 percent. The research firm says, “The mainstay early adoption verticals like Manufacturing, Logistics, and Energy are still showing impressive growth, while newer verticals like healthcare, media & entertainment, and retail/commerce/marketing are the fastest growing.”

Personally, AR is one of the technologies I find most exciting and compelling for service organizations because I can so easily visualize the problems it can solve. In other words, its value proposition is clear to me (and countless others). Take the talent gap, for instance, and think about how AR can help organizations to more quickly and efficiently train and support limited resources. Consider the value of remote resolution, and how AR can be used either internally or with customers to reduce the need for truck rolls in many cases or, at minimum, ensure better preparation when a tech arrives on site. Even knowledge management – being able to capture the information exchange in the AR sessions and catalog that as shared knowledge is incredibly valuable.

While I’ve talked with numerous service leaders having success with AR within their respective organizations, what has surfaced is the reality that there are a few shared hurdles that need to be overcome in order to attain ROI and reap the full rewards of AR. Here are four common hurdles that those I’ve interviewed have experienced and would caution you to expect and preparer for as you implement AR:

Older workforce resistance. The reality is, any new tool can be met with skepticism and hesitance by those workers set in their way. But I’d say a tool like AR has a buzz about it that can emphasize these emotions in some of your older workers. Those I’ve interviewed have reported some significant challenges with getting older workers on board with using AR. Overcoming this hurdle comes down to three things – having a proactive change management strategy in place, encouraging an open dialogue with these workers as they become familiar with the tool, and ensuring you have measures in place to hold your workers accountable for using the technology.

Connectivity issues. This is a hurdle I am sure is being addressed by those providing AR technology, but a recurring issue among the folks that have adopted the technology is experiencing connectivity problems. This ranges from not being able to initiate sessions to sessions being interrupted, but the end result is that it can be a very frustrating experience for the employees (and customers, if you are using this technology with your customers) and contributes to the adoption issues discussed above. I’d recommend you test, retest, and keep testing connectivity during your trial and pilot to ensure that the solution works to your expectations.

Battery life issues. Some of the folks I’ve talked with are using AR for very short trouble-shooting chats (three to five minutes) and others for longer support calls (20 to 25 minutes). Those that are using AR for longer durations have reported that the sessions kill the battery life of their mobile devices. This will present varying degrees of issue depending on how many opportunities your technicians have to charge their device throughout the day, but again is something you should test and bring up to your AR provider if you’re researching or evaluating this technology.

Wearables need work. Most of the companies I’ve spoken with about AR are using a smartphone or tablet for sessions, while many are interested in or considering moving to wearable devices. One of the service leaders I interviewed had tested different wearables and explained that while the AR solution works quite seamlessly on a smartphone, it isn’t as smooth on the wearables – that there’s still some work that needs done for the application to have the same impact on a wearable as it does a smartphone. I am certain progress is being made with this daily, but it’s important to identify the preferred device for your use case is and test it thoroughly.

Despite these hurdles, the value of AR in field service is clear, and that is echoed by those I’ve discussed challenges with. All the people I’ve spoken to about AR use feel it is worthwhile despite some of the stumbling blocks. It is always worthwhile, though, to discuss both sides of the coin when it comes to technology – the value it will provide, but the fact that it is never a seamless journey. If you are looking to deploy AR, these issues are worth investigating and discussing during your evaluation.

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Avoiding Reckless Tech Adoption

January 16, 2020 | 4 Mins Read

Avoiding Reckless Tech Adoption

By Tom Paquin

As someone who cooks a lot at home, I have been trying to improve my culinary chops for quite a while now. Between binging on cooking YouTube channels (Highly recommended: Bon Appetit) and simply getting creative with ingredients, I think that I’ve built up a strong home cook aptitude, and have proudly expanded my repertoire (and my palate) with new spices and ingredients. One thing that practice has taught me is the tenuous balance of done-ness. There’s a lot of precision that goes into the balance of overcooking and undercooking. Once something is on the skillet, the clock starts ticking. When do I flip this? When do I add the garlic? When do I take it off the heat?

The preparedness of a business for a new technology requires an intimate understanding of a similar balance. Leave your business in the oven too long without adopting the right tech, and your competitors will have surpassed you, your infrastructure will have become too rigid, and your customers will move onto someone who delivers more. We all know that, though, and talk about the dangers of resting on your laurels quite a bit. What happens, though, when you adopt a technology before your business is ready for it?

I discussed an example of this a few weeks ago with a service leader who preemptively deployed augmented reality tech without properly addressing infrastructure challenges, leading to the tech sitting uselessly on a shelf. In the inverse, though, I was talking to a service leader a few weeks ago who had yet to adopt IFS Lobby, a dashboard utility that’s part of the IFS service management platform, and asked him why he hadn’t yet.

“We need to explore every avenue before adopting any new system,” He said. That’s fine, of course, but had they explored any avenues yet? There’s ultimately no difference between technology you own sitting unused on a shelf and technology that you have the capabilities to use but refuse deploy. Both are useless. So, with any new technology, how do you know when your business is ready?

No two businesses are the same, of course, but based on what I’ve seen, when it comes to successful adoption, there are a few steps you can take to know you’re making the right move at the right time.

Hear from reference customers. We all want to be trailblazers, but the fact is that most technology advancements have been adopted in one way or another before you considered it. In service, what often happens is that technology saturation happens in sales, retail, or some adjacent industry, or in a disruptive tech play, which sets the standards that are adapted and iterated upon in a service environment. Find those customers and hear their stories. Look not just at the value, but at the best practices, at the initial legwork that goes into adoption, and, most importantly, where things went wrong. Best practices are often built upon mistakes. You can make them yourself, or you can learn from those who came before you. Save yourself the headache and learn from your neighbor.

Take stock of your digital inventory. This goes without saying, but there are a lot of digital switches at play in the modern enterprise, and the data collected from them, their functionality, or their output could be a key component that folds itself into a new technology adoption. Understand that technology mix, and whether or not any pieces are missing. Key at this step as well is looking at the software that will sit around your new tech purchase. Does everything speak a common language? How difficult will integration be? How will it impact or enhance the effectiveness of this software? Often these questions will come from your references, or from your own team, but often as well, they’ll come from the below.

Consult the experts early. Whether it’s a third party integrator or a branch of the company whose tech you’re buying, start asking—and getting answers to—"into the weeds” questions very early on in the process. This is pretty standard practice, of course, but this is frequently saved for the point when organizations are ready to adopt a technology, rather than when they’re evaluating if they should adopt a technology. At both stages, it’s easy to get handed a laundry list of performance gains, when really, you should be equally as interested in understanding how something actually works, and what the change management processes will actually be. If the people you’re working with can’t get you those answers, then it might be too early, or you should find a company that does.

Unlike business, there’s one thing that you can do to get the perfect meal, and that’s practice a lot, knowing that you might end up with the odd turkey with pink in the middle (apologies to my poor wife, who was a great sport during my trial attempts to modernize Thanksgiving). Of course with service, you can’t practice the adoption of a new technology, because each new technology is its own dish. For that reason, it needs to be more like reading a recipe. Keep a close eye on the directions, and make sure that you have all the ingredients before the food hits the pan.

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