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December 17, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: The Case for a Chief Service Officer

December 17, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: The Case for a Chief Service Officer

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By Tom Paquin

A few weeks back, I ran a quick retrospective on my first Future of Field Service article, then followed that up with a slightly less old article. Today I was to talk about an article from mid-2019 on the idea of a chief service officer for your business.

You can read the original piece here.

That article discussed in detail the servitization mindset impacting businesses at the time. As I outlined it in the original article:

  • A shift away from ownership towards products-as-a-service.
  • An oversaturation of products entering the market from new, global entrants and decreasing barriers to entry.
  • A fundamental shift in the economy away from product-focused businesses towards services-focused businesses.
  • The need to diversify product portfolios with low-overhead add-ons that simultaneously offer value to the customer beyond your competitors.
  • Best-in-class manufacturers, retailers, and suppliers creating pathways towards completely upending business practices with service.

Servitizaiton shows no signs of slowing, especially in the wake of supply chain issues that are projected to run into next year, changing consumer sentiment, and new technology tools for delivering seamless service for businesses wherein service would not have been a consideration eighteen months ago. 

And the best way to make it clear that service is not a line item on your balance sheet, but a new cultural pillar, is to align a Chief Service Officer.

Service is, as we know, more than ever, the primary touchpoint for businesses. With more ecommerce, and more channels for service through delivery and new business models, it’s reckless to slap service functions onto your business (especially by partnering with third parties) and expect them to carry your brand promise. 

The Chief Service Officer can help set that precedent in a meaningful way for your business. As I wrote in 2019:

So what does the Chief Service Officer do? This will obviously differ from company to company, but on a high-level, here are some general ideas:

  • Own the technology rollout for all of service.
  • Work with product to set rigid parameters for service execution.
  • Develop benchmarks, roadmaps, and dashboard to measure service’s impact on the whole company.
  • Set up and execute on service business development efforts within sales.
  • Own the service management platform, tie it to all areas of enterprise resource planning, asset management, and customer experience management.
  • Make the push that your company provides service because it wants to faster a stronger relationship with its customers.

This hasn’t changed, and having an actual human being behind these processes means that service can be executed, on every level, from a more well-informed place.

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December 13, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

5 Tactical Ways to Improve Your Change Management Effectiveness

December 13, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

5 Tactical Ways to Improve Your Change Management Effectiveness

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Here’s what I know about change management:

  • It’s critically important
  • Lacking and/or shoddy efforts are the #1 reason given when change initiatives fail
  • People commonly acknowledge these first two points, yet STILL don’t put the time, energy, or investment into getting it right
  • It doesn’t have to be so hard; you just have to truly understand its importance and prioritize change management as a part of your strategy

If you listen to the podcast, you have probably heard me state how perplexed I am at the immense gap that exists between the “talk” around the importance of change management and the “walk” or action put in to getting it right. The harsh reality is that this must change. There is far too much change happening at far too fast a pace for companies to continue to be able to manage change in reactive versus proactive manner.

Making Change Management More Proactive 

So, with that said, let’s move beyond rant to talk about five ways you could improve your change management effectiveness. These points were inspired by and some of them discussed in my podcast last week with Karin Hamel, Vice President of Services for US Digital Buildings at Schneider Electric. While Karin and I’s conversation centered around what it will take to build the workforce of the future, managing change is a key part of that – because not only is the pace of change not slowing, but the variables playing a part in companies’ initiatives are only growing more complex and interconnected. 

#1: Cut Corporate Speak

Communication around change is no place for sesquipedalian speech. See what I mean? I’m laughing typing this, but the point is valid – the more you focus on concise, relatable communication the better it will be received and digested. Keep in mind that your goal in communicating around change isn’t just getting a point across, but also building rapport and connection.

“Make sure you talk directly to the reader, your technician in this case, the real person, and cut the MBA talk,” says Karin. “That was something that I found I really needed some help with. It was helpful to have someone point that out to me.” And here’s a tip: if you don’t know how your intended audience speaks or what resonates, you aren’t spending enough time with them. 

#2: Focus on Collaboration over Communication

The next tip is to make sure you remember that change cannot be managed with communication alone, it requires collaboration. In fact, when you focus your efforts on collaboration over communication, you may find a good percentage of your change challenges alleviated. 

What I mean by collaboration over communication is that you should not be focused on simply delivering a message – or a mandate – and expecting your workforce to fall in line. Rather, you need to understand the value in collaboration – a bi-directional exchange of points that helps ensure everyone is on the same page, feedback is heard and acknowledged, and change is being not just begrudgingly accepted but embraced. 

#3: Help Employees Visualize Change

This is another great point that came from Karin. She has done some work with the Nour Group to help create a visualization of strategy. This visualization takes a plethora of detailed content, that can be consumed if and when it needs to be and simplifies it into one easy-to-digest graphical page. 

“The Nour Group helped us go through our whole strategy slide deck, that 40-page slide deck that we all have sitting in a desk drawer somewhere, on a thumb drive. We took that and boiled it down to one page, that’s a very visual, graphic document, that really spells everything out, walks your audience through the whole strategy, and takes away that corporate speak,” explains Karin. “We use this visualization, and then print it out on mousepads, use it as a backdrop. Having it in many different places, so that it’s really repeatable, like a drum beat continuously throughout the year. It’s something like a war cry. Everyone can rally around this visualization and identify themselves there.”

#4: Prioritize Ample Training and Upskilling

We know that resistance to change is largely fear-based, and in today’s circumstances where frontline workers may have some valid trepidation around how their roles are evolving, the role of ample training and upskilling in change management cannot be overemphasized. Maybe you’re asking your workforce to use a new technology – you need to ensure you bear the burden of not only selecting a strong solution, but providing however much training, however many types of training, your employees need to feel confident in that tool’s use. 

Perhaps their role itself is evolving, with new service objectives requiring a different approach and therefore different skills. This is a reality for many businesses today, and that causes a lot of overwhelm for your workers. If they know from the beginning that they play an incredibly valuable role in your company’s evolution, and that you are committed to providing them every upskilling opportunity it will take to make them successful, well – they may not fear the change so much. 

#5: Recognize Efforts and Impact

Consider this scenario: Change is introduced, and mandated. Employee accepts that if they want to continue in their career, they must adapt. They work through the change, learning whatever they need to in order to thrive in the “after.” Employer seems to not even notice the emotional, intellectual, and/or physical effort this employee’s change took and continues without so much as a “thanks for your hard work” until the next demand arises. 

I’d argue this is standard practice for many organizations, and the root of its faultiness is that it isn’t all too human. Your employees are people, and for many of our readers, those employees are the frontline worker that you are relying on to spearhead your company’s evolution from its historical incarnation to its modernized identity. Do they not deserve more?

They do. Change management would be far more successful if we focused on expressing appreciation for our employees’ efforts – if we showed empathy around how hard change is and recognized them for not only their willingness to grow and evolve with the business but for their efforts to learn and succeed in whatever the new normal is we’re introducing. 

You can take notes from Schneider’s approach. “We built up a recognition program around this strategy visualization document and our Hero program. As a technician, I can identify how I can contribute to our overall business ambitions by this kind of map. Then we have peer-to-peer nominations so that as employees contribute or deliver on one of the key outcomes, they can be recognized,” explains Karin. “We have a woman that runs this program for us, and we have great internal communication around it. We keep it all connected to our strategy and it runs throughout the whole year, and we’ve found it has been a great accelerant to create the kind of movement in the culture that we want.”

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December 10, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

The True Cost of Operational Success

December 10, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

The True Cost of Operational Success

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By Tom Paquin

We prattle on and on about the power of service optimization here, the invisible “service bucks” saved from mitigating truck rolls and streamlining technician performance. And these are all valuable things, certainly, but more and more businesses, to justify upgrades of their service systems and the development of new tools, are seeking to understand the total cost of service operations for their business. 

Putting numbers behind these functions is not new, but it has required a number of assumptions. And getting those costs together remains an integral component in allocation budgets, managing headcount, and crucially, setting service prices. So what are some tips on doing this with as few assumptions as possible, to provide as accurate a picture as possible of the total cost of service? Here are some thoughts:

You Can’t Measure Cost Until You Learn to Measure Service
Here’s the deal: Service software can, under many circumstances, turn data into an asset, and leveraging that data intelligently can go a long way to understanding how service processes fit together. Nevertheless, there’s two major caveats to this: Technical blind spots and human error (both of which are actually human error of course).

You can avoid technical blind spots by building a set of service tools that is as all-encompassing as possible. This means putting optimization, customer experience, enterprise planning, and human capital systems all under a single roof. Is this perfect? Of course not. One major consideration is where your software is coming from. If it’s all from a single vendor, then great, assuming that the ‘boil-the-ocean’ approach hasn’t limited functionality in any meaningful way. If it’s from a core vendor and a series of APIs, what’s the data “exchange rate”? Are your systems on comparable version numbers? Are they adequately calibrated to all new processes? These are all important considerations to ensure that service is being run correctly.

On the “human error” side, you need to ensure that you’re avoiding (as best as you can) bias in your technical criteria. It’s very easy to lean into things that make your business or your technicians look better. While that might be great for marketing, it limits the ability to price accurately, and it also impede the ability to benchmark service improvements accurately. 

Wait, Should We Actually Care About Any of This?
I’ll end by saying that while saving a service buck is nice in the immediate, the true value of service optimization comes from what you can pass onto your customer. Those savings, sometimes intangible, help retain customers, encourage upsells, and spurn new business. And at the end of the day, every dollar saved is worth half as much as a dollar of new revenue. 

So don’t forget who it is that you are optimizing your services processes for.

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Speed: The Characteristic That is Both Critical and Detrimental to Fruitful Innovation

December 6, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Speed: The Characteristic That is Both Critical and Detrimental to Fruitful Innovation

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The market, technological, and environmental factors that create disruption to drive innovation are quite intense in today’s landscape. This puts pressure on business leaders to evolve and transform at a pace that allows them to remain relevant, keep competitive, and create differentiation. This pressure is not simply perceived – it is real, no doubt. But how that pressure causes leaders and companies to respond is quite interesting, and I think begs an exploration of the differences between urgency and haste.  

On last week’s podcast, I welcomed Eduardo Bonefont, VP of Life Sciences Technical Services at BD for an insightful discussion around the conundrum of balancing short-term priorities and long-term success. He shares the story of how, in 2017, he was asked to take his current position to transform the service experience across BD Life Sciences globally because customer feedback wasn’t stellar, and he had a proven track record of aiding underperforming regions in transformation to better performance. He worked with leadership to create a transformation plan, which included investments in people, processes, and tools. 

As he dug in, he realized that the mission to invest in new technology was in many ways at odds with the parallel mission to improve the employee experience – which he knew would equate to a better customer experience. In a nutshell, he and other leaders learned in their firsthand listening of frontline employees that the last thing teams wanted was investment in new technology – they wanted issues with their current systems that were causing daily struggles addressed first. 

“It turned out that the cost to fix all the issues that they had, and there was a big list, was equal to the investments that we were going to make on new technology,” explains Eduardo. “Myself and the entire leadership team decided quickly that we needed to pivot our goal to refocus our efforts on fixing these issues to create a better experience for our associates. That became our “pause year” when we used everything that we had available to us in order for us to fix the old stuff before we began with new.”

The idea of BD’s “pause year” is so intriguing to me, for a few reasons. First, I think the pressure companies are under to innovate causes them to race – often past foundational issues that will ultimately inhibit their success. Second, it illustrates BD’s recognition of the very critical fact that employee experience is tied directly to customer experience. If your frontline service workers are frustrated, experiencing daily challenges, or disconnected from your strategy and roadmap for innovation, it’s almost impossible to accomplish your objectives. They are an essential aspect of your company’s differentiation, and ignoring their feedback, desires, or feelings – no matter how challenging to address – compromises the most important resource you depend upon to deliver the customer experience you’re striving for. Finally, it shows restraint in considering not just the short-term objectives or problems but in factoring in how the capacity for longer-term victory grows with a relatively short investment of time. 

Set Sail for Service Success

“I am a sailor and in boating, if all of a sudden you run aground, there’s a sand dune or something, and you cannot move forward, the majority of boaters have an instinct to plow right ahead,” explains Eduardo. “They put the engine in full force, thinking ‘I’m going to get out of this. It’s not supposed to be here.’ But that can create damage to your boat, that can create damage to yourselves too. And it’s a very expensive proposal to go do that when the right answer along all along could have been, why don’t I just reverse? I already had a path behind me that’s working. If I take reverse, it’s the easiest way to get out of a sand dune when you’re stuck in order so you can move forward effectively.”

Eduardo and his team applied this analogy to the Life Sciences business and the overall objectives they had. Yes, they were trying to move ahead in improving customer experience. And yes, they believed that the incorporation of new technology was imperative to that mission. But they hit a sand dune when they uncovered the fact that their frontline workforce had some real issues they needed addressed. Rather than plow through those and risk damaging the business, they hit reverse and took the time to fix those issues so that the sail ahead would be safer, smoother, and with a higher likelihood of success. “Applying that analogy to the business, if you plow head, if you push forward, you could create a significant amount of damage and distrust that is just really hard to overcome in future years. At the end, you’re not going to get that continuous improvement if you don’t take the workforce into consideration.”

Knowing When to Hit the Gas vs. Hit the Brake

Eduardo was clear to point out that this pause year didn’t mean the entire business came to a halt while BD addressed employee concerns. They kept on with the day to day, and with focusing on improvements. But the brake was applied in terms of layering new technology investments on top of the tools the workforce felt weren’t working properly. 

It can be challenging to determine when to apply gas versus when to hit the brake, particularly because pressures are high. While there’s no cut-and-dry formula for making the best decision, here are a few questions I think it helps to ask yourself and your team:

  • Are we balancing short-term pressures with long-term objectives and potential?
  • Will this decision harm us at all in reaching our longer-term goals?
  • Are we listening to and prioritizing what our customers want and need?
  • Are we taking into consideration, genuinely, the feedback of our employees and the realities of their experience?
  • Are we slowing down based on facts or fear?
  • Are we promoting employee creativity and employee voice enough, knowing that’s where many great innovative ideas come from?
  • Do we have technologies in place that we are keeping based on outdated criteria rather than a true consensus that they serve our current, and future, needs?

There are of course many more factors – if you have input on how you balance a proper sense of urgency with avoiding the risk of haste, I’d love to hear from you. And if you haven’t yet listened to Eduardo’s podcast episode, I urge you to do so – I really respect the balance he and his team have struck between prioritizing the employee experience and making progress on business outcomes. 

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December 3, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

December 3, 2021 | 2 Mins Read

Revisiting Old Articles: What to Expect When You’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

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By Tom Paquin

A few weeks back, I ran a quick retrospective on my first Future of Field Service article. This week, I’m going to fast forward a bit to an article from early 2020 which looks laughably quaint within the context of what was less than two months away. 

Read the Article: What to Expect when you’re Expecting (Your Employees to Quit)

Today of course, the situation is exacerbated, with 30% of workers reportedly voluntarily handing in resignations. 

We know the reasons for this—COVID has, for many, redefined the boundaries of work/life balance, shifted expectations about what a job can be (both through technology and also through necessity) and fundamentally changed the dynamics of the global economy. 

And while this impacts every industry, it invariably impacts service at a greater clip. Service has never been an easy profession, and in a job landscape where physical presence in an office is becoming out of style for many business, the idea of being beholden to traffic, and being tethered to on-site operations can be an unattractive option for many.

And frankly, a lot of the hiring practices outlined in the article still stand. Where they can be enhanced, iterated upon, and reengineered to better support the workforce, and attract new people, mostly relates to technology.

We’ve obviously spoken a lot about remote assistance, and will continue to into next year, as it kept businesses running through COVID, and now offers the means to avoid costly truck rolls for more routine operations. It could also serve as the catalyst that keeps employees on board and attracts new ones. If, for instance, employees were able to work “Hybrid shifts”, in the field some days, at home others, it would offer the level of flexibility than many crave. 

This is just one example. A more decentralized dispatch, as well, might offer some reprieve. It also will allow service businesses to do more with less, which, with a leaner workforce, might be the best option.

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November 29, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

10 Non-Monetary Ways to Show Your Employees You Appreciate Them

November 29, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

10 Non-Monetary Ways to Show Your Employees You Appreciate Them

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Last week was Thanksgiving in the United States and I love the reminder the holiday gives to reflect and practice gratitude. I also moderated a panel last week on the labor shortage and the combination had me thinking about the criticality of showing our employees we’re thankful for them. We know that retention is an imperative aspect of the labor shortage and I am not confident we’re doing all we can to show appreciation for our employees in non-monetary ways. 

Of course, your employees expect fair and equitable pay and let’s hope you’re all providing that. But today’s employees expect far more, and many companies haven’t taken the time to gain a solid understanding of what’s important to the new generation of workforce and how elements beyond pay make a huge difference when it comes to the employee experience, employee engagement and, ultimately, employee retention. 

On last week’s podcast, I spoke with Dr. Jack Wiley, who is recognized internationally for pioneering research linking employee work attitudes to measures of organizational success. Most recently, Dr. Wiley was professor of psychology for Manchester University, where he founded the undergraduate program in industrial organizational psychology. He currently serves as the chief scientific officer at Engage2Excel, and as the president and CEO of both Jack Wiley Consulting and Employee Centricity. He was on to discuss his most recent book, Employee Centricity, for which he conducted vast research on what it is employees want from their managers. 

“I think we're all aware of the fact that over the last 18 months, the workplace dynamic has changed in some ways that will be more or less forever going forward. I think some of these changes are simply going to be changes that we're going to be dealing with in our careers as we move forward. So, that represents an unprecedented challenge for managers. They have a lot of additional issues that they need to be attending with, especially today in the United States, we saw the August numbers show that 4.4 million workers quit. A recent survey that I saw indicated about 65 percent of employees are actually considering leaving their current job,” he shares.

I’ve seen some of these statistics, so they didn’t shock me as much as what Dr. Wiley shared next. “Over 70 percent of managers in the United States, and I'm talking about all industries, all different levels of management, smaller organizations, larger organizations, over 70 percent of managers either had no training in people management or the training they had received was limited to no more than four hours,” he says. “And so, when we consider the centrality of people management responsibilities in the context of the overall role of the manager, and over 70 percent had no more than four hours at best, also I think is part of the problem.”

Effective, engaged managers and overall company culture are critical to employee retention – so we must do a better job of understanding what our workforce wants and needs and ensuring our leadership is both committed to and able to provide that. There are many layers to this, but employees that feel more appreciated and valued is an important piece of the puzzle. With that in mind, here are 10 ways you can show your employees you are thankful for them that have nothing to do with compensation:

  1. Recognition. We all want to feel that what we do matters, and we all want to feel valued for our contributions. This doesn’t have to be complex, but it is often overlooked. When is the last time you genuinely thanked an employee? We can start by doing more of that and we can build upon that by ensuring others within the organization see the hard work of employees, creating programs that showcase efforts, and even giving awards for those going above and beyond. “Providing recognition is about psychological appreciation,” says Dr. Wiley. “’Thank you for a job well done. I'm not going to take credit for your good work, I'm going to make sure you're in the spotlight up the chain of command.’”
  2. Listen. Again, this sounds simple but happens far less than it should. Employees want to feel their voice matters and they want to know their ideas are valued. They want to feel comfortable coming to managers with thoughts, concerns, personal needs, and so on. Moreover, the input of frontline employees is double the gift, because not only does listening help employees feel more important and engaged – but their ideas are often different and very valuable when it comes to setting strategy and making investments. Creating a culture where employees across the organization feel comfortable speaking up is a must today, and this includes a willingness to be open minded and a preparedness to have hard conversations. A great way to show an employee appreciation is to ask in earnest, “What do you think?”
  3. Offer mentorships. Mentorships are a great way to help employees stay engaged, motivated, and keep personal connections that build longevity and loyalty. New employees can “learn the ropes” and mentors can get to know employees in a deeper way, which can help with building on strengths and developing their careers. A mentee who feels a mentor is investing time in them will appreciate the opportunity to learn and grow and will feel valued by the company providing such an opportunity. 
  4. Provide career mapping. It’s very important for today’s employees to have options for growth and career progression. Employees feel appreciated when they have an opportunity to grow their skills, their experiences, and themselves within an organization. Career mapping provides this to your employees, but it also helps for you to map talent within your organization to retain as much as possible and to put stars in optimal roles.  
  5. Value outcomes over output. The traditional working world rewarded hours clocked in or pieces of parts made – output. The new working world needs to shift to ensuring employees feel valued for the outcomes they can achieve, not the output alone. Setting success criteria based on desired outcomes, and then measuring employees based on that, enables you to give employees more latitude on how they accomplish what you need them to accomplish which helps them feel like a larger contributor. “Employees want more flexibility in how they go about their work. So, they're looking for their managers to provide them with more autonomy. Help me understand what the work is you want accomplished but give me more room to decide how I'm going to go about doing that myself,” explains Dr. Wiley. 
  6. Look for opportunities to reskill or upskill. A great way to thank employees for their hard work and dedication is to give them the opportunity to learn a new skill or to advance their training. Whether something as simple as a “we’ll buy you a book a month” program – which I love – to more formal training, an investment in your employees’ education and future is a great way to show you appreciate them. 
  7. Give time back. What’s more precious than money? Time. Another great way to show gratitude is to give the gift of time back. In 2020, IFS decided to give every employee their birthday off. We also have an annual CSR day that we can use to volunteer however we’d like. These small gestures have a big impact. 
  8. Show your trust. Being micromanaged is a fast path to employee frustration and disconnect. We must learn how better to empower our employees, and this requires trust. Feeling trusted is another way for employees to feel appreciated and my guess is that most of the time, employee outcomes improve when trust is increased. 
  9. Prioritize mental health. Showing your employees you care about them as human beings, not just for their performance at work, is a great way to show your gratitude. The last two years have been challenging and many people need more connection than they did pre-Covid. Offering support and resources around mental health is a way to say thank you and a way to ensure your employees maintain their wellbeing. 
  10. Promote fun. We don’t all need to have ping pong tables in our offices, but there’s nothing wrong with having fun at work. Nurturing an environment where employees are encouraged to have fun – or perhaps even coordinating a fun-only activity or outing every so often – keeps morale high and helps employees know you appreciate them. 

What would you add to this list? I’d love to hear!

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My Thoughts from Field Service Palm Springs 2021: 5 Barriers to the Service Revolution

November 22, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

My Thoughts from Field Service Palm Springs 2021: 5 Barriers to the Service Revolution

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

When Field Service Palm Springs 2020 was cancelled, I wondered when we’d ever be at the point of being able to return. It’s an event I look forward to every year and last week, that return happened with Field Service Palm Springs 2021. I can’t explain how happy I was to be back in California, sharing thoughts, ideas, smiles, and, yes, drinks with so many colleagues, co-workers, friends, and new connections. The sentiment of not being able to replicate the energy you get from an in-person event any other way is one I heard shared by many attendees. 

The event took place over three days and included mainstage keynote sessions, panels, fireside chats, and afternoon breakout track session and roundtables. It was interesting to hear stories of how companies weathered the storm of the pandemic and what’s top of mind as we move ahead. There were some great success stories shared by folks like Larry Blue of Bell and Howell, Tim Spencer of BUNN, and Gyner Ozgul of Smart Care Equipment Solutions. And while I think it’s important to listen to how others are making progress and learn from their journeys, I think it’s also critical that we work to examine some of the barriers holding field service back from its ultimate success. 

So, with that in mind, I’m sharing here the five barriers I heard this week that seem to be in the way of companies deriving the full potential of service. 

Barrier #1: No Service Identity

We know there’s a continuum of service maturity that companies are progressing through, from break-fix on one end to outcomes-based service at the other. And no company matures in one big leap. However, the barrier here seems to be a lack of service identity for some organizations. To achieve true outcomes-based service, you’re talking about a fundamental change in how business is conducted. In reality, it’s a change in company identity versus service identity – or the incorporation of service identity into the overall company identity.  

The evolution to outcomes cannot be achieved in the service function alone – it requires a top-level recognition of the opportunity service presents for the business and a company-wide commitment to the journey of adopting that identity. I believe that for us to witness a surge in progress through that continuum, we need greater and more pervasive acceptance of the fact that service must become a part of the company’s identity. We made strides when we moved from perceiving service as a profit center versus a cost center but what’s needed now is the elimination of the silo in total and for it to be seen as an integral aspect of the company value proposition.   

Barrier #2: Digital Alignment

This is tied to business identity in a way, because as companies work to create a more cohesive and service-centric value proposition, the realization occurs that greater digital alignment is required. Rather than a disparity of digital tools in use across the business, however well-functioning they are, companies need to become more cohesive in their digital strategy and digital investments. 

We discussed this need here where we explored the barriers to digital transformation success and the idea of building the Digital Dream Team. To create the customer experiences we need to, we must look at digital more holistically so that we ensure a seamless customer journey, so we gather the right data at the right time, and so we set the stage to be able to leverage that data as a strategic differentiator. 

Barrier #3: Legacy Company Culture

The need for innovation has never been greater, but for many organizations there’s a legacy culture really stifling creativity and employee empowerment. This disparity was evident in some of my discussions where you could see almost two entirely different worlds exist – on one end, you have companies that are embracing change and working to create environments where employees feel valued, know they can provide feedback and share ideas, and feel comfortable speaking up and trying things because failure is seen as an opportunity not a disaster. 

On the other hand, you hear people talking about how rigid the management is, how narrow the focus, how outdated the employee experience. And I would say that, right now, this is sadly still the majority. But I do believe it won’t be for long. There’s simply no way to remain relevant without adapting and adopting a more modern culture. Your customers will demand it and your employees will, too. There are so many resources on employee engagement, company culture, and modern leadership and my opinion is that these topics absolutely need to be woven into the event agenda more going forward because this is an area that needs attention. 

Barrier #4: The Talent Gap

This was one of the number one topics of discussion, and of course we do a lot of content on this topic. You can read my advice on how to control the controllables around the talent gap here, but while on site I also recorded a podcast with Roy Dockery of Swisslog that you’ll see soon. Roy has strong opinions on this subject and at the heart his though is, “There isn’t a talent gap, companies are just lazy in how they hire.” He’s not wrong.

What he means is that companies have always hired on experience, and that experience is quite frankly becoming extinct. We must then become more creative and, yes, work harder to find talent and develop it versus expecting experienced workers to show up in droves. There are layers to this to explore, including more modern recruiting practices, the importance of the employee value proposition, company culture and employee engagement and retention, and how technology can ease the burden. It’s a topic that will continue to be important, but I hope the audience is willing to listen to Roy’s point and begin to think differently about how to close the gap.

Barrier #5: Data Aggregation vs. Storytelling

There was a lot of discussion at the event around collecting data and leveraging ML and AI, but the barrier I believe is that companies are still focused on the aggregation of the data rather than the stories it can tell. Of course, the aggregation must come first, but ample attention needs to be put into knowing what you can do with that data and ensuring you have systems – and talent – to appropriately translate your data into valuable business insights. 

This isn’t necessarily a barrier, but more data storytelling and a deeper understanding of how to use data to drive customer value is absolutely key to the future of service and I think there’s a lot of exploration to do on best practices around this topic. 

If you attended the event, I’d love to hear your thoughts and takeaways! Also, the event is back to its normal schedule for 2022 and will be happening April 26-28. If you missed last week’s event, stay tuned here for the agenda and perhaps I’ll see you in the Spring. 

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November 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Field Service Comes to Medical Care

November 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Field Service Comes to Medical Care

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By Tom Paquin

In November 2020, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services launched the Acute Hospital Care At Home program to provide hospitals expanded flexibility to care for patients in their homes. This is but one of many at-home hospital care programs that have begun to pop up, in an effort to keep high-risk patients safe, mitigate capacity issues at hospitals, and to simply allow people the dignity of care from their own home. And while we’ve spoken about medical devices before, it’s interesting to take this conversation into medical care itself.

While this certainly is a nice option for individuals with chronic conditions who would prefer to stay in their own home rather than make regular trips to the hospital, it’s impossible to not see this as what it is: Yet another vector for field service management. And in-home medical care being another service option means that what was once a simple, centralized function now has tendrils that extend far outside a single network of buildings. Let’s talk about what that means.

Scheduling in the Another Dimension
Under even the rosiest of circumstances, coordinating a staff of personnel across a business is a challenge. Take “Making the rounds” and move it to a statewide scale, and you’ve added another dimension of challenges, logistics, and pain. Do you embed individuals in homes? Do you subdivide labor between at-home and in-office? Do you bring on contingent labor and merge them with salaried staff? 

In service, we know that this can be most effectively managed by a full-featured optimization system. For staffing effectiveness (especially in the face of a labor shortage), this is an imperative. Getting this right will allow hospitals and associated organizations to offer the care that patients need, when they need it, in a way that maximizes value and limits overhead. 

Decentralizing the Service Supply Chain
For medical devices, especially consumables, there’s a variety of interesting opportunities to provide decentralized service. Should consumables be sent directly to the patient? What are the compliance risks of doing so? What about remittance and disposal of hazardous materials? There’s a lot of potential for value add, money saved, and more thoughtful utilization of materials. 

Getting all that figured out will be beholden to understanding parts management and reverse logistics across all channels of care. That means fusing in-office care with field care, in a single view, across use cases. 

Always-on Device Management
I can imagine that home medical care would be particularly appealing to individuals on dialysis, or who receive lengthy treatments of other kinds. Obviously many of those types of treatments require and include complex machinery in order to function correctly. And when that equipment falls out of physical view, tracking becomes all the more important.

We’re quick to articulate the invaluable connection between asset management and service management, and that becomes doubly true when medical property is in a customer’s home. For things to run efficiently, you need to know that there’s an issue with a piece of equipment before the appointment, not at the beginning of an appointment.

Whenever service comes into play, these sorts of considerations naturally arise. And while it’s important for all service organizations to get service right, the stakes are often much higher for medical care. Fortunately, today’s tools for service deliver can rise to meet those challenges, and help initiatives like this succeed. 

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Are Misperceptions Holding You Back from the Potential of As-a-Service?

November 15, 2021 | 4 Mins Read

Are Misperceptions Holding You Back from the Potential of As-a-Service?

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

If you listened to the recent podcast with Dave Mackerness of Kaer, you should understand the value that the As-a-Service business model holds. However, it seems that there are some common myths around what it really means to introduce an As-a-Service offering that holds companies back from it potential. On this week’s podcast, I welcome Kevin Bowers, Director of Field Service Research at Technology & Services Industry Association to discuss the myths and truths of As-A-Service. 

Kevin recently wrote a column on this topic that prompted me reaching out and inviting him for a podcast discussion. In that column, he shares the two most common misperceptions he’s witnessed – that As-a-Service means simply leasing equipment or that it is related to a cloud offering. “My boss’s boss often says, do you know what the S in as a service stands for? It doesn't stand for subscription. It doesn't stand for solution. It's for the service,” says Kevin. “It's about adding value to that piece of equipment. It's not, like you said, CAPEX, OPEX. It's about helping the customers achieve something that they're after. And it doesn't have to be in the cloud.”

I agree with these points fully. As-a-Service gets brushed off as nothing more than giving customers a way to pay that is OPEX versus CAPEX, but the true value of this opportunity is in delivering far more than different payment terms. It’s about offering customers an outcome they need, an experience they desire, and the peace of mind they seek. As such providing something As-a-Service is really one method of migrating to an outcomes-based model. When companies simply try to re-label their traditional products and services “As-a-Service” and wonder why customers aren’t interested, it’s because the true value of the model is in the outcome not in the offer.

Simplicity Sells

One of the benefits of introducing As-a-Service is in its simplicity – you are solving a problem your customer has, reliably and consistently, as a service. This is easy to understand, highly compelling, and likely to succeed. What happens, though, is that companies over-complicate the idea of As-a-Service based on legacy thinking by trying to position it as the capabilities that enable the company to provide X-as-a-Service rather than articulating the outcome to the customer. 

What companies must understand is that today’s customers are far less interested than ever in the products you sell or even the services you provide – they care about how you can help them. This is the root of As-a-Service. It doesn’t mean repackaging what you’ve always done with a shiny new bow, it means reorienting your business to guarantee outcomes that your customers need and value. “At TSIA, we've been saying it for seven, eight years now: customers don't care about your product,” says Kevin. “You posted about your experience at your event in Netherlands recently, talking about how it's not about the product, the service. It's about the story, and more and more, that story is about outcomes. And to be clear, it's about the customer's outcome, not your outcome. I think that idea still ruffles feathers.”

This mindset or identity shift can prevent companies from seeing the realities of the transition to As-a-Service, which then prohibits their success because they are hedging their bets instead of taking a leap. One important aspect of As-a-Service to understand is that risk is inherent, and the more you try to mitigate your risk, the less value you’re delivering to customers which means that your shift to the model will appear unsuccessful when you never truly embraced the model at all. Companies who offer outcomes take on a certain amount of risk, which is part of the appeal for customers. There’s no way around that, so rather than looking for a shortcut, you should spend your energy determining what you need to change within the business to be confident in accepting more risk.

This is where technology plays a huge role. It’s incredibly challenging, if not impossible, for a company to scale its operations to guaranteed outcomes with manpower and sheer will. You need data, automation, and intelligence of modern tools to enable this transition. “Historically a missed SLA was a missed SLA. In the world of outcomes, when field service doesn’t arrive on time, you don’t get paid,” explains Kevin. “This means you have to have the right infrastructure in place. You can't run field service on an Excel sheet anymore and have pipe dreams that you're going to deliver an outcome.”

This brings about another misperception, which is that the introduction of As-a-Service is a service transformation. It’s not, it’s a business transformation. You cannot, as a company, introduce As-a-Service in just one silo – it is an overarching strategy and shift in companywide approach. This realization can scare some folks away and it needn’t. While ultimately the move to delivering outcomes is a change in company identity, it isn’t a matter of flipping a switch – it can most certainly start and be proven in an area of the business and then expanded strategically over time. This approach was discussed in the podcast with Kaer and Kevin gives another example in our discussion this week. 

The truth Kevin and I, along with many others, agree on is that As-a-Service isn’t a trend or fad but a proven business model that will only continue to become more prevalent. So, take stock of what misperceptions you may have and consider what you stand to gain by breaking those down and examining the truths of companies like Kaer seeing immense success from embracing risk and being willing to innovate. 

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Revisiting Old Articles: Part 1

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Revisiting Old Articles: Part 1

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By Tom Paquin

If you’ve been following the work that we’ve done on State of Service here at FoFS, you’d have a fresh view on how the many challenges of the last two years have culminated in our current expectations around service delivery. So I figured let’s dig into the archives and see what we were saying back when this site got started.

Sarah brought me into the Future of Field Service family in early 2019, and my tenure began with a couple of articles in January of that year. Let’s take a look at some of them, how things have changed, and what remains the same. Here’s my first article for FoFS:

Is Field Service The Retail Game Changer?
Most of the existing examples listed here have been among companies selling complex tech products, but that should not be the limit to retail’s service footprint. If field service right in every instance? Absolutely not. I think we’d all be a bit alarmed if a Victoria’s Secret technician rang your doorbell for a 3PM hosiery service appointment. But Victoria’s Secret actually does have a robust in-store service offering that works great for them. Think of what would have happened if Border’s, or Circuit City, or Blockbuster had developed service systems in-store for consultation and unique services. These companies failed because they tried to compete against the superior capabilities of competitors, rather than improving, and utilizing their unique set of strengths.

Have you been to your local mall recently? Yikes.

I remember the first time I ventured into an indoor mall during COVID times, and I was shocked by the dramatically different landscape. Legacy brands and corporate strongholds had eroded, leaving a swath of vacancies, some new local businesses, and a surprising number of storefronts now taken up by something I wouldn’t even think that they were zoned for: Restaurants.

With Amazon slowly gobbling up the world of retail commerce like a big, exploitative Galactus, businesses have needed to flex their services in order to stay relevant. This is true across retail, from grocery curbside and delivery to personal shopping, to vastly expanded pick up in store.

Some businesses are more creative than others, and in what is apparently a burgeoning “Metaverse”, the utilization of online channels to deliver service solutions will increase as well. 

The reality is that brick and mortar stores were tasked with the drive to innovate or die before COVID, and COVID advanced digital transformation by a half-decade or so. Some businesses have not survived the transition, while others are innovating their way towards new revenue, better customer experiences, and meeting (often literally) their customers where they are. 

Next time, we’ll talk about the death of the frankensystem.

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