blog Archives - Page 26 of 50 - Future of Field Service

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We talk a lot about the move to delivering outcomes and experiences rather than products and services. Why? Because that’s what today’s customers demand, and that evolution is what it will take to remain competitive and to differentiate your brand. There’s a near universal understanding among service businesses – and manufacturers servitizing their business – at this point that determining how to transform operations and internal complexity in a way that enables a more seamless, complete customer experience is critical.

What I think is less universally understood is the breadth of potential that exists delivering outcomes to your customers. Many organizations seem to equate outcomes-based service with guaranteeing uptime, which is most certainly an important aspect of an outcomes-based value proposition – it just isn’t the only aspect you should be considering. Don’t get me wrong, the purpose of this article isn’t to diminish the benefits of determining how to guarantee uptime – we’ve seen companies like Cubic Transportation have immense success in doing so.

My point, rather, is to think of uptime as a launching point for the potential of shifting to an outcomes-based service model, not the definition of an outcomes-based service model. If you can expand your view of how and why uptime is important to your customers, you can begin to see other ways your company can play a role in enabling their desired outcomes. Let me give a few examples to better explain:

A medical device company who provides mission-critical equipment to hospitals and healthcare facilities recognizes the fact that this equipment is dependent upon the hospital’s IT infrastructure to be operable. The medical device company sees an opportunity to expand its services skillset into IT skills to further improve its ability in providing customers with outcomes important to their ultimate objective: being able to care for patients when needed
A heavy equipment manufacturer understands that their customers are experiencing a massive change in the age and skillsets of their frontline workforce, which is causing issues in the customers’ output and performance. The manufacturer recognizes the opportunity to provide professional services to their customers to train on use of the equipment and consult on ways to best drive efficiency and productivity
A restaurant equipment service provider realizes that the data it gathers from equipment to ensure uptime can be incredibly valuable to restaurant stakeholders in terms of visibility into peak periods, product preferences, use of equipment, etc. and uncovers an opportunity to provide this data in the form of consumable business insights to help customers drive their outcomes

These three quick examples around the incorporation of adjacent or complimentary services, the use of domain expertise in the form of professional services or consulting, and the translation of data into impactful business insights are just the beginning in terms of looking beyond the uptime of products when you consider your company’s definition of providing outcomes-based service.

Putting your company in a position where you have the mindset, technologies, processes and skills to guarantee uptime is more than likely your best first step toward realizing the potential of the move to outcomes – but if you stop there, you may be selling your company short of far more success. The other ways in which you can deliver outcomes to your customers can be everything from relatively small adjustments to your offerings to net new lines of service – but if you truly want to differentiate your services from your competitors, you want to be thinking beyond the scope of your traditional core competency to determine what additional impact is possible.

By Tom Paquin

Listen, we love servitization here. It’s something that we talk about so much that we have a section of our website dedicated to it. Restructuring businesses away from product-focused growth strategies towards business-focused strategies objectively supports the bottom-line (overhead costs for service are significantly lower than that for other product functions), provides new outlets for customer engagement, and aides in the development of subscription-based products build around perpetual maintenance or outcome guarantees.

So why would a more service-minded approach? To understand this, we need to think about what businesses are focusing on servitization, and what that means about the ways that they approach customers, parts, and products themselves.

When we discuss servitization, we’re mostly talking about manufacturers of goods. Manufacturing has had no shortage of disruptions over the last two decades or so, and solvency means rethinking their footprints, their relationship with their staff, and their relationship with their products. Service remains a masterful way to bring these elements together in support of business interests.

Service doesn’t happen in a vacuum, though. It changes the supply chains, workflows, and it changes what constitutes a new device. Pre-servitization, businesses don’t care what happens to their products post-transaction. They use raw materials, sell to consumers, and at end of life, they don’t have to worry about expenditures, because the product is in the hands of someone else.

When service enters into the picture, profitability of devices in the hands of consumers becomes more important. If, for instance, a service technician hauls away a component that costs $18 to manufacture, do they recycle the aluminum for eight cents? No—they figure out a way to recycle the parts in-house. This is the basis of the circular economy of manufacturing, a topic that we’ve discussed before. And while this is great for the environment (fewer end-of-life machines in landfills) it’s also great for the bottom-line, and will change the ways that manufacturers create products, thus changing the ways that those products are serviced.

This isn’t speculative any more. Gartner expects by 2029 that 100% of manufacturers will have embraced this model. So how does this change service?

Repairs in the Circular Economy

If manufacturers are banking on service, and therefore seeing parts and products throughout their lifecycle, they’re going to do everything in their power to reuse parts in an effort to mitigate costs, power the circular economy, and protect the bottom-line. My favorite forward-thinking example, Apple, practically dislocates its own shoulder patting itself on the back for this, and hey, if you hire a supply chain guy as your CEO, you get really smart supply chain decisions.

So—if manufacturers are incentivized to invest in the circular economy, that means a couple of things:

Manufacturers are going to want parts to be reasonably intact upon extraction from a product
Manufacturers are going to want parts and products back as much as possible
The act of repair will, in many circumstances, be eclipsed by the act of remanufacturing goods into wholly new items

The first point here hinges upon a simple premise: Manufacturers are going to focus on increasing not only quality control, in order to mitigate repairs, but part modularity, in order to make the act of repair itself a different type of process. If, for example, you need to replace a shock absorber in your washing machine, rather than 3,200 proprietary screws, if the part’s locking mechanism is self-contained, it can easily be removed and replaced.

Making parts easier to replace also means less actual service appointments. Why? Because easier parts means easier on-site service. When things break, manufacturers can ship parts to customers, and provide the packaging to allow the broken part to be shipped back to the manufacturer, thus keeping it in the circular manufacturing loop. Add in tools like remote assistance and even moderately complex jobs can be completed without a truck roll or a local tech.

So a servitized future means a future with far fewer truck rolls, far more remote assistance, and the need for a much more complex system of forward and reverse logistics. As I’ve mentioned many times before, these are imperative, and easy-to-overlook elements of service management, and in an environment when service appointments themselves will be increasingly de-emphasized, they take on greater significance. A while back I created a buyer’s guide to discuss the important elements of Reverse Logistics, so if you’re interested in learning more, you can start there.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

Smart Care Equipment Solutions is the largest independent provider of commercial kitchen repair in the United States. You can tell by a quick visit to the company’s website the clarity that exists around how service acts as a competitive differentiator and significant growth opportunity. The company’s vision is clearly articulated on its site, stating, “By 2024, we will become America’s Best commercial kitchen service company by: Delighting customers through the entire service experience; Being the first choice for top technicians; Acquiring service companies that strengthen our offering and reflect our culture; and tangibly improving the success of our customers and technicians by leveraging the industry’s richest set of data.”

Gyner Ozgul, Sr. VP of Operations at Smart Care, has a long tenure with the company and is not only passionate about what the future holds but bullish on how to get there. Ozgul knows that a strategic vision for the future is imperative but laying a strong foundation to build that future upon is the critical first step. Since Smart Care grows a lot through acquisition, the company has recently focused on reshaping its IT infrastructure to provide the cohesiveness, consistency, and visibility needed to build its vision for the future. “On the commercial side of the business, data is our enabler for differentiation because of scale. To put that in simple terms, Smart Care would like to be the consumer reports of the repair industry for kitchens. Our data and our size will allow us to do that, but it's a big vision and getting there is a journey. Knowing the right steps to build toward that outcome is how we’ll ultimately achieve that goal,” says Ozgul.

Know Your Truths, Set Your Priorities

Ozgul and the Smart Care team realized that to work toward that vision as well as address the evolution in customer expectations and the opportunity to better optimize resources, it was necessary to invest in more modern technology. “We needed technology that would help us build a better customer experience. From an end user perspective, I call it the Amazon mentality or consumerization that's happened so this whole expectation of service delivery and timing a service delivery and great communication and constant communication flow, but also things like information on the equipment you're working on and work order management systems,” explains Ozgul. “Impacting the customer experience was first and foremost for us.”

The technology in place at Smart Care was around 15 years old, outdated in terms of functionality, relied heavily on integrations which made it complex to maintain, and wasn’t going to be effective in supporting the goals Smart Care had for the business. “We knew we needed to invest in a platform that would enable us to scale over time, that could support our growth,” says Ozgul. “We wanted to take the opportunity to focus on optimizing processes and to determine how to optimize the utilization of our technicians, which are a finite resource. They're repairing very complex pieces of equipment in high-pressure environments with customers that have very high expectations, and being able to manage that workforce remotely, especially during the pandemic. To do this all well enough so that the customer sees the service level impact is a challenge for our organization, but one we knew we needed to take on.”

Smart Care began its search for more modern technology with clarity on three primary objectives: delivering a more modern and consistent customer experience, improving optimization of its resources, and investing in technology that would enable the company to scale service delivery as it grows both organically and through acquisition.

A Data-Driven Future Isn’t Possible Without Modern, Cohesive Technology

Smart Care chose to deploy a technology suite from IFS that includes Applications Enterprise Resource Management, Field Service Management, and Planning and Scheduling Optimization. “At the highest level, we chose IFS because we believe the platform gives us the ability we desire to scale as a business,” says Ozgul. “Looking at our future vision, we wanted to make sure we had a partner in a technology that allows us to dictate the inflow of the data. In all data reporting or monetization out there, the inflow of data is critical. In our case, part of the challenge we had is that inflow was really difficult because of our antiquated technology. Just as an example, on a work order, a tech could opt out of certain fields which is very disruptive if you're trying to do data aggregation and monetization to customers. With IFS, we’ve been able to institute a process that techs are required to follow which not only improves the customer experience as we desired but helps us improve our data integrity which expands our opportunities for its use.”

With IFS, Smart Care sets the stage for its journey to differentiation through data. “IFS helps us to master the seemingly simple things first, like building labor and parts accurately,” explains Ozgul. “That seems very fundamental but believe it or not it’s easy to do wrong and provides a ton of value when we get it right. With IFS we have a simpler platform with less integrations – and every integration is a breakage point, so this improves integrity.”

The end-to-end use of IFS technology, from order to cash, addresses Smart Care’s need to provide a consistent customer experience. “We use IFS on the front end for CRM, then a call moves to dispatch and that's where we use IFS from a scheduling optimization standpoint. Our dispatchers now have full visibility of technicians and their work days, and the tool has levels of automation built in that we can configure to allow us to automate portions of the schedule in order to keep technicians busy all the time, keep calls flowing, and drive much better service to the customer at the end user level.”

Parts management, work order management, and mobile capabilities are all being leveraged from IFS as well. “Things like parts management and warehouse management that we supply into those calls for technicians to do the repairs, we are working on a few adjacencies to IFS with things like AI tools to help technicians with part and product identification, as well as self-help guides. We use the IFS mobility tool for our technicians which is an iPad-based work order management system that integrates with the back-office tools. It relays the information the customer calls in, as well as any new information that comes from us, in terms of directive to the technician to perform the service through his mobile device. For instance, we can dictate what questions he should be asking to the customer. All customer requirements and needs, the work order diagnosis and history, everything is notated in the mobile solution and then communicates back with the CRM in the background so we have optics into all of that information up until the closure of the service event.”

Upon closer of the service event, Smart Care invoices and bills through IFS and can customize the method based on customer preference. “All of that functionality is built in on the billing side, so the lifecycle of a work order flows through the system,” says Ozgul. “We are a national footprint business. A ton of complexity comes out of that. Geographic complexity, operating complexities. We need to be able to give customers a consistent level of service and IFS enables us to do that. But it also gives us the ability to aggregate data, which is very unique and imperative for our long-term vision. Every single work order in IFS generates hundreds of data points and over time this allows us to generate very valuable insights, which is where we feel we can drive a significant point of differentiation.”

Early Wins and Future Vision

Smart Care has been live on the IFS platform since September of 2020. “Our earliest win with the system was in terms of what we call value capture. With the former mobility solution, there were instances where time wasn’t being recorded or billed for accurately. With IFS mobile, we've configured the system so that there is an accurate reconciliation of the job time on site, the bill time to the customer, and the paid time to the technician, and in doing so we’ve seen a decrease in value leakage,” explains Ozgul. “On the parts side, the chain of custody, in terms of when a part moves through our warehousing system to the technician and ultimately to the work order, it's much tighter, and there is less opportunity for that part to get lost in the process.” IFS improved the value capture for both labor and parts and put an immediate stop to that value leakage, which improved Smart Care’s gross profit by 5-8% within four months of go-live.

Current focus areas for Smart Care around use of IFS are around better understanding customer pipelines using FSM and further configuring the Planning and Scheduling Optimization (PSO) tool. “On the sales side, we are using the understanding our customer pipelines using FSM. So, where are the pipelines? What's our close rate? How many customers convert from pipeline to sales? Because we're using this whole IFS platform, we have an ability to see what our actual sell-through of a customer is end to end,” explain Ozgul. “With PSO, we're putting in customer SLA expectations into the tool now so that we can let the system help us control that service expectation to a customer.”

The company is also continuing to evaluate and pilot technologies that work well alongside the IFS platform, such as Remote Assistance for remote service capabilities, Aquant AI to improve knowledge management, and more customer self-help tools. Perhaps the most exciting potential is to watch Smart Care’s data-driven service vision come to life, which will happen by building upon its success with the IFS platform. “Our customers have equipment that's in excess of 100,000 to 200,000 dollars for a single piece of equipment so their understanding of the lifecycle, birth to death of that equipment, and how they extend their capital and where they should spend their capital and where they should be fixing the equipment versus replacing the equipment is something we see as very important, and something customers want that we’ll be able to provide because we now have the capabilities within IFS to house that data in a logical manner,” says Ozgul. “The ability to increasingly leverage data as a part of our service value proposition is the most exciting aspect of what our investment in IFS will enable.”

By Tom Paquin

Back in June of last year, which feels like it happened something like six decades ago, we started to emerge from the bald, overwhelming panic of early-stage pandemic into something that vaguely resembled a functioning strategy. I wrote about it then, wondering where we were. Now, as we clear the one-year mark from the world health organization’s proclamation of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, what have we learned? Where are we? What comes next?

Even between now and June, much has changed. In spite of June’s promise of some eased restrictions, case counts remained stubbornly high, and with new strains emerging from the UK, South Africa, and other areas of the world crashing against unwise holiday gatherings, things have been rough. There’s been a natural ebb and flow, though, and, at least here in the US, numbers are trending in the right direction.

These milestones converging offer us an opportunity to refocus on what we’ve learned, and how to adapt those learnings to service.

Technology has been fundamentally recalibrated

I, a nerd, have been using internet-enabled systems for years, drawn to the appeal of not having to speak to an actual human being whenever possible. It appears as though my cohorts across disciplines have caught up with me, moving all sorts of once-interpersonal activities online. With that increase in consumption and literacy of new processes, the ability to manage commerce digitally not only expanded over the last year, but it’s gained features and complexity.

Online appointment booking is a gateway to zero-touch scheduling, which could lead to completely remote services. One thing is for certain—there’s no getting the toothpaste back in the tube with a lot of these technologies. The break lines of technology advancement were severed by COVID-19, and we’re barreling forward at a much faster speed than we were at this time last year. It’s up to businesses to capitalize on that, evaluate what is needed to compete in the changing service market, and make the right upgrades to your technology portfolio that will permit you to meet your customer’s expectations.

Customer centricity is the price of admission

To that end, and enhanced by technology, customers don’t just expect speed and accuracy, they expect consideration of their wants, needs, and safety. I think about our conversation with Peloton a few months ago, and how they set expectations by asking to do things like take off their shoes before stepping into a person’s home, and how, even since August, those expectations have continually evolved.

Because of that, it’s key that service businesses build contingencies into how they manage customers, understand customer expectations and requirements before they arrive at the job site, and incorporate those into their planning and scheduling, logistics, and so on. This extends far beyond COVID-related needs to Service-level agreements, but COVID certainly has influenced the expectations, and how they are delivered, and in a world where masks and other types of PPE are set to be a consideration in perpetuity, it’s important not to stumble as we get back to work.

Continuity planning

I’ve always been writing about continuity through an ever-shifting set of lenses, but this year, it’s taken on an even greater importance. It’s the first time in decades that global businesses have been confronted by a universal disruption.

I hate to break it to you all, but it’s not going to be the last time. Just ask the people who lived through the second world war and The Great Depression what multi-year global disruptions of industry looks like. Smart businesses have continuity managers on-staff, but technology helps here too. When confronted with uncertainties, you can either panic, shed resources, or you can consult simulations and plans. It’s impossible to know the nature of our next disruption, but long-term survival of business interests depend on an understanding that the only constant is change.

Don’t believe me? Ask Blockbuster.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

As I thought about what to write about for International Women’s Day this year, I realized how incredibly fortunate I am to be surrounded by intelligent, brave, strong women. On the world stage there were numerous women I was in awe of this year, including Stacey Abrams and the sacrifice she made for democracy as well as witnessing Kamala Harris sworn in as the United States’ first female Vice President. At home, I am lucky to have a diverse set of family and friends that support me (and that I support), that share struggles I know well as well as many I can learn from, and who I am thrilled to do life with. At work, I am continually impressed by IFS’ desire to see women thrive and also by the women I work alongside across the globe that are so inspiring. I also truly enjoy talking with the women we feature on the Future of Field Service podcast and decided this would be a great opportunity to share a summary of some of the wise words shared this year.

While there are many positives to reflect on this IWD, this year has also made me think extensively about the work yet to do to eliminate gender bias and reach equality. When you look at some of the examples of how women, especially women of color, have been treated this year, it proves just how far we have to go. Further, the impact of COVID on working moms is something that makes me incredibly sad. I think about how hard I’ve worked for my career and how much it means to me, and I realize how privileged I am to still have it – many moms who have worked equally hard and have just as much passion for what they do have had to let it go due to the circumstances of the pandemic and the ways women have been disproportionately impacted.

I say all of this because it isn’t right to celebrate the good without acknowledging all the work that still needs to be done. I know that the women whose voices I’m sharing here are fighting hard every day to advocate, mentor, challenge, and change – and I’m doing the same. With that said, here is a complication of some of the amazing women we’ve had on the podcast this year and their thoughts on a variety of leadership and service transformation topics:

Madhu Karnani Oza, Director of Technical Services for Electrophysiology business at Abbott for Asia Pacific, Episode 98, on the mindset of service. “When it comes to service a common theme is that a lot of the hurdles we face are internal. A lot of the hurdles we face are internal culture, which is the mindset of the folks within your organization. Do they believe in what service can do? If the internal hurdle is high, then you want your service organization to be front and center. You want that message to be out there that this is important and it’s going to be part of whatever is the most central organization for that product. It may be operations and it may be commercial. If you want to send the message that it’s important, you’ve got to put it where it shines and not tucked away.”

Emilie Giraudet, Regional Digital Hub Lead at NS BlueScope and formerly the Head Of Customer Service Business Support & Sales Steering at GEA Group, Episode 95, on change management. “I understood early that it’s not enough to have very high position and ask your people to do things, you really have to engage them and to motivate them. To me, there are three main dimensions to succeed in implementing change. The first one is about motivating people. We are human beings, so we need a certain level of excitement and enthusiasm to get things done. I believe it’s crucial really to find a way to motivate people around your project. The second one is about showing the direction, so being able to create a vision to make it compelling enough to be able to start the change and to motivate people to act. The third dimension to succeed in change management is to be able to slice the elephant into actionable and achievable steps to reduce the complexity and encourage continuous success. I really believe that being a leader is not about giving people instruction, but motivating people, understanding their needs, designing and communicating a compelling vision, and executing plans with clear steps and milestones. All these dimensions are crucial.”

Bonnie Anderson, Global Manager of Talent Acquisition and Future Talent at Tetra Pak, Episode 85, on hiring during and post Covid. “One thing that I think is really important at the moment is to remember that it’s a super tough time for candidates right now. It’s a tough time for all of us and having that empathy for our candidates and providing a great candidate experience when you’re talking to them is really important. Sometimes they might’ve lost their job. They may have lost loved ones. As hiring managers and recruiters, we really need to be mindful that all of us have other things happening in our lives that could be out of our control but could be impacting our state of mind in a given moment.”

Linda Tucci, Global Sr. Director of the Technical Solutions Center at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, Episode 83, on making mental health a priority in service leadership by leading by example. “For my team, I felt it very important that I shared my story, my struggles, and how I responded to it. When I did my midyear global updates, a series of town halls, as a check-in, I shared openly how I’d used our employee assistance program at work and how beneficial I found that experience. And I invited everyone, if they were struggling in any way, to find someone to talk to. It didn’t need to be their manager, but to know of the great tools that we have here at Ortho for them. I received heartfelt responses from individuals around the world, and a few even told me that it gave them the courage to open up to have conversations that they were struggling. And I’ve encouraged my managers to do the same with their teams, to make sure that they’re caring for their people in the context of their present state. It was important for me that I modeled that behavior.”

Sonya Lacore, Vice President of Inflight Operations at Southwest Airlines, Episode 80, on building your confidence. “I was just a very, very shy child. I grew up in a very small town in Louisiana. As much as I love where I came from, college was not really pushed. It was get married, have children, and so that’s the path that I took. So, because I didn’t have a college degree, I felt like something was lacking in me. I never just got the chance to accomplish that. As a result, I began to look at everybody else like they were more competent, especially if they had a degree. And if they were in other roles, I would think, “Wow.” I always wanted more, and I’d look at them and wish that I could be that. Then one day, I just realized, “Okay. I’ve got some strengths. I’ve got strengths as it relates to talking with and encouraging others, and just people strengths.” And I thought, “Okay. It’s time for me to turn my cup upside down, pour out all of the things that I don’t believe about myself. Fill it back up with things that I do believe I can accomplish.” And I slowly started on that path. I think that Southwest does such a great job of developing leaders, and the path is there for any employee, if they want it. I took advantage of those variety of classes and some of them were hard. Some of them are, how do you stand before a big group and speak? And they critique you and tell you things you shouldn’t say and do. It’s not an enjoyable process. But once I got through it, I think I really learned a lot about myself and leveraging my strengths.”

Katie Hunt, Service Operations Leader at APi Group, Episode 78, on knowing it’s OK to say no. “I’ve learned it’s okay to say no, and it’s okay to push back a little bit. Make sure that you look at all the perspectives, you hear everyone’s input, but ultimately, you can say no, and you can push back a little bit, in terms of what your final decision is. And you’re never going to make everyone happy. I think with a project this large, that was a tough lesson because I love for everyone to get along and work well together and collaborate. And there were people upset at different points in the project. And it’s not personal. It’s really just what’s best for the business and what’s best for the organization overall.”

Sophia Williams, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Telecom and Technology Business Unit at NCR Corporation, Episode 79, on the value of teamwork. “I reserve the right to get smarter and I will tell you that as I tell my team, I’ve got a leadership team of about 14 people, we are 14 times better than any one of us individually because we all have different experiences, we all have different points of view, et cetera. I set the strategic priorities on our customers. Customers are everything to me because we don’t exist if not for our customers. Then I hear from everybody and then we align on that. Talent sets you free. Bring in the right people and then take care of them and be a sponge.”

Cindy Etherington, VP, Dell Technologies Education Services at Dell Technologies, Episode 79, on making sure your voice is heard. “For most of my career, and in particular earlier in my career, I was the only woman. One of very few women in the room whether that be within the company that I worked for at the time or I was in sales for a good portion of my career as well or with our customers and partners. Making sure that I found a way to have my voice be heard was a challenge. It was definitely feeling like one of the crowd, one of the group, equal playing field was certainly a challenge but it was also an advantage that I had at the same time. It’s almost like your strength is also your weakness in some cases where I could use the fact that I was different and I had a different way of thinking of things to give myself a platform and to be heard.”

Mita Mallick, Head of Inclusion, Equity and Impact at Carta, Episode 68, on having courageous conversations around race. “You have to stop being color blind. I had a leader years ago say to me “Well, I don’t see color.” And I was like, “So you don’t see me as brown? What do you see me as?” And it is this idea that we live in a utopia, everyone is equal. But it’s not. And I do think it’s something that many of us were raised on that we have to unlearn now and there’s so many things that we have to unlearn or relearn or learn for the first time. And, so, this idea that you would look at me and say, “I don’t see color;” my brownness has defined me from the moment I’ve entered this world. It defines me when I walk into meetings. People see that before they even hear me speak or before I sit down or before I present. And so, I think it’s also a privilege to claim colorblindness. I don’t know many people of color who would say they don’t see color. I could be wrong, but it’s just thinking about too is who is the person that’s actually saying they don’t see color? Because it’s not something I would say because it’s defined my existence since the day I was born. And it’s defined, it’s actually that you’re not acknowledging that persons existence or identity or what they might have been through in their lives. So, I think it’s so important. I don’t think you can have a courageous conversation on race if you don’t acknowledge that race exists.”

Marlene Kolodziej, VP of Centralized Services at RICOH USA, Inc., Episode 67, on avoiding burnout. “Be more human and kind to yourself and take the time to take a step back and realize that it’s okay to get in touch with your needs as well, and not to try and be everything to everyone during something so dramatic as what we’re going through today. It’s unprecedented. And I think that we all need to take care of ourselves and our needs, whether it be a career or family or time or whatever that is. Even from a health perspective that I think folks need to really take a step back and take that personal inventory and make sure they’re doing well for themselves, as well as others in their life and in their work.”

Reihaneh Irani-Famili, VP of Business Readiness, National Grid, Episode 63, on measuring based on value versus time. “Right now, we’re not an 8:00 to 5:00 business, so expecting people to have set times that they would do things and then assessing them based on how many hours they sat in the chair and did something, becomes irrelevant. And I’m glad that it is becoming irrelevant because it’s a better way of working. You need to replace that 8:00 to 5:00 mentality by a deliverable-based mentality and a value-based mentality. And it’s both for the leaders in the companies as well as for those employees. Because as an employee, if before my success was I spent eight hours in the office, now that needs to be replaced by this is the value that I have created in the hours that I was working or being productive. And so it became really obvious for me very early on that the more clarity you can give on the outcomes and the value that you’re trying to drive and less about how they would get to that, it helps people be more productive.”

Nicola Buckley, EVP, Park Place Technologies, Episode 62, on building a team that balances your strengths and opportunity areas. “I grew up playing team sports. I know exactly what I’m good at and I know exactly what I’m not good at. And being hyper aware of your strengths and how you build a team that compliments your strengths and your opportunity areas, it really helps the team feel empowered. So, I give stretch projects to team members a lot and they execute and hit them out of the park. It’s just making people feel valued and empowered and everyone works very well together and in an environment like that.”

This year’s IWD theme is #ChooseToChallenge. The website says, “A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we're all responsible for our own thoughts and actions - all day, every day. We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women's achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world. From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge.” There are many ways to challenge – what’s most important is that you are looking for the opportunities to push against gender bias and inequity, that are acting as an advocate for women, and that you are taking real-word, everyday action. Challenge can feel uncomfortable, but it is so incredibly important. As the late, great Ruth Bader Ginsberg said, “Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.”

By Tom Paquin

This is part of an ongoing series on the state and standards of service management software. Here are the previous articles in the series:

When people ask, “What is Service Management?” the answers usually focus on the obvious: tracking, cataloging, and optimizing service operations for a business (I mean, that’s more or less exactly how I defined it). This is invariably true, and it’s certainly key to successfully running a service business. But it ignores the heart of why service is so important in the first place.

Service software, at its best, is a catalyst for growth, not just in terms of managing systems and processes, but by helping you master complexity and track more elements of your business than ever before—a single source of truth, under one roof.

This level of detail doesn’t just delight customers, it actually offers you the tools to rethink your book of business, and how you package products for your customers. Publicizing these things can often be a challenge. Does your customer really care about any of this? Not if you don’t give them a reason to. They won’t care that you adopted a new outlook, or a new service platform, but if you position your new tools, servitization plans, etc in a way that’s actually compelling, they’ll certainly care.

To do this correctly, there’s ostensibly three steps necessary:

Track your success
Articulate the value
Reiterate the value

Tracking your success is invariably the first challenge, and it’s where smart technology systems can be the difference between success and failure. Spencer technologies uses IFS dashboards built into their service solution to show real-time analytics from support technicians and assets in the field. This actually uses the technology itself to tell a story about how they’re benefiting their customer’s bottom-line. For asset-intensive businesses, this frequently is about unearthing and cataloguing information about assets, then serving them back to customers in a digestible way. No matter what, you can’t effectively derive value without first tracking value.

Now articulating that value goes hand-in-hand with this. We’ve already touched on ways that Spencer has done so within the concepts that they actually use to track, but for other companies, it can be more complex. One brand I know of uses their service successes as case studies—"Look at the value that optimization has offer in terms of uptime for ‘X’ company. What do your uptime numbers look like?”

Given the wide swaths of industries under that big, beautiful service umbrella, a great place to start for inspiration about how businesses do this is through our podcasts. There’s now over 100 stories of service success spread across a diverse set of industries, both business and consumer-facing. Lots of great material to consider.

My last point is the most salient, and as I’ve discovered, the most challenging for companies to focus on—marketing messaging needs to be perpetual. As I learned many years ago from an Forrester analyst, the CEO of a pizza company thinks about pizza every day. Their customers think about pizza when they want pizza. Because of this, they’re likely to miss the salient details of your marketing blitz if said blitz has an expiration date on the side of the package. Sometimes it’s not about meeting your customers where they are. Sometimes it’s about being there when they reach you, with the right use cases and messaging apparatus to validate why you’re the choice for their service needs.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

In a recent Future of Field Service Advisory Forum session, we discussed the topic of what customer centricity looks like in practice. It was a great question posed by one of our members, wondering what exactly others do behind-the-scenes to substantiate their claims of customer centricity. The conversation among the group surfaced some really interesting points, which I’ll recap here, and a sense of camaraderie around the fact that customer centricity isn’t nearly as easy as it sounds – and certainly not as simple as making the claim.

Be Clear on Your Definition of Customer Centricity

The first thing that came up is the need to create clarity around what you mean by customer centricity. It’s easy to claim customer centricity as a buzzword, but if you want to make true impact you need to further qualify the areas you’re looking to address. One of the forum members suggested looking at this in terms of three areas: customer success (the ability to use and benefit from your products or services in the intended way), customer experience (the feelings your customer has about how you’ve delivered said products or services), and customer satisfaction (the customers overall feelings about what you provided and how you’ve provided it).

Examining each of these areas allow you to see where you need to focus the most attention and develop an action plan around the feedback you’ve gathered. Another important point to note is that customer centricity can’t be the focus of service in a silo, it needs to be approached from a company-wide perspective.

Determine What (and How) to Measure

We discussed the fact that, to start, many of the metrics by which you measure service success operationally will also be important to your customers. For instance, first time fix is important to you as it relates to keeping costs controlled, but it’s important to your customer satisfaction as well. The suggestion from the group was to examine the operational metrics you currently use and determine the lens through which your customers would look at them. So, if you look at SLA compliance, that would likely translate to your customers in terms of the importance to them of uptime. Understanding what is most important to your customer will help you create the best metrics by which to measure your performance in a way that is truly customer centric.

You also need to consider how you’re assessing customer feedback. With NPS being a commonly-used tool, one member pointed out the importance of measuring both transactional and relational NPS – in other words, NPS related to how your customer rates a specific transaction as well as NPS related to how your customer relates their overall working relationship with you.

Prioritize the Personal Touch

One of the most emphatically reinforced points by many members of the conversation was the importance of keeping a human feel to all of this. While customer surveys and NPS scores are important tools to use, we discussed the fact that they are relatively impersonal. The group was passionate about the need to have actual, one-on-one conversations with customers to gather more detailed, anecdotal input and to express that they – as people – matter enough to you to take the time to prioritize talking with them.

Not only is this approach important when it comes to personalizing your brand and showing customers how much you care, but this level of customer engagement is key to developing a deep enough understanding of your customers’ businesses, processes, and needs to be able to effectively develop new value propositions for the future. And while gauging the impact of your current efforts is important, the real key to customer centricity is developing relationships and gleaning insight that will put you in a position to better meet the needs of your customers, now and into the future.

What advice do you have about walking the customer centricity talk? I’d love to hear from you!

Tom Paquin

A few weeks back, I wrote an article on the importance of proper parts management and reverse logistics for sustainability. In it, I made the case not just for the moral imperative that smart waste management allows, but also the economic imperative. In that same vein, I think it’s important, within field service, to discuss optimization in the same vein.

I’ve outlined optimization in excruciating detail (and sometimes with the help of Super Mario) over the last few years, so if you’re in need of a primer, they’re out there. The bottom line is: Best-in-class planning and scheduling optimization finds and fixed invisible inefficiencies for your business. We’ve used the example of Cubic previously, where PSO showed them that their instincts of leaving a single technician at a single site for the entirety of the day was actually wasting money and resources. But why, exactly, is that the case?

It comes down to what your optimization system is trying to do. Inferior systems with optimization capabilities, under many circumstances, are just shoving people into time slots in what is essentially the illusion of automation. True, full-featured optimization powered by AI is (as we have discussed before) attempting to accomplish a specific set of goals for your business. Specifically, they are using complex algorithms fed by vehicle, job, and location data to minimize:

Drive time
Time from ticket to invoice
Appointment time
Stockouts

And many more. By coordinating a list of goals (and feeding that list with good data) you’re mitigating a lot of drive time. Drive time means gas guzzling time.

Let’s put together a general estimate to what that could look like. Let’s assume your vehicles average 35 miles per gallon, and your system, by consolidating truck rolls, saves 10 miles of drive time per truck per day, which is a pretty standard expectation. Assuming you have, let’s say, 200 technicians, that’s about 57 gallons of gas a day, 286 gallons per work week, 14,857 gallons per year.

Obviously there’s a monetary component to this. Last time I filled up, I paid $2.50 per gallon or so. Assuming that you’re using regular unleaded and happen to be in the greater Boston area, that is more than $37,000 in savings annually on nothing more than gas. That ignores every other saving that good optimization offers a business.

There’s obviously a bottom-line benefit to this, but the ecological story is just as prescient, and worth publicizing. There are obviously a variety of ways that businesses can mitigate their carbon footprint, but drive time is absolutely and unequivocally a key. And yes, cynical as it might be, if your business is making decisions that eliminate waste, ecologically through reverse logistics and operationally through AI-powered scheduling, you have tools to market around that, too. It’s harder, then, to find a more tangible win-win for a business that’s not just forward-looking with its growth, but also with its place in the natural world.

By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

We’re a year into this global pandemic, and I’ve written multiple articles and published numerous podcasts about how COVID has increased the pace of change, made businesses more open minded in how they operate, and accelerated digital transformation. While the roots of this change are unfortunate, the results of how it is propelling service forward are in many ways exciting. We’ve featured many success stories in the last year about how companies like Park Place Technologies, Munters, and Alfa Laval have navigated the turbulence masterfully in a way that has not only provided business continuity but powers business transformation.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we must temper our drive for change that brings such immense opportunity from a business perspective with some real empathy and patience for what our frontline workers are experiencing. Keep in mind that when you’re owning the vision and setting the strategy, it is exhilarating and exciting – when you’re on the receiving end it can be quite overwhelming.

To put yourself in the shoes of your frontline workers, you really only have to think a bit about how this last year has impacted you on a personal level. We all have our different stories, but I don’t know many individuals who haven’t struggled in some way – be it physical health, mental health, juggling work and children being home, the weight of being an essential worker, and so much more. However, as leaders, we are built to keep our eye on the prize and keep momentum building – and while I’m not at all proposing we grind that momentum to a halt, I think we need to take pause and consider the weariness of the workforce.

Balance Business Needs with The Human Experience

The business needs to continue evolving, perhaps now more than ever. I am simply suggesting that as we find ourselves a year into an incredibly taxing pandemic, we need to consider a bit more than we might normally what the human experience of our workforce looks like and be sure we adjust our business strategy to compensate for some of the needs of our people.

Change management is a topic we’ve discussed in detail for a long time, and with good reason – it is often where transformation efforts fall short, because we overlook or underprioritize the importance of creating not just compliance but adoption among our workforce. I would say that, today, change management is even more critical – because the frontline troops are weary. They’re weary from a year of worry about their health, their families, and their jobs. They’re weary from adapting to new circumstances and requirements, at work and at home. And I believe the onus is on us to make an extra effort in how we manage change to do whatever we can to minimize their weariness.

Adjust Your Strategy, Speed, and Style

Of course, what this looks like in every business and for each change will be unique, but there are three areas I would suggest you consider:

Do you have a solid strategy for managing change? If you say no, well, start there. If yes, ask yourself when was that strategy set – pre- or post-COVID? It might be worth re-examining whether your strategy for managing change is ample for COVID circumstances. Aspects like clearly articulating your ‘why,’ over-communicating, and making ample time for soliciting feedback and addressing concerns are even more important today – you want to think about these steps through the lens of a workforce that is likely stressed, tired, and perhaps worried about how this change will impact their career with your company. It’s important to set extra steps, time, and resources in your strategy to ensure you’re not simply checking a change management box but really helping your employees through an addition to an already-taxing time.
When COVID hit, the companies that reacted well did so nimbly and quickly. The speed of change early on was rapid, and it needed to be. But a year in, we’re all a bit more hardened than we were in those early days. While you may still need to apply speed to certain situations or project, where you can think about how you could perhaps slow down a degree or two in order to alleviate some stress, allow more time for adoption, and incorporate more change management into the project.
I would argue this is the more important of the three to consider and there’s one word I’d use to summarize the style you need to consider to best address this workforce weariness: PERSONAL. In this new often-virtual world full of uncertainty and volatility, we’re all hungry for more human connection. More authenticity, more transparency, more empathy, more understanding. If you’ve used a textbook change process in the past, know that textbook may not resonate today the way it would have two years ago – you need to dig in and think about how to foster a more personal style of connection and management with your employees. The more personal you get, the better your chances of resonating and breaking away some of that weariness to create more acceptance, engagement, and buy-in.

By Tom Paquin

If you—like me—have someone who is currently eligible for vaccination from COVID-19 somewhere in the United States, it’s likely that you—again, like me—have refreshed a state government website incessantly, scrambled over the sudden appearance of an open spot, frantically plugged in you or your loved one’s medical information, and been greeted by a frozen webpage, or an error message, or a notification that there are no vaccines available at your given location.

I live in the state of Massachusetts, whose initial vaccine rollout, for various reasons, was poor. And in spite of some improvements, on the 18^th of February we moved into Phase 2 of rollout, offering vaccines to people 65 and older, thus flooding over a million new people onto the sites and into the vaccine queue. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this has led to frustration, anger, and confusion as the scheduling portal buckled under the traffic and those without constant access to a computer or who can sit on hold for over an hour are left in a lurch.

This has left many, myself included, frustrated, demoralized, and unsure of what to do next. So we’re going to channel that frustration into what we love to do around here—applying a service-oriented mindset to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout!

While we are quick to talk about service management in the private sector, it’s important to remember that nonprofits and public works need service support too. Often their confluence with the private sector is a blurred line, to begin with (especially in the case of these rollouts, most of which are happening with the help of private enterprises) but, though customer retention is less of a concern for governments and municipalities, mitigating waste and maximizing customer happiness is paramount to successful operations.

So let’s look at a few tips for how to take vaccine rollout and make it right for people:

Stress Testing and Scenario Modeling

Naturally, one of the biggest problems with the vaccine rollout has been the volume of people accessing the web crashing the site. Those who eschewed the website and called have met operators who are also attempting to access a crashing website. How can these issues be mitigated in the future?

My state, like every other land mass on the planet, has a given number of human people in it. That number of human people accessing a scheduling system, under any circumstances, can be simulated. It is something hackers do frequently. A key to any rollout of a customer-facing system is stress testing the load of users at a given time. Managing that load means managing not just the traffic, but how that traffic is queued, how it is routed, and how it is prioritized.

Getting these right in any service scenario will benefit from a favorite topic of mine: simulating service interactions. “What if?” scenario modelers are easier and easier to enable (most commonly in the planning and scheduling world), and can show outcomes at various volumes crosschecked across other conditions. The confluence of these give a picture of overall system health and allow businesses to build immediate contingencies and systems for roadblocks.

Meeting the Needs of Diverse Stakeholders

I am privileged to work in a job that offers me the ability to sit in front of a screen for eight to ten hours a day. Because of this, I could conceivably spend all day refreshing the “Vaxfinder” portal indefinitely and snatch up the latest appointment in between meetings and production work.

People who ironically work in many of the industries that are exposed far more frequently to the public—Postal workers, bus drivers, food service workers, and so on—Lack that privilege. You could argue that this is a socioeconomic failure and represents greater fissures in the foundation of civilized society that have been unearthed by this crisis, and I’m not qualified to say whether or not that is true. I’d argue, though, that a small way to begin to repair such fissures would be through ensuring racial and economic equity with respect to the rollout.

It would be wrong of me to say that technology will save us from our problems, and good people are working to combat this legislatively. But by developing triggers, allocating appropriately into specific demographics, and, plainly, ensuring that the rate of vaccine utilization matches the demographic makeup of the state, region, and so on, is important.

This succeeds though systems of tracking, and is a reminder of the importance, in any service setting, that tracking is never, ever a binary. Lifecycle tracking begins with the supply chain, though the delivery of service (or, in this case, jabs), and finally, the follow-up and demographic management. If that’s not measured in a single, unified way, then you can’t match demographic shortfalls to an increase in the supply chain.

Obviously in the walled garden of a private enterprise, this is easier to do than for a government or nonprofit, but thoughtful development on the front-end can, at the very least, mitigate and correct some of these issues.

Unfortunately, because of that, this article functions more as an allegory for service delivery than a solution that governments can take to heart. But when it’s time to schedule your own jab, consider how your own business is managing supply chain, service, and volume, and if there’s a way to do it better, more equitably, and with less friction for all of your customers.

Is Your View of Outcomes-Based Service Limiting Your Potential?

Is Your View of Outcomes-Based Service Limiting Your Potential?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

How Servitization will Lead to the End of Service as we Know It

How Servitization will Lead to the End of Service as we Know It

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

Smart Care’s Recipe for Scalable Service Success

Smart Care’s Recipe for Scalable Service Success

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

Where are We Now?

Where are We Now?

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Move Over Bob: A New Narrative to Re-Invigorate & Diversify the Trades

Leaving a Legacy: The Incredible Impact of Dame Stephanie Shirley

The “Fail Fast” Mantra: Empowering or Anxiety-Inducing?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

Wise Words from Women in Service on International Women’s Day 2021

Wise Words from Women in Service on International Women’s Day 2021

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Move Over Bob: A New Narrative to Re-Invigorate & Diversify the Trades

Leaving a Legacy: The Incredible Impact of Dame Stephanie Shirley

The “Fail Fast” Mantra: Empowering or Anxiety-Inducing?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

Back to Basics: Making Service a Competitive Differentiator

Back to Basics: Making Service a Competitive Differentiator

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

As AI Unlocks the Promise of IoT, It’s Time to Double Down on Service Innovation

From IoT to GenAI and Beyond: Advice for Building Intelligent Connected Solutions

What Does It Take to Thrive Vs. Merely Survive in the Experience Economy?

Most Recent

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results

The Complexities of True Customer Centricity in Service

The Complexities of True Customer Centricity in Service

Share

Stay Connected

Related Content

Service Council Symposium 2025 Highlights

Why Unisys Expanded Beyond SLAs to XLAs: Perspective to Consider for Escaping Service Complacency

Trust as a Change Catalyst: Why Psychological Safety Drives Better Results