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April 12, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

April 12, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

The Future of the Service Workforce: 5 Pillars of Preparation

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

The future of work is a topic that comes up in almost every conversation I have in one way or another. Service leaders are grappling with a lack of available talent, working to determine how the field service role is changing, and balancing the management and retention of both older and young workers who have significantly different needs and desires. There are many layers to this conversation, all of which we will continue to dig into here at Future of Field Service. The common understanding, though, is that preparing for the future of the service workforce will be one of the biggest challenges among our audience in the coming handful of years. Today I’m going to discuss five pillars of preparation that are key to setting your company up to navigate this massive challenge with the highest chance of success.

Pillar #1: Redefine

The role of the field technician has changed, is changing, and will continue to change. You need to work hard to consider how the role is being redefined based on your company’s journey toward Servitization or leveraging advanced services as a competitive differentiator or path to revenue growth. What does this mean for your needs today as well as for your needs over the next five years?

For most organizations, what’s happening is that the role is evolving to require more than the traditional technical skill sets. Today’s field technicians are needing more soft skills to succeed in the role of trusted advisor as customer relationships and service value propositions evolve. This trend will only continue, so it’s essential to map where your company is heading in terms of what services you’ll be providing and how and then how that translates to the skills needed from your field technicians to accomplish those goals.

Perhaps you can evolve the role of your field technician to meet your future needs; perhaps you’ll need to add new roles as your business model matures. Being clear on the redefinition, though, from what was required historically to what you’ll need over the next five years gives you the insights needed to determine where the gaps lie, how to reframe job requirements and postings as well as training programs and progression paths, and prioritize greatest needs.

Pillar #2: Redesign

Once you have better defined your current state as it relates to talent and what’s needed to meet your service objectives, you can work to redesign your recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and progression processes to be in line with what you need – versus what you’ve always done. As skill sets needed change, so too should job descriptions and recruiting practices. Training may need to focus more heavily on soft skills and relationship management, as well as use of technology, than it has in the past.

Many companies complain of a “talent gap” when really what they’re frustrated with is an “experience gap,” meaning they are accustomed to being able to hire technicians with years of experience and those tenured technicians are becoming harder to come by. This doesn’t mean that talent doesn’t exist, though, it just means you have to work harder for it than you have in the past. This is a new normal you need to adjust to, and it means redesigning your definitions of talent, experience, and fit.

Some of the top areas of “redesign” underway when it comes to creating a workforce for the future are modernizing job roles and requirements to attract a more diverse pool of candidates, being sure to create appeal for the younger generation, introducing new roles based on your redefined requirements, and – perhaps most importantly – thinking about how to foster more talent versus simply attracting it.

Companies like Tetra Pak, for example, have created programs to foster future talent. This need to become more creative, and take more ownership, around meeting the needs you have for your field workforce teams is I think one of the biggest areas of redesign that’s essential. You cannot continue to post jobs and expect a wave of ready-to-hire applicants; you need to become more inventive around how you can take smart, capable people and meld them into the talent you need to exceed.

Pillar #3: Outsource

Outsourcing field work isn’t for everyone, but it is a growing trend. And here’s why – what many companies are doing is outsourcing the more basic, traditional break-fix work in an effort to have more time and energy to focus on upskilling and developing their in-house talent to do some of the more sophisticated work around advanced services.

There have been some reservations around leveraging third-party workers, and I don’t think those reservations are entirely without merit. But as the gig economy grows it becomes a more practical choice for many, and with today’s technologies, many of the concerns around the management of those workers and the control over brand experience are being minimized.

Perhaps for you it isn’t a move to outsourcing, but to creating a hierarchy of field technician within your company – an entry level position that handles some of the basics and a progression of positions that tackle more sophisticated service offerings. However you decide to tackle it, you shouldn’t rule out outsourcing without doing some due diligence.

Pillar #4: Automate

Another critical element of the future of work strategy is automation. How can you leverage predictive technology to anticipate versus react to needs, and to better prepare technicians for the work they’ll do on site? How can you leverage AI for knowledge capture and management, so that as your most experienced technicians retire you don’t lose a lifetime of knowledge along with them?

How does remote service fit into your service strategy? Using remote assistance and AR for a remote-first approach can act similar to outsourcing in the sense of eliminating the most basic level of service requirements by handling remotely tasks that can be resolved easily and quickly.

How enabled are your customers with self-service? Self service fulfills the customer’s desire for more control and autonomy, while often reducing the burden of the service provider in some ways.

Today’s technologies are powerful, sophisticated, and ready to help you morph your workforce into the future. Examining your options around automation, what can be automated and how, is key to managing the significant demands on service organizations that are only increasing.

Pillar #5: Innovate

Like all areas of service transformation, the conversation around the workforce is one that requires an innovative mindset. Break free of the “this is how we’ve done it” and you’ll be halfway there. Your business is likely changing (or it should be!), and therefore your workforce needs to change too. Look at how other businesses in your industry but maybe more importantly outside of your industry are tackling this universal challenge. Be open to new ideas, new roles, new processes, and new technologies. Those that exceed at creating the workforce of the future will do so by thinking out of the box, by creating a unique culture and challenge for their teams, and by understanding that your frontline workforce is absolutely imperative to your success as a service organization.

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April 9, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Preparing for the Future of Aftermarket Service Providers

April 9, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Preparing for the Future of Aftermarket Service Providers

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By Tom Paquin

Oh how we love servitization. We talk all the time about traditional companies product-izing repairs and regular service, building product categories around utilities that previously were seen as a cost center, or relegated to other organizations altogether. But what about those businesses who have been delivering service all along? We certainly talk about them, and we talk to them. Their experience extends, under many circumstances, far beyond that of new entrants.

And as the expectations of these new entrants have changed, so too have the expectations of these aftermarket service companies. Whether it be through companies attempting to corral their work under a licensee framework, or the pinch of OEMs encroaching upon their well-worn turf, challenges mount for legacy companies.

As always, not every challenge will be the same. Not every business will be up against the same types of competition, nor the same environmental challenges. But for many, there are a few issues worth confronting before the metastasize into more complex problems. Here’s a few such problems, and how our legacy service brethren can work to address them.

Rising Tides Sink Old Ships

Ok—I’m not saying that every service provider will be wiped out by a wave of servitization, in which the brands that are serviced build internal infrastructure to compete with you. Dealer service centers and private mechanics are able to live and work side-by-side, have access to the same materials, and offer comparable services.

But in a new environment where businesses are selling outcomes, not products to consumers, the need to pivot services to embrace that might be the key. For some, that might look like, as mentioned before, becoming part of a network of certified service providers for a single brand. Often, that means that the onus of optimization, parts management, and repair coordination is taken out of your hands. But it also means that you need to have the right tools in hand—and the willingness to adapt those tools—to meet the needs of the manufacturer or distributor of serviceable products.

If you’re a service provider against numerous products in a specific industry, like commercial kitchens, retail, or HVAC, that model isn’t as feasible. For those companies, you’ll often lack the ability to connect as closely to specific assets as a manufacturer. For these companies, delivering exceptional service at the greatest value is the key to success. It’s imperative, then, to think about the tools you’re using today to capture that success.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Maturity

Legacy aftermarket service providers have an obvious leg-up in the service wars of the future…they’ve been doing it for a very long time, so they have the infrastructure, systems, processes, and procedures that have been iterated upon for years to produce the New York Yankees of service technology stacks (as a Masshole, this pains me to type).

But also…

Legacy aftermarket service providers have an obvious detriment in the service wars of the future…they’ve been doing it for a very long time, so they’re saddled with dozens of overwritten technologies, iterated into a mob of indiscernible wires to produce the Miami Marlins of service technology stacks (sorry Floridians…the Marlins are bad).

This duality emphasizes the importance of auditing your service processes. In the next few weeks, we’ll present some questions that we can ask to help you evaluate the integrity of your software. It’s certainly tough to turn the mirror onto processes, especially when those processes are day-in, day-out activities of your service business. But taking the time to step back and make those evaluations could spell the difference between success and failure.

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April 5, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Insights Gleaned in The Trenches of Servitization

April 5, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Insights Gleaned in The Trenches of Servitization

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I’m hopeful by now you’ve seen the special report we published recently, The Service Centricity Playbook: 7 Phases of Morphing from Product Provider to Trusted Advisor. The report looks at the common steps along the journey that companies take when servitizing their businesses. But we all know that the real value comes in when you can spend time with people that have done the work and are willing to share the good, the bad, and the ugly of what it took to achieve success. The team from Noventum and I hosted a discussion with Wolfgang Kuenkler, VP – Head of Global Retail & Delivery Services at Diebold Nixdorf and Roel Rentmeesters, Director of Global Customer Service at Munters to hear their tales of living the “playbook” in real life. Here are some of the insights they shared.

Servitization Isn’t Service Transformation, It’s Business Transformation

One of the biggest misperceptions around this journey is that it is a service journey but, in reality, it is a journey for the entire organization – and success only comes when the entire business gets on board. “It was a quite a difficult journey to start with, because it's a mindset and it’s a highly cross-functional journey as well,” says Roel. “This is not just a service journey. R&D spot trends on what is coming up. Product management, who has a relationship with customers as well, bring in what they feel as demands. And so together, this is where you develop this service strategy and vision, and how to bring it to life. And on top, what's so exciting is the fact that it doesn't stop.”

The deeper and richer your history as a product-centric business, the more challenging this shift can be for the business. “If you are coming into the beginning as a pure, product-based company, service is something which over time will change your organization,” says Wolfgang. “You cannot compare product sales to services sales; it is totally different. Everybody in the company must understand that service is not for free. Service is really a big business and it could be very profitable for the company. This is the first step to solution sales. Diebold Nixdorf was really product-driven until 2008 when the economic crisis hit, and the product sales went down dramatically. Our stability came from our long-term contracts. We have long term contracts, three years, five years, so we had that permanent income. This helped to change the mindset of the account management, executive management, and everyone involved. From this point on, service was very important for us on the same level as product – it is 50 percent of our business.”

Standardization is Key to Servitization Success

Wolfgang and Roel agreed on the importance of global standardization. “Diebold Nixdorf has a global service organization of about 16,000 people. Our main customers are global customers from the oil industry, from fishing industries or sales of furniture and, of course, global banks,” explains Wolfgang. “What they're expecting is that an engineer in Indonesia and Malaysia and Brazil is working in the same way as an engineer in U.K. or in the Netherlands or in Denmark. Standardization is key to achieving this. So, what we are doing is being standard in our services, our contracts, our sales processes, our service delivery, our support, our logistics, everything. It is possible, from my point of view, that people are acting in all the countries in the same way, because this is what customers expect from us.”

At Munters, where the journey is earlier in process, standardization is being worked toward by a dedicated team. “I am a strong believer that central services can take away a lot of the burden of the countries and inconsistencies in the way we operate,” says Roel. “We involve them in creating the standards based on best practices that they might have on one side and best practices that come from other companies that are working in a standard way. We have a central services management team that looks into the infrastructure, the product development and the processes, and the business systems we want to use to serve as an incubator and facilitator for the countries that are actually executing the business. We can dedicate resources specifically on the initiatives and steps we are taking, the work to implement them for the countries to benefit from.”

Regardless of what stage of the journey, continual optimization is the name of the game. “We have a continual improvement manager that specifically looks into the end-to-end processes, to make sure that everything flows where it needs to flow,” explains Roel. “If you use companies like IFS with an ERP system, they often base that on a standard process, embedded in there as a framework that you can use. It’s not just customer value that you will be able to create by implementing standard processes; it is your internal way of operating that will change as well. You will become more efficient and that means that you need to adapt your processes to what you implement. If you implement a remote management center that will change your processes, then the way you sell things and the way you train the people that need to sell that to customers also need to change. It’s a continuous journey of learning and refining.”

Streamlined Technology Enables Streamlined Service

Finally, it’s important to realize that the level of cohesiveness you need to achieve for Servitization success is impossible to come by without modernized, streamlined technology. “For IT, we are the service experts and we define the processes. It helps us to optimize our processes,” says Wolfgang. “Our goal is to have only a limited number of tools, because each tool increases the number of complexity costs. To master data services without master data will not work. For IT infrastructure and service, you need a vision. In the same way its important to have a service vision, so also is a vision for IT. There are too many tools on the market at the moment and you must be clear on your requirements to find the right fit.”

You may want to consider having a dedicated resource that is responsible for tying this together. “We have a VP of Digital and that person is really targeting how the company needs to do digitalize and what it needs to do to support the business. We did an inventory on the needs that we saw from a business perspective and are creating a roadmap based on that,” explains Roel. “New technology is key, and alignment between IT and the business is a must.”

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Reinventing ITSM for the Work-From-Home Generation

April 2, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Reinventing ITSM for the Work-From-Home Generation

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By Tom Paquin

I’ve been a remote worker since I started at IFS in 2019. For the first 15 months of my remote employment, I felt like a member of an exclusive club. No commute, the ability to play 90’s hip hop as loud as I want, and the daily company of no one other than my dog, French Fry, who did not complain when I microwaved fish for lunch.

In March of last year, though, my wife joined me in my fortress of solitude. Then, in the weeks to come, so did everybody else who worked in an office.

There were a lot of learnings over this last year, but certainly chief among them, for many folks, was that remote work can be done. For many of us, we’re more productive, more focused, and while the adjustment to new communication strategies can be a hurdle, many businesses have found great success through videoconferencing.

I am certain that, today, many people are tripping over themselves to get back into an office. In Boston especially, startup culture centers around Friday afternoon happy hours and ping pong tournaments, and there are undoubtedly a lot of foosball tables out there regrettably collecting dust. That’s never been of interest to me, and I am certain that many of my compatriots will agree, and, with the infrastructure that we’ve built over the last year to support home work, would prefer to keep this arrangement.

Businesses are looking at ways to solidify this process in an effort to reinvent how they use their office space. Whether through communal desks, hybrid workers, or simply not renewing leases, we’re figuring out what office culture will look like post-pandemic.

From a personnel perspective, this is coming together. From an IT perspective, we’ve been duct-taping solutions together in an attempt to make these systems and processes work, essentially building the track as we’ve been traveling on it. That is not to say that some organizations were unprepared, of course. But on the whole, we’ve been thinking on our feet, for better or worse.

So what do we do now that we know that the traditional office environment has been fundamentally changed forever? How do we organize, operationalize, and service our enterprise equipment as it is dispersed across regions, nations, and the world?

As is always the case, there are as many considerations as there are businesses managing those considerations, but here’s a few high-level ones to get you thinking about the right mix for your business:

Device Management
I come from the world of business hardware sales, and within that space, proper device management was (at least in 2015) the most overlooked element of proper IT management. I’ve written about this in the context of COVID before, but the stakes and expectations have shifted. One of my biggest clients, whose workforce had 75% annual turnover and were exclusively field-based operatives (a real churn-and-burn sales house…I’m not here to endorse that type of business model but I have to acknowledge it exists) had device management, location services, and remote access installed at the manufacturer, shipped the device directly to the sales folks. It never physically touched the hands of an IT person in the organization, but IT had full oversight into what apps were installed on it, how it was used, and, when the employee quit, was able to remotely shut it off, providing a helpful screen with exact directions on how to remit the device.

Now that “field operatives” can mean “all employees”, IT managers need to think carefully about how much money they’re wasting on packing tape and shipping boxes, prepping machines by hand and slapping on postage. A better way exists, and by streamlining this process, you can save time for some of the more complex challenges that we have listed below.

Diagnostics
My wife’s work computer turns on about 25% of the time. The fan whirs wildly, the keyboard lights up, but there’s no image on the screen. I’m not in IT any more but my educated guess is that it’s a RAM issue. My wife has called her IT manager several times, and they’ve remotely accesser her machine and reset her firmware I don’t know how many times.

I should note that I have no idea how my wife is describing the problem that she is having, but the solution does not address it, and regardless of the number of times that they go through this song and dance, the issue is not resolved. Simple issues like this can often be resolved through remote access, yes, but when you’re dealing with a hardware issue, it’s much smarter to diagnose this from outside of the computer screen. This is not rocket science, but a simple remote assistance array, and some smart diagnostics could save a lot of time, here. This is a step beyond telestration—true remote assistance with on-screen prompts. If you can’t get your machine back to an office to be looked at, thinking about this differently will be a saving grace.

Logistics
Ok, let’s think about the above example again. Assume the RAM is the culprit. Common IT practice would be to send out a whole new computer, remit the broken one, and have IT fix it on-prem. That is fine, but it’s kind of a waste of time and resources. Assuming remote assistance is working correctly, you could just ship new RAM to the user, and walk them through the repair process. On most PCs, RAM’s an easy fix…I just lifted many machine and it has a small plate with the appropriate expansion slots right there.

From a logistics perspective, this changes things marginally. You could ship product direct (as discussed before), but what about remittance? Perhaps you have the end user just throw away the defective product (but please do not throw computer parts in the trash). What if, instead, you worked out a refurbishment plan with the manufacturer? If so, ticket creation for an issue, when diagnosed, could trigger the appropriate logistics materials without any sort of manual work being applied. Imagine time saved not having to coordinate with a vendor, but simply to know that a product would ship out, along with a return box, and that this was not just saving time, but saving money, too. This feeds into what I was saying about the circular economy last week.

That’s one example, and like any other, requires smart software solutions, a connected infrastructure, and pre-planning to ensure frictionless management of any challenge. To do that, it’s not just about the technology, it’s about understanding what goes wrong with end user’s products, and how to fix them. End-to-end automation of remote IT service requires end-to-end understanding of the business. There’s a lot of legwork that goes into that, but the benefits outweigh the challenges.

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Inside the CMO’s Mind: 4 “Musts” for Impactful Service Marketing

March 29, 2021 | 5 Mins Read

Inside the CMO’s Mind: 4 “Musts” for Impactful Service Marketing

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By Sarah Nicastro, Creator, Future of Field Service

I believe the vast majority of our audience – that’s you! – understand that services are a strong path to differentiation and growth for their businesses. I’d even go so far as to say that many have refined or created services that create value for their customers – examples like moving from reactive to predictive models or introducing net new services that help enable customer outcomes. Where I think many still struggle, however, is in articulating their value proposition in a way that resonates and marketing their services in a manner that drives success.

Lucky for you all, we have an excellent podcast episode coming this week with Jennifer Deutsch, Chief Marketing Officer at Park Place Technologies. Park Place is the world's largest third-party maintenance provider for data centers who, through 16 acquisitions, has expanded beyond TPM into the software business with an entire portfolio of products that includes network analytics, hardware monitoring, and more. Prior to her role at Park Place, Jennifer has marketing experience with brands like Marriott, Ritz-Carlton, Renaissance Hotels and Resorts, Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts, Nestle, and many more.

In this week’s podcast, Jennifer gives some excellent examples and illustrations around what impactful service marketing looks like. I won’t give it all away – you’ll have to tune in – but I do want to recap some of the major points. So, here are Jennifer’s top four “musts” when it comes to seeing success with your service marketing.

Must #1: Innovate with an Eye Toward Operational Realities

Jennifer is clear that innovation is a key ingredient of marketing. “We lead through innovation. As an organization and also a marketing department, we are fearless in our innovation,” she says. “It’s through this innovation that we've been able to change the dynamics of our brand, our products, but also the category. We recently introduced we introduced our First-Time Fix Guarantee. We are really putting our money where our mouth is that the first time, we are going to fix it. If we don't fix it, there’s a penalty for us – we’re going to service that piece of equipment for a month. That was such an innovation for the category.”

The caution here, though, is that as you’re innovating your marketing you must be sure that innovation is grounded in operational realities. Making the claim is bold, and it gets attention, but you have to be able to back it up with results. “Claim generation is an art. It took three years for us to be able to offer the First-Time Fix Guarantee and know we could deliver,” explains Jennifer. “When I was at Renaissance Hotels, we made an offer to guests that we could deliver fresh hot coffee with their wake-up call. You walk outside your door and there is a fresh pot of coffee, just the way you want it, which is pretty amazing. That's marketing and operations connected at the hip. You make the claim, you'll have coffee, at the very same time that you have your wakeup call, and it's going to be hot, and it's going to be perfect. We had to make sure that we could deliver. We had to make sure at Park Place that we could deliver the First-Time Fix Guarantee, that we're fixing it first the very first time.”

Must #2: Remember that Simplicity is King

It is easier to be verbose that it is to streamline, but when it comes to impactful marketing you must work to simplify. “As Aristotle said, ‘The real genius is simplicity,’ says Jennifer. “You must clearly communicate features and benefits simply. When you look at our tagline, ‘All about uptime,’ it's a very simple tagline. It uses one of the most impactful important words in our category: uptime. It's important that it's easy to understand, the messaging is simple, and that immediately, customers understand what it is that you're launching.”

The goal here is to create a simple hook that gets your audience to want to learn more, then you can deliver the details. “Simplification is so important because people have shorter attention spans than ever. Space is limited the way that we're consuming messaging, whether it's a social media post, et cetera. You need to work hard to find a few words that really communicate your message,” explains Jennifer. “If you don't have an arresting headline, you're not getting the reader to read the rest. I think that briefer is better.”

You’ll have the details when you need to provide them to someone that is interested in what you have to offer – but what you lead with needs to be simple. It also needs to be in the terminology of what your customers care more about. Note the difference between Park Place’s “All about uptime” versus “IoT-enabled predictive maintenance” – Park Place’s tagline is impactful because it speaks to how the company helps alleviate customer pain points.

Must #3: Get a Fresh Perspective

Innovation always benefits from diversity of thought and getting input on marketing messages is a valuable way to refine and polish your ideas. “I am an insights-driven, customer-driven marketer, because I am a focus group of one. My opinion is one individual. I must talk to customers and have a very, very deep understanding of what they face, what their environment is like, and what they need. That's the greatest inspiration for me, personally, as a marketer,” says Jennifer.

Park Place regularly obtains insights from its customers for marketing and many other purposes through its Customer Advisory Board. “Our customer advisory board is made up of 36 customers who have varying titles from CIO to data center manager and everything in between. It's great because we get a diversity of thoughts and opinions,” explains Jennifer. “Our entire senior leadership team participates, because we all need to be hearing the same thing from our customers to work on our end on how to improve the customer experience, how to evolve our roadmap, and then how to develop our messaging.”

I was also struck during my conversation with Jennifer by how valuable her own fresh perspective is to Park Place. She has had experience marketing for a variety of industries and brands, and I think her outside-in views have helped the company to excel in developing its simple, customer-centric messaging that is proving highly impactful. This is something to consider in terms of consulting with experts outside of your industry when developing your messaging, whether that’s a full-time hire or leveraging some agency expertise to get that fresh perspective.

Must #4: When in Doubt, Test it Out

Our final “must” is to know how simple and affordable it is to test messaging in today’s digital world to ensure you are landing on something that will achieve the results you desire. “Long ago, you would AB test in controlled environments, and it was expensive,” explains Jennifer. “Today, with digital, it's very easy to AB test. You just simply run two campaigns and see which one tests better and then change your variables in real-time; you can analyze your data very easy with digital. AB testing today is easier and more cost effective than it's ever been because of the digital environment.”

These four points are just the beginning of the excellent insights Jennifer provides during this podcast episode. Be sure to check out the full-length interview to learn more.

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March 26, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Gamifying Service

March 26, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Gamifying Service

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By Tom Paquin

Anyone who’s read more than a passing article from me knows that I am a gaming enthusiast. Whether it’s Baseball, computer Solitaire, Dungeons and Dragons, Jeopardy, or Super Mario, give me something with a score, and objective, and a repeatable loop of actions and behaviors, and I’m in the zone. Even if I am terrible at it, I’m having a really nice time.

I know that I am not alone in my pro-games predelictions (partially because they are so vaguely defined in this article), as the concept of games and gaming have seeped heavily into the world of organizational behavior for businesses.

For the uninitiated, let’s ask the obvious question: What is gamification? We’ll define gamification as the act of building a system of scoring, objectives, and rewards (not punishment…games are supposed to be fun) behind performance in some sort of measurable way.

I recall, for instance, working at a big-box retailer, where speed was the #1 priority. Each transaction was ranked, and your cumulative score was presented as one of three colors—Green for excellent, yellow for average, and red for poor. While it was perhaps a bit reductive a benchmark by the standards of a post-Amazon world, it certainly kept lines moving quickly.

This has permeated across businesses of all disciplines and is far from a new concept in service. There have been benchmarks, KPI scoreboards, team goals, and good old-fashioned performance metrics for decades, all of which have been influenced by and benefitted from increasingly complex technology. Digital performance lobbies are industry standard today. Gamification has landed, but the key is figuring out how to take these measurements and benchmarks and coordinating them in a way that’s more valuable than numbers on a screen. While numbers alone might be enough of a motivator for someone like me, who needs to collect all 900 seeds in a Zelda game, it can be useful (and instructive!) to contextualize those numbers as having a specific benefit for your service teams. With that in mind, here’s an example of how to make gamification work for service:

Aligning Objectives with Dealer Networks

As I mentioned last week, manufacturers are moving at an accelerated pace towards a fully circular model of development. While manufacturers are incentivized to do this for their bottom-line, if manufacturers do not manage their own service, their service deliverers—through dealer networks, or perhaps just people certified to repair specific equipment—don’t necessarily care if widget #4 is returned to the supply chain. Gamification could be a way to strengthen relationships with these dealer networks, and by measuring reverse logistics and remittance of parts, and establishing rewards for something like value of parts returned to manufacturer (or something that works better for you—I’m throwing out a completely arbitrary example here) could improve a manufacturer’s bottom-line and keep materials in the circular workflow for remanufacturing.

As always, a certain technology infrastructure needs to be in place for this to work. You’ll need to have a reverse logistics system that extends beyond the borders of your own organization, and you’ll need to have at least superficial data about how your partners perform service. A tall order, for sure, but in the name of a more servitized economy, doing some legwork on the technology side now will help you capitalize on this today and se you up for tomorrow.

This is obviously one somewhat specific example, but there are of course hundreds of different ways to turn the data wells available to you into scoreboards that inspire and motive your service workers.

Have you used gamification in a particularly interesting way for your business? If so, we’d love to hear about it! Drop us a line and let’s talk!

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

March 22, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

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

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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.

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

March 19, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

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

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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.

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Smart Care’s Recipe for Scalable Service Success

March 15, 2021 | 8 Mins Read

Smart Care’s Recipe for Scalable Service Success

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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.”

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Where are We Now?

March 12, 2021 | 3 Mins Read

Where are We Now?

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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.

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