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August 2, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

4 Signs It is Time for A Digital Rebirth

August 2, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

4 Signs It is Time for A Digital Rebirth

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’ve had a handful of excellent conversations in the past few weeks about digital transformation – what it really means, the distance between recognizing its importance and knowing how to take action, and the biggest barriers that stand in the way of success even once you have a clear idea of your digital objectives. Based on what I’ve heard, it seems that for many organizations it is time for a digital rebirth.

There are a handful of reasons why I believe this, the first of which is that it is undoubtedly a critical aspect of your company’s success or failure in what is our digital present and our digital future. So, it’s incredibly important to get this right, and similar to our conversations around Servitization and business model shifts, doing so is trickier than it sounds because it is a matter of making some foundational changes. Digital transformation isn’t about a never-ending quest of technology investments, it’s about reshaping your business to compete in the digital era. My recent conversations have illustrated that there’s in many instances a missing of the urgency that is very real, and/or a lack of clarity on what it takes to make the changes needed.

In a recent conversation I hosted with Philip Carter of IDC, he spoke about a company’s digital identity and digital destiny. I’m curious – do you know your digital identity? Have you considered your digital destiny? My bet is many do not and have not, and that’s because we haven’t properly defined what digital transformation means for our business. The first step in your digital rebirth needs to be defining these terms, for your business, in a way that only you can do. Only then you can determine what your digital transformation needs to look like and take meaningful steps toward achieving success. If when you think about digital transformation and what it really means your head just spins, here are four surefire signs you need to consider a digital rebirth.

#1: You Haven’t Yet Realized/Admitted Your Company is a Technology Company

Every company today is a technology company, and this truth will only be multiplied as we step into the future. Out-and-out resistance is futile, and even hesitancy is putting you significantly behind. At one point we looked at digital transformation from the perspective of using technology to automate manual processes, but at this point the definition of digital transformation has broadened to becoming a digital company.

This can mean digitizing internally in a way that optimizes your use of resources, automates tasks to maximize output, streamlining the customer journey to create a seamless customer experience, and enabling the level of fast-paced, data-driven decision making that is needed today. But it can also mean using digital tools to create outcomes-based service offerings and even digital services for your customers. The options are limitless and unique to your needs and goals, but the truth is universal.

In Accenture’s Technology Vision 2021 report, the firm states, “Amid the challenges of 2020, two truths became evident. More companies than ever have embraced the axiom that every business is a technology business, and they’ve ignited a new era of exponential transformation as technology continuously reshapes industries and the human experience.” The report goes on to highlight the difference in performance between companies who embrace and take action on this reality versus those who lag, stating that digital leaders (the top 10 percent of companies leading technology innovation) achieve 2–3x revenue growth as compared to their competitors. Accenture refers to this widening divide as the “Digital Achievement Gap.”

#2: You Lack Technology-Adept Leadership

Who then is leading us into this new world of digital potential? That’s a very important question. I see all too often leadership within organizations that holds its company back from success for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it is overall resistance to change – the, “we’ve always done it this way and it works just fine” mentality. Other times it is overwhelm – not knowing where to start. And sometimes it is ego standing in the way of admitting the need of more digital expertise. It can be many different things, but to keep pace in the way you need to in the digital era, you must have technology adept-leadership.

As Accenture’s report states, “During the pandemic, it became starkly clear that there is no leadership without technology leadership. Rapid digital acceleration during the pandemic has cemented technology as the cornerstone of global leadership.”

To be clear, this doesn’t mean every leader has to be a technology guru. But it also doesn’t mean that every leader should go out and hire a digital leader just to shirk the responsibility of a foundational understanding, vision, and acumen. Technology-adept leadership also isn’t the be-all and end-all of digital success – we know that we know that people and processes are what most commonly foil these efforts. Today’s leaders need to combine keen technology awareness with agile and courageous decisions and ample amounts of emotional intelligence.

#3: Your Digital Transformation Efforts are Siloed

In the recent IDC conversation I mentioned earlier, Carter pointed out a statistic highlighting the fact that only 26 percent of organizations achieve ROI with their digital transformation efforts. The number one reason for this is the widespread existence of organizational siloes. There will be no true digital success if these siloes aren’t broken down to where the company is working toward an aligned vision for their digital destiny and working collectively on the digital transformation initiatives that will get them there.

You hear many conversations about how the business and IT are working closer on technology decisions. The Accenture report states that “83% of executives agree that their organization’s business and technology strategies are becoming inseparable—even indistinguishable.” The closer the communication and partnership across all functions of the business, the greater the impact your digital transformations efforts will have.

We discussed here the topic of building a digital dream team. The idea is that a team is formed that combines stakeholders from each function of the business with someone designated to “coach” – often a head of innovation-type title. This team approach helps to ensure that there are common, measured objectives; that duplicative investments and efforts aren’t taking place; that digital decisions are being made with the customer journey in mind; and that true progress is being made in prioritizing the efforts that will best help you reach your digital destiny.

#4: Your Tech Stack/Strategy Are Antiquated

This one may sound obvious – it might be time for a digital rebirth if your technology is aging. Well, yes. But you might be surprised just how many companies or leaders have outdated technology strategies or systems and simply don’t see them as such. It’s important to stay abreast of how digital has evolved, and continues to evolve, and evaluate how that evolution should impact your strategy.

We did an article recently with Cimcorp, discussing the five tenets of their modern approach to IT. We discuss the need to rethink the role of IT within your business, the benefit of relinquishing some control, the value of a platform approach, and more. The premise of Cimcorp’s thinking is to determine how to work smarter rather than harder so that the IT team has the bandwidth to focus more on the company’s digital strategy and digital future rather than its time being all-consumed by hands-on IT management. This thinking is incredibly smart, and what will set apart leaders from laggards.

In terms of the tech itself, Accenture states that “90% of business and IT executives in our survey agree that to be agile and resilient, their organizations need to fast forward their digital transformation with cloud at its core. Building a competitive technology stack starts with accumulating technical wealth—cloud strategies and microservices are the key. Enterprises need an adaptive technology foundation, and they can’t afford to be weighed down by legacy systems. As enterprises merge their technology and business strategies, they will start to play a bigger role facilitating people’s relationship with tech. This requires building trust—not just in products and services, but in the technologies behind them.”

I can imagine for someone reading this that is thinking a digital rebirth may be warranted, the idea likely seems very daunting. I won’t lie to you and say that it isn’t, but it is imperative. There is so much that rests on a company’s ability to be not just digitally competent but digitally competitive that it isn’t something you can ignore or delay. Daunting or not, mastering digital is simply a must.

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July 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Build Service Processes that Work by Studying Customer Behavior, Not Customer Wants

July 30, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Build Service Processes that Work by Studying Customer Behavior, Not Customer Wants

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By Tom Paquin

Is the customer always right? Obviously not. If a customer comes into a store and says that they are deserving of a 60% discount on their order because they had a hard time finding a parking spot, it’s okay to say ‘no’ to them.

I’d argue that any utterance, complaint, or assertion of any kind from a customer be met with a proportional amount of scrutiny. Because people don’t necessarily know what they want. Sometimes you need to show them what they want.

I will use a video game example, so skip the next two paragraphs if you don’t want to reach about Nintendo. Every few years, wide-eyed analysts and fans make broad assertions that Nintendo is about to release some sort of “dream” console, or game collection, or localization of a beloved Japanese game. These things never happen, and instead Nintendo releases modest hardware upgrades or $60 re-releases of mediocre games.

Nintendo does this rather than capitulate to fan demands because it is cheaper, it specifically targets the young demographic that Nintendo has always targeted, and because it has proven to be incredibly successful. Podcaster and journalist Justin McElroy frequently says, of Nintendo, “They won’t sell what you want them to, but you’ll want what they sell you.”

This is a similar strategy to the one employed by Apple, who, rather than acquiesce to the demand that they build a $500 “Netbook” (remember netbooks?) in the late aughts, built the exact opposite—a nearly $2,000 computer called the MacBook Air, that had something called a “Solid State Hard Drive”. And what type of computer has endured for over a decade?

Doing that requires you to understand your customers better than they do, and to study your customers in a non-binary fashion. The Simpsons has shown what happens when you just ask people what they want:

There is no value in getting a list of customer wants, you need to understand their behavior. In service, there are a variety of ways that you can do this.

One key consideration is to consider not just asset and employee output when measuring service processes, but also customer output. If assets are IoT-enabled, what is the length of time between exception and customer contact? When given an array of service times, how far into the future does the customer, on average, book an appointment for a specific need?

Then, of course, you can begin to benchmark elements against one another. What is the correlation between NPS and time from ticket to invoice? What length of product ownership yields the most repairs, errors, and scraps?

Finally, you can begin to involve customers directly in the service process, and see what attrition rates are with utilities like appointment assistance, “where’s my tech”, and other such tools. Doing so allows you to see what customers really value, anticipate their needs, and build service solutions that meet the contour of your business without needlessly cutting into your bottom-line. Because you know your business best, and your customers should want what you are serving them.

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July 26, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

3 Barriers Preventing VoC From Driving Fruitful Innovation Within Service Businesses

July 26, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

3 Barriers Preventing VoC From Driving Fruitful Innovation Within Service Businesses

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

While there are a few companies still struggling to grasp the concept that Voice of the Customer is the key driver of service innovation, evolution, and growth; the vast majority have accepted there’s no other path to success. This is important because it’s absolutely clear to everyone paying attention that gone are the days of “build it and they will come” or any reasonable chance of success in creating solutions or making technology investments based on hunches or good intentions.

Today, customer is king – period. In all industries, in all geographies, we are simply living in a time where differentiation and revenue growth depend on being able to deliver experiences and outcomes that your customers need, value, and desire. Attempting to do this without putting their direct input front and center of your strategy is foolish, and most companies I talk with recognize this truth. However, in many cases, that recognition has not yet been matched by an effective means for obtaining and reacting to the customer voice. This must quickly be addressed – the recognition of the criticality of VoC must be married to the proper measures for collecting, channeling, and closing the loop on customer insights. Based on the conversations I’ve had, there are three primary barriers that are preventing companies from making proper use of VoC.

#1: Customers Won’t Engage

“We’ve tried collecting input from our customers, but they don’t respond to our efforts.”

This is the most challenging of the three barriers, because it is most likely representative of a more systemic issue (or issues). If your customers aren’t interested in providing you with feedback or discussing with you their needs and challenges, you first need to examine the customer-centricity of your approach and where you may be falling short in building close customer relationships.

If you feel you have good customer relationships but aren’t having success with them engaging in VoC efforts, I would then move on to review both your method of collecting insights and your follow through on feedback. If your method of outreach is poorly timed, cumbersome to use, or entirely impersonal, it may be that they simply aren’t willing to participate due to those factors. Looking into the most effective forms of customer outreach is worthwhile, and keep in mind that you need to balance quantitative measures of collecting feedback with more in-depth, qualitative engagement particularly when you’re looking to better understand challenges and needs. Along these lines, make sure you think through the matching of input sought versus contact asked. So, for instance, feedback on current operations should clearly be sought from those experiencing your company’s services, whereas input on innovation or next-generation offerings may require someone other than your current day-to-day contact.

Then you move on to considering whether or not you are following through. If you are asking for customer input, quantitatively or qualitatively, and not providing a feedback loop for them to hear or see how their time and effort to engage had an impact, they won’t continue to provide that input. Why would they? A feedback loop is imperative for nurturing ongoing VoC efforts. This is a step many miss because it takes time and effort, but no customer will continue to weigh in – particularly on anything other than a negative experience – if they don’t see the impact their voice is having.

#2: VoC Data is Siloed

“We gather the data through a survey tool, but then it just sits in that tool and isn’t really digested in a timely or effective manner.”

VoC data collected or insight from customer conversations doesn’t do your company any good if it just sits somewhere, unused. But this happens, because oftentimes the measure used to gather the input is lacking in any sort of analytics functionality as well as siloed from the systems used for decision making or customer engagement. The siloed data is often compounded by a lack of clarity on who within the organizations owns VoC and is responsible for ensuring the insights are put to good use.

This type of scenario is particularly unfortunate because you have customers who are willing to engage and are actively doing so, only for their input to be wasted. This leads to the issue of no feedback loop, which means it is only a matter of time before those customers you have weighing in decide it isn’t worth their effort to do so. VoC insights need to be incorporated into your company-wide systems and decision-making processes so that you can ensure the invaluable perspective of those already investing in your company’s success are used to drive it forward.

#3: Action on VoC Input is Unclear

“We gather VoC data, but honestly struggle with knowing what to do with the input.”

I’ve had people tell me that they used to collect VoC input and simply stopped because the data wasn’t being used. This makes me break out in hives! The first step of taking action on VoC data is to choose a tool that helps you to avoid analysis paralysis – one that has functionality built in to help surface trends, decipher patterns, and sift through important points.

The other important aspect of taking proper action, however, is ensuring someone is accountable for making proper use of VoC. With the importance of the role it plays in innovation and company growth potential, this may very well be a specific resource dedicated to a formal VoC program and held accountable for ensuring the input doesn’t sit unused, the proper actions are taken, and a customer feedback loop put in place. Ultimately, VoC should be everyone’s responsibility in some form – whether in collecting it, evangelizing it, creating based on it, or being accountable to it – but without proper ownership, a lack of action is likely. If you aren’t at a point where you have dedicated VoC resources, you need to ensure duties of action are assigned and metrics put in place to measure how VoC is being used. It’s far too precious a resource to waste.

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July 23, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Your Last Service Appointment

July 23, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Your Last Service Appointment

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By Tom Paquin

Last week, I wrote about service appointments from the cradle, and what we can learn from them. Life being a series of contrasts, I figured I might as well take that full circle and talk about what goes into the last service appointment you’ll ever have: your funeral.

Because we have the luxury of living in a society that doesn’t have to think about death constantly (something that’s only been true for about 100 years) it’s easy for us to mentally and logistically avoid the topic. But as a wise man once told me, human beings are guaranteed to always need to do three things: eat, go to the bathroom (he used a slightly different phrase), and die. And it’s important that we’re candid about all three. So let’s think about funeral services, and what we can learn about them, through a service lens.

Planning Ahead

My paternal grandparents, may they rest in peace, each began paying into a “funeral account” in their mid-fifties. This is not the same thing as life insurance: They paid ten dollars a month each over the course of a decade, at which point their accounts were fully financed, meaning that the funeral, coffin, and grave plot were all paid for. With this, they were furthermore able to choose their coffin, the readings at their funeral, the flowers, and the cards handed out to friends and family. We would never in a million years have put my grandmother in a baby blue coffin, but that’s what she wanted, and that’s what I carried on the day we buried her.

Offering services like this is good business, but much more than that, it takes the onus off of the customer. Sure—funerals are not exactly brimming with repeat customers, but service appointments are, and, as much as we don’t want to admit it, having an end-of-life plan for customer assets is as useful as having an end-of-life plan for our corporeal bodies. This, in some truly bizarre way, is a backdoor into servitization, as, perhaps with a monthly fee, customers are able to a pay for service and can build up collateral to a replacement when their current asset reaches end-of-life. This obviously wouldn’t work for every industry, but for a set as diverse as cars to industrial machinery, there’s certainly application.

Customer Experience

Listen, losing someone is not fun. They’re gone, which can be a huge bummer, and on top of that, you have the grapple with a rolodex of existential questions that otherwise just wake you up in an abrupt panic at 3AM. It’s for that reason that it’s imperative to have a good bedside manner, easy and responsive booking, and a clear, well-communicated plan of follow-up actions.

This is no different that service, where broken assets can mean money right out the door. That’s why a cogent, logical, and well-articulated customer experience plan is key. From chatbots, to remote assistance, to an uber-like view and communication network for technicians, there’s a lot that customers expect to get right when they need support.

Logistics Management

Funeral homes have to manage an overwhelming network of connections—from churches, to graveyards, they need to be well-connected to the surrounding areas and have embedded relationships with the appropriate people to make the process of burying a loved one as seamless as possible.

This is no different than managing a network of depots, warehouses, and dispatched for service reps. As we always, always, always say, these disparate functions have to be housed under a single view to be effective. This is how you manage seamless handoffs between dispatch, service, and repair—the hallmark of an effectively-run service business.

Obviously, the objectives of a funeral home and that of a service business differ slightly—You can’t repair uncle Morty, I’m sorry to say. But the fundamentals—delivering seamless, well-run service is the same. And when it’s your loved one’s memory we’re talking about, there’s no second chances. A philosophy that the best service companies also take to heart.

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Closing the Digital Transformation ROI Gap: How to Overcome the #1 Issue that Hinders Success

July 19, 2021 | 8 Mins Read

Closing the Digital Transformation ROI Gap: How to Overcome the #1 Issue that Hinders Success

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The term ‘digital transformation’ easily rolls off the tongue of every business leader in the world today. But what does a modern definition of digital transformation entail? Certainly, we’re far past the point of actually digitizing paper-based information and processes. Digital transformation in today’s terms is representative of a company’s shift to excelling in the digital era – the mastery of digital tools, the cohesiveness of customer experience, and the introduction of digital products and services.

While the criticality of digital is widely understood, many companies are still grappling with how to articulate their digital identity and make tangible progress in their digital evolution. This is largely since organizational structure, culture, and company workflow aren’t historically set up in a way that is conducive to the collaboration and agility that today’s digital imperative demands.

In a recent session with Phillip Carter, Chief Analyst for IDC in Europe, Fredrik Tukk, Head of Innovation Scouting at Maersk Drilling, and Marne Martin, President of the Service Management Global Business Unit at IFS, we dove into a detailed conversation on what it takes to achieve digital transformation ROI in today’s landscape. There were many important points discussed and you can stay tuned to the podcast for a replay of the full session coming soon, but what stood out to me that I want to cover in this article is the number one issue that stands in the way of digital transformation ROI and how you can move past that barrier.

Organizational Silos Kill Digital Progress

“2020 was an inflection point for IT spend and digital transformation efforts more specifically because it was the first time ever we saw a lack of correlation between GDP trends and IT spend. Normally with a significant drop in GDP, IT spend follows that very closely,” says Carter. “If you look at 2020, the biggest drop in GDP since World War II, IT spend held up remarkably well, and that was driven primarily by investments in digital transformation. Our research shows that we will hit $1.5 trillion investments in digital transformation globally this year, growing at about 15%. So, we are literally hurtling towards our digital destiny.”

This digital destiny is being recognized in both our personal lives and in the business world. But as businesses look to keep pace with digital innovation, there exists a significant disconnect between the investment in digital and achieving ROI. “We're moving towards a digital first mindset, not just at a business level, but also at a personal level, a societal level. I think we can feel that we can see that,” explains Carter. “But the problem is that our pre-pandemic research showcases that only 26% of organizations are really delivering an ROI from all of those investments. That's the digital ROI gap, as we call it. And we need to close that gap to drive the next phase as we move to reignite business, across the board.”

To close the gap, we need to examine what it is that is keeping organizations who know digital investment is important from achieving their desired outcomes. “The primary reason for the ROI gap is the inability to scale due to organizational silos. These silos create barriers across traditional organizational structures which are linked to the legacy technology architectures of the past,” says Carter. “We also hear feedback that IT and security leaders slow things down, so there is a sense that business and IT need to come together in a more cohesive fashion to drive scale. We call it the digital dream team, where every business function becomes a technology function. This requires a need to raise the tech IQ across all of those business functions, and IT needs to be at the table as well.”

Building Your Digital Dream Team

In building a digital dream team, you should consider that the goal is to – as Carter said – raise the tech IQ of every business function and create a more cohesive, collaborative approach to digital transformation. This forces elimination of silos and brings issues to the surface in order to identify, resolve, and move past them. “It used to be that the IT department was building the technological foundation for the company. But these days, many times you find new technologies or new vendors that come to you with a different perspective where you can execute. And sometimes, especially around COVID, it hasn't been focused on the ROI,” explains Tukk. “It's been focused on actually delivering a value to the customer that might not be measurable. One example I have from our industry, from when we couldn't travel. We needed to focus on utilizing new technology and doing remote maintenance. There isn’t a direct ROI on that. It’s not a business decision, it's a necessity to keep the rig going. So, you need to find the solution, where then technology played a major part, and that solution wouldn't come from IT, and you need to find someone who can deliver that to you today. And that's why you need to find other ways of working than the traditional way.”

It's time to work past the age-old IT and business divide and to create an environment where a team approach with shared goals is the norm. To do this, you need not only to identify who the team players will be but who will lead, or coach, the team. “If you think about Premier League, for example. So often the business feels they are the offense, and we need them to be the offense, but there's either a perception or sometimes reality that IT is playing defense and slows down the offense,” says Martin. “We need to be thinking about how we get a full team to be working together. We often don't have that coach or a leader that can bring the offensive and defensive elements together to work as a team and, specifically, a Premier League team. So that's where we have actions that we can continue to drive and be better at, as part of IFS as a vendor. But we're also looking to how we can enable the leaders and the coaches in an organization to be more effective. And, to the extent that there isn't that type of leader in the digital dream team, that we call that out and work with our customers to address that.”

Teamwork Builds Speed and Effectiveness

In the more traditional, IT-leads-all approach, there can often be a sense of control that creates friction and can cause a lack of flexibility. “When it comes to digital transformation, there is for some natural reasons a lack of flexibility and adaptability to take on new technologies and test them out on the side more or less to the legacy system,” explains Tukk. “For example, we’re working with a startup who suggest a technology that might be set in a different cloud setting. If I come to my IT department, they say, ‘No, we are Microsoft, no discussion.’ No flexibility. I understand they also can't just say yes to everything, but with increased speed in change in digital, go to market needs to be fast. When you work as a team and focus on solving your problem you can go to market much faster.”

And, yes, speed is critical. That’s not to say rush haphazardly, but the pace of change is continuing to increase and the pace of innovation – effective innovation – needs to match. “I talk quite a lot about this notion of four-wheel drive innovation, which is taking the speed and mindset from the digital innovation initiatives around the edge, into the core as well. And that's basically saying, ‘Okay, we need to evolve quickly so that there can't be two speeds of technology investment or technology adoption, or business direction.’ It needs to be one speed,” explains Carter. “And that speed is a lot faster than it currently is. But that requires people like Fredrik who drive digital innovation initiatives and push the agenda on the frontiers to also bring that mindset into the core, across all the different business units. And that's part of the digital dream team stepping up to this new level around digital investments and outcomes associated with that.”

This move to a digital dream team requires team members letting go of ego and focusing on problem resolution. The most effective way to accomplish this is to ensure the whole team is focused around a common goal. “What we see here as a way of driving that alignment across the teams is a focus on metrics that everyone signs up to,” notes Carter. “With the remote maintenance example that Fredrik highlighted, if you've got a metric around meantime to resolution and IT, and the business, and digital are working towards that, then suddenly there's a different level of alignment. And you bring that speed from the innovation areas into the core, as part of the fact that everyone is going to be measured on that outcome.”

So, if the digital dream team is how you overcome the havoc that organizational silos have on digital transformation success, it seems the coach you choose to lead that team would take some careful consideration. What makes a good digital dream team leader? “You need to look for people that can work through conflict,” says Martin. “Keep the team on track, be able to motivate and drive the courage and the curiosity to actually get it done. Don't just think of it from a functional perspective, think about it as who has the enablers to do the job well and that that person might come from finance, or might come from sales, or might come from operations, IT, you don't know necessarily where that person comes from.”

The coach role is far less about function or title, and far more about personality. “It's much less about the title, but more about the personality,” says Carter. “I think it's the classic T-shaped person, someone who's strong in key detail areas where it links to the project at hand. They need to understand at least the domain associated with the use case, but then have the emotional intelligence so to speak, in terms of courage, in terms of curiosity, in terms of engagement, bringing people along, dealing with the friction, picking up the ball and running with it.”

As we experience our digital destiny unfold, we’ll witness death to complacency and over-caution. Tukk shares some wise words, “I’ve come to realize that you’ve just got to try. Don't sit and plan for too long. Don't sit and think, oh, we should find someone else, we should do this or that, we should plan more. Give it a go, give it a try. The worst thing that can happen is you fail. But if you do it small and fast, no big harm done.”

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July 16, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Your First Service Appointment

July 16, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Your First Service Appointment

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By Tom Paquin

A few months ago, my wife Kate and I welcomed our baby girl into the world. She is the light of our life and I am so madly in love with her, proud of her mom for everything she put her body and mind through to bring her into the world, and overjoyed at a lifetime of possibilities for our little one.

While we were very fortunate to have a relatively straightforward pregnancy and birth for our child, I understand implicitly that the act of childbirth is never really stress-free. Birth at a hospital, too is complex—You’re working with a network of caretakers, managing processes that can shift on a dime, all the time with the implicit need to keep processes quick and seamless.

As it is with any service-oriented activity, I can’t turn off my service brain, and, really, any visit to the hospital is a kind of service appointment. For my baby girl, it was her first. And like any service appointment, there are lessons that we can learn and apply broadly to other service instances. Let’s discuss a few. For this exercise, we’ll consider a hospital as the service provider.

Predictive Planning and Scenario Screening

While it’s impossible to know precisely when a baby is going to be born (unless it’s scheduled, of course), you can usually get a pretty decent idea how many patients will be giving birth at any given time at a specific hospital. You take the number of childbearing people who have OBs within the hospital’s network and build some statistical analysis based on how far those people are along, how many additional people might show up unexpectedly based on historical data, and you can build a pretty decent projection of staffing, inventory, and room needs for a given time within a specific range.

We’ve talked about this before but it remains a salient—and overlooked—utility for service development that I think is key in all service scenarios, but in hospitals, getting it right could be the difference between life and death.

Knowledge Management

Television shows have long prepared me for the presence of the eponymous “chart” hanging from the end of every hospital bed in the world, ready to share any pertinent information about a patient’s symptoms, status, and course of treatment with the medical professionals on any given shift.

Understanding not just the milestones that a customer experiences as they go through a service visit, but also the “condition” of that customer is key in any service appointment. Are they ready for an upsell? Do they have specific requirements as highlighted in an SLA agreement? Not too long ago we discussed the importance of meeting customers where they are, and this is another component of that.

The Handoff

When you have a baby, if everything goes according to plan, there’s an instant when suddenly there’s a new patient. The mother, as a patient, is “sunsetted”, and the baby, as a patient emerges (Somewhat literally). This can happen in all sorts of service appointments, as well. Perhaps, in isolating an issue on a customer site, it becomes clear that there’s, instead an infrastructure problem. This is not uncommon in areas like telco and utilities, in which consumer needs are often tied to transmission and distribution challenges, though the two are not always mutually exclusive, and are sometimes interconnected.

The important thing in these scenarios is don’t forget customer #1. If the issue is resolved at the handoff, but persists at the symptomatic site, then guess what? Not only do you have an unhappy customer, you have an issue that hasn’t been resolved.

These are just a few examples, but these are all competencies that, while spending a few days in the hospital with our daughter, we saw managed with various degrees of competency. Nevertheless, when you’re living it (and you can’t turn off the service part of your brain), you start to see the connections, and realize that there are a great deal of areas that service companies could ignore at their own peril.

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Modernizing Technician Utilization to Keep Pace with Customer Demands

July 12, 2021 | 6 Mins Read

Modernizing Technician Utilization to Keep Pace with Customer Demands

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We often discuss the ways in which the role of the field technician is evolving and what the job might look like in a year or two or five. But, perhaps in doing so we are overlooking an important question: how are you handling the demands of the present day? Forward-thinking is important, but the reality is that many organizations have yet to modernize technician utilization enough to meet today’s demands.

I recently sat down with Ian Pattinson, who's the former vice president of technical operations at Rogers Communications, to record a podcast on this topic that will publish this week. Ian has spent more than 25 years in telecommunications and has a wealth of knowledge on what it takes to evolve technician utilization to meet today’s customer demands. While his knowledge is born of telecom experience, the points are applicable to many industries.

Today, the moment of service presents an opportunity for strategic differentiation for companies in telecommunications and beyond. But delivering on that moment of service in an environment that is increasingly complex isn’t possible without evolving and modernizing business strategy, processes, and technology. Taking on this change is necessary not only to keep pace with today’s pressures but most certainly to be able to compete effectively as the future we’re all envisioning unfolds.

Recognize Field Technicians for the Key Strategic Asset They Are

The reason the topic of technician utilization is imperative is because of the technician’s role in the service experience that is now – in most cases – what sets one company apart from the next. This importance is compounded by the fact that technicians are becoming harder and harder to recruit and hire, making utilization even more critical. “In a world where we've got advanced self-installation by customers themselves, and then increasingly more technically complicated customer homes as we begin, the technician has really become that key strategic asset for the service provider,” says Ian. “The technician is the trusted technical advisor that is welcomed into a home by customers and really becomes the face of the brand. It is also one of the biggest operational costs, which presents a massive opportunity to drive compounding material improvements across the P&L. Looking at the greater marketplace, there are several iconic consumer brands out there that have already delivered on new spectacular service experiences. These factors, combined with pervasive social media, mean that customers’ expectations have really increased, and their tolerances for problems have really decreased.”

(Re)Categorize Service Work and Technician Skillsets

For organizations like those Ian is referencing, where the service environment is becoming increasingly complex or the role of the technician is expanding to trusted advisory, the concept of categorizing technician work into various levels may be worthwhile. “As those customer homes become more technically complex, so does their work and their tools, the skills required and the training that's needed,” explains Ian. “Not every technician can be a top-level expert on all skills and all points in time, and then in the future, with technology changing so quickly. By breaking down the install and repair process into several technical skills and levels, joined with all the disposition and telemetry data that is widely available now, this enables the matching of the skills of the technician to the specific attributes and needs of the customer. This categorization dramatically increases the probability of getting it right the first time, first time right being really, really critical, and eliminating a lot of the breakage and the inevitable downstream costs that create a much better customer experience.”

In categorizing or tiering technician skills and work, you create the potential to more easily incorporate the use of contract workers if you choose. As discussed in this podcast, some organizations are leveraging contingent workers to complete some foundational tasks so that they can work on upskilling their salaried talent to take on more of the trusted advisor role.

Align Technician Compensation to Customer Centricity

One of the most important points Ian and I discuss during the podcast is that, while most organizations have adopted a strong customer focus, many have not introduced changes in technician compensation to align their performance to that focus. “Strong cross-functional collaboration is required to evolve the compensation model and career development, frankly, from what has been traditionally a tenure-based model to a skills and quality-based performance model,” says Ian. “Quality levels need to be determined and continually monitored based on a variety of different data points. My experience has been that after only a short time, the data clearly demonstrates the correlation between specific quality problems, and skill and compliance gaps.”

This data gives organizations invaluable insight into where within its talent pool attention is needed to address issues in training, knowledge, buy-in, or compliance so that customer outcomes are prioritized. “Automatically tagging under-threshold performers for management triage and attention of retraining is really, really important,” explains Ian. “It's beyond just the compensation and career development and rewards; delivering this new model also requires investing in a new training curriculum, data analytics reporting, and moreover allocating the right amount of task time to do the work properly, and then empowering individual technician discretion when additional time is required. Now they're being measured and performing based on quality and, when that quality gets delivered, it just pays back in spades. It takes senior management conviction to drive this change management program and to create what can be slightly more complex order stratification, and increasing and decreasing task codes, but the total cost of ownership improvements do come from what are reduced downstream, repeat calls, repeat visits, more satisfied customers with higher retention, higher tenure, and frankly, more satisfied the technicians that do a better job.”

Modernize Your Digital Toolset

The final area to address is that optimizing technician utilization cannot be accomplished without modernizing your digital toolset. Particularly in high-volume applications such as telecommunications, sophistication in the scheduling and dispatching of technicians is key to achieving customer satisfaction with today’s expectations. Understanding the capabilities of today’s software choices, which have evolved significantly in recent years, will help you to see how powerful of an enabler technology is in the customer experience. “My experience has been that moving to a standard-based, cloud product resolved three key issues with an old on-prem system. The first is that the old platform just couldn't deliver on the new strategy. It had been so highly customized, was no longer standard product, and hence was incredibly slow, expensive, and risky to change.  Secondly, the infrastructure on-prem became quickly outdated, had slow latency performance from more and unpredictable usage, with no option to change quickly which is important in today’s landscape. The last key area was around stability and availability problems.”

While legacy technology can be a major barrier to customer satisfaction, prioritizing the modernization of your digital tools can drive momentum. And when you leverage a system that helps you ensure the appropriate matching and prioritization of technician to customer, not only do you positively impact the customer experience, but you improve employee satisfaction as well. “Moving to a cloud-based standard product resolved those three key areas. System availability went to over 99.9%, we built credibility with frontline technicians, and we enabled the ongoing rapid delivery of new features and capability to keep the platform current.”

Be sure to listen to Ian’s interview on the Future of Field Service podcast this week to hear more.

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Companies are Abandoning On-Prem Support. What Comes Next For Those Who Need It?

July 9, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Companies are Abandoning On-Prem Support. What Comes Next For Those Who Need It?

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By Tom Paquin

“Cloud” has long since emerged from the ether and cemented itself not as the future, but as the present. This has been accelerated (as have all things) by COVID-19, as businesses grapple with a newly-dispersed workforce and the challenges that such a scenario invariably uncover. With the march towards cloud, developing products and maintaining support for “dinosaur” on-prem systems seems like more and more of a liability. In a world where everybody wants to sell you a subscription, why devote resources to a one-time purchase product that you’ll need to support with bug updates?

So, unsurprisingly, legacy vendors have been sprinting away from their on-prem products at an breakneck pace. Of course, for the businesses that employ these products, especially in service, there are invariably a great deal of questions that need to be answered. How long will my current build be supported? What does an upgrade path look like? What if my business requires on-prem for regulatory or security reasons? Let’s dig into some of these:

Building a Bridge

So I’ll start by saying—if you need an on-prem solution and your on-prem solution provider is unequivocally moving away from on-prem, you’re going to have to find a solution with your current vendor, find a new on-prem vendor, or perhaps own, build, and update your system yourself, which is an incredibly daunting task. For the rest of you, read on.

The bottom line is that if your vendor has announced an end to support of on-prem products, you’re going to start thinking of your bridge. Whether they’ll coordinate a transition to a cloud product or not is certainly a consideration. But it’s important to ask: If you’re going to be doing a whole new implementation, does it make sense to keep this product?

Realistically, a dramatic business change in a software vendor is a perfect opportunity to take a step back and evaluate the market. Part of that is of course auditing your own tech stack and decide, based on what you know about your competitors, if it’s not time to look at what features and functions have become the industry standard.

Hey, and what do you know? We covered that in our Back to Basics series last year!

Obviously there are many dimensions to a new implementation, including usability, features, price, integration, and so on. But if you’re looking for a viable solution to give you on-prem flexibility, you should look to containerized products.

Containerization and the Future of On-Prem

As I covered recently, containerization, or Kubernetes, or whatever you’d like to call it, is the act of building a service instance that is modularly developed. A containerized cloud product can live in the multi-tenant cloud world, the single tenant world of a cloud managed by the end user, or, crucially, the containerized product can be thrown into an on-prem server system under your direct control.

While this is in some ways more complex that a standard on-prem delivery, it, for most businesses, represents the future of what on-prem really means. Of course, you may evaluate your needs, decide that a single-tenant provides enough support, and that’s that. But that degree of functional flexibility is a key component of best-in-class service applications.

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Exploring the Gap Between Customer Focus and Customer Impact

July 5, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Exploring the Gap Between Customer Focus and Customer Impact

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I often tell the story of never planning to build a career in this space – when I began at Field Technologies, I intended it to be a transitional step in my journey. Life unfolded as it does, and for many reasons this world of field service and service industries became my career – and my passion. Part of that is because as I dug in circa 2008, we were at the beginning of a very intriguing evolution. This was when organizations began talking more about the focus on customer experience; the early days of seeing service as a potential source of differentiation and profits.

It’s been incredibly interesting to me to see this journey unfold, for various companies across industries and across the globe. The reality, some years later, is that while the focus on customer experience and customer satisfaction has become the forefront of focus for just about every service-based business, there exists a gap between the focus and the impact. The effort is there, but the outcome often isn’t.

IFS recently sponsored a global study of more than 1,700 executives and 12,500 consumers titled “Fixing the fundamentals: Understanding new business models and opportunities in the wake of Covid-19” to examine this topic and how, in many instances, the gap that exists has been exacerbated by the pandemic. IFS CEO Darren Roos states in the opening of the findings, “Long before the pandemic, the ‘Amazon effect’ had revolutionized customer expectations for speed and consistency. But now, companies in industries ranging from paint manufacturing to air travel are finding the pandemic has made both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers even more demanding.”

The study reveals that “although some 79 percent of organizations are investing the time and resources to identify where each inflection point is, nearly a third (29 percent) admitted that they report problems but don’t act. A further 18 percent said they are too busy to report an issue unless urgent, while 38 percent of respondents only act when it is urgently required. In fact, only 14 percent said that they are proactively planning for problem prevention across their customer inflection points.”

So, while organizations collectively realize the criticality of customer focus, and are likely actively investing in improving in this area, they are struggling to take action besides times in which it is urgent. And we know the cost of customer neglect. The study reports that 26 percent of respondents would be unlikely to engage with a brand after just one negative experience. Further, according to the study, “some 30 percent of businesses see product/service quality as the single largest determining factor for winning or losing customers, while 25 percent feel success hinges on product/service reliability. By tackling issues with internal processes, enterprises can directly improve both product/service quality and product/service reliability—yet many are still not joining the dots.”

As I read this research, I began to think to myself – why are we struggling so much with moving from reactive to proactive when it comes to the customer experience? It brought to mind three particular areas of conversation among my interviews that I think are playing a big role in the gap that exists within this study and beyond between customer focus and customer impact.

Organizational Siloes Kill Customer Satisfaction

The first is that many companies have yet to achieve the level of operational alignment and collaboration that is key to the streamlined, simple experience customers are looking for. Many efforts underway exist in a particular function and can be disconnected from the larger strategy of the organization. While this can result in some incremental improvement, the siloed approach can never achieve the ultimate desired customer outcome. In order to create success with customer focus, it needs to be a company-wide initiative, focus, and effort. There must be overarching goals for which each function is aware, in agreement, and measured upon. Regular, cross-functional examination of customer efforts and satisfaction needs to occur, and actions assigned with accountability for completion. I think a big part of why the issues identified aren’t addressed until they are urgent is because without a cohesive approach, ownership and accountability isn’t clear and therefor issues that aren’t urgent are easily overlooked or fall prey to “passing the buck.”

Modern Technology Fuels the Customer Experience

Another major problem, and stemming from the overall issue of siloes, is that the level of customer experience desired today simply cannot be delivered without the use of modern, cohesive technology. Legacy systems that are decentralized, highly configured, and just plain outdated present far too many failure points in the seamlessness that is critical in today’s landscape. Legacy systems also oftentimes fuel the siloes that we already discussed – without companywide visibility into customer insights, performance, and analytics, it is relatively impossible to achieve the alignment and collaboration necessary to succeed. Standardizing on a modern platform that creates a single source of truth from which the entire organization can operate is a must for closing the gap between customer focus and customer impact. And customers know this – they are well aware of the sophistication of technology that exists today based on its use in their personal lives, so their tolerance for outdated technology from service providers is increasingly nonexistent.

Customer Focus Isn’t Represented in Employee Compensation

Finally, while the mission to improve customer experience is clear for most companies, in many it hasn’t yet been reflected in how employees are motivated and compensated. In field service, for instance, technicians who have historically been urged to increase number of jobs per day have a driving force that is at odds (in many cases) with allowing them the time and empowerment to provide a positive customer experience. Examining how the performance of each function, again companywide, is measured and incentivized and ensuring that is aligned with the customer-centric objectives you have is another crucial aspect of ensuring you have overall consistency in your quest for customer success.

I’m quite sure these three issues are not the only challenges that exist within the gap between intent and impact, but they are three that come up quite often. While both research and conversations prove that intentions are good when it comes to the topic of customer centricity, we need to work toward a more proactive versus reactive approach – and I do believe these three categories are a very good place to start.

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The Benefits and Drawbacks of the Industry-Specific Cloud

July 2, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

The Benefits and Drawbacks of the Industry-Specific Cloud

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By Tom Paquin

Recently I came across this report on Forrester exploring the pros and cons for horizontal vs. vertical cloud solutions for different business areas. It’s worth a read if you haven’t done so, but naturally any time I come across one of these, I want to put it into the service context.

Of course, service is not a specific vertical, is it? It’s a loosely-connected cluster of verticals, focused on very different outcomes, very different types of service, and very different workflow structures. For that exact reason it is important to give some thought to, if not specifically how a solution is built with your industry in mind, how it conforms to the unique structure of your industry.

There are some obvious benefits to this approach, so let’s look into a few of them.

Speaks Your Jargon

This might seem reasonably simple, but in an industry that is rife with specific terminology, context, and nomenclature, an out-of-the-box solution may lack the necessary nuance to even catalog everything that needs to be cataloged.

Every industry has its jargon—with sometimes conflicting meanings, so ensuring that your solution properly understands the complexity of meter readings for utilities versus those for telecommunications without ten thousand customizations can be, in one hand, a way to ensure things are simply working properly. On the other, getting that right early offers a catalyst for growth of additional solutions, which can take advantage of standardized output that’s already internalized the necessary nuances of a specific industry.

Workflow Friendly

A pure service provider invariably differs dramatically from a manufacturer. Sure, bolt-on modules for sustainability and reverse logistics can square the circle, but only when they are overlaid into a sequence that actually understands the unique flow of service appointments specific to an industry.

A constant refrain of mine is that software is useless if your technicians aren’t willing to push the buttons to get it to actually work. By choosing software that actually understands your workflows, you are that much more likely to build software that meets the needs, expectations, and rhythms of your technicians.

Regulation-Ready

Finally—and this is a point that certainly plays within the context of workflows—is the necessity of implicit regulatory understanding. Within medical devices, for example, you need to be able to respect HIPAA within the context of your given workflows. This can’t be an add-on or a late-addition, this needs to be in the product from the jump. These regulatory requirements can be part of configurations, changed for regions, and sit along other requirements, such as SLA of course.

With all of these benefits to exploring a verticalized cloud, are there any drawbacks? Yes, absolutely—verticalization can limit your exposure and understanding of broader service trends. Further, niche companies often lack the breadth and depth of capabilities of their more generalized counterparts. For these reasons, many firms instead look to larger companies who have expressed deep domain expertise. There’s of course a natural trade off when one works with a jack of all trades, but that balance might end up being the key to service success.

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