Tag: podcast

ABB’s Use of AR and AI to Modernize Field Service and Transform CX

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ANDRITZ Shares Digital Transformation Lessons Learned

October 28, 2020 | 20 Mins Read

ANDRITZ Shares Digital Transformation Lessons Learned

Klaus Glatz, Chief Digital Officer at ANDRITZ, talks with Sarah about customer needs driving digital transformation and service evolution as well as shares his biggest digital transformation lessons learned.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about digital transformation lessons learned. We know that digital transformation journeys can be fraught with complexity, and I think it's incredibly valuable to hear from folks lessons learned when they are willing to share those. So I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Klaus Glatz, Chief Digital Officer at ANDRITZ. Klaus, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Klaus Glatz: Hello. Nice to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. Before we dig into to ANDRITZ digital transformation journey and some of what you've been leading for the organization. Let's first just share a bit about yourself, your role, what ANDRITZ business does for anyone that might not be familiar and we'll start there.

Klaus Glatz: Yeah, you're welcome. First staring with ANDRITZ. ANDRITZ is a global acting machine and plant engineering company. We deliver big machines and big plants for different businesses. Our biggest area is pulp and paper, where we deliver from unit machine, single machines up to big mills. The second one is hydro. Hydro power plants starting from hydropower plants to small pumps, everything related to water and energy production. The third one is metals where we do metals processing and metals forming. So we're doing big presses for them, mainly for the automotive industry and do all forms of transformation of different steels and metal products. And then we have a fourth one, which is separation, where we do liquid and solid separation. It's large sludge dissolving. So mainly from municipalities. So it's a broad range of separation of different materials.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Klaus Glatz: As you said, my name is Klaus Glatz. I'm chief digital officer at ANDRITZ, being responsible for developing IoT, as well as the whole digitalization activities, which we call here smart services. Where also field service management is part of. We are delivering new services, new products, thinking about different business models, what we can offer to our customers. The ultimate goal for sure is to help our customers to be more efficient, to be more productive, to eliminate downtimes or unplanned downtimes as much as possible. And the field service management for us is a key topic here. We call the field service technicians out in the field, and we need to better optimize what they're doing, how we schedule them, how we can support them with material documentation, and also how we show up the whole reporting part, but also I guess the whole cashflow part. So to say, how long does it take for us to create invoices to send it to our customers because this has an impact on our cash flow.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely.

Klaus Glatz: So I guess a digitalization for us is on one hand internal digitalization. So I guess optimizing processes, delivering also new solutions, in order to help our people to really focus on what they should do and not, I guess, losing time in having bad products or better applications or whatever.

And then the secondhand, I guess we are doing to digitalization for our customers, creating additional revenue, implementing new models, like performance based contracts, revenue sharing models, up to equipment as a service. So we have different ideas here, how we can help our customers to better use our products. But also I guess, at the end of the day, gets to create more revenue in what they're doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Okay. And so when you and I spoke last, we had a whole conversation around the fact that, evolving customer demands and what your customers are looking to ANDRITZ for is what's driving your digital transformation efforts, whether that's internally to be able to serve them better or externally in new offerings. So, we talked about a few trends that you've noticed recently with how customers are changing in what they want or how they want to work with you. So, I want to talk about a few of those.

Sarah Nicastro: So, the first we talked about is in your industry, you explained to me that historically customers have wanted to maintain a pretty high level of self service and that they are now wanting to relinquish some of that control and move to more of a full service partnership with ANDRITZ so that they can focus on their core competencies. So, tell us a little bit what you've seen in that regard, because I think that that's something that would be a shared observation across a number of different industries.

Klaus Glatz: I think that the whole cooperation relationship is getting more integrated. So I guess it's not just we deliver something, and then I guess we hand it over to the customer, and then tell them have fun, and if you need service, I guess, just call us. Our intention here is to help them to create more output by that using, which is relevant for us, energy, energy consumption, chemicals, all of this stuff. We learn what customers are doing, how they operate our machines and plants. And this is what we use here based on data to help them to optimize how they’re running our equipment; and that's why, I guess it's urgently, or it's really needed, that we work together, we cooperate and help each other.

Klaus Glatz: We help the customers, I guess, to be more efficient, and the customer helps us to better understand our machines and products and further optimize them. So, it's a win-win situation for both. And this is definitely what we're striving for, and I guess the real thing, typically what happens to customers now, industries, if they've unplanned downtimes. So, if a machine is failing, I guess this creates huge losses because each of these machines is needed to produce something. So it's in our interest, but also the interest of the customer, to avoid as much as possible unplanned down times.

Klaus Glatz: And also, I guess from an integration perspective, we see a tendency that we are heading more in other things like paper use or machine as a service, or I guess it is output based on a contract.

Maybe really I guess, make sure that we are responsible here from starting from delivering a machine to the phase where we fade the machine out, and still, I guess we help him with our service beeper, with our predictive maintenance solutions to understand what's going on and to better plan or better forecast what's going to happen.

Klaus Glatz: It's always easier that if we know that a machine needs maintenance or service in two months, then we can properly plan it. I guess if the machine is failing today, it's nearly impossible to help a customer. So it's, bad for both sides, and the wide integration between a customer and the supplier is getting deeper, and is getting more and more intense in business. I think beneficial for both sides because also our interest is to have happy customers. And that's why now like as I said before, we need to avoid unplanned down times as much as possible.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. And so, as a part of this evolution, customers are looking to you now, not just to provide service, but to provide a lot of insights. So, insights on how they can optimize the use of your equipment insights on, common patterns of failure points and how you can, like you said, use predictive analytics to work ahead of those, and as a way to avoid that unplanned downtime. I guess that's the other big trend is you're not just in the product or service business, you're in the insight and information business as well, right?

Klaus Glatz: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you've seen the evolution here, we used to provide our machines and now I guess we are talking a lot about sensors, collecting data, converting data into information, information into knowledge. We are experts in our domain what we're doing. We understand our purposes, but I guess with having this data available, collecting dozens of different sensory information also puts us into a position that we still learn how we can further optimize or improve our machines. If you see as an example, at a big mill today, we have 125,000 possible errors, which you need to understand in order to produce the optimal output. I guess, for people working 30, 35, 40 years in Jacksonville, they understand how to operate such a mill. The issue for the customer is that, because of demographics, the people are somehow retiring your integration services, how to capture the knowledge and how to convert the knowledge into data.

Klaus Glatz: And it's all about data. And because data helps us to understand our internal processes in our mills, hydropower plants, whatever, and help us really to do better decisions. And division here for us for sure is that at some point in time, we go more and more towards autonomy or autonomous solutions, because I guess, if you have seen such a mill operating 365 days, 24 hours, using typically three shifts, I guess it's not fine to work in such environments, and that's why I guess the more we can help our customers to guide the operators, to do autonomous decisions, the better. So, the less people you need in order to operate that.

Klaus Glatz: At the end of the day, it's a very dangerous environment. It's an unhealthy environment, and that's why it's also an interesting possibility for us, but also for the customers that with having digital solutions in place, this would first optimize what they are doing. We would guide them which decision they need to take based on historical data based on algorithm, based on forecasting, to really produce what the customer of our customers wants to have.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I want to just pause for a minute and go back to a point that you made that I think is a really powerful, and I'm kind of paraphrasing what you said a bit, but I think that one of the points you made is made me think about, to be successful as a service provider, historically, you had to be the expert of your industry, right? You had to be the expert of your business and the solutions you're providing. I think, to be successful in today's landscape and going forward, you need to not only be an expert about your business, but you need to be an expert about your customers businesses.

Sarah Nicastro: The more you can learn about the ins and outs of how they operate and what that actually looks like, the more you're able to craft services and solutions that help meet those needs, so it's I guess, more work maybe than it has been in the past, but also a lot more opportunity. Right?

Sarah Nicastro: So, I want to talk about, thus far, how have these trends both in, customer expectations and needs as well as what's possible with the technology that we have today, how have these trends changed ANDRITZ service offerings thus far, and how do you see that evolving in the coming years?

Klaus Glatz: Yeah, technology gives a lot of opportunity with this year, starting from, I said I guess, using modern solutions to better guide and dispatch our field service technicians, giving them with AR virtual reality, mixed reality, the possibility to visualize things, but also getting in contact very easily with real experts. And technology, I guess, offers here a lot of possibilities here still. We also are still in the learning phase. Even though we’ve done already a lot, the integration between customers and companies is getting more intense, which creates some challenges but also it gives a lot of opportunities. And we are really focusing on opportunities here and making sure that also, I guess, seeing how ANDRITZ is developing all the job profiles in place that we didn't have five years ago.

Klaus Glatz: It's everything, data analytics, algorithms. So this is something where we will have an own team now working on that, which hasn't been existing, I guess, five years back. Still, we are a very engineering-intense company. We are field service company. But there are additional competences and skills that will also be needed in the future. We will add a bunch of different other capabilities and jobs or job profiles to complement in what we are doing.

Klaus Glatz: I still think that we are at the beginning, even we are doing a lot, but I guess the knowledge, it gives us so much more possibilities here, which we still in the phase of learning and understanding how we can use them. Specifically, the whole thing and on AI machine learning, anomaly detection, which are key topics also for us to further improve our machines and plants. I guess we just started, and this is what for sure will be further explored how we can use these technologies here in further optimizing in what we are doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that mindset of continuous learning is what drives companies to be successful. I think when you start to feel like you have it all figured out, that's when you stop making a lot of progress; because I think when you realize that the capabilities are as significant as they are, then you know, that you can keep evolving and keep changing and expanding what you're doing.

Sarah Nicastro: So, I know that you mentioned within your customer base, with the retirement and turnover of some of the skillsets that have traditionally run these plants, those customers are looking more to ANDRITZ to fill some of those gaps with your expertise. And then ultimately your goal is to provide, an autonomous solution to your customers. So that you've taken the need for those historical skillsets out. Is that I guess an accurate description?

Klaus Glatz: Yeah. I guess it's exactly what's happening. It's not just for us by us because this is, as I said before, this is demographics, and to find real experts in those areas is not easy. You need to educate them. You need to train them. It takes really years and years to be able to run those big mills, because the issue is that you do something now and which has an impact eight hours later.

Klaus Glatz: So it's not that you immediately see, I guess then they decide. It's a time series and if you produce eight hours of the wrong thing you lose a lot of money. So it's a very now intense, intense area. And that's why I guess customers are fully open here, whatever we can provide to help them to better understand what's going on to better assist them and guide them in order to avoid that they're producing eight hours the wrong part. So to say, this is definitely something they're looking for.

Klaus Glatz: Selling those solutions was challenging also because our sales force wasn't used to sell digital solutions or services, but they're more used to that now than three, four years back. I guess it's not easy to sell those solutions because if you used to sell a product, the machine, you can talk intelligently about the mechanics. But to explain now how we're going to use data, algorithm, machine learning, artificial intelligence, to further optimize what you're doing, is not easy. And this is something we also needed to learn, which competencies do we need specifically in sales in order to convince our customers that what we are doing makes sense?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yeah. That's a very good point, and you had mentioned a few minutes ago, the idea, and this is one of the most exciting topics to me in this space, is looking at how service businesses are evolving and what that means in terms of how current roles are changing, but also the new skill sets that are going to be needed within businesses. I think it's really interesting and really a lot of exciting things will happen over the coming years as we kind of see that play out, and a lot of good opportunity for folks. Obviously the role of the frontline field service worker has changed. To your point, these customers no longer just want them to show up and fix something that's broken. They want them to be a trusted advisor type of relationship. So, what has that been like for the frontline workers of ANDRITZ?

Klaus Glatz: Yeah. It's also for them, selling as the trusted advisors, and still also they need to develop themselves. Because you need your field service technicians, they still need to fix something. They have the tools with them, but a lot has changed. Now they’re using digital tools too, and you need a lot of experience. So if you have a junior elevate the need and send the junior and the senior together to a job site, because the senior was training junior how to do things, what we’ve seen here is with using remote assistance towards augmented reality and electronic documentation, it's not always needed that there's always a junior and a senior going together to the job site.

Klaus Glatz: So, typically we send the junior wearing HoloLens or whatever product. And the senior is sitting in his office at headquarters and still helps him to get his job done. And the cool thing is that the senior could now act as a multiplier because he can now instruct 10, 15, 20 different people and not having the need to travel that much. And this is also something, we have learned, if you're at the job site and need to do things on your own, someone remotely can instruct someone to do things correctly. Now people need to learn how to use these tools, how their role is changing, how they will be the one guiding other people.

Klaus Glatz: There we have seen some changes and our predictive solutions. We also have a performance center where we can see how different machines are performing and target finding the need for suggesting maintenance work and field service activities before something is happening.

Klaus Glatz: This is also a change because typically they were used as firefighters. Emergencies would come popping up and they were flying fully rolled like hell and today it's much more controlled. We understand our machines much better. We see, if the place needs a service in one month and then you can proactively suggest it to the customer. You can dispatch a service technician. It's not the big surprise. The technician doesn't get a call on Saturday or Sunday that you need to get onto the plane and fly to wherever in order to get things fixed. It's much more controlled. It's not saying that now emergencies are gone 100%, not at all, but it's a completely different working environment, which is absolutely beneficial for the people, but also for the customers, because customers also can better plan work which needs to be done here in order to keep this environment up and running.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Okay, so you've talked about a few, but I just want to recap real quick before we run through a few lessons. In terms of ANDRITZ digital transformation efforts thus far, talk to us a little bit about what some of the key pillars of that strategy are. So I know you mentioned FSM. I know you're using IOT and predictive analytics. Talk to us a little bit about what some of those core components are.

Klaus Glatz: Yeah. So say, I guess for the whole field service environment, it's our field service management solution, which we're using globally, or we are in the phase of rolling it out globally. On the IoT side via using videos and standard components and standard products. We are also, once it comes to our IOT offerings, I guess we are not working with one specifically because I guess customers typically have their preferences, which we need to respect so to say.

Klaus Glatz: We're very focused on internal development team where we're developed a lot of things on our own, because what we have learned is that to develop a good algorithm, requires a deep domain expertise in what you're doing. And that's why, I guess we are doing those things

Klaus Glatz: I guess still customers would like to have the solutions on premise, which creates some issues in data exchange. They are heading more and more towards cloud, but there's still a way to go. And we even start to develop our own sensors specifically for our needs together with universities and other companies, for sure. But I guess we also in the position to offer our own sensors. And that's why, I guess it's not that they're using this five building blocks or the five standard products. We do it mainly use-case based on a need pace, because the requirements or the environment in the m is differillent than in a hydropower plant. That's why we also need to use different components and different solutions for that. And we are not set, we do it selectively where we think we could get the most out of it.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So let's talk through a couple of the lessons learned. So the first comment you made is how important it is to think big, but act small. So tell folks what you mean by that.

Klaus Glatz: Yes. That's what I said, I guess, our mission was and still is, I guess we want to develop an autonomous whatever. I guess if it starts from zero, it's very ambitious. In time, all of the things should run autonomous. That's why you need to have a very clear plan, which steps you need today in order to get there. And we also started very small, very easy, took a very simple product and started to understand how we are. We need to develop our competencies and our skills in order to be able to develop those things. For sure. I guess it's important still. Things like you need a budget and you need to have a project sponsor and you need to have someone who has a vision, where I want to develop to, from a product solution perspective.

Klaus Glatz: It's easier from a business model change. It's much, much more complex from things like equipment as a service. It's also different complexity, but we started really with a set. Weak things, easy things and style to get all these models that we're developing together. And those are now today, a very strong development team. We also have distributed development with people in India, with people in Croatia, with people in Australia, with people in Finland. And as I said, you need to really see how to break a big thing into small pieces and then be quick in the delivery. We also now integrate customers in our discussions. So once we are doing a proof of value for something, we typically have already 10, 15 customers willing to test, willing to use it, and we also expand our reach. So say our chain also, including customers, and once we did with a tour cause we have a catalog.

Klaus Glatz: We had 15 customers, which we used in order to cost-check and to challenge things. But we think customer needs is really required or requested by a customer. So I think you need to open up your channels, your partnering, your collaboration, and really understand what are the needs of the customers. What he really needs and for which parts he is willing to pay it, because at the end of the day, our interest is to increase our revenue side. And that's why it's important not to work two years in your protected environment, go out to the customers and learn you’re off. Failing is also okay. This is also what we need to learn and it's think big and start small.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. The next area of importance is understanding how critical clean data is. So tell us what you've learned around the importance of clean data.

Klaus Glatz: This is the absolute key area. If you're working with bad data, you can have the best solution and the most fancy thing in place and it will not work. And also in our case, data intake with the correctness of data is a huge topic. Data is key and of utmost importance. You cannot make good decisions with bad data. And this is something I guess, which is painful and which you need to understand in which creates huge efforts in cleaning data. But you have no other alternative than they just start picking up the data, make sure data is still valid. It's correct, it's updated, because otherwise I guess, you will fail with whatever you are doing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, very good point. And then the third point is that process harmonization is equally important and an area that often gets rushed. So tell us a little bit about process harmonization.

Klaus Glatz: It's also key. I guess if we see that there were elements of topics, process harmonization is also very important, because to support different process variance, different process situations, with one tool always creates a lot of complexity. So, you need to have slim and easy processes in place, and then also it helps when implementing the tool. If you have 15 different deviations with 45 different process variances to support that with one thing, the solution is a mess of complexity. Not working as expected either it's low, or equating the wrong output, or doesn't integrate with anything. So both this harmonization and standardization is also really, really important because otherwise you create too much complexity.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Makes sense. So those are really good points and good food for thought. And I think it's a really interesting journey that you're on. And I look forward to following you along and talking more, as you guys progress toward the world of autonomous solutions. Klaus, any other lessons learned or closing thoughts that you would want to share?

Klaus Glatz: I think that the whole change management aspect is also still a huge topic here, because change always creates some fear, so to say. It's also important that you communicate, you get the people on board, you get a lot of visibility and transparency in what you're doing. This is also what we had to learn that maybe, I guess we missed out on change management at the beginning a little bit too much so to say. So, that's why I guess we also see this is very, very important. Two sided within the company, but also when cooperating with customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Klaus Glatz: Customers need to know we don't want to steal your data. We don't want to misuse your data. We just want to learn from experience what we can improve, and this is a joint journey with our customers. And still who is owning which data and who is allowed to access data is still sometimes a topic, but I will say that the whole change management aspect is also something which is key here to be successful. And if you lose some profiles, you win some others, but still it's being transparent, being also accessible for people to explain what you're doing is also key here.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I agree. A hundred percent. We'll Klaus, thank you so much for being here and for sharing your journey and your perspective with us. I really appreciate it and hope you'll come back and join us again some time.

Klaus Glatz: You're welcome. Whenever it's needed.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. You can find more content by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn and Twitter at TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS service management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.

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Sonya Lacore, Vice President of Inflight Operations at Southwest Airlines, talks with Sarah about the “secret sauce” of Southwest providing the customer experience it is known for as well as the “secret sauce” of her leadership style.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. You might recognize today's guest from the industry or from a recent podcast that we published, that was a replay of a panel discussion I moderated for the Service Council's Virtual Symposium. Our guest today is Sonya Lacore, Vice President of Inflight Operations at Southwest Airlines. Sonya, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast!

Sonya Lacore: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: I loved the panel discussion we did so much, and I am so excited to have you here today and to share some more of your insights with our audience. We are going to talk through a lot of different things today, including how Sonya and others at Southwest have come up with their secret sauce. So we're going to talk a bit about that. But before we do, I want to spend some time, Sonya, talking about you and your journey. Before we dig into the secret sauce part of today's conversation, can you tell our listeners, first, about your role at Southwest?

Sonya Lacore: You bet. I am, as you mentioned, VP of Inflight Operations at Southwest. That really means I have oversight and support, and just there to help, and encourage, and support our 17,000 flight attendants. As you might imagine, that is a busy role but certainly one that I love, because they make it easy.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. That's a lot of folks to be responsible for. No pressure, I'm sure.

Sonya Lacore: No, never.

Sarah Nicastro: So that's the current task. But you've had quite a journey in getting where you are, and even within your journey at Southwest and before that. Whatever you're willing to share, tell our listeners a bit about Sonya's history and the progression through and to where you are with Southwest today.

Sonya Lacore: I love that you asked me that Sarah, because it is an interesting story to me, for sure. I hope others can benefit from it. I started with Southwest almost 19 years ago. I found myself, after being in business with my former husband in the construction industry, of all things... We ended up parting ways, and that business ended. I needed to find something else. And because I had poured everything into that, I honestly didn't know where to turn.

Sonya Lacore: So, I found Southwest. The entry level position for me at the time was a flight attendant position. I was so excited that they were hiring. I loved, loved their values and their core tenants of the company. One of the things that I noticed right away is that their customer is secondary to their employee. The employee is the number one customer. They believe that if the flight attendants or the ground ops or whoever is well taken care of, they'll take care of the customer. I support that 100%, and I loved that.

Sonya Lacore: So I stayed in that role for, gosh, a little over three and a half years. I found myself really craving leadership. I knew I had leadership ability and I wanted to move into a different role. I have served in a variety of six or seven roles along the way to where I am today, and I love that Southwest supports that from the ground up. If you had told me I would be in this role today, I would never have believed it, but I'm certainly thankful for it.

Sarah Nicastro: When you just said, "If you had told me, I would be in this role. That I would be a vice president at Southwest, that I would be leading an operations of 17,000 folks." You had shared with me, that part of the reason you wouldn't believe that is because you were lacking in self-confidence when you started.

Sonya Lacore: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sarah Nicastro: Talk as much as you're willing, as you want, about why was that? And how did some of those early experiences at Southwest, and even before Southwest, start to kind of fuel that fire in you of becoming more confident and growing that desire for leadership?

Sonya Lacore: Sure. I was just a very, very shy child. So start with that. 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.

Sonya Lacore: 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.

Sonya Lacore: 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.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really cool. It's interesting. The title of this podcast is, The Secret Sauce of Southwest. Right? One of the things that I think makes you so passionate about the secret sauce of Southwest is how Southwest helped you find your own secret sauce. Do you know what I mean? I came from a small town and a very humble background. I have struggled with some of the same things, the imposter syndrome. It takes some time, I think, to really find your footing and to start to realize that it's not about being more or less valuable, or talented, or skilled than anyone else. It's just about owning what you bring to the table-

Sonya Lacore: Yes. That is so true. And being okay with that. Recognizing that what you have is a gift and you can use that to help others in some way. That is what I have tried to do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. We talked a little bit on our panel, with the other women, that everyone doesn't need to be good at the same things. In fact, that would be a big problem. Right? So I think it just takes some time to shift your focus from what your weaknesses are, to what your strengths are, and really embrace that. So that's really cool.

Sarah Nicastro:

I'm curious to ask, Sonya... So in your early days at Southwest as a flight attendant, what were some of the ways you saw this employee focus in practice? How did you recognize firsthand, that at Southwest, the employee is the number one customer?

Sonya Lacore: Well, I think they really demonstrate their investment in you as soon as you walk into the training. The culture there really is real. It's not a word. It is really real. They grieve with you. They rejoice with you. They celebrate with you. They bring the employee along every step of the journey. When they say they care about you, I believed it from the beginning, because they demonstrated that. Then now, as you become a leader, it is up to you, and it's your obligation to show that to others.

Sonya Lacore: And I guess, said differently, they take the approach, and I 100% support this. It is really hard to give of yourself, if someone is not giving to you. So said differently, you got to fill up the employee, so they can fill up the customer. Kind of, as we would say in the flight attendant world, put your oxygen mask on first, so you can help others. It's kind of, we put the oxygen mask on our people, so that they can be healthy, and whole, and well to serve the public. I believed it, and I see it every day today.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. This is a topic that we've discussed a few times. This idea of companies are very rightly, heavily focused on the customer experience, as well they should be. But sometimes that focus is at the detriment of focusing on the employee experience and not really focusing enough on that correlation of how you treat your employees and what that means in terms of their willingness, and ability, and inclination to deliver that customer experience. Right?

Sarah Nicastro: It makes a lot of sense to me, this focus. That the secret sauce is really prioritizing the employees, so that they aren't checking a box of, "Here's the customer experience I'm supposed to deliver." But rather, they're genuinely happy and satisfied, and therefore, naturally provide that. Right? On the Southwest flights that I've been on, and I can't wait to be on another one, you have that feeling that they actually want to be there.

Sarah Nicastro: They're not showing up to get their shift over with, and they're not annoyed with everyone that walks into the airplane. They're personable. They're smiling. They're making jokes, and it is a different experience. I think that that is a really important lesson for folks to think about. Yes. How you treat your customers is critical, but how are you treating the employees that you want to deliver that experience? So tell me a bit about the Southwest culture and some of the things that you think are critical in creating that secret sauce.

Sonya Lacore: First of all, I think it does begin with... We call our employees our number one customer. We have two terms, the internal customer, and the external customer. And so meeting their needs wherever they are. Everybody's so different. I think the other piece of that secret sauce is we let our people be genuinely authentic. When you mentioned being on one of our flights. You may have a flight attendant that is a really good vocalist and they can sing, or you may have someone who, their secret sauce is leaning into the customer and getting with a small child, getting on their knees in the aisle to talk to them, instead of standing above them.

Sonya Lacore: It doesn't matter what your special gift is. We ask our employees to bring that with them, and then we celebrate that with them. Just little things. Like if a customer videotapes something wonderful and they send it in, we broadcast that. And then before you know it, we're on national television with it. And when our employees see that, we celebrate that, then they want to do more of that. It's truly an investment in who they are.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I want to take a minute here to draw a couple of parallels for our audience. Right? So if you think about the audience of this podcast, there are brands like Southwest. And we recently interviewed Peloton, which is another more consumer-facing brand. Right? Kind of a different world of experience and customer demands, if you will. And actually had a pretty similar conversation with the gentleman from Peloton, talking about they have invested in field operations as a competitive differentiator.

Sarah Nicastro: So they've realized that rather than partnering with a third party to go in and deliver and set up their bikes, they could provide a more unique and white glove experience by having those people be a part of their business, and to do that with internal team members. But as they're hiring these folks, they're prioritizing their ability to be creative and authentic, just like you said. I think that's a really important point.

Sarah Nicastro: It's hard for folks to feel satisfied, if they feel that they are forced to be something they're not or forced to act in a certain way that isn't natural to them. Thinking about the modern field service experience, if you will, there is more of a need to think about how to be creative and how to make room for authenticity and things like that. Just more personality, giving people that opportunity to be themselves.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that a lot of our audience is more mechanical in nature. If you think about HVAC, or you think about a medical device, or you think about construction, or different manufacturing industries. It is a different type of feel. But a lot of the evolution that's happening in those different spaces is around customers wanting more of an experience. Right? And so I think there's a lot for those folks to learn from someone like you, and in a company like Southwest, about how to deliver a more personable, authentic, creative experience to the customer.

Sarah Nicastro: I was hoping you could talk a little bit about, what are some of the ways that you encourage your team members to kind of give that extra, and make it an experience, and what can that look like?

Sonya Lacore: First of all, I think we hire well. I'll just say that. When we onboard them, we have a true onboarding process. When they come onboard, they know, without a doubt, that hospitality is a non-negotiable. We tell them upfront, we deliver a service that customers are expecting. And our service is to get them from point A to B safely, on time, as best we can with on-time performance. But in between that is that little something extra, or we like to call it the essence. You've got the service that you deliver, and then there's the essence in how you deliver it.

Sonya Lacore: So I'll give you an example. I'll use the flight attendants, since I lead that group. You may have a mother that comes to the back of the aircraft and say, "Hey, do you have a microwave onboard? I need to warm up a water bottle for my baby." We don't have a microwave. It would be very easy for the flight attendants to say, "Sorry. We don't have one." But they've been taught to say, yes and/or no, "but here's what we can help you with." And so the, "No. We don't have a microwave, but what we do have is"... "I have hot water. So I can put it in a cup for you, and you can put your baby's bottle in there and warm it up." So they just are encouraged to always look for those extra things that they can do.

Sonya Lacore: Because our motto, too, is we want every customer that steps onboard to feel welcomed, cared for, and appreciated, like they are a guest in our home. So you take that same scenario, and it was a guest in your home, you're not going to say, "Nope, can't do that for you." You're going to try to find a way. That resonates with our employees. They also know at the end of the day, the customer is ultimately the one that signs their paycheck. So all of it comes together.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. I think that's a really good example. I want to talk a little bit about... From a company perspective or a leadership perspective, before we talk about you individually as a leader. If you just look at Southwest as a whole, what are any of the best practices or processes that are in place to kind of facilitate this type of employee focus, and to really stay engaged with employees, and to make sure that they are happy and engaged and therefore delivering that customer experience?

Sonya Lacore: Well, it is taught to us early on, that the voice of the customer is our internal customer, and so their voice matters. You have to be willing to give avenues for that and listen to them, so that you can make improvements along the way. So we found a variety of ways to do that. I'll just use myself as an example. When I was a brand new leader, my leader came to me and said, "Let me be clear. You will never be in trouble for going out and traveling and talking too much to the front line." I took that as a, "Wow, that is a real green light."

Sonya Lacore: What a beautiful way to spend your career, just going out and talking to your people all the time. It energizes you. Just as in any company, there are hard things that you have to get over. I'll use this environment we're in right now. When I can get out and talk to the frontline, that is my most motivated moment. That energizes me unlike anything else. I think we promote that from the very beginning and the feedback that we get.

Sonya Lacore: And we also do an employee survey. So you want to hear what they're having to say through the survey? And if the survey says, "Hey, we haven't seen or heard from our leaders enough," then you can just bet we're going to get out there and do more of it, because that's what the business is about. You know, Colleen Barrett, one of our beloved founders, said, "We're in the customer service industry. We just happen to fly airplanes." Well, we're in the internal customer service industry for our people.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I know you had said to me, in a previous conversation, that Southwest really fosters this feeling of family. So closer than just coworkers or colleagues, but that it's really a Southwest family. Some of the advice for what that takes can be really hard to articulate, because it is about the culture, and it is about those interactions and it is just about how you treat people and how you listen. I always find it interesting, whether it's when I'm traveling and I meet with different people in my travels, or whether it's having a service experience here at home or something.

Sarah Nicastro: Obviously, with what I do, I'm always interested. But I'll ask like, "So how do you like your job?" And you can always tell by the way someone responds, how they're treated. I have had people that are like, "I love it." You know, "I love it. This company is great." Or, "I love what I do." You also have people that will just rant or... You know? It is so important. I think it's just something that can't be overemphasized.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk about you, as a leader, for a few moments. I know that you said you believe strongly in leading from the heart. Tell our listeners what that means, and how it fits in with your career at Southwest.

Sonya Lacore: Every company has... Certainly, you have policies. And in an airline industry, you're highly regulated. So knowing that there's always an opportunity to meet someone where they are in their moment in life. I've often said, if I had one super power, it would be to be able to know the backstory of each individual I talk to and meet with, before I even see them. Because when you know what their path has been, whether it's been wonderful or hurtful. If you know that, then you know what they need in that moment.

Sonya Lacore: And so I really believe leading from the heart means putting yourself in that person's shoes, listening, and really hearing what they're trying to tell you. I think, too, that takes a lot of humility for you to just stop and listen and take other people's thoughts into account. For me, it just means believing in people and helping lift them up. I don't know. I think before they can start their day, if you can do any little thing from the heart and color outside the box a little bit, and extenuate circumstances individually, on an individual basis, and not treat everybody like they're a number, but they really are a person. I think that, that's leading from the heart.

Sonya Lacore: If you can even call their family member by name or, "Hey, how's your dog? The last time I talked to you"... Then people know you care about them. So that when you do really need to have a challenging conversation with them, they know you care and that you're not just following a policy. I just can't say enough about the heart will lead you to do the right thing. The [inaudible 00:25:16] will lead you to the right policy, but the heart will lead you to do the right thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And with 17,000 people, that's... It's not like a team of five. Right? I mean, a team of five, it would be really easy to remember everyone's family names and who has what pets. It is a really good point that in some ways, the bigger the team, the more important it is to look for those opportunities to let folks know that you are invested in them personally, and not just as 1 of 17,000. Right?

Sonya Lacore: Yeah. We have a process. With over 60,000 employees, we have something called our Internal Customer Care Team. And when anyone has any life event, they know that they should and could report that to their leader, or they can submit a form themself. But it might be that they had a baby. It might be that they had a wedding. It might be that they graduated with their Master's. Unfortunately, it might be a death. Whatever it may be, our leaders get to see that information about that person. That gives us a chance to celebrate, or grieve with them. I think that [inaudible 00:26:30] important moments that matter. But we can't know about it unless they tell us, and we do have a process that I love.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's really nice because it's hard in a big, big company. You're going to have your certain folks you interact with on a daily basis, that you get really close with. But you don't want to be disconnected from the "bigger" family. Right? I'm curious. If you don't mind me asking, Sonya, what has changed, or how does leading from the heart look different in a year like this year?

Sonya Lacore: Well, that's a great question. I think you really have to have some empathy and understand that everybody responds to this differently. We have people who are not afraid, and then we have people who generally are. We have people who have health conditions. And so just really, really understanding those differences and giving options without punitive action. Because we're an airline and we have to keep going. There are some people who say, "I can't do it." "Well, then let's discuss what that looks like for you, and what your options are." I think that's what we've done and it seems to have worked well for us.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. One of the things you said earlier, too, is the different methods that you have in place. So the customer care, but also as a leadership team, and just as a company to listen. When it comes to employee engagement and employee satisfaction, I think sometimes just listening is overlooked for how really big it is. You know? I think people appreciate the fact to weigh in and to feel heard, even if it doesn't always impact the outcome. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: That's just part of making them feel valued and important, rather than, just like you said, a number, or that their opinions don't matter as much as others. So, I like that. I like that idea of giving folks an opportunity to voice concerns and being empathetic and understanding while you're working through those challenges.

Sarah Nicastro: You had shared with me, Sonya, that one of the things you've loved about leading, and particularly leading other women, is paying it forward, in terms of helping women build some of the confidence that early on in your career, you were lacking in yourself. What has that looked like for you? And tell us about that being a passion of yours.

Sonya Lacore: Oh, my gosh. It's a passion, because I never want anyone to feel some of the way that I felt. I know that it can be avoided with some mentoring, and some coaching, and some encouragement. It really is a passion for me. My assistant, Devin, will tell you often, "You cannot mentor someone else. You don't have time on your calendar." But I want to, because I love it so much. I believe that it's just really important to see the strength in someone and pull that out and give them an opportunity and tell them. I really do believe in positive reinforcement, much more than I do critiquing. Someone did that for me.

Sonya Lacore: But the other thing, Sarah, that I can't emphasize enough is in today's society, there are a few types of approaches that you can take. You can say, "Hey, I'm great at this. Look at me, I'm going to stand up. I'm going to go for that job." I was not that person. I think when you have a low self-esteem, you're not going to be that person. So to have someone else tap you on the shoulder, and say, "Hey, I see something in you. Let's develop that. Let's really fine-tune that." And then, "I think this would be a great position for you."

Sonya Lacore: If someone had not done that for me, I would not be sitting here talking to you today. And so while many subscribe to, and I don't judge that and I don't disagree. Everybody's different, many subscribed to, "I got this, I'm going for it." You know, blows right through it and they get it, and that's great. But everyone doesn't work that way. And I think it’s important to point out that difference.

Sonya Lacore: So, yeah. So that's what I try to do. I almost try to find women that I can see a little bit of my younger self in, and I'm going to focus some energy on that. That's my way of giving back. That's my way of being energized, to be honest. And that keeps you really, really humble because there's so much of that out there.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I love that. And I think the point you made about positive reinforcement kind of ties nicely back to the secret sauce of Southwest. In the sense of it's another really quite simple thing that leaders can do to make people feel so much more appreciated, and seen, and acknowledged. I think that oftentimes in business, with the pace you're moving, or with the challenges you're facing, it's easy to miss those opportunities.

Sarah Nicastro: It's easy to just forget to take two minutes to type a message after you talk with someone, or to not point out something. Unfortunately, especially for folks that maybe lack a little bit of confidence. Like I know for myself, I'm very hard on myself. So I can get paid 20 compliments, but the one critique will outweigh those for me. Do you know what I mean?

Sonya Lacore: Oh, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So they're important, because if I only get the critique, I start to get really down on myself. You even sent me a note after the panel, and said, "I really enjoyed that. You did a great job." That means a lot to me. Just to have someone take a moment to acknowledge something like that. And so I can see how those types of interactions with your team... That stuff makes a huge difference in making people feel valued and feel important for who they are and what they do. You know?

Sarah Nicastro: That's why I say this topic's hard. You're not going to come in with a blueprint of, "Here's things you've never considered for how to make your employees engaged and happy." But the problem is people don't do the things that are simple, but not simple. Right? And so it's just another thing I think to point out. Of those moments of that positive reinforcement and building people up are so, so important. So.

Sonya Lacore: You hit on the key word. I think is feeling valued. Because it takes someone like myself with low self-esteem. Once I found what my strengths were and I really accepted those, then I began to use them, and then I could see the value. And then if someone does reinforce that for you, it makes you want to do it again, and do it again. Then your self-esteem starts to rebuild and you say, "Wow, I really do kind of have a calling," or whatever it may be. So it's like that hamster wheel. I love it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. And then you can put your energy into full steam ahead on that, instead of energy on all the things you're not good at. Right?

Sonya Lacore: Right. Right.

Sarah Nicastro: It gives you that motivation of, "Oh, my gosh. Someone values this, so I'm going to work harder. I'm going to do more of this. I'm going to be confident in who I am," and all of that. So I love it. Sonya, any, I guess, closing thoughts or final words of wisdom for our listeners?

Sonya Lacore: I think we've covered it really well. I would just say, know what your strengths are, identify those, be really comfortable with them. And then when you continue to use them, you'll be able to say," You know what? That stuff I'm not good at, I'll still work on it. But it doesn't matter so much, because I've got this whole little arsenal of tools over here I'll use, and these are working just fine."

Sonya Lacore: So I don't mean to imply you don't ever need to develop, continue developing. But I would say never beat yourself up over the things you can't do, and focus on the things you can.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Well, Sonya, thank you so much for being here and for sharing some of your personal journey with us, as well as some of what Southwest is up to. I appreciate it, and it's been a pleasure.

Sonya Lacore: It's been a joy with you, too. So nice. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. You can find more content by visiting@futureof fieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter at The Future of FS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Women in Service: Leading Through Change

October 7, 2020 | 33 Mins Read

Women in Service: Leading Through Change

Sarah shares a panel discussion from the Service Council Virtual Symposium with Linda Tucci of Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, Dr. Marlene Kolodziej of RICOH USA, Sophia Williams of NCR, Sonya Lacore of Southwest Airlines, and Cindy Etherington of Dell about how they are leading through this time of immense change.

Sarah Nicastro: Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for this session, Women in Service: Leading the Industry Through Change. My name is Sarah Nicastro. I am field service evangelist and creator of the future of field service. I'm so excited to be here today. I will be moderating the session with this wonderful panel and I'm very excited for our conversation. I am going to ask each of our panelists to introduce themselves, to talk just briefly about the organizations that they're with and what their roles are. Sonya, do you mind starting?

Sonya Lacore: I'm happy to. Hello everybody. It's wonderful to be here today. I'm Sonya Lacore, I work for Southwest Airlines. I'm starting my 19th year there. I started as vice president of our in flight operations which basically means I support and am an advocate for our almost 17,000 flight attendants. Started my career as a flight attendant and served in a variety of roles and now I get to have the privilege of leading them. So happy to be with all of you today and can't wait to hear from the other ladies.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sonya. Linda, can you go next?

Linda Tucci: Sure thing. I'm Linda Tucci. I've been at Ortho Clinical Diagnostics as the global director for our technical solutions center for the past five years. Our company manufactures product for blood testing and that includes both diagnostic analysis and also blood transfusion compatibility. My team provides technical remote support for our customers and escalation support to field personnel. Our customers are primarily medial technologists the ones that my team supports. Those working in hospital or reference laboratories and they run the analyzers that produce the results and it's such a critical role in healthcare. I'm really proud that I've served as a medical technologist. For the past 20 years I've held various roles in service management in the medical device sector and I'm really happy to be part of this panel today.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Thank you Linda. Sophia, can you go next please?

Sophia Williams: Sure. I'm Sophia Williams and I run the telecom and technology division of NCOR and basically that division is support service provider, clients we're the world's largest service provider in tech OEM's and delivering their services solutions on behalf of their enterprise customers. I've been in services for a number of years. I started out in sales and then I managed sales organization and then I had a general manager role and I fell in love with services because I think services is such a key part of our ability to ensure that we keep our customers very happy and we therefore can drive incremental revenue. That's what I do as part of NCOR corporation.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sophia and I agree. Service is where it's at. Cindy?

Cindy Etherington: Thanks. Hey everybody, Cindy Etherington. I'm with Dell Technologies. I've been here for about nine years and I lead our education services business. We're a business unit within Dell Technologies Services and we're responsible for three things. We really provide learning solutions to our customers to make sure they get the best return on their Dell Technologies investments. We also support our partners and enable them so that they represent Dell Technologies to the best of their ability in the market and then thirdly we support all of our internal team members, 140,000 or so of them for all of the technical training on our products on our portfolio. We also do some cross company learning platforms for efficiencies and effectiveness. It makes sense for the company to have one of something versus numerous of them so our learning management system and our learning records tour and our learning experience platform we manage that for Dell Technologies. Spent my entire career in the technologies sector, mostly in services and I'm passionate about enabling the next generation of leaders, in particular supporting young professionals and diverse professionals and also women in technology.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. Okay, and Marlene.

Marlene Kolodziej: Hi. Thank you it's a pleasure to be here. I'm the vice president of centralized services for Ricoh USA and my role is providing customer support for all of Ricoh hardware and software services and products as well as providing IT support both white label and external support and certainly having spent more than 30 years now I'm giving my age away but more than 30 years in IT I'm now on the business side but still providing services and support which I find is just so critical especially as in this day and age helping our customers find the most success based on where they're at in their environment today and in their situation especially as the world is changing so rapidly.

Sarah Nicastro: Well thank you all so much for doing the introductions. I like to have panelists introduce themselves because that gets me off the hook and being fearful of mispronouncing everyone's names. Thank you and I at Future of Field Service we've had a Women in Service series for the last couple of years where we've really taken a deep dive in article form and podcast form into women's journeys and I think that when I started covering this space 13, 14 years ago I was oftentimes the only female in a room and sometimes that is still the case although it's certainly improving. I think until that has completely evolved it is important to showcase these types of conversations and I'm very thankful to the service council for having us all here today to do this.

Sarah Nicastro: I have prepared what I think are some good questions for these ladies and we're going to walk through those but certainly feel free to submit your own questions as well. I will be keeping an eye on the Q and A chat and if we have some good questions come in I will incorporate them into our conversation today. Without further ado, let's get started. I'm going to ask each of you to answer this first question. The first question is really talking about if you think of your journey as a female leader, what would you say the biggest challenges and the biggest advantages have been for you? Cindy, can you start?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, it's actual thought provoking question Sarah and I think there's many challenges and many advantages of being a woman as well as there's advantages and challenges for lots of differentiation whether it be gender or ethnicity, race, background, religion, whatever that might be. The first thing that comes to my mind interestingly enough you just referenced and that is 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.

Cindy Etherington: That's the first thing that comes to mind for me. I've tried to focus in my career on my strengths, many of which I think are strengths because I am a woman. Few that come to mind, empathy and being able to put yourself in the shoes of your customers or your partners or your team members. Being realistically optimistic. I think others follow leaders who are optimistic about what the future holds and then I'd say relationship building which is I think a strength of many women, not that men are not but definitely a woman's strength for fostering teamwork and collaboration. Taking advantage of being a woman is one thing and then figuring out what are the strengths that I bring to the table as a woman and really leveraging them was what I chose and still do choose to focus on.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah thank you Cindy. One of the things I wanted to comment on that you said is oftentimes the strength and the weakness are sort of different sides of the same coin, right? Being the only woman in the room is a challenge but it can also be an opportunity. I think the struggle there is building the confidence or finding the confidence to leverage that platform. That's something I know early in my career I struggled with. I was intimidated to be the only woman in the room so I would stay quiet instead of speaking up and it took me some years to kind of flex those muscles to be able to feel confident in my own voice. I think that that's a struggle that is shared I'm sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so let's keep going with this same question. Challenges, advantages. Sophia, can you go next?

Sophia Williams: Yeah, I will and I'll try to hit something maybe a little different than other folks other than I will say that clearly when I started years ago I was definitely the only female in the room and frankly in some parts the globe, we run a global business, I'm still often the only female in the room. Early on I think there probably were some challenges and I think they quickly were overcome and I had to kind of think back when it was a thought provoking question, I had to think back to those days but I am a female leader that has attributes that at least back when I first started working and had leadership roles were more attributed to male attributes if you will. Very assertive, very action oriented, very if it's good for the business, I'm going to go for it without apology. Forceful, et cetera.

Sophia Williams: I think that was basically... It's kind of like a whirlwind maybe to some folks and was kind of unanticipated. I think some of the challenge I had there was initially not being taken as seriously just because of my gender and the fact that I may have been the only woman in the room. It became an advantage pretty quickly because I was able to be the curve ball. I had a boss once that said, "Damn, you're a curve ball. You're the curve ball," not expecting for someone to be as strong. I think at the end of the day I was able to navigate and execute turbulent waters as a result of that with great success. I would say that very quickly in terms of developing your brand, I think that the brand of an individual is very important regardless of their gender. In this case, the question is about gender.

Sophia Williams: My brand was one that was very focused on getting it done, getting the job done, a say do ratio of 100%. If I say that I'm going to do it we will deliver it 100% of the time. Those kind of brand attributes very quickly overshadowed my gender. It's been really years and years since I've felt disadvantaged in any way by being a woman. I think because in large part the brand that one creates is more valued than necessarily the gender of that person. Overall, I would say there's still far too few women in technology services and in technology overall and I love to mentor women and I love to spend time with young college students in the STEM environment to be able to encourage their activities and so forth. Honestly I would say that it's been a long time since it's been a disadvantage and nor has it been an advantage in a long time. In my mind you bring your brand and what you do to the table and regardless of your gender or anything else about you if that brand is something people can count on consistently whatever it happens to be, then the rest is just about performance.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you Sophia. Love those points. Linda, can you go next?

Linda Tucci: I would say for me the main advantage... I've been really lucky in my career to be surrounded by people that were very supportive of women in leadership roles and also had great mentors that were willing to spend time, generous with their time with me and I would even say more importantly willing to tell me the truth even when I didn't want to hear it in a way that I could hear it. I was really lucky in that regard. Maybe to take a different spin on challenge, I would actually say that my main challenge for me is that I got in my own way especially early on in my career when I first became a manager. You could've written a book about me, The Five Dysfunctions of Linda. Do you know what I mean? I did everything wrong or at least I felt that way trying to adapt other styles rather than stopping and uncovering my own. Maybe taking myself too seriously.

Linda Tucci: It took me a while to realize the importance of being authentic. To uncover my own style, to build on it and to really focus on my strengths as said before and I'm a big advocate to really build on your strengths, leverage and develop those skills that come innate or you can grow into and so I would just add those key points to the conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: Wonderful. Sonya?

Sonya Lacore: I love what some of the other ladies have said. One of the things that I'm a big fan of is establishing your personal plan and what that looks like. For me, especially in the customer service industry that translates into kindness and compassion and empathy and I think sometimes the challenge can be that politeness can be mistaken for weakness. I think for me although it hasn't really been a challenge because I agree with Linda if you leverage your strengths you know that you have them and then you just share those.

Sonya Lacore: I happened to serve in an operational group where I am the only female out of 22 people. I go into that meeting every Monday and I kind of play this little game with myself of okay, take gender out of it. Would I still say or do what I'm about to do and the answer is always yes I am because I'm going to follow my heart and I'm going to back it up with facts, data of course but there's people who know me know that I also am a really big fan of I don't think work works without a little bit of play. I like to be the one to go in and incorporate, "Hey, take the first five minutes. How was your weekend? Tell me a little bit about you on a personal level," and I think when you do that just kind of puts everybody on the same playing field. Everybody's getting a little bit more relaxed. Then I think you can really start debating and be productive.

Sonya Lacore: I just think having a softer approach sometimes is really an advantage and it allows you to lead from the heart and just as Linda said, just be you.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. You know what I think is interesting? I saw Marlene just dropped off and hopefully she'll come right back on but I'm noticing the differences between Sophia's response and Sonya's response and I love it, right? It's a really good illustration of number one there's no right way to lead and number two, there no right way to be a woman or a females or there's no necessarily hard and fast rules of attributes. For me personally I identified Sophia with what you said a lot. Some of those same characteristics you mentioned in terms of your assertiveness and in certain professional situations that where I've been surrounded by a lot of folks that maybe didn't appreciate those as female characteristics or something that would've been delivered in this same way by a male counterpart was just perceived differently because it was coming from me as a female, that's very frustrating.

Sarah Nicastro: Again, it takes time and confidence to, when you're questioned feel comfortable defending yourself and defending your position instead of just shrinking down and saying less as a result of that. I think I used to, Sonya to your point kind of feel like I workshop doing something wrong by not being softer or some of the characteristics that you love about yourself and it took me some time to just feel comfortable in I am who I am, right? Everyone has different strengths and it's up to us to not waste time wanting to be different but to be the best us we can be. Marlene, can you talk a little bit about your own challenges and advantages?

Marlene Kolodziej: Thank you for asking. I think I echo a lot of what all of these strong women were talking about where there's a disconnect between what's on the outside in a sense to perhaps the strength and the persona that's coming through on the inside. We have certain... We're assigned certain behaviors in a sense as a woman there's this empathetic, softer sort of expectation of behavior. For me personally I was raised as a tomboy and I grew up in the technology industry so usually the only female and surrounded by men and sort of in the early '80s and PC's and laptops and desktops and data center and network so you sort of were the one that ran the wire frame and constructed the data centers and it was very masculine environment but when you think about being a female there's a certain expectation of how you're behaving versus how you want to behave or how you show your strength.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think that was the battle is, and even today there's a bit of that disconnect between what's seen on the outside versus truly what's on the inside. Certainly all of us have been very successful in our roles and what we do and there's been a lot of bruises along the way but I think... This is on my LinkedIn if any of read the story I talk about how I had an amazing supportive male boss who at the time when there was a disconnect between what I was projecting versus being female this person had the wherewithal to ask, "Marlene, if you were a man would you have these same issues?" The answer was no. That was an enlightening learning experience for me to realize that I also had to adapt a little bit as well as hoping others grow to understand that sometimes the inside and the outside might be disconnected based on who you are and how you were raised and your perception of traditional male or traditional female roles.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Marlene, I think we need to check your connection. I caught what you said but it is... You are very choppy. I don't know if you want to maybe disconnect and reconnect once more and hopefully that would help. You were good in the beginning and then when you dropped off and joined back in. Sophia coming back to what you had said about your leadership style. You did describe your leadership style already. What I want to ask you instead of describing it is how would you say it has evolved or refined throughout your career?

Sophia Williams: Well, I think the original question was really more about the attributes of myself as a person and particularly in an environment but as I've led teams I guess my leadership style certainly has evolved over time, no question. I would say if I had to describe it in one word and I actually went back because we do a lot of... Especially since COVID we've had some really fun exercises as a team that we've done where we'll have my HR VP and everybody submits something they're very proud about in dealing with everybody on the team, my leadership team and so forth so I've gone back and looked at all those and I would say the one word if I had to describe it in one word would be deeply engaged. I'm talking about me with my team. That was kind of how I'm responding to this question.

Sophia Williams: I guess that's true really within the corporation as well as deeply engaged but when I say that, what does that mean? Certainly it's changed over time. I am so transparent as a leader and again I am just as transparent as the day is long because I find that decisions made by the leadership team are much better decisions than if I make them on my own. I'm sure the earlier in my career I probably didn't feel that way. I probably felt, "I'm the leader, I've got to take control, I've got to make these decisions." Everything I do is very inclusive. Everybody has a vote. We debate important issues. We all align before that we lead as well and I try to listen and I probably wasn't as good of a listener earlier in my career.

Sophia Williams: I try to listen very carefully to the different points of view because you know what? 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. Then I would say the culture I've got, people... I'm very proud of this culture and it's not the culture that I probably had early on but it's a highly accountable, high performing culture, no question about it. It's also deeply familial. Kind of like steeped in friendship not just accountability but in friendship.

Sophia Williams: We really take care of each other in my organization and on my team. We hold each other accountable so it doesn't mean... you know when you said the difference between myself and Sonya it's... I try to create a leadership style that really has a little bit of both. Deep accountability, high performance culture but my gosh it's very familial. Spending time with people, how are their families, knowing what their kids are doing and really spending time to understand what their needs are. I would say in the midst of COVID you have to have different listening because some people... They have a certain persona, their brand if you will and you start to see challenges. I've had a couple people in my leadership team that I've highly encouraged, "Take a few days off. I don't want to hear from you for a couple of days. Go do something. I know you can't go anywhere necessarily but go do something just whatever you want to do."

Sophia Williams: Really listening, highly engaged and the last thing I would say that's definitely something I have learned over time is a willingness to be vulnerable. I think that vulnerability is such a great leadership trait because that makes you very engaged. I don't have the answers for everything and anyone that thinks they do they're definitely wrong, right? I have a point of view and it's a point of view and my experience oft times makes that point of view have some validity to it, right? Sometimes I just am stumped with a situation and I'll throw it open to the team. "Guys, I'm not sure what to do here. I've got a couple ideas," but that's being vulnerable and that's okay. I would say deeply engaged is my leadership style and definitely it has changed over time.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. I reserve the right to get smarter. I really really like that. I also think when you were talking about the level of engagement and kind of the familial feel you have with your team, I was kind of thinking about my own team and the folks that I work with day to day and when you have that bond, it's not just accountability. It's way more than that because it's not about being accountable for getting your job done. You genuinely care about the people you're working with and the mission you're working towards and the role that each of you play in that so I really like that.

Cindy Etherington: Sophia, I think that's a great comment about you reserve the right to get smarter. I love that comment. I had a mentor early in my career and he probably gave me the best advice I've ever received and it was really silly at the time and I wasn't sure exactly what he meant. He had to explain it to me a little bit more but it was very simply, "Be a sponge." He said, "Surround yourself with great people and continuously learn from them."

Sophia Williams: Agreed, agreed.

Cindy Etherington: Continuous learning is a journey and it's fun and what keep things fresh and exciting and new so I love your perspective there.

Sophia Williams: I appreciate that and I'll tell you, the interesting thing is if you ask all of my leadership team in unison they will answer this question the same way. What does Sophia says sets you free? The answer is talent. Talent sets you free. Bring in the right people and then take care of them and create that bond but we really do care for each other and be sponge and believe me I do reserve the right to get smarter every single day.

Sarah Nicastro: That's awesome. Okay, I want to shift gears a little bit. COVID has been brought up a couple times in our conversation and it's obviously been a huge part of our lives this year and continues to be. It's not just that situation though. There's a lot of change happening now. There's a lot of different areas of change in our world today and we are all navigating it personally but I'm interested in talking about how you're navigating it with your teams and your leadership. With all of the change that is happening in our world, what is your best thoughts, advice, input on how you lead through change? Marlene, let's try you out and see how this audio's sounding.

Marlene Kolodziej: When you think about navigating through COVID and through a pandemic, I recently had put together a presentation around business continuity and disaster recovery and I tell everyone, you need to write these type of models as if you don't exist. You're dead in a sense and I don't like to quite say that but it really is true that you should be prepared for fire or flood and never, ever imagine that I'd have to prepare for a pandemic. I think for us it's around making sure that the change has been not only shifting from an office to remote work force but really helping many of our peers and our staff adapt to this change. I think as women in particular I think a lot of the caregiving role for children and for school and for the house fall on their shoulders as well. Not to say that there's not many men who are equal contributors or sole contributors in this case but I find for much of my staff the burden of home schooling and trying to do their job and trying to keep the house running does fall on their shoulders.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think for all of us it's been really around being creative in terms of your solutions to help all of your staff and all of your workers be successful in this changing environment, in this unsure state to continue to deliver business and help our customers be successful.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Good points. Anybody want to volunteer to go next?

Linda Tucci: Yeah, actually I would. It's interesting when I hear that question. I put it in the context of my experience and earlier this year my mom passed away at the age of 96. It was right before COVID blew up and so coming back to work... I paused, I went to be with my mom, she passed away, I came back and the world changed. I was in such a fragile state and I felt it really important just to share my experience with my team openly and to tap onto that importance of vulnerability and sharing how I was struggling and how I was responding to that inclusive to taking advantage of our great employee assistance program here at Ortho. Having the conversations that needed to take place, telling my boss, "You know something? I need compassion right now. I really need support right now," and that really made me say am I demonstrating that compassion to others? Everybody has their story. 2020, it isn't for wimps. Everything is being thrown at us and I encouraged my entire team... I did a series of town halls in the July time frame that if they're struggling to find somebody to talk to.

Linda Tucci: It's so often in service organizations no matter gender that we're always focused outwardly and I would say that the topic of self compassion, we talked about it openly and I used my experience so that maybe there could also have a comfort level to start that dialogue. I would also say practically and in my team, my management team historically is on site, right? While we do have remote workers historically the managers are used to being on site seeing their folks and practically we did some modules for our management team around the shift to managing virtually.

Linda Tucci: I would also say with our team we spoke very openly because to a point made earlier there's so much change happening within our own organization. What was happening with the projects? What could we share? We talked openly about the degree of change on top of everything happening in the world with the degree of change at work, to be as transparent as possible and to open up different mechanisms of getting bi-directional dialogue taking place. It's really that dialogue in communication. It's not only key, it's critical, it's crucial. It's more important than ever and I would say for me personally I'm really taking more time for me. More planning and thinking time and really focusing on the present. My personal experience has been it's so easy to get overwhelmed with everything that's happening. Focus on what's most important in the moment, remember that I matter and that in order to do my best that I have to really take care of myself and encourage that within my team as well.

Sarah Nicastro: I think it's such an important example to set for your team. I was thinking particularly if you've transitioned from in person work to remote work this year. It's very easy for people to start feeling isolated and if you're struggling with something work related, perhaps it feels easy to speak up and say, "Hey, I really need help with this but it's so easy for some of those personal struggles to be invisible to the people you work with and I think that your speaking up and sharing that probably made your team feel so empowered to come to you if they needed that type of support from you. I just think that's a really really important point and thank you for sharing that story.

Sonya Lacore: Sarah, I'll go next if you don't mind. I love the ladies talking about vulnerability and transparency. I'm such a fan of transparency and through this I would say that agility has also been my keyword probably for the year because change is coming so fast and we make our decisions based on the information we have right at hand in front of us today and tomorrow that changes. I'll just be transparent and say I was experiencing decision fatigue not because of making too many decisions but because the decisions I was making I second guessed them the next day because new information came.

Sonya Lacore: Even to the point where I was passionate about change that we made, communicated it one day to 17,000 people and then the very next day new information came and I had to go back and say, "I know I said that was really important yesterday and today guess what? We're going to pivot and that taught me to just ask for grace and give myself grace because I think as women we have a tendency to beat ourselves up over the past decisions instead of just saying, "Pivot, move on and let's go from here." I think that's what helped me. I think on a more professional level I'm energized when I think about helping others realize the value of what they bring. I don't want to minimize certainly the pandemic but I'm trying to find ways to look for joy and one of the ways to find that joy, it might be for some people it might be that you find it in your family. It might be that you find it in your job.

Sonya Lacore: I think what's really interesting is some people just need to know that the value they bring, our job is to help them see that value and encourage them because they're panicked enough about job security, having to take care of homeschooling or whatever it may be, women or men I think it's just really key. I do think that sometimes happiness can hide itself in life's smallest details and just looking for those moments of happiness is what I think is helping me get my team through it.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good points. Cindy or Sophia?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, I think I love the topic of change because I think change is ever present and change 99.9% of the time I like to think leads to opportunity. As a leader, what I do relative to helping my team through changes, I've kind of established a culture of change in the organization and make sure that everybody understands that everything is changing at a faster pace than ever before especially the technology industry as a matter of fact so we're going to make the most of it. We dwell on the opportunities that the change creates. I also think it's important that we as leaders recognize the fact that people go through change at a different pace and that's their prerogative. We can't make them go faster and understand and turn that back on but we can help them with understanding the reason for the change, the outcome of the change and help them balance the time they need to get through the process and acceptance of the change and move forward with the need that we have as leaders to actually get the change done. I think that balance falls on us an awful lot as leaders. I think the one thing that it takes to make that happen is communicate, communicate, communicate.

Cindy Etherington: I think Sonya just mentioned it. Before, during, after. If you have to re-pivot to Sonya's point go re-pivot fast. Be open, be transparent, explain what happened and again get back on that change train and help people along.

Sophia Williams: I think I'm the last one on this question but I think everything everyone said has just been amazing. I'm learning from this and I love the whole conversation about finding your joy and I couldn't agree more Cindy that change is constant and certainly not to minimize COVID but in my business... I have a sales organization, I have a product development organization, a services delivery organization, the whole general management role and so particularly right off the bat from the sales teams, there's a lot of concern certainly about job security overall but also about just the fact are customers going to be buying things right now and all that. To your point, I am one of those folks, I guess the eternal optimist but every time there's a challenge, a really big challenge there's always opportunity. Always opportunity. What is that? Let's figure that out together.

Sophia Williams: I'm in the networking world. Well, networks have become more important. Yes, people are sweating their assets longer but let's come up with new solutions. Let's come up with new things to help our customers weather the storm better and as a result we feel better about ourselves and as a result we're seeing there is opportunity because at some point this will be behind us, hopefully sooner rather than later. I really wanted to reemphasize I thought it was a brilliant point you made. I would say that I'm just in touch with my LT for sure, my leadership team for sure very frequently. We've always had one on one's but I actually reach out to them just for a chat like independent of business 101's. How are you doing? How's the family? It's like those concerns that are invisible I think someone had said earlier about the invisibility.

Sophia Williams: Some things you can see, some things you can't see and having a listening and knowing your team well enough and knowing when you need to encourage them to take a little time off or you need to have a different levels of conversation, et cetera. Yeah, I think that also doing what I've never done before. I've never exercised before in my life, I never have. I should. I'm terrible to admit that but I now get up at... Because we had kind of a challenge on our team. One of the things we did to kind of keep things fun. I get up at 4:30 every morning I do my deep exercise because I have to get back home and do my video because I do think video's important on every call. I really believe that. I get my clothes on, I get my suit on, I put my makeup on, roll my hair which is a difficult thing to do after one has been exercising for an hour, hour and half but I do that and I shared that with the team so that's another vulnerability. This is something I've never done before. I'm doing it and encourage you guys to do it.

Sophia Williams: One of my guys in London, I told him about my morning walks and I was like, "Why don't you do that?" He was like, "Well I can't do it in the morning." I said book on from 11:30 to 1:00 and you just go out and walk. Just go out and walk in the middle of the day, take it off your calendar. You're busy, you're working 9, 10 hours a day but find time for you. I think we're just making sure we're very much with not only ourselves and what we need but also in touch with our teams. That also I think then encourages them to be in touch with their teams and so on and so forth because we truly are all in this together. I know it's an overused phrase but we are.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, I agree. Okay so technically we're done in three minutes. That is clearly not happening. Hopefully you all can hang on with me for just a bit. I do want to try and work through the rest of our questions. We'll do a little bit of rapid fire but I think that they're all fantastic and I want to spend a little bit extra time with you all. Cindy, for you what do you think of first if I ask you what is your superpower?

Cindy Etherington: Yeah, it's empowerment. I think that the most important thing that we do as leaders is empower others and help them get a seat at the table, help them have confidence, sharing their point of view and really helping them perform and contribute. Get much more from a whole bunch of people than I could ever get from myself of any one of us could ever get from ourselves as a leader. So empowerment.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that. That seems to be a recurring theme here as well. Sophia you spoke about maybe an early inclination before you mature and just learn to want to be the leader and you learn that actually hey, if we have a strong team we're far stronger as a team than any one of us individually. I like that a lot. Marlene, can you share an example with us of when you feel that you showed some strong courage in your career?

Marlene Kolodziej: Yeah, that's an interesting question and I think that it's sort of along the theme of empowerment where the strong courage would be around helping or trusting other individuals to do what they need to do in terms of putting them in new positions. Hiring them without maybe them having all the experience that they need. Really putting your faith in some of the... Especially the women that you might bring on to help groom them and grow them and help them just be successful in their careers knowing that they don't have everything that you need but you have enough faith to trust that you're going to put your reputation and you're going to invest in those individuals to ensure that they're successful not knowing if they really will be.

Marlene Kolodziej: I think it's a little bit of a leap of faith, it's a little bit of empowerment, it's a little bit of a challenge to really put yourself out there to help other people be successful especially when you don't know how it's going to work out and I think that's... I'm sure many of us have done that over and over and don't realize maybe how much we do it and how much faith it sometimes takes even when you cross all your T's and dot your I's to make sure that you're helping people be successful and to move forward in their own careers and to attain the levels that they want to attain in their work world to help build successful people.

Sarah Nicastro: I like that. I was thinking as you were answering Marlene, the question was phrased in a way of what was a big moment of courage? I would assume we've all experienced moments where we really took a leap. We really put ourselves out there or we really had to be brave to do X but I think it's also important to think about courage doesn't always have to be big. Courage is also the daily, right? I spoke earlier about there were a lot of times very early in my career where it took a lot of courage just for me to speak up in the next meeting after someone was dismissive of me. Instead of shrinking away it took real courage to keep standing up or Linda you spoke about your show of vulnerability and your openness. That is courage. I think it's also just important to reflect on it. It doesn't have to be this big event. It's choices every day to be vulnerable, to continue to learn and all of that stuff.

Marlene Kolodziej: Thank you for that Sarah and I think just to close that conversation a little bit, we all have stories about like you just said where we had this big event but I think we find courage every single day in everything that we do. I don't want to miss that message. I just gave one example and especially when you think about the pandemic just how much we have to find in ourselves every day to be courageous and to be strong and to do the right thing over and over and over again. That to me was about people development but it's the same for any other story that I'm sure all of us can talk about. The courage that it takes every day to just keep doing the right thing.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, for sure. Linda, can you share with us a book or a person or a resource that has had a significant impact on you and your journey?

Linda Tucci: There's two people that I'd like to touch upon that have definitely left their mark on my career and my life I would say. Early in my career as I was starting out I was a medical technologist in a hospital lab in New York City and the head of the department there, an esteemed clinical microbiologist, one day sat me down in her office. She pointed her finger at me and she said, "I am going to mentor you." I didn't even know what that meant nor did I know the impact that that moment would have on my career moving. She I would say opened the door to potential which led to my master's degree and opportunities in my career and such a gift so early on in my career to have someone proactively grab me and mentor me and that's made me see both the value and the importance of mentorship.

Linda Tucci: Then later in my career as I become a director I had the good fortune of working with an executive coach that provides coaching, organizational design and development and for me that work was transformational. Really reached and deep and introspective and helping me see the... Or understand systems thinking and how the organization is interconnected and the value of constructive dialogue and conversation at work. Phyllis opened the door to help me see and believe in my potential while my work with Maria was more of polishing me off into the leader that I would become or hoped to be experienced as and I would say also for me made me want to mentor others and pass that on and I've tried to do that throughout my career. My experiences with them and with others really left an imprint that was really a gift in my life.

Sarah Nicastro: That's amazing and I love that she took that initiative with you. It wasn't something you asked for. Sonya can you share with us what do you do to take time for yourself? To balance, to reenergize so that you can give yourself to your team?

Sonya Lacore: So much of it really does come back to what Linda was talking about. I find great satisfaction in helping others realize the value of who they are and what they bring and I grew up with very low self esteem for a variety of reasons and it took me years to overcome that but one of the things that I have come to know is that I am worthy and if there's a message that I want others to hear is you are worthy and when you give yourself back to helping others whether it's mentoring or just helping people see the good in themselves when they can't even see it themselves then that will fill me up and re-center me and rebalance me and I just... That's how I re-center is giving back. You always feel better when you're not focusing on yourself, right? There's a message I want all the women to hear today. It is you are worthy to do whatever it is that you set out to do. Believe it and you do you.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. I love that. All right ladies. I know we are already over on time so as much as I would like to keep talking with you all I don't want to go too crazy here but thank you so, so much to each of you for joining in today. I really really appreciate it.

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Katie Hunt, Service Operations Leader at APi Group, shares with Sarah insights gleaned and lessons learned during the company’s recent field service software upgrade.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking to you about seven keys to software upgrade success. If you have ever been in the midst of a software upgrade project, you know that it is no easy feat, and there are plenty of lessons to be learned along the way.

I'm excited to welcome today Katie Hunt, service operations leader at APi Group. Katie, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Katie Hunt: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: So before we dig into these seven keys to success, which I'm excited to share, tell us a little bit about APi Group and your role. And I know that this is a topic that is very fresh for you because you had just come off of a major project. So fill us in.

Katie Hunt: Yes. So I'll start with APi Group. APi Group is a family of companies that provides business solutions for safety, specialty, and industrial services. We have over 15,000 employees and are in 200 locations in the US, Canada, the UK. And what's really unique is that our purpose is building great leaders, which for a construction company is sometimes looked on as unique. And so while we focus on that project delivery and great customer service, we also want to grow our individuals, grow our teams ,and make sure we can share knowledge, best practices, and just push each other to the next level.

Katie Hunt: So myself, I joined APi Group after going through the leader development program. I joined after I was in the military, and that was just a very unique opportunity to learn the industry and kind of develop some skills there. And I had the opportunity to join an operating company and then lead this project, which eventually led to leading the full-time service operations team at APi group.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. So you are fresh, very fresh off of a major upgrade of your Alliance service software platform. So, I've talked with you a few times along the way, and I think it's an excellent opportunity to share these seven keys or seven lessons today because it did just happen. So inevitably, you go through a big project like this, and you learn some lessons along the way, but time just kind of washes them away and kind of just makes them not so clear in your mind. So I'm excited to talk about seven aspects that you have uncovered that you feel are particularly critical to having a smooth upgrade and to having a successful project.

Sarah Nicastro: So the first key or the first tip is to be clear on your why. So explain what this means and why it is so important.

Katie Hunt: So ultimately, I would say that the why equates to the vision of a project. Identifying the why is so important because it not only lets stakeholders know why we're doing this project, but then it also serves as a benchmark for project efforts. So you can avoid that scope creep, and you can make sure you're staying on task. So once you create that vision, like we did, of standardizing processes, moving to a hosted environment for those benefits, or just setting the groundwork so that you can truly scale your business, you can then communicate effectively throughout the organization and really just maintain that focus and discipline and ultimately compare all of those decisions back to that strategic vision and keep the project on track.

Katie Hunt: I also wanted to call out, it's so important to know that the whys might be different for different cohort groups. We have a very large organization, and when I'm communicating, and my teams communicating to executives, it's a different message sometimes than the end user or the branch level professionals, which is fine. But ultimately, they all need to tie back to that strategic vision, so that they're all in alignment.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. So, tell us a bit about APi Group's whys with the recent upgrade. So what were the major strategic drivers that kind of led you through this project?

Katie Hunt: Sure. So APi Group was recently acquired and by J2, and we've now become a public company, in that one of the main driving factors for that purchase, and it's been mentioned by their leadership, is just our ability to perform a service and inspection operations because it's that reoccurring revenue, as we all know through hard times lately. And it's just very important. And so they are really pushing us to grow and scale that side of our business. And as such, we have over 20 companies that conduct service work, along with all the subsidiary companies. And a key factor of that is standardizing processes. So getting everyone on the same system, that was one of our key factors.

Katie Hunt: And another one was simply starting this movement to a hosted environment, to have that higher-level support, greater performance and stability, and really just setting the stage to grow the business and move to that next level.

Sarah Nicastro: Perfect. Okay. So you have these pillars that are leading you through the project, and you need to, as you said, have these in place, so that as things ramp up, as things get stressful, as things get hectic, as opportunities arise to kind of go off path, you can stay focused on what it is that you have set out to achieve. So that's the first key.

Sarah Nicastro: The second is defining the team that will be responsible for leading the project. So tell us what you learned here, in terms of this point.

Katie Hunt: Right. So this project was unique, in that we really relied on the operating companies to provide insight and guidance and decision making across the board. We had the core team, which was very lean, including myself and about four other key team members, but we did learn that we could have used a couple more people, not only a dedicated project manager to delineate the project management from business decisions, but also just having an extra set of eyes for different perspective. So that was a lesson learned.

Katie Hunt: But one thing I think we did extremely well was rely on the operating companies to provide feedback. We had a unique structure with a service steering committee, where we had one representative from each company. They came together, and they really made the agreement upfront that this would be the decision making body. Even if everybody didn't agree, we would move forward with the decision of that committee, so that we could standardize processes. And so although we had great discussions and sometimes people didn't agree, we were able to make those decisions, move forward. And it really took the ownership off of APi Group to push this initiative, and it put that on the companies to drive this change forward, which was phenomenal for our team and just a big success overall. So we definitely recommended that for future projects.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's a really good point because if you're going to have issues up for discussion or perhaps discrepancies in opinion, all of those things, if you're doing it by committee, it gives the sense of being far more fair. So if you handle those things on a case by case basis, it's easier to have someone be upset about decision that was made. Whereas if it's just an understanding of we're going to discuss, we're going to vote by committee, and whatever the outcome is, the outcome is, that would alleviate a lot of frustration, I would imagine.

Katie Hunt: Right. And I think it gets buy-in, too, from the committee.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So number three, key number three is to develop guiding principles, so that as the inevitable ebbs and flows of the project occur, you know exactly what to stay focused on. So, tell us about what APi's guiding principles were, and if you have any examples of kind of how and when they came into play.

Katie Hunt: Sure. We had four that we outlined. We actually did a full vision with guiding principles, some goals, and that kind of thing, just so everyone was aligned. And the first one that we focused on was maintaining focus on end user needs. We didn't want to have a holistic technology solution that didn't meet what the end user needs from the field professionals to those office leaders that are really the ones executing the work.

Katie Hunt: Our second one was being open to changing processes. Change is hard, but we know that we all agreed, hey, we might have to change our processes. We're doing this for the betterment of the group. And that was just an agreement up front.

Katie Hunt: The third one was leveraging the ideas and suggestions of the service steering committee, which we've already discussed, which worked very well.

Katie Hunt: And then the last one was valuing time over process changes. And this one was a little bit unique that I'll expand on because we really, when we were conducting the project, had a couple constraints, including time, the scope of work, and the budget. And what we were saying with this is, our go live date needs to be met, despite all the process changes being fully complete.

Katie Hunt: And so an example of that was where, as we grew closer to go live, we had a list of items that had not yet been implemented. And we prioritized, made sure we hit those really key items, brought them forward before go live. And we're still working in sprints after go live, to continue to refine the system. So we wanted to view go live not as a stopping point, but really as something we could continue and use as a springboard to keep developing our processes, systems, et cetera.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So these four guiding principles are what really kept you focused on those four aspects that you felt were most important for the success of the project. Do you have any other examples of... Within the project, where one of these came into play and kind of steered you back on track, if you will?

Katie Hunt: Yes. So one good example, I would say, is the focus on the end user need. It's very easy when you see the bright, shiny object, and you want to go make this cool change, but then during the actual testing and training, the end user gives us feedback that, hey, this is really not what we want. And so what we really tried to do is, during our testing and training, we utilized a Microsoft team session and page, and it was open forum session. Anyone can provide feedback. We documented everything, to make sure that they had feedback. They were heard. I think at one point we had 480 responses or something.

Katie Hunt: But you're just going through these and really trying to make sure that the end user knows that, one, they could speak up. There was no ramifications. They were being listened to. And then we understood that their needs were very high priority. So we had to take a step back a couple of times on some enhancements we thought would be beneficial and really look at it from their perspective. And so we did that as much as possible.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. And I think what you said is a really good point of not only for the project team, but for everyone involved, to make sure it's communicated to look at the go live as just the starting point. So that people understand if there's feedback they've given that can't make it for that go live cutoff, it doesn't mean you're not listening, and it doesn't mean that it's not going to get incorporated. That there's going to be opportunities to continue to evolve what you're doing, but being able to use those principles to keep you on track with not just continuing to brainstorm and never actually getting the result out. That makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So key number four is the importance of testing. So talk to us about all things testing.

Katie Hunt: Oh, goodness. Okay. So testing, we love it and we hate it because there's never enough time for testing, but there's so many different methods of testing. And it's just so crucial. I would say one thing I learned that I did not know going into this project, was how many different methods and different types of testing you could do, from the load testing to the off-road testing, to the scripted testing, to automated, there's just a whole gamut of how you can test the system.

Katie Hunt: And I think going into it, one, just having a really, really solid plan. Before I came on board, the team already had an excellent script of testing items and what we needed to do. So we had a really good baseline that we could springboard off of and really develop and test. And then we just wanted to make sure that we put the system through the paces and tested as if we were conducting real-world operations.

Katie Hunt: And that was the key thing, was rehearse like you want to actually execute. And it's like a military thing, I've learned, you want to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. So I would say that's one thing that we did well, especially with rehearsing the actual cut-over, but also with testing.

Katie Hunt: One thing that I would suggest that had been used at APi Group before I was on board was the testing matrix and really just holding the companies accountable and checking in and asking the question of not only who has tested, but when and what. Because if you have a whole group that focuses just on one end of the testing and you miss the portion where you need to invoice the work order, rather than just create it, you have a gap in the testing. So by spreading it out and having the end users do the testing and staggering it correctly, I think it's very, very beneficial. And that's one of the most crucial phases that we possibly could have gone through.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So you said at the beginning of this question, there's never enough time for testing. Okay. So that makes me wonder, how do you strike the right balance of testing enough without, again, holding yourself back from ever crossing the finish line?

Katie Hunt: So this goes back to our initial constraint of time, that being just a key factor. We almost had a point where we were testing and continuing some configuration and development at the same time. So this is a lesson learned for us, is making sure that you have the schedule outlined, where you have the users in the system soon enough to catch any bugs or issues or concerns, but having them in late enough so the development is done, so they can have a good testing experience.

Katie Hunt: So really, I think we did a really good job of having a test phase and then almost a recovery phase to address those issues, and then have a second testing cycle. But one thing I would say that we could have probably done a little bit better job on is clearly annotating, during those testing cycles, specific items to test as well as specific items not to test that were still in development. And that way, it's just very clear. But at some point you have to go live, and I think it's one of those things, it's a judgment call of what are priority one items, what are priority two, and what can we live without until after go live. And that depends on the company and system.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. Okay, good. All right. So key number five is providing ample and effective training. So tell us how you tackled training and any advice you have for folks here.

Katie Hunt: Okay. So I will say training is one item, I am extremely proud of our team on this. We receive some very positive feedback, and we're continuing to use some of these items as we move forward. We really tackled it by... We created videos within our LMS system with APi Group. And we kept them short, no more than five minutes, because attention span of most people is not more than that when watching the training videos. And then we also made cheat sheets. We made quick reference guides that folks can print off on a one pager for key topics, put it in a little folder, or guys can throw it in their trucks, as they're out on site, and just references as needed. And then lastly, we did make those user manuals that are very in depth. They have screenshots, they answer those tough questions, deep dive, and really, people can search them and use the PDF and that kind of thing if needed.

Katie Hunt: The other item we did is we had weekly live trainings. This was a suggestion by one of our steering committee members, and we essentially dedicated a topic each week, and we opened it up on teams where people could just ask questions. They chatted questions. We had the live stream. And basically, we had really good participation. I think week after week, about 150 people would log in, ask questions, and share ideas. And I think having that service community through our team's page has just been a really good benefit, but we are going to continue to take those trainings and use them for onboarding new users and then refine them, probably quarterly as we move forward, just as a continued resource. Okay.

Sarah Nicastro: So when you're doing these trainings through the teams page, and you're having these interactions, are you able to capture... Obviously, you had your testing phase, and you captured feedback, and then you incorporated it into the system. As you're training, so obviously this wouldn't be feedback that isn't necessary for go live by any means, but as you are training folks, and there's something that they think of that's just a good idea, so it's something that maybe you didn't think of during the critical phase of the project, but now that it's out, it makes sense to incorporate, are you capturing those insights and able to have access to that information and decide how and what to work on?

Katie Hunt: Yes. So we did push the training ownership on the companies. That's one thing I failed to mention is that, although we're developing all these resources and the weekly trainings, we are asking the companies to do that as well. But in that, if they were to find something that they wanted to add, let's say a change request or something that's a configuration change, we are essentially conducting two weeks sprints, and we're still ongoing in that phase right now, where they can submit that request through our ticketing system or on teams and let us know that they think they want this idea, provide the justification. And then what our team can do is test it out, research it, run it by the steering committee still. And if we think it's something we want to implement, then we will bundle that together in our bulk migration of code every two weeks or three weeks, as those changes become ready.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. Okay. So key number six, one of my favorites, is prioritizing the need to manage change. So I think when you and I initially talked about doing this podcast, I maybe suggested putting training and change management together, and you very rightly said, "No, no, no, those are two totally different things." And you're right. You're right. That's actually a representation of, I think, some of the mistakes that often gets made in the industry, is this tendency to kind of de-prioritize or under focus on the criticality of change management.

Sarah Nicastro: So tell us, from your perspective, why it is so important and what your experience was, what you think you did well, what you would maybe do differently, how you tackled this.

Katie Hunt: Sure. So, the first thing is, change is never easy. And I really think, even though this is a very intangible part of the project, it's one of the most important, just because it often gets pushed to the side when the budget gets tight, or you're short on time, and you don't have time to effectively communicate. So I would just encourage, this is definitely something we did not want to lose focus on. And we did have times where we slipped. Everyone does. But at the same time, I think we did a pretty good job of circling back and making sure that we communicated this effectively.

Katie Hunt: Our strategy overall was not to push this on the companies, but to really have the companies take ownership. We are 100% there to support, assist developing these training tools, develop the testing, outline the plan. But for a three person, four person team, it's not feasible to train and really manage that change for 20 companies, 3000 users. It's just not feasible. I don't have enough hours in the day for that.

Katie Hunt: But so really, we pushed the ownership on the companies, but we did everything in our power to explain the why behind these changes. And if they had pushback, if they had feedback, we would listen. And there were times where we didn't make a change, or we've switched the processes, but we did that in a standardized manner to make sure that everyone was in alignment. And so really, I think we just constantly tried to solicit feedback, really tried to over-communicate whenever possible, and focus on what I think is the most important resource of the project, is the people. No matter the technology, no matter the system, if the people don't support it, and the people don't understand why, and they aren't getting what they need to conduct their work and be successful, the project's ultimately going to fail. So we didn't want to lose focus on the people. We wanted to maintain communication and really just make sure that people understood the why of the changes and how it helped them personally, not just the company overall.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense. I'm curious, you said there was a couple of times you slipped, and everyone does. I don't know if it's too much to ask. Is there an example you can share? I just think it would be helpful for someone to hear, in reality, what that looks like and how you circled back to kind of work on something that is an inevitable. No one's perfect. So you're not always going... No matter how critical you know it is, you're not always going to do things perfectly.

Katie Hunt: Sure. I think one of the best examples, especially during testing, when it's very high paced, and especially how we manage the reporting of different questions, issues, process changes, et cetera, it was fast and furious on teams with people reporting, emailing, calling, having so much feedback. And we were trying so hard to document everything and capture it and respond and execute. And I think sometimes, I know me personally, I would get caught up responding to tickets and responding and solutioning the symptoms and making sure we got these tickets closed, rather than looking at the root cause of why someone is asking this question. Is it a lack of understanding of training, or is it maybe the process isn't correct, or the system does have a bug. And so really just taking a step back, kind of soliciting some advice from our core team and then the steering committee and say, "Hey, can you guys test this out? Am I off base here?"

Katie Hunt: And really, it takes time, and it's harder than just responding to tickets or responding to people with the first answer you can come up with. But I think in the long run, knowing that we're taking the time to really deep dive into these issues and find a good solution and good process change helps in the long run, rather than just that quick, "Oh, we got your ticket closed. You're good to go." So, it is hard and it does take time, but I think as long as we circled back to maintaining the focus on the why and the people, it worked out.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, that is a really good example because you're going fast, you're in problem solving mode.

Katie Hunt: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: So you get this issue, and it's like, great. I can fix this. Boom. Without thinking, I wonder why they're asking this question. Maybe they don't totally get this part of the objective or what have you. I think that's a really good point.

Sarah Nicastro: And it sounds like... I tend to think one of the most important aspects of change management is making sure people feel heard. And there's a difference between people feeling heard, and you always agreeing or acting on feedback. So they're not the same thing. You can let people know that they're heard and that you value their input, even if you're not using it.

Sarah Nicastro: And so I think that it's important to understand that because I remember one of the companies, I'm not going to remember which company it was, but a number of years ago, we were talking about change management, and they said every single piece of feedback, they made sure it got followed up on. If they had a meeting, they would write it all down. And even if that was saying, thanks for your idea, but we didn't use it. But they still wanted people to know that they were listening, so that they would continue giving that feedback and stay engaged and feel a part of the process. So good stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So our final key, number seven, is to set KPIs from which to measure progress and determine the project success. So talk with us about KPIs.

Katie Hunt: So I would say this is one thing we definitely could have done better. And I think it circles back to our team structure. And that was just an aspect of, we had individuals filling multiple roles. We had one individual that was the project manager, as well as the business process lead. So they're not only managing logistics, resourcing, budget, but they're also doing the process analysis, business decisions, and architecture. And having that, something's going to slip through the cracks. So I think that was a lack that we've identified for future projects.

Katie Hunt: And what the downstream effect of that was, is we did not really have project KPIs. Our BI and metrics team has done a phenomenal job of creating operational performance metrics. But in terms of the actual project itself and key milestones, making sure vendors are on track, making sure our other work streams are on track, that the operating companies... I think we could have done a better job measuring those milestones and KPIs and actually having other KPIs rather than just on time and on budget, which is what most people focus on. We could have been more granular and had more holistic KPIs.

Katie Hunt: But I think it's very important because it really keeps that project on track, in scope, on budget, and on time. And so I don't have much on this topic because it is an area we can improve, but I would say it's important just to make sure that you have somebody dedicated to that aspect of the project.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, Katie, I have two bonus questions for you.

Katie Hunt: Oh, gosh.

Sarah Nicastro: So the first is I know you come from a military background, and I'm curious what military learning you found to be most helpful for you within this process. So what's something from that part of your history that proved to be very useful in this project?

Katie Hunt: So I would say that one of the biggest one is rehearsals. Before any mission, any military exercise, anything, you always rehearse. You run through the motions until you can't forget them. And specifically with this project, the cut-over and that cut-over weekend, we rehearsed, I think it ended up being four times, and the original scope had only one rehearsal. And so we added those on, simply because it wasn't right when we did it the first time, and we kept doing until we got as close to go live as possible.

Katie Hunt: I think also just testing the capabilities and making sure you put both the people and the systems through their paces. Similar to rehearsals, you want to push those things to the limit when you're practicing, so that when you're actually executing and lives are on the line, you can execute how you need to. So I would say those are the big ones. That's a tough question. There's so many things I learned in the military. It's hard to kind of go through them all.

Sarah Nicastro: I bet. Okay. Last question is... I know this was a different experience for you. It was a new challenge for you in your career. What do you feel you, as an individual, what was the biggest lesson you as a person learned throughout this project?

Katie Hunt: I've actually had this conversation with my team a little bit, and really, it goes back to your point of listening to everyone's feedback. But ultimately, it's okay to say no, and it's okay to push back a little bit and 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. But yeah, just it's been a challenging experience, but at the same time it's been pretty rewarding. And I would just say the people I've gotten to work with and the team has been phenomenal. So I'm just grateful for all their work that they've put in.

Sarah Nicastro: That's really cool. I think it's awesome. I'm sure it's been challenging, but it is always rewarding to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and to really do different things and learn different things. So I'm really excited for you. I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing these seven keys to success, and I look forward to connecting again soon.

Katie Hunt: Well, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate you having me on.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks, Katie. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter at the Future of FS. The Future of Field Service Podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening.

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3 Themes Driving the Future of Service

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3 Themes Driving the Future of Service

Sarah shares a recent keynote she delivered for Aston Business School’s World Servitization Convention, which includes her presentation of three key themes she feels have surfaced as a result of COVID and will impact the future of service across industries as well as a discussion with Larry Blue, CEO of Bell and Howell; Kevin Starr, Global Program Manager, Advanced Services at ABB; and Robin Butler, Group Field Service Director at WaterLogic about how these themes have presented in their companies and what they feel the future holds.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're sharing with you a keynote session that I recently delivered at Aston Business Schools Advanced Services Group World Servitization Convention. Say that three times fast! I was asked by Aston to join the event and deliver a session discussing some of the key themes that I've found in my conversations with service leaders this year that I think are a result of COVID, but things that will ultimately drive some significant progress forward for the industry. So in this session I am presenting those themes and then welcoming a panel to join me and talk through their thoughts on the themes, what they've witnessed in their businesses, and what they think the future of service will hold. I think it's a great discussion. I hope you enjoy it. If you haven't checked out the research the Advanced Services Group is doing, it's well worth the time to do so. So have a listen and enjoy.

Sarah Nicastro: Hello everyone. I am so excited to be here with you all today. My name is Sarah Nicastro. I am creator of Future of Field Service and Field Service Evangelist. I am going to go ahead and share my screen so I can share some slides with you all, and we will get started. So very, very excited to be here with you all today. Want to talk a little bit about some of the themes that I've picked up on that I think are going to drive the future of service forward.

Before I do that, let me tell you a little bit about me. So as I said, Sarah Nicastro, Field Service Evangelist, creator of Future of Field service. I live in Erie Pennsylvania, right on Lake Erie. It's a beautiful place this time of year, but we pay for it significantly in the winter months with some serious snow. Today is actually my wedding anniversary. I've been married to my husband, Eric, for seven years today, and we have two young boys. Evan, who turned five in June, and Ellis, who will be four in October. So they keep me very, very busy, that and work. But in my free time, when I do have some, I love to read nonfiction books. I love to travel when travel is possible and I love to spend time outside.

So, as I said, my role is running an industry resource called Future of Field Service. So Future of Field Service is published in partnership with IFS. I was asked to join the IFS family just about two years ago. Prior to that I was the publisher and editor in chief of a North American publication called Field Technologies. I had been there for about 11 years, and joined IFS late 2018 to launch Future of Field Service, which came to fruition in January of 2019.

So, what is Future of Field Service? Future of Field Service is an educational platform for any business across industries with a service focus. So even though it says field service it really is service as a whole. Our editorial philosophy, if you will, is heavily focused on sharing the voice of the community. So the vast majority of our content is derived from interviews with service leaders themselves, talking about the projects they're working on, the initiatives they're driving within their companies, the transformations they have underway, their paths to Servitization. We feel that sharing those insights from peer to peer is one of the most valuable ways for folks within the community to learn from one another.

Aston invited me here today to talk with you all about some of the macro trends that I've picked up on in my conversations with those service leaders this year. We all know that this year has been a particularly different and very challenging year for us all in a variety of ways. The way that businesses have been reacting to COVID challenges, the way that businesses have seen themselves evolving as a result of what's happening, there are some commonalities. While it is a very unfortunate situation, I do think that these three trends in particular are sort of a positive outcome of a negative situation in the sense that as we recover I think these themes are going to really drive significant progress in the industry and on the path to Servitization.

I am going to talk with you about some of the trends, three trends in particular, that I've noticed this year as I'm interviewing service leaders. I will present them at, like I said, a macro level. I'm going to share with you some quotes from some of the interviews that we've done and talk with you about some of the folks that I've had the good fortune to speak with this year. Then I'm going to invite on a panel of some of my friends who I've talked with that are service leaders themselves. I'm going to ask them to weigh in on these three themes, what they've noticed, and most importantly, how we see them driving things forward.

Let's go ahead and get started. So the first theme that I want to talk about is the theme of openness to change. So each of these themes I'm going to talk with you about today is something that could be on a continuum, okay? So some organizations were already really quite good at these things, and they've just gotten better under pressure. Other organizations that were lagging have had more of a gap to fill.

So, openness to change. So we know that change is very hard, and honestly, I would say in my 13 or so years speaking with service leaders and discussing transformation in service industries, I think that resistance to change, mismanagement of change, managing change and not prioritizing change management is one of the biggest areas that prohibits a company from transforming in the ways they would like to.

Change is hard, personally, professionally, it can be very challenging, right? And it's natural for folks to want to do things a way that they're comfortable with, that they're familiar with, right? But what we've seen as a result of COVID is far more openness to change, out of necessity really, right? So companies can't continue to do business the way they were doing business in December of last year. They need to do business differently. Employees can't continue to work the way they were working December of last year, they have to work differently. So that force has really, really opened people's minds and hearts to doing things differently than we've done. I think that while that is a challenging process, it is one that I think will have a long-term impact as businesses recover from this. So let's take a look at a couple examples.

So the first is Reihaneh Irani-Famili from National Grid, and I like what she said. So a situation like this is helping leaders across industries to build those change readiness muscles. So if we think of it as a muscle that we need to exercise, and build, and flex, that's what this situation has done for organizations and individuals alike. Companies are finding ways to be more creative than they've ever been, more agile than they've ever been, and really getting some necessary practice at doing that.

You see a quote here from Reeve Bunn, who is the president of DSL. Again, I like what he says. You get to early March, and all of a sudden you have to be laser focused. The speed at which you start to do things is quite amazing. It reminds you of what you're truly capable of. You can move a mountain pretty fast when you have to, far faster than we probably thought we could back in January. So I think this is a really good summary of what I mean here. Each of the companies that I've spoken with that I feel are reacting well to this circumstance have looked at this situation and the need to change and they've jumped at it, whether it was comfortable or not. I think that there will be a long-term effect of this as we go forward, because some of that resistance to change has diminished, because people realize they can do it, they have done it, and they can do it in different ways we need to as things continue to improve.

So that's the first theme. Moving on to the second is closeness with customers. So again, I don't say this in the sense that companies were not close with their customers before. Some were very, very good at that, particularly when we talk about Servitization. If you look at the Advanced Services Group's forces for Servitization, one of those is market pressure. It's what your customers are demanding from you. So to be good at evolving on that Servitization journey, you have to be in tune with what those customer needs are. So some folks were already really good at this, and some weren't. Some were, again, stuck doing things the way they had always done, or getting by out of a need to just get by. But this situation has really forced organizations to become closer than ever with their customers. Again, it's a time of great change, right? So what your customers needed from you late last year or early this year is completely different from what they need from you today, and the only way to stay on top of what those needs are and be able to react in an agile manner and a creative manner to meet them is to be close with those customers.

Let's take a look at a couple of quotes here. So Nicola Buckley is the executive vice president of Park Place Technologies, which is an IT services firm. She talked, we had her on the podcast, she talked a lot about how quickly and with great flexibility the company reacted to what their customers need. So this has been a difficult situation for folks from a financial perspective, and a lot of decisions have been put on hold or decisions are different than they looked a while back. Park Place Technologies has done a great job of reacting very fast to taking that into consideration and looking at from a services standpoint the contracts that they were offering. How could they change? So they introduced shorter contracts, they introduced more flexible terms. They really listened to the challenges their customers are having and they reacted quickly. She said to me that in this situation they feel that reacting in a way that puts their customers' needs first is a great way for them to build long-term loyalty and long-term relationships, which will ultimately pay off.

The next quote is we had Jamie Beck from Peloton on. They're one of the organizations, one of the industries that has actually been busier as a result of COVID. Everyone wants to move to home workouts. They have turned to field operations actually as a way to, as he says, put a strategic moat around what they're doing as a business. So they're looking at what those customer needs are. They recognize that with more bikes and more treadmills deployed in the field, they'll have a greater need for a service force. They wanted to provide that service themselves rather than relying on third-party providers. So they're, again, getting close to what those customer needs are and finding ways to scale up, in this case quickly and react adeptly.

I think that the other thing that's interesting when you talk to manufacturers is a lot of them have seen a spike in interest in service agreements. Companies wanting to do their best to extend the life of their equipment that they have because they aren't at a point where they want to make large capital investments right now. So, in a sense it's also opening customers' minds to the idea of Servitization and what service can do to benefit them. So, that's the second theme.

The final theme is recognition of the digital imperative. So again, if you think of this as a continuum there are obviously organizations as we came into this situation that were well on their digital transformation journeys and there were those that were lagging behind. I've talked with folks on both end of that spectrum, and those that were already making a lot of progress when it comes to digital transformation and embracing digital tools were A, very thankful that they had been, and B, able to build on that foundation very quickly to react to changing circumstances and how work needs to be done. Those that were lagging are working to play catch-up. They're realizing that this is something that they need to prioritize and they need to get up to speed on, because not only do they need to react to this situation, but they need to be ready to react to the next situation.

If you look at this quote here, this is from Jens at Alfa Laval. Alfa Laval had been looking into remote assistance, pre-COVID. This is another theme we hear, this acceleration of digital transformation, right? So this is something that was on Alfa Laval's radar, and it was sped up significantly as COVID hit, because the company realized that it's something that could help them immediately. But as Jens says, as this situation evolves and we begin recovery, this is a tool that will take them from business continuity to business transformation. So it's something that the organization has been able to derive immediate value from in being able to keep service consistency in this situation, but it's something that they'll evolve the use of and build on as things improve.

Similar story here from Roel at Munters. I like what he says, is one of the greatest benefits of technology is how it will equip Munters to bring its vision for Servitization to reality. So he says here, "I'm thankful for how the technology is helping us address today's challenges and excited for what the future holds." I think that is a good synopsis of how folks feel about the digital imperative. They're thankful for how it is allowing them to navigate through this crazy time, but also excited about the potential that it will bring to organizations as recovery ramps up, particularly knowing that there is that greater openness to change that I spoke about first.

So, these are the themes we're noticing, these are the macro trends that we have seen time and time again, conversation and conversation again. But what is going to come next? So I want to invite on three friends of mine who I have talked with at different points about this situation and their journeys, and I want to get their thoughts on these themes and what they've noticed related to each theme, and most importantly, what we think the future will hold.

Sarah Nicastro: So Kevin, Robin, and Larry, can you please turn your cameras on and join me now? There we go. All right, fabulous. So I'm excited for the-

Larry Blue: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Hello, hello. Thank you all for being here. I'm excited to have you.

Robin Butler: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so to start I'm going to ask each of you to introduce yourselves. Say a bit about our organization and what the business does and your role. So Larry, I'll let you go first.

Larry Blue: All right. Great. Thanks, Sarah. My name is Larry Blue, I'm the chief executive officer for Bell and Howell. Bell and Howell is a North American automation equipment service business and value added distributor. So we do sell some equipment for some of our partners, some of our customers, and we service that equipment. So it feeds into our service business. So Sarah, thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here, Larry. Robin, can you go next?

Robin Butler: Sure. Good morning and afternoon. I'm Robin Butler. As of last week I am the group field service director for WaterLogic. We're a global business with direct representation in about 19 countries. We provide point of use water dispenser in office environments largely. We do have a very small consumer element too. Each of the units are relatively independent businesses with their own independent operating models. Really my role is to come in and start to create some career best practice and standardization process operations.

Robin Butler: My background though, as I said, I've only been in WaterLogic for seven days. My background is actually in the telco market, and I imagine Sarah will be talking a lot about that at least as much, if not more, than my six days experience in WaterLogic.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. Great, and Kevin.

Kevin Starr: Hi, I'm Kevin Starr. I've been with ABB 33 years. It's a automation industrial supplier of all kinds of products and services. I work in the process industry section, where we deal with paper, pulp, minerals, mining, metals, cement, food and beverage, and now data centers. So I've been involved with service, and I'm being brought in to help usher us into the digital age of service.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you all for being here. I'm really excited to have you with me and to have this conversation. So before we talk about the themes, I do want to bring up the Advanced Services Group's services staircase. So this is ... I know each of you had taken a look at this because I sent it to you, and hopefully most of the folks on have as well. But this is their staircase, and I'm hoping that for context for the discussion we're about to have each of you can kind of talk a little bit about where you think your organization falls on this staircase. So Kevin, can you weigh in here first?

Kevin Starr: Yeah, sure. Actually, this falls in line very, very well with what we call our industry care service agreements, where there's four components to start. Well, we do sell parts and products, and that's a big component of our business globally. Then we get into the break and fix, we call that rapid response. When it breaks, somebody has to be there. Then we get into the performance improvement, or the lifecycle management, which is sort of in the middle tier there, where you're doing better preventive maintenance to make sure a problem doesn't happen.

Kevin Starr: Then we get into performance improvement, where we're trying to be faster at reducing first time fix. Then we get into operational excellence, where we do forecasting and predictions. We're finding that typically your digital alignment, you can do more things remotely as you get further up the ladder there.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense.

Kevin Starr: We're in all of those different areas.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Larry.

Larry Blue: Thanks, Sarah. In looking at this, a lot of what Kevin just said is pretty much the same for Bell and Howell. However, I think we're more toward the guaranteeing the outcomes from our products, and we're investing right now pretty heavily into data analytics to move up to being able to guarantee the outcomes of business practices and business processes. We're not quite there yet. We're kind of spotty. We service equipment from about 60 different manufacturers who've outsourced their service requirements. So some of the machines tend to be very legacy machines, and it's a little harder to instrument them, a little harder to connect them to the internet, and therefore be able to get the kinds of remote data that you need to be able to guarantee business processes. We are doing that in some cases, where we're taking sensors, putting it onto different types of equipment and starting to move in that direction. But I would say that's where we are.

Larry Blue: We've been doing remote monitoring and repair on some of the newer types, more intelligent types of equipment for about the last four years now. So we're trying now to use that data that we're getting and being able to start looking at the business processes for our customers.

Sarah Nicastro: Excellent. Okay, and Robin.

Robin Butler: Yeah. I would say we're kind of a mix, much like the other two. I mean, essentially we're a product business. So the orange is a big part of our revenue stream, and in fact we sell indirect too. So that element of the business is solely product. The core of the business I would then say is sat in the middle with the assured maintenance. So most of our units are sold with a service contract. In many of the markets they can only be sold with a service contract, and is very much assured maintenance. So we are trying to maintain about every six months, depending on the machine, to prevent any breaks.

Robin Butler: But actually we do have one or two much higher value offerings, where the product itself is more orientated towards specific outcomes, particularly in the hotel and catering sector. I would say we're probably moving into the customer asset capability area there. So that first tier, the blue. There is talk about whether some of the markets weren't climbing up that value chain into the capability sector as well, but that is certainly a couple of steps for us on a majority of our machines.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, good. All right, so that gives everyone a little bit of context for where each of you are at. So now I want to revisit the themes that I walked us through at the beginning of the presentation, and I really just want to have an open discussion and get each of your thoughts on what have you observed within your organization and in the industry as a whole related to each of these themes. And mostly importantly, how do we feel these themes are going to impact the future of service? So, how are they going to carry us forward as this situation evolves? So we can keep this open, but I will prompt us along. So the first obviously is, as I discussed, is openness to change. So Kevin, can you start and just talk to us about how you've witness this theme and what you think that long-term impact of this will be?

Kevin Starr: Ooh, yeah. This has been a ... Well, this year especially, I think that accelerated. We've been expecting the digital revolution to hit for several years actually, and COVID really sped that up. I kind of think about this a lot, is the fear of change is sort of inversely proportional to the risk of staying. When folks could hit their targets by not changing, why would they? COVID stopped that. So the industrial revolution 4.0 is upon us. The information that's available, the assets. As Larry mentioned, we also have legacy equipment, 30, 40 year old stuff and new stuff. So the amount of information that our customers have to be able to understand is staggering. So when they used to be able to call us, say, "Hey, my system is down." Now that could mean 20 different things, which could be 20 different skillsets. So if we send in the wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong solution, it makes everybody mad. So we're realizing customers are like, "We cannot stay where we're at. Please, help us." So we're being asked to do ... I've done more digital webinars, we've introduced more digital, more remote. We've had more remote connections than we've ever had, because we can't get people to site.

Kevin Starr: We've used technology where the remote insights, where you can see through the lens, HoloLenses and all that. I mean, it's some of the stuff that we were dreaming of, even at the different conventions is actually being we have to have it now. So if you're not open to change right now, you're probably going to have a hard time staying in business.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think one of the things that I maybe didn't mention about this theme is how it is permeating businesses from top leadership all the way down to the frontline worker. So I've talked with I mentioned Alfa Laval, Munters, are a few organizations that I've interviewed since COVID hit that have deployed remote assistants, right? Remote assistants is a tool that when I was interviewing folks about it last year they were excited about it at the leadership level, but at the frontline workforce level it was a lot of, but we're not sure how to get them excited about it. They just want to keep doing things the way they've always done, right? So even at the frontline level I think this situation has ... If you can't go on site and you need a way to continue working, it's really pushed these folks to be open to these tools that a lot of times at the leadership level companies have been excited about for a while.

Larry Blue: Sarah, just to comment on that. I think the willingness to adopt these tools I also think is a generational thing. I think if you look at our workforce, we've brought in probably two, 300 new field technicians in the last three, four years. That group seems to be very open to adopting the new tools, in fact, they kind of expect it. Some of the guys that have been here a long time, and we are pretty bifurcated in our workforce, they were a little less accepting, but as they saw the power of the tools, particularly in the last six months, we've seen good uptake from that group as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. Robin, what are your thoughts on this first theme?

Robin Butler: Yeah. I got two really, I think, to pick up really directly on the points Larry and you just made. You know I talk a lot about the case for change, right? You're going to land change successfully, you've got to create a compelling case. That is often difficult with the frontline in particular, but I guess what we've got now is we've got such stark choices, and many businesses are facing this horrible decision of change or disappear, and that's a threat what would've felt really distant and perhaps improbable to many people on the frontline. I think that is a much easier narrative to tell. It really is the case for many organizations, and the people on the frontline will know and believe it, and therefore be much more willing to accept those cases for change.

Robin Butler: So, I think you're right. Right to the organization there is much more openness to change. Of course because it's driving change, successful change drives a greater appetite for change. So because people are doing it and doing it quickly and landing change, that will create more kind of enthusiasm and support for change.

Robin Butler: I do wonder though whether this is a lasting change, a lasting trend, or whether it is simply a consequence of the situation we find ourselves in today. Ultimately-

Sarah Nicastro: And we'll get comfortable again.

Robin Butler: Yeah. I mean, human beings, we're kind of resistant to change, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Robin Butler: So that's millions of years of evolution have led us to this point. Is a global pandemic and this rapid disruption going to change that longer term, or as you say, once we get comfortable again with these new things we've adopted, the change imperative disappears, unless there are structural changes within an organization over how it makes decisions, then I'm not sure how lasting the change will be. If it fundamentally changes the appetite for risk and how they go about making decisions, that's going to make a lasting change.

Larry Blue: Robin, just to comment on that. One of the areas that we've seen in terms of how is this going to impact the future of service is we have implemented as a result of COVID a lot more virtual training. As I mentioned earlier, we service about 60 different manufacturers' equipment and we're bringing new ones on board pretty regularly. As you bring those new pieces of equipment on board, you need to train your field staff. We had started down that path prior to the pandemic, but we have moved very quickly and pretty successfully into virtual training on many types of equipment that we're now servicing. The interesting part of that and the thing that I think will make it a standard way for us to do training is the fact that it actually increased the rate at which we could derive revenue.

Larry Blue: We recently signed a new digital printer company to a service contract, and we had to train on their equipment. We made a comparison to a prior customer in terms of the amount of time, the ramp to revenue, and we were six months faster in getting to revenue with the new customer than we were with the old customer, as a result of being able to train the field faster because we were doing it virtually.

Robin Butler: Actually, it's a good example, Larry, I think of ... I like it because it's not a direct customer orientated change, but it's a change on how you do change, and so that's likely to lead, sorry to overuse the word, lasting change for how you do change, right?

Larry Blue: Yeah.

Robin Butler: Yeah.

Larry Blue: It certainly will. It's become in fact, we're going through our budget process right now, and honestly the budget per training is changing significantly as the result of this process and this practice.

Robin Butler: Great.

Sarah Nicastro: So Robin, I think it's a really great point that you brought up. One of the things I was going to say is, I think where there is change being operationalized, I think it will be a lasting change. Where it's this sense of openness to change out of necessity, particularly at the frontline level, that I think will diminish. But one of the aspects of this that has come up in conversation after conversation that is more on the operational side is more rapid decision making, right? So organizations that used to meet on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis, they're now having to meet and make decisions weekly, daily, right? So they're putting steps in place to make that possible, obviously to have the right data that they need to have those meetings, to make those decisions. But in that, operationally, they're not only getting comfortable changing more quickly and being more agile, but they're putting systems in place to make that a longstanding impact.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think it's a good point, though. I think that there are areas of it that as we reach this next normal and people get comfortable again I think will diminish, and then there are areas that I think will stick. Go ahead.

Larry Blue: We're seeing some of that, Sarah, already. It gets to one of the other areas that became kind of interesting, and that is at our customers' sites, people are ... Here in the US masks have become a political weapon.

Larry Blue: We have a number of situations where at our customers' sites they're not mandating the wearing of masks. Part of our job as leadership of service companies is to keep our employees safe. So we've given our techs the freedom to say, "Look, I'm not going in there because I don't feel safe." So they have the ability to do that. Because people have started to believe that okay, COVID is going away in certain areas, people aren't wearing masks. So we are reverting back to that comfort factor there, but it still represents an issue for us in management to make sure that our folks understand they have the authority to walk away from a job because it's not safe. I think that part will stick. I think the masks and everything we're already starting to see what Robin was mentioning.

Sarah Nicastro: Right, yeah. There is certainly more empowerment of the workforce as well. So I want to keep progressing along, and I think actually when you talk about the first theme, openness to change, it ties in very well with the next theme, because not only are we as organizations more open to change, but customers in a lot of ways are more open to change than they have been as well, right? So again, out of necessity customers who maybe were kind of stuck with well, I don't want to change our service agreement because this is just what we've always done, or I don't want to talk about outcomes based service or Servitization because we just have this comfortable thing. There are a lot of situations that are forcing customers to think differently, want to do business differently, to view the value of service differently. So I think that first theme ties in with the second theme.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk a bit about what have your organizations witnessed in terms of your relationships with customers. Again, how do you think having to be closer and more creative in this time will have an impact on the future? So I don't know. Kevin, do you want to start?

Kevin Starr: Sure. Why not. I think part of the closeness is customers, and I guess to Robin's point about will it stick or not is I've always found that value sticks and cool sometimes doesn't. So how do you know if you're hitting the mark if you don't know your customer? So at the end of the day, if they don't make money, we don't make money. So we have a lot of effort going into the value of services rendered. So what if this machine doesn't start back up? Or what if it does start back up? And the difference is it's kind of amazing with all the different industries that I get to work in is with uptime or downtime avoidance, or to be able to predict a problem before we even walk into it, from do we have the right spares mix. All of that stuff has a lot to do with our customer's bottom line, and if we don't know what our customer is doing, that's very, very challenging. So our closeness with customers is that we know their process. We've been in their industries, we know the equipment, and we can help them reach their goals.

Kevin Starr: There's been a lot of that right now as their goals change this year. So we've been with them to ... Our contracts, they ask us for terms and condition adjustments, for how we change our cashflow, how we work with them on everything. But that's part of sticking with our, they're our colleagues. We're here to help them, and if they don't make money, they don't need us. So we're in this together, and feel that when we have that trusted advisor status where they know that hey, we're calling ABB, they'll help us. We're going to come out of this and we're going to even be stronger than ever. So that's that relationship, that bond with the trusted advisor and that we are genuinely interested in helping them meet or exceed their value requirements. That's becoming a bigger topic. I guess on the top end of our staircase there is more of a consultant maybe at one point, but still part of our operational excellence. It's not just enough if the equipment is on. Is it on and driving performance?

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Kevin Starr: That's where analytics come in and all that fun stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. They want more than just uptime, right.

Kevin Starr: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, Kevin, you, ABB has seen an increase in service interest during this time, right?

Kevin Starr: Yes, yes.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. I think that that is in line with a lot of the folks I've talked to. They've either really ramped up on the services side, because again, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of companies aren't in a position to make capital investments. So they want to look at how can we work with you to extend the life of our equipment? How can we work with you on these different service related things? A lot of organizations have even introduced new service offerings, right? I've talked with HVAC organization that are doing air checks, and more quality stuff. I've talked with companies that have introduced safety services and things like that. So it's been an opportunity for folks that might be not doing as well on the product side to really ramp up those service offerings.

Kevin Starr: I would even say the staircase is almost is very traditional starting with a widget or an asset, or something that you can touch and then you grow into service. This year that's almost flipped upside down as we start with service, and oh, by the way, we make some good products. It's almost the opposite. Is they're looking for the long-term service provider that has a variety of solutions that can be tailored to fit, and then we also make equipment that they can continue to invest in their process.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Larry, Robin, what are your thoughts on this theme?

Larry Blue: I agree with a lot of what Kevin said. I mean, we're finding that our customers have a more positive, I would say a more positive opinion of the services that we provide, because guys are showing up in the middle of a pandemic. We're continuing to meet our service level agreements, we're continuing to do the preventive maintenance stuff. We're moving to predictive and then to I think that consultative kind of level with what we call a prescriptive maintenance, and that requires a lot of this data that we were talking about earlier. But I think Kevin's point about service coming first, making sure that you can in fact get all the equipment, that you've got highly skilled employees that can fix it quickly, because let's face it, the cost of a lot of this new equipment is such that it's a critical piece of gear, and it's not redundant. There are no extra systems laying around for folks to get back up and running and run those particular tasks. So having that equipment as a single point of failure makes a rapid response, and with the right kind of response. Again, to Kevin's point, you got to have the right people with the right skills there at the right time. I think we're seeing that more so with our customers today because of the environment, because of COVID.

Larry Blue: Whether that's one of those temporal changes that Robin was talking about, we'll see. But certainly during this period we are seeing that.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. And Robin.

Robin Butler: Well, I think first of all this is more likely to be a lasting change than the openness to change one is, because ultimately we are social animals, right? It's in our nature generally, maybe not as individuals, but as a species to interact and be social, and want to understand each other. We're inquisitive beings. I think, I mean, specifically on closeness to customer, I've got a huge amount to add on top of what Kevin and Larry have said. I kind of agree with it all, but I would almost expand it slightly and say it's actually it's been a great time to be in field service, because it's going a bit beyond closeness with customers and probably a bit more like closeness with society as a whole. We're seeing society as a customer. We're seeing lots of people step up and start to produce products to help fight the pandemic, even though that's miles outside their core, but they've got facilities to do it. Many of us will have people who are classified as key worker status, which anyone from the UK will understand what that means. The telco and IT sector, where I've come from, that stepped up and played a key role in building these enormous kind of super hospitals and delivering the infrastructure that is helping the planet fight the pandemic.

Robin Butler: I think it's driven much more appreciation of people who do these types of jobs. The people like, I think as Larry said, you still get up every day and go into sites, while everyone else is sat working from home, sort of shielding themselves from the virus, out they are. They're out there, making sure the infrastructure works. I think that's driven personal pride of the individuals doing it, but also kind of pride from society. I think it has driven that closeness, and I certainly hope that's something that lasts and we'll start to see some benefits through kind of retention rates and the ease with which we recruit.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's a really good point. I think there is not a theme in here around sort of the humanity of this all, but it has been something that's come up in conversation after conversation, both in how folks are relating to their employees and how they're relating to their customers. Just this idea that how you treat people right now is something that they're going to remember for a very long time. So from a customer perspective what that looks like, again, is to Kevin's point, if we give them what they need right now we're building a loyalty, we're building a relationship, and that's a long-term investment that will pay off. I think that companies for the most part have been very, very good at that.

Sarah Nicastro: I think related to the topic we're here to talk about today in terms of Servitization, I do think that this change in customer relationship and sort of change in how customers view service is something that I think will have a impact on the journey to Servitization going forward. Because just as simple as someone saying, "No, I'd rather buy the equipment." To, "No, I'd rather pay a monthly fee to use the equipment." I mean, just differences in that mentality right now are huge, and the realization of how important service is and the role it plays, and that trusted advisor status, and those true business partnerships. I think that that will really kind of spur this journey forward.

Robin Butler: It's really exposed the interdependencies I think between organizations and the ecosystems they exist in.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, exactly. I think that it's going to make it so that it's not a company trying to drive a Servitization journey, versus a company meeting its customers with what they need and having it be a mutually beneficial outcome.

Larry Blue: We got a quick question here about how all of this, closeness with customers was going to impact the future of service. Speaking from a Bell and Howell perspective, we've had a lot more customers be willing to allow us to gather more data on their machines, because we can say, "Look, we may not be able to get a tech in there because of safety concerns, et cetera, but if you allow us to connect to the equipment to be able to monitor the health of that equipment, we can provide a similar level of uptime." Or lack of downtime to Kevin's point, with remote kinds of services, remote assistance. I think that has helped tremendously because if you're close to the customer and you're open with the customer, you develop that trust that Robin was talking about. As you develop that trust, they know you're not going to misuse the data. I think that's an important aspect, and certainly we're seeing that openness with certain customers that we currently have.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a very good point. Okay, so I forgot to say this guys earlier, but we are going to try and take some questions from the audience. I do see that there are some. So let's get through this third theme and then we'll try and save a few minutes to answer some of the audience questions that we have. If you have one and you're listening, please go ahead and type it in now. We will get to as many as we can and I'm sure that all four of us would be happy to follow up after the session today as well.

Sarah Nicastro: So last theme, recognition of the digital imperative. So digital tools have helped us to persist through this situation and to have business continuity, and they are also what will enable a lot of the long-standing change that we're talking about. So customers want more data, customers need more solution advisor and consultative relationships, and data is how we deliver on that.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk about what you each have recognized in terms of the digital imperative and what we think will happen going forward.

Kevin Starr: I guess to me we're in the midst of a digital revolution. That's why they call it digital revolution 4.0. I mean, that was before COVID was coming. Sometimes you have to sit back. So, what does that mean? That means there's a paradigm shift. The way you think in the old paradigm won't work in the new paradigm, and that's where people get scared. In the old paradigm of service we could train a person to be a subject matter expert and they could handle pretty much an entire class of assets. Today, the amount of assets, functions, and processes that are in the industrial sector that our people have to know has grown exponentially. It's actually grown beyond point of singularities, going beyond what a person can know. So there's always sort of the whack-a-mole kind of in today's world is well, what's going to get hit today? And if I'm an expert on a transformer, I'm not an expert on a drive. If I'm an expert on a drive, I'm not an expert on the control system, or in HMI, or data space, or a control.

Kevin Starr: So what we're seeing is we are having cybersecurity, and IT, and OT. There's specialties now that require tremendous levels of knowledge, but they don't all break at the same time, but they all interact. That's what we're seeing, is customers are frustrated. They don't know who to hire. Well, if I hire a control guy, I don't have a cyber guy. Then we don't know if we hire a subject matter expert but they're not a generalist, that's the imperative that we're in. We've recognized that and we've shifted to a connected engineer by sort of like we call it the project Iron Man, is how do we put a platform in place that a person can plug into and automatically kind of like The Matrix, and okay, now I'm an expert on this. That can't happen with the technology that's available today. We're trying to leverage the expertise that we have globally and then bring it to the point of contact, which is our field service organization that comes in contact with the customer so that they can have that trust, and that sort of like, hey, what's your problem? I can fix it, doesn't matter what it is. You know?

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Kevin Starr: That's what we are seeing. Is if you think you can hire one person who knows everything, you're thinking in an old manner and that's not going to work. You're going to hurt the person, you're going to hurt morale, and you're going to stagnate. So you have to think different, and this digital imperative is, what I'm seeing is if you don't think different, you're going to hurt yourself or hurt your business.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Larry.

Larry Blue: Yeah. I was just scribbling some notes here. I mean, one of the things that ... Kevin is absolutely right. You can't hire a MacGyver that can fix everything.

Kevin Starr: That's good.

Larry Blue: Right? You just can't do it. What you have to do is you have to give your guys in the field access to those SMEs, right? The way you give them access is through artificial reality, virtual reality, the Google Glasses, those kinds of things so that you can have the SME looking over your shoulder when you're working on something that you haven't seen before, right? Or if you've seen it, you saw it in training six months ago, a year ago, or whatever, and you need a refresher.

Larry Blue: All of that is now possible with today's technology. We've implemented some of it. We've got a lot more to do.

Larry Blue: But the reality is you now have tools that are available to you, and you have bandwidth available to you and connectivity that you didn't have before to be able to create the network of experts that then can virtually parachute in to a problem. I think that's a really important way to look at this and to be able to provide the level of support customers need, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Robin, what would you add?

Robin Butler: I think the digital imperative has been there a long time, like Larry and Kevin have already said. Your terminology is spot on here. It's really COVID has emphasized and it's created recognition of both the opportunity and in fact the imperative, because I think what we've already started to see in the telecoms and technology sector in particular is, IT sector, is some organizations have already fallen behind the curve on it, and it can be very capital intensive to make the change. If they don't do it soon enough, if they do it in a reactionary way, they won't perhaps have the funding to be able to make the change, and then they're on a hiding to nowhere.

Robin Butler: I think it's important though, when this big kind of shock we've gone through, it would've driven certain types of digital adoption. I won't say innovation, because I don't think we've innovated very much, we've just adopted, which is really kind of the first point we discussed. So I think it would've changed the business case behind the adoption of some of these elements. I always talk about three threads to digitalization. One is digitizing the product that the customer interacts with, actually their product. The second is the way they interact with a service organization, things like WhatsApp or chat. Then the infrastructure that your own employees work upon. That can be digitized too, ERPs and CRMs. I think it's really important that people out there push forward on all three of those journeys in a coordinated and cohesive way. Don't just suddenly grab the product element and say, "We need to make that change now because of COVID." And forget that you can and should be making the other two at the same time, because actually I suspect you'll end up with a fragmented approach and you'll end up trying to replace an ERP many years after you introduced many of the functionalities that would've benefited from a coordinated cloud based ERP.

Robin Butler: So yeah, I think that's probably what I would add on it.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Okay, so let's see if we can just move through. So these are just some key takeaways. Remember that all of this is still a "people thing," right? So people are always first, whether that's employees or customers. I think companies right now are doing a good job keeping that in mind. We talked about operationalizing, faster decision-making, and really taking this digital imperative seriously and working to either build upon the success you've achieved or catch up.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm going to hop over and see if we have time for just one or two questions. Before I do that, I just want to invite you to, if you aren't already familiar, check out what we're doing at Future of Field Service. I am very, very passionate about what I do, and giving this community a platform to learn, and connect, and collaborate, and I would love to have you check it out. So let's see if we can squeeze in just a question or two.

Sarah Nicastro: So this one, first one I'm reading is for Larry. If I understand correctly, your company services equipment from many different manufacturers. How do you get access to digital monitoring data and present that to your field technicians?

Larry Blue: Great question. I was just typing out the answer because I didn't know whether we were going to get time or not. We price our services assuming that the remote monitoring ... Again, as I mentioned earlier, and I'm getting a little ahead of myself, it does vary depending on the intelligence of the equipment. Some of the equipment just isn't connected, some of the equipment just isn't all that intelligent because it's 40 years old. The more intelligent equipment, we price our services assuming remote monitoring and remote repair, so the customer gets a better deal. We're also able then to provide some of that consultative capability so that we're able to actually make the equipment run better and save them run time. So we offer that as part of it, and generally they'll run an ROI, and as long as that you're not looking at any PII, because we all understand cybersecurity and those issues, that you're only looking at machine data. Then we're able to justify the ROI typically with the savings they get on their service as well as the additional uptime they get from the prescriptive maintenance offerings.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. Sadly, we are out of time. It bums me out because I could talk with Robin, Larry and Kevin for at least another hour or two. We didn't get to all of your questions, but rest assured we will follow up with you. Gentlemen, I appreciate you being here with me very, very much. So thank you for your time this morning and for sharing so openly your insights with myself and with our audience. To everyone that tuned in, thank you so much for spending some time with me as well. It was my pleasure, and I hope to talk with you all again soon.

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Cisco Adapts to CX Trends

Sae Kwon, VP of Customer Experience at Cisco, talks with Sarah about the changes in customer expectations he’s taken note of across his 24 years at Cisco and how the company has adapted to meet some of the most recent needs to deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Sae Kwon, Vice President of Customer Experience at Cisco. Today, we're going to be talking a bit about some of the trends that Sae has recognized related to customer experience and how he and his team at Cisco are adapting to meet and exceed with the new and evolving circumstances. Sae, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being here.

Sae Kwon: Hi Sarah, thanks for the opportunity to be here with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Happy to have you. It is my Thursday night and Sae's Friday morning, so I was just telling him before we went live that I'm jealous that he's a little bit closer to the weekend than I am. So, Sae before-

Sae Kwon: Happy Friday.

Sarah Nicastro: Happy Friday, Yeah. All right. So before we dig into the topic, tell us first a little bit about yourself and your history with Cisco.

Sae Kwon: Okay. So I grew up in Sydney, Australia, and I went to The University of Sydney and studied computer science there. And I joined another company before Cisco as a programmer, software programmer, spent a few years there and then I joined Cisco. When I joined Cisco, it was 1996 as a call center agent in the technical assistance center. And when I joined, I thought about what can I do to get ahead in a company like Cisco? And I looked around and there was a certification called CCIE, Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert. And I did that and then I became an engineer in the technical assistance center and then I had the most amazing career in Cisco over the 24 years, which I can go into more detail if you want.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And you and I when we spoke before, we talked about how great it's been for you having been with the company for that long but never having gotten bored or feeling really the need to go anywhere else, because you've been able to do a lot of different things and continue learning and growing and expanding your skillset and having a lot of new experiences. Feel free to tell us a bit more, I would love to hear it.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. So I'll give a short summary first and then I'll go into a bit more detail, but in a short summary, 24 years, I probably didn't have the same role for more than two or three years at a time, so every two or three years my role was changing, also I had the opportunity to work across four different countries in roles that were country leadership role or regional leadership role. So it's just been really exciting, a lot of opportunities were there, whether it's moving to another country or doing a different role. One of the first big opportunity I had was in year 2000. That's when Korea was going through an internet boom at that time. The government was really encouraging the service providers there to roll out high speed internet in Korea, so our business was doing very well over there and we needed to set up a Korean Technical Assistance Center in Korea.

Sae Kwon: So Cisco asked me to go to Korea and set that up, and that was a huge opportunity for me because until then I was an engineer. That's when I had the opportunity to build a business. It sort of felt like a venture within a company, venture company within a company because I had the opportunity to build a business plan, put the processes in, hire people and set up the Technical Assistance Center in Korea. So I did that and I spent about four years in Korea just making sure that the whole Technical Assistance Center was settled in and then I passed it on to a local manager and came back to Sydney.

Sae Kwon: Then spent six years in Sydney doing various regional roles, like Focused Technical Support which is a premium service for the top customers where we have dedicated engineers and operations managers to support them. And then 2010, I had the opportunity to go to Japan and lead the technical services in Japan, which was another huge opportunity, I never imagined I'd work in Japan because I don't speak Japanese, I don't have any ties or any background there, but went there, had a great time. Really big business in Japan as you can imagine, and the people there were fantastic, so I spent about two and a half years there, excuse me, really enjoyed working there, helped grow the business, was involved with some of the recovery efforts during the big Japan earthquake as well, which was really good to give back. And then, came back to Sydney.

Sae Kwon: At that time I did something called service enablement, which is sort of like a business development role, but really focused on new services. So whenever we would launch a new service, this team would go in there, build a plan on how do we enable sales? How do we accelerate? And just get the ball rolling and then once the business is up and running, then the sales teams take over.

Sae Kwon: And then I had the opportunity to lead the Technical Services for APJC, that's when I moved to Singapore about three years ago. And then about two years ago we went through a huge transformation in Cisco, from Cisco Services to Customer Experience. That's when we realized that we can't just have reactive services, we needed to be thinking about the whole life cycle of the customer's journey, right from the presales to design implementation, onboarding adopt, and to support and then to renewal as well, because we wanted to make sure that we were helping the customer all along their life cycle as they used their solutions. That's where I am now. But it's been a really exciting 24 years.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think it's really cool that you've been able to spend that much time with Cisco and always feel challenged and feel satisfied and fulfilled, I mean, it speaks to when you have a good gig, right? Just hang onto it and keep having those great experiences, I also always think it's interesting when I speak with someone who's in a customer experience role that has had a long tenure with a company, because I think it gives you a unique perspective of how customer needs and expectations have evolved over time. And for someone like yourself who has worked in different regions of the business, different areas of the business, it gives you a unique perspective on some of the ideas of how Cisco can adapt to meet those needs. So, very cool.

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk a little bit about that. When you and I connected previously, we talked about Cisco's journey toward being a more solution centric business, right? Which is a journey that a vast majority of companies are somewhere on. And you mentioned the customer journey, so I know, we talked a bit about how you at Cisco over the last little while have noticed some areas in the customer journey that you needed to evolve to meet some new demands. So I know that you've kind of restructured the business a bit to meet those, tell our listeners a little bit about the evolution of what the customers are needing from you and how you're adapting to meet those needs.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. So, if I go back to when I started with Cisco, 24 years ago, we were basically selling hardware boxes, right? With software on there, but it was being sold as a hardware product on its own, and services attached to that. And then we realized that customers were not buying just that box, they were buying a solution essentially, it's many boxes connected together, but it's a solution. So, I can't remember the exact time, but it was in the 2000s, that's when we introduced what we called Solution Support, because we had many different types of products that made up a solution, and the customers sometimes were getting very confused in terms of, okay, where is the problem lying when they had an issue, right?

Sae Kwon: So we introduced Solution Support where we said, Hey, Mr. Customer, you don't have to worry about where the problem is, just call us when you see the problem, we will do that searching for you and find out where it is and hide that complexity for you. So that's one of the evolutions we had in the early stages.

Sae Kwon: The other one was, I talked about the focus technical support before, the premium level services where we have dedicated engineers and operations managers. That's another one that we introduced in the 2000s because we realized again, that when the customer calls us, we spend a lot of time just trying to understand the customer's network environment, the IT environment, but when you have a dedicated engineer and operations manager that already understands the customer's environment, when a problem occurs that troubleshooting and finding that root cause and the resolution becomes so much faster.

Sae Kwon: So that's another one and also I'm going to talk about it a bit more later, but services, although it's about technology, at the end of the day it's all about people, and having dedicated people that not only knows your infrastructure but has a relationship with you as a person, is also really good. Because when you don't know the person and you're in a network down situation, you're under pressure, I'm talking from a customer perspective, under pressure from your bosses, things can get really heated. But when you have someone you can trust in Cisco that you know that, He knows my environment, that's when you can have a much much more productive and constructive discussions and troubleshooting so that you can find the resolution faster.

Sae Kwon: So I think that was a really good service that the customers liked. So that was in the early stages, and then we looked at all the intellectual property that we had collected over the few decades of service that we were providing to our customers. And we realized that a lot of the basic questions were repeated over and over again. So we put that online and made it possible for the customers to do self service, that made it possible for us to focus engineers onto the most complex issues, for the simpler repeatable issues, customers can come in and just get the answers through self service online, and which it allows us to provide a more cost effective service, but also allowed us to focus our top engineers onto the complex issues that the customers really needed the attention on.

Sae Kwon: So that's the other evolution that we did, and then we also looked at analyzing and using those intellectual property and using analytics to start to see how we can predict issues from reccurring, because we realized that there were patterns, there's certain patterns in the network were occurring before an issue would occur. So using those patterns, we used to call them digital signatures, using those patterns we could start to tell the customers that, "Hey, Mr. Customer, if you see these patterns in your network, you may be hitting this problem. So let's take an action to avoid that." So we can start to help our customers to avoid problems from occurring because fast troubleshooting is good but when the trouble doesn't occur it's even better.

Sae Kwon: So that was the other thing that we were doing. So we were going through that evolution and then the most recent transformation that we did that I talked about two years ago, is when we thought, okay, it's not just about the problem, it's not just about troubleshooting or avoiding the problem. We have to start right from when the customer purchases a solution. We have to help them design it well and we had professional services team that did the design.

Sae Kwon: We already had that, but we didn't have anyone that really helped the customers to onboard the solution into their business and build a plan on how to adopt and consume that within their business. These customers would have had a business requirement and that's the reason why they bought our solution for a certain outcome that they were thinking about, but we were not in there helping them, we were leaving it to the customers.

Sae Kwon: And that's the transformation that we did two years ago when we moved from Cisco Services to customer experience, was to bring professional services and technical services, which we already had but they were in siloed departments, bring them together and then create what we call customer success, where we had the onboarding and adoption capabilities.

Sae Kwon: And we're starting to see some really good outcomes and customers are starting to give us some really good feedback both verbally as well as from a business standpoint as well, so we can see some really good early signs.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think it's such an important thing to talk about in terms of a few aspects, I mean, one is examining that customer journey often enough and carefully enough to recognize where those gaps exist. I think it sounds very simple but companies get just in the day to day and they don't always think to do that or take the time or resources to do that and to your point, you have the professional services team on the front end and you had technical services there to help them in a later stage, but there was this big gap in between that was a fantastic opportunity for Cisco as a business to tackle and then also a fantastic opportunity for you to endear yourself to your customers because you're fulfilling a very valid need that they have.

Sarah Nicastro: The other point that I think is important to touch on is, as you mentioned, the need, when you look at the customer journey and when you look at customer experience, to break down some of those silos. I mean I'm sure the professional service team was doing a fantastic job and I'm sure the technical services team was doing a fantastic job, but if you don't have a function looking at that bigger picture and really looking at it from that customer perspective of where those gaps are and how to fill them, you can have a siloed operation where everyone's doing a great job, but it's still not creating a consistent, seamless customer experience. So, I think that's really interesting.

Sarah Nicastro: So as you've been on this journey, in identifying these needs and working as a business to pivot and adapt to restructure to be able to meet them, are there any lessons you've learned or tips you would share for other organizations that are kind of doing this work of exploring the customer journey, looking for opportunities to provide new and different services, that sort of thing.

Sae Kwon: Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that come to my mind is timing, because we had professional services and technical services and they were both very successful businesses on their own. It was a separate organization, but very successful businesses, but we could see in the longer term that we needed that customer success function as well and we needed to bring the teams together. It was a very difficult decision but we needed to make it at the time and we couldn't afford to wait until these businesses started to slow down. So, but as you can imagine at that time, when you have three successful large businesses, it's hard to make that decision to disrupt, because you're disrupting a lot of people, a lot of organizations and I think I once described it as, we put everything into a box, shook it, turned it upside down and then put it down and then we started from there, it sort of felt that way at the time.

Sae Kwon: But having that courage to disrupt early on, I think is really important. It can be very risky and scary, but if you do that, then you have a really strong business sort of slowing down, plateauing but if you make that transformation at the right time, then you can go through that growth curve again, I think. So the timing is so important, and having the courage to disrupt earlier is really important. And then it's all about people, you change management, because in a services businesses our most important asset in a services business is people.

Sae Kwon: So we want to make sure that we talk about the why, why are we doing this? So that people will buy into it. And it takes time, some people buy into it faster, some people buy into it later, but it takes time and we need to take everyone through the change journey, and then bring them along through that journey. So I think those two are probably the main things, there's a lot of other things that you've got to be thinking about, Timing and change management, just making sure that you bring the people along.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think the timing point, I really like, because I often say you can't just stay with the status quo. Right. But I think that sometimes there's an interpretation of status quo as average. Right. And in this case, the status quo was really good. Right, and the status quo was going very well. So to your point, it becomes even more difficult to decide to disrupt that status quo because it's working well. Right. But if you recognize this opportunity for it to work even better, to your point, you need to move when the time is right, to realize the full value from doing that. So I think that's a really important point. So as you've been on this journey of the last few years with the new customer success function and your role with customer experience, there's a number of trends that have surfaced that you've realized and are working around.

Sarah Nicastro: The first is, we had a discussion and it relates to the introduction of customer success because it's basically the idea of customers wanting outcomes, they don't necessarily want a product or a service, they want peace of mind, they want business partners, solution providers. So, tell us a little bit more about what you've seen as it relates to customers, demanding outcomes.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. We've seen a trend where we... I think probably about up to about 10 years ago, we were talking mainly to IT departments and selling to them. So we were mainly doing technology selling faster, easier to use, easier to operate technology selling. But the trend we saw since that is the business owners, so that business function is not the IT departments, business functions and business owners were looking for solutions, whether to adopt within the organization or to adopt the technology solution that could help them to differentiate against their competitors. Right.

Sae Kwon: So, banking is a great example. I think banking has gone through, during the last decade, they've gone through a huge transformation, right? Where in the past they used to have branches with people everywhere, a lot of the banks have many less branches now, and it's a lot of online banking and they enhancing that all the time, right? Even the branches have become very digitized, usually when you walk into the branches. So you can see that sort of transformation, so we're now starting to talk to people that are not necessarily IT people they're business people.

Sae Kwon: So they look for a certain outcome or a business solution, and we have to package our solutions in that way for them. Yeah. So that's from a product and services perspective and then... hardware and software perspective. And then from a services perspective, we have to do the same because the company is moving in that direction, solution selling, so that's why we have to introduce solution support and make sure that we're not leaving the customers to go through the complexity, we want to hide the complexity, let the customers, allow them to focus on their business.

Sae Kwon: So that's one area, and then the other area that we see in terms of changing how the customers want to work with us is how they want to buy? In the past they wanted to buy and own, but we're seeing more and more customers not wanting to buy and own it, but they want to buy and pay as they go, or pay as they use. So that's the other model that we call a subscription model, and that's the other model that we see becoming more and more popular amongst the customers, because they have budget constraints, they don't want to spend a large amount of capital upfront, they want to be able to stagger that. So that's the other trend that we've seen in terms of change?

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And I often say, I mean, the future of service, I think, is learning how to master all of this complexity to present simplicity. I mean, that's what customers want, and I think that there is so much complexity on the backend for a company to deliver seamless, simple service and customer experience. But getting good at that is really, you know what needs to happen.

Sae Kwon: So if I can jump in, I mean, in terms of outcomes and solutions, I think last nine months has been really interesting, because of COVID-19, and those required some solutions that we never thought about before, like remote workforce, working from home solutions, yeah, secure connectivity, and now the solutions that customers asking for is returned to the office solutions. So those type of solutions. So, it's not technology solutions anymore, I mean, it's made up of technology, but solutions are real business outcomes that the customers are looking for now.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. Yes. And I think that's another good point, I was talking to a company a couple of months ago and he was kind of venting and saying I'm just really frustrated, because we've deployed IOT and no one's buying it. And I said, well, I mean, have you thought about that because your customers don't care if you're using IOT. I mean, that doesn't matter to them, they care about what pain of theirs that can solve, so it's interesting when you really dig into how this world is evolving, and the level of complexity companies have to take on to evolve and be successful, because it isn't just technology, it's how you sell, it's how you market, it's how you're operationally structured. You know what I mean?

Sarah Nicastro: There's so many different aspects of it, I find it really interesting and exciting, which is why I love what I do, but it's a lot of hard work to keep up with the way things are changing and what customers are demanding. So you've mentioned a couple of times since we've been speaking today, that one of probably arguably the most important ingredient to all of this is people, right? So to your point, you can have this great vision, if you don't have change management, it's going nowhere, you can have the best technology, if people aren't on board, it's not going to help, right? So, we know that people are absolutely imperative to companies accomplishing this mission and being able to deliver the customer experience you want.

Sarah Nicastro: And one of the questions that comes up a lot right now is around the issue of recruiting and hiring and retaining good talent, because not only is it important, but it's increasingly difficult to come by. So tell us a bit about your thoughts on people as it relates to customer experience and how Cisco is tackling the whole hiring, developing, and retaining of good talent.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. So I start with hiring, I think our hiring processes have evolved over time as well, and at the moment, really focusing on making sure that we bring in, we tap into the diverse diversity, because let's look at gender diversity for example, we don't have that many female IT engineers, they are very few, which means we're missing out on half the world's talent, right? So it's just making sure that we tap into and can bring in the whole talent, whether it's gender diversity or whether it's cultural diversity. So what we're doing at the moment is trying something called blind interviews, right. Just not knowing what the background or any of the other, just looking at the skills and experience and so forth, and that's working out really well and that's helping for us to hire and tap into the much more diverse workforce and then bring them in which has been working really well.

Sae Kwon: And then I think once we bring people into the company, I think what we need to do is we need to create an environment where you're not working like a robot, because one of the challenges that we had in that 10, 15 years ago in the early times when I joined is technical assistance center can easily be seen as a call center. But engineers don't like working in a call center, they want to be innovating, they want to be troubleshooting, they want to be creative, they want to be empowered.

Sae Kwon: So trying to create that environment where the engineers feel like they're coming in, they're growing, they're innovating, that's really important, but they still need to pick up the phone and talk to the customer and help the customer, but in an environment where it doesn't feel like a call center, it feels like a place where they're innovating and they're really empowered to make decisions. So that's the other area that we try to really create, so that technical assistants and the engineers don't feel like a call center agent and working off scripts, but they're really empowered to support the customers. Of course there are processes and tools and trainings that we provide to our engineers because we also need to make sure that the experience that our customers have with their technical assistance center is consistent.

Sae Kwon: We can't have inconsistent levels of, in the early days we used to have that customer would talk to engineer A, have a great experience, talk to engineer B, not so great experience. So we wanted to make sure that we sort of make that more consistent through trainings, and soft skills trainings and things like that. But you can still provide a consistent experience but also provide an environment where engineers are feeling like they innovating and they empowered.

Sae Kwon: And then the other one is I think, fun, I think just making sure that people are having fun as they come in is also important. I mean, some people may say it doesn't work, doesn't have to be fun, you can have fun outside. But if work can be fun, it's so much more better. So creating that environment where people can come in and enjoy each other's company, work hard but also have fun I think that's so important. So creating that sort of environment through, it's not always just fun events. I think it's the culture that the company creates, the culture that the managers creates for their teams. It's also really important for the engineers to come in and feel like they're being valued and they're enjoying, when they come in.

Sae Kwon: And then the other one is just creating a lot of different growth opportunities, like I've personally gone through. Making sure that if you want it, there are many different opportunities there. And Cisco is one of the companies that's a global company, luckily we can provide a lot of different opportunities, whether it's a different function, different city, different country, depending on what people want to do, what they want to work towards, of course you don't just get it, you have to work towards it, but if you want to work towards it, there are many opportunities to do other things. So I think all of those things come together to provide that environment where once people come in, they don't necessarily want to leave because everything is provided here.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that's a really good point and like you've said, you're a good testament of Cisco's ability to create that environment that people want to stay in. So I think that's really good. I've written a few articles in my time talking about the correlation between employee engagement and employee satisfaction and the customer experience. So it's, I think sometimes when companies go down the customer experience path, they can do so at the cost of also focusing on the the employee experience and what do their employees need, and it is really important to consider how big of a piece of the puzzle it is because you can't rely on disconnected unhappy people to deliver this amazing experience to your customers-

Sae Kwon: I think that's a really good point because when I was working in the technical assistance center and managing the team there, you sometimes think that customers, because you're on the phone, you're not seeing each other, customers may not know how that engineer is feeling, but they know. If their engineer is empowered, is passionate, he's happy, they know. If their engineer is not happy, they know as well. So making sure that engineers are really motivated, really empowered, happy is so important.

Sarah Nicastro: And to your point, yes, that comes through. If you can create an environment, like you said, yes, you want to have standards and you want to have expectations, but then give these people the freedom to be themselves a bit and to be engaged and that's what makes them committed and into what they're doing and that 1000% comes through. So I think that's a really good point. I want to talk a little bit about some of the trends you've seen related to how different technologies play a role in the customer experience. So we've touched on a few, but let's go back through and just talk a bit. So we talked about an increase in acceptance of remote support as well as self service.

Sarah Nicastro: So tell us a little bit what you're seeing related to maybe a change in perception from the customer side of the value of those tools and how it can benefit them.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. So the benefit of self service is you don't have to wait in the phone queue, you can just go in, search for solutions and the solutions are there. And I think as the younger generations' coming to the workforce, they're more used to that type of online activity, so I think that that really suits them really well. So self service is becoming bigger and bigger and that really helps us to run a much much more efficient operations, because we can solve a bulk of the customer queries through self service, online self service. Remote delivery, that's also really important because in the past everyone wanted to do things face to face. Everyone said, Come on site, meet me face to face. But with some of the tools that we have, in Cisco we have our Cisco WebEx tool, which is a similar one to what we're using now and we use that to have meetings with our customers, discussion, whiteboarding, troubleshooting, sharing information, all of that can occur through there.

Sae Kwon: And especially during the COVID-19 situation, when no one could travel, this has become a huge opportunity for us to demonstrate the capabilities of these tools that we had. And again, it allows us to be more efficient, provide a better ROI to the customer as well. And the other thing that it does is also if you focus on onsite and face-to-face delivery, or face-to-face engagements, you can only tap into your local resources. But Cisco being a global company, we have experts all over the place, and when we have the remote capability, now we can start to bring in the best talent from all around the world for that customer. So I think that's the other opportunity that this brings up. You can tap into the top talent everywhere, anywhere.

Sae Kwon: Of course you have to watch the time zones, but that's the other big advantage that it opens up that I see.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I'm a people person and I really miss face-to-face events and all of that, but I do absolutely agree that this situation has kind of forced folks to realize how much can be done remotely, and so there's certainly a time and place for seeing people in person and all of that, but it is interesting how there's a little, well, not a little bit, a lot more openness to some of these things than there was just a very short time ago.

Sae Kwon: I don't think technology, no matter how good the video conferencing technology is, I don't think will ever a 100% replace face-to-face, I think humans need that human interaction. That's always going to be there, but I think, like the self service has played a role in making us more efficient, I think this will do that as well. And we will be able to provide a much better service using these tools, but it will never replace 100% face-to-face.

Sarah Nicastro: When you were talking about self service, I was thinking, it's such a delicate balance to get right, I mean the role you're in and just the jobs that play a part in that customer experience. You want to make them feel empowered to solve problems on their own when they want to, but boy, when they want to talk to someone, someone needs to, I mean it's just I'm thinking of, I don't want to name any names because that's not nice, but I'm thinking of a service experience I had not too long ago where I had an issue and no matter how frustrated you are, you can't get someone on the phone. And while I would rather do self service, if it gets to that point and then you don't have the help you need, it's just incredibly frustrating. So it's a big puzzle of making sure that, whatever your customer wants, however they want to interact and whatever those preferences are, you're there to meet those needs.

Sae Kwon: Yeah, I think the key is giving customers a choice on how they want to interact with us, and whatever method they choose, we need to be there ready. Just because we have self service option, it doesn't mean that we can start to neglect the phone calls, right? We need to make sure that if the customer want to call us, we're there picking up the phones quickly and we are responding back to them quickly. We need to make sure, and we continue to look at time to pick up and time to respond, stats, so that we can ensure that we have enough people there to support those customers, but they need to call us as well. So, that's the balance that... So important that balance.

Sarah Nicastro: Like you said, it's taking on all of that complexity so that when a customer wants to self serve or they want to call or whatever, someone's there. But when you think about what's going on in the back end, it's pretty impressive. So I also wanted to talk a little bit about... You had talked about Cisco's move toward predictive service, and all of the data you have at this point and being able to notice those patterns and start to work with customers to predict some of the issues you know will likely arise. How do you see your use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data? How do you see that expanding in the coming couple of years?

Sae Kwon: I think that's going to... I think the word I would use would be that's going to explode. I think that's going to be a huge opportunity to leverage AI and intellectual property and the data that we have and combined that together, it's going to be so powerful. And it's again similar to self service and remote, this is going to be another tool that's going to help us to provide our customers with much, much better solution, much, much more consistent, data-based support that our customers are looking for, reliable support that our customers are looking for.

Sae Kwon: Similar to self service and remote support, I don't think AI will ever 100% displace people, because people are always going to be at the core, because once the automation or AI comes in and comes up with a solution, there's got to be some people that sort of goes through that and analyzes that and makes that relevant for their customer because, every customer is a little bit different, the environment depending on what country they're in, what business vertical they're in and what market their customer bases are, they're all very different. So there's always got to be the people there. And customers always want to have the choice of being able talk to people as well as we just talked about so... But I think AI part is going to explode it and it's going to be a huge opportunity for us and for our customers as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, when you start thinking about... When you draw the parallels between outcomes based service and predictive analytics, I mean, there is no better outcome than a customer just having peace of mind that their systems are going to continue working. Right? So, I mean, it's sort of the ultimate outcome, so the more capable companies can get in leveraging that data they have to really analyze where those failure points often are and really get ahead of those things. It's making strides and delivering the best possible outcomes that people are going to be willing to pay for.

Sae Kwon: Yeah. And it's going to be so much more important because, technology is becoming more and more complex, although, on the surface, when you use it, it's making life so much easier or making businesses so much more competitive, they can differentiate but, at the back end, how the technology comes together is so complex. And you need to make sure that you have the right people to be able to put that together but, having AI, having all the different tools to help go through the complexity is going to be really important as well. Because these days, when you look at one solution, it's not just one technology, there could be the network that needs to be put together, and then there's got to be security and then there's got to be some data center ability and then there's got to be virtualization ability and then there's got to be collaboration, video conferencing, they need to come together to form a solution that provides that business outcome for the customer, right?

Sae Kwon: And it's going to get even more complex as we go, because these things will probably, even the customer solutions will have things like AI and automation that come in and start to bring all these different technologies together. So, I sometimes feel a little bit sorry for our engineers because, when we go to... When I used to troubleshoot, there were maybe two or three products in a solution. Now when an engineer's going to troubleshoot there's many, many different products, and they need to understand that. And it's not easy for one or two engineers to understand everything. So they need to work together, and when you can have things like AI and automation tools come in and help our engineers, it makes it so much better. So, complexity is another reason why AI is going to be so important and automation is going to be so important.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. To your point, it frees them up to work on the things that... If you can automate some of the more simple things, it frees them up to work on the things that their expertise really is needed for. So last question Sae is, what's the biggest lesson you as a customer experience leader have learned, that you think others could benefit from hearing?

Sae Kwon: The first one is listening to customers. That's where everything starts from, right? We need to continue to talk to customers and listen to them because things are always changing, the requirements are always changing and you need to be able to move with that, that will be the number one thing. And then number two would be look after your people, make sure that you hire the best people, train them and retain them and help them to grow within the company, because motivated employees will look after your customers, right? So that's so important. And then third one would be, continue to disrupt, and it's not always easy, especially when you have a very successful business. Right? But you have to continue to disrupt, especially in the technology area that I work in.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I love that. I love that you spoke earlier about timing and having the courage to take those chances, I think that's a really good message for folks. And certainly, I think there's a lot of organizations that have really good intentions on customer experience, but they start to go down these paths on a lot of assumptions, versus actually talking to the customers and not only talking to them, but listening and really hearing what they're saying. So it sounds like customer experience, listen to your customers, it should automatically go together, but unfortunately that is not always the case and it is imperative, and of course we talked about how critically important people are in making this all happen. So very good advice, very good insights Sae, I really appreciate you being here with us today.

Sae Kwon: Thank you. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: It was great, thank you. For more content, be sure to check us out at www.futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn, as well as Twitter at The Future of FS. The future of field service podcast is published in partnership with IFS, you can learn more about IFS service management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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New Metrics for a New World of Service Delivery

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New Metrics for a New World of Service Delivery

Bill Pollock, President and Principal Consulting Analyst at Strategies for Growth, weighs in on how he feels organizations need to evolve how they measure progress and success in today’s service landscape.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about new metrics for a new world of service delivery. We've talked a lot lately about how many things are changing for service organizations. And another thing that needs to change is the way that you're measuring your progress and success. I'm excited to welcome back to the podcast today Bill Pollock, president and principal consulting analyst at Strategies For Growth. Bill, welcome back to the podcast.

Bill Pollock: Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, absolutely. Glad to have you. So you are doing a lot of research in this space, and you and I have known each other a long time and we've both seen this evolution that's taking place in service and witnessed some of the trends that are occurring. Before we dig into to how KPIs and metrics and measurement need to change based on those trends and the evolution, let's first talk a little bit about the history of how service success or failure has been measured. And then we'll talk about why we need to evolve from there.

Bill Pollock: Sure. That's a really great way to start off this session. The way that success has been measured over the years depends really on how sophisticated or knowledgeable or how vulnerable a services organization is. For example, there've been many cases over the years where I've seen companies that have been doing fairly well and they figure, "Well, we really don't need to measure our success because we're successful all the time." And the problem with that is that whether it's self-inflicted or an existential like COVID-19 or an economic meltdown, even those that are doing well year after year after year ultimately hit a point where they're not doing well. And if they haven't been measuring things on a regular basis, then they don't know at the outset, "Why did we just tank? What happened that made us not satisfy our customers anymore?"

Bill Pollock: So the thing is that what I believe is that if you're not doing well or you're always on the cusp and you always are striving to do better, then you really do need to measure things and see how your performance is trending over the years. The paradox though, is that if you're doing well and you're making some money and you have a high profit margin, you may not be tempted to measure as much, but that's the time when you really should measure, because you've got the resources, you've got the cash in hand to do some measurement. I don't believe there's a single organization out there that can say, "Regardless of how we're doing right now, there's absolutely no improvement that we can make. We're doing the best that anyone can. No improvements are possible." That's not possible. Traditionally, what we've seen is things all over the place.

Bill Pollock: For example, one of the first field service management surveys that we did at Strategies For Growth over a decade ago, we asked questions, "What do you measure?" We had a laundry list. "Do you mentioned this and the other thing?" And one of the questions was, of course, "Do you measure customer satisfaction?" And at that time, and again, this is like 15 years ago, the response was something only like 47%, less than half. And then another question was, "Do you measure customer retention?" And 65% said, "Yes, we measure customer retention." And my question is, how can you measure customer retention if you're not measuring satisfaction? And it leads me to believe... I did a workshop for one of the trade associations once years ago and I said, "What is the quickest way to improve your customer satisfaction performance?" And everyone started raising their hand. "Pay more attention to customers, listen to the voice of the customer, do some market research."

Bill Pollock: And I said, "Well, this is tongue in cheek, but the best way to improve your customer satisfaction overnight is notify all your customers who are not giving you a perfect score that you're no longer customers." All you have left are customers that are giving you a perfect score. Well, of course that's nonsensical, but there are many organizations, one organization, for example, said to me, "We're doing about 85% customer satisfaction now. How much money can we save if we did only 82% customer satisfaction?" I was an economics major in college, I understand the elasticity and sensitivity of numbers crossmatched against each other, but that's not the way to manage a business. So, really, and as far as customer retention is concerned, at the end of the career of the business, just before the business closes, if you still have every customer you ever had and they're still buying things from you and they're still relatively satisfied, then you had a nice career and that business and had a good reputation.

Bill Pollock: But you can't wait until the very end to measure something. You have to measure it all along. So really, the history of service success measurement is, some people will say, if you're measuring more than six KPIs, that's too many. Others will say, if you're not measuring 20 or 24, that's not enough. The rule of thumb is wherever you're not doing well and you know it, or you may not be doing as well as you could, but you're not sure can, any areas where you believe you're vulnerable because of what you're doing and about to do or what one of your competitors is about to do, or there's a merger or acquisition in the competitive landscape, they're the things that you have to measure.

Bill Pollock: Some people make the mistake of measuring only things that will ultimately impact their merit reviews and their bonuses. And that's good for you, but it's not good for the company, it's not good for the customers. So it's been all over the place. It long enough has passed that it's time to rethink and reengineer the way you measure things, and COVID-19 has made it even more critical to do it now instead of tomorrow or next year.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So a couple of themes that you just brought up are obviously the variability, which makes sense. Every company is going to be a bit different in how they view this, how they approach it, what KPIs they use, et cetera. So certainly understand that there's no uniform approach or advice. The other theme is you're saying that companies have a tendency to want to measure more when they are struggling. I would argue that a third thing that's important to talk about though is that customers today are demanding more visibility than they ever have before. So that is, I think, another reason that organizations need to expand and evolve the metrics that they're using and how they're tracking their progress and success.

Sarah Nicastro: Because I've heard a lot of feedback from folks that customers used to be happy if it was just, "Hey, you showed up, you got the job done. Great." And now they want to know all of the details on what that looks like. And so having that data becomes important from that perspective as well. So knowing, Bill, that there's no singular answer to this question, can you give me a couple of examples of metrics that have maybe been historically used that are becoming a little bit ineffective or obsolete in today's environment?

Bill Pollock: And getting back to a point I just made before, everything needed to change anyway and COVID-19 said, "You got to do it now." But even before the COVID pandemic, the transformation of the industry from an analog world to a digital world and from an onsite fix to a remote fix or prevention made it such that in trending your performance data from year over year over year, it's not only not apples and oranges, it's apples and vegetables to try and make those comparisons. Like in department stores, they always measure one week's sales this year compared to the same week's sales last year. Well, it doesn't make sense for them to do that now, just as it doesn't make sense for us to, as an industry, look at our performance this year compared to last yeah. It's almost like there's a need to have two sets of books.

Bill Pollock: As we move from analog to digital and onsite to remote, things just don't mean the same anymore. Like for example, and forgive me for looking down at some of the notes I have here, in our 2020 field service management survey that we conduct every year at Strategies For Growth, the top five or six KPIs that are being used by a service organization, number one has always been number one in every one of the surveys we've done, customer satisfaction. And it's always in the 70 to 77, 78% say, "This is one metric that we use."

Bill Pollock: The second one has always been total service revenue. And you're running a service organization, you want to generate revenue. What we did is we compared our notes from 2020 to 2011, which is basically 10 years earlier, to see what kind of differences there were. We did not differentiate between service revenue and service profitability 10 years ago, but we do it now. So the number three factor, if we standardized the two surveys and those two years would be looking at total service profitability. But it's almost pointless to say which is second, which is third, or third or fourth because they're pretty much the same. You're looking at revenue and you're looking at profitability.

Bill Pollock: But then we see some differences. 10 years ago, the next three factors were field technician utilization, which is basically the time that a field tech spends performing a repair divided by the total time that he or she is working that day for the company. And then total service cost, onsite response time, and the percent of total service revenue under contract. So 10 years ago, they were the top five or six factors that we were seeing. Fast forward to this year, first time fixed rate pops way up from seventh or eighth place into third place.

Bill Pollock: So what customers are looking forward to is they don't want to jerk around with having to make repeat calls on their half to the service company or to the service company say, "Hey, it didn't work. We got a signal from your system. We have to come back and do something else." They wanted to fix the first time. The beauty of it is that many customers don't really realize that something's broken or about to break because it's fixed remotely before it breaks. So the first time fix rate I believe is going to diminish in its important because you're really looking for a first time prevention/ fix rate where a failure is prevented rather than fixed right the first time. But there's a whole series of other things like meantime between failures. That used to be along with meantime to repair, two of the biggest metrics 10 years ago, 15, 20, 30 years ago.

Bill Pollock: But equipment and systems don't fail as often anymore. And even when they're about to fail, they can be prevented from failing remotely. So when I said two sets of books, maybe you used to measure meantime between failures. Maybe now is the time to start measuring meantime between prevented failures. There are some cases where the equipment is just as likely to break down after 18 months today as it was after 18 months last year or 10 years ago. The thing is last year and 10 years ago, it would break down every 18 months. This year, it doesn't break down here every 18 months because it's being fixed before it breaks remotely. So the whole concept of break-fix, I believe is transforming into break-prevention. So what happens is the old metrics and the new metrics might coincide in terms of when the equipment is likely to fail, but it's not going to fail because you're doing something remotely.

Bill Pollock: And this is the whole concept between the old break-fix model and the, newer, it's not so new anymore, servitization model or the outcomes-based model. So we're seeing the transformation based on going digital, adapting to a civilization model and employing the use of remote diagnostics and remote fixes more and more over time.

Sarah Nicastro: So that all makes sense. So this new world of service, and if we look at the root cause of why measurement of progress and success needs to evolve, it's really related to the evolution toward predictive service, outcomes-based service servitization and looking for ways to measure and reflect success in those new terms. So, as you said, some of the metrics that would be more related to the traditional break-fix models are things that over time maybe become obsolete. So the other thing that comes up a lot when I talk with folks about this topic is it's not only that the KPIs a company may need to use are changing, but it's also the speed at which that data is being reviewed and communicated needs to become faster as well as. Is that correct? What are your thoughts on that?

Bill Pollock: That is correct. I've written a couple or a few pieces over the years, and many other writers have about the problems with data collection. And [inaudible 00:16:42] data lakes are out there and you're catching titles in some of these articles, you don't want to drown into data lake, but you need water to survive. And the thing is that many organizations now have the tools they never had before to collect as much data as possible, whether they're collecting it proactively or unilaterally by leading leaders or it doesn't make sense to me much, but some organizations still are manually transcribing numbers into a spreadsheet. But there's so much information that now has been collected and transmitted and shared by the equipment and the systems themselves. And companies are finding themselves in a situation where they're collecting too much data and they either don't have the bandwidth to process it and analyze it and assess it.

Bill Pollock: And then once it's analyzed say, "Hey, this is good stuff. This is not so good stuff. Let's take the good stuff, who should get it? Who do we share that with?" So that's where the data lakes can become data oceans and you can drown in that data. But there are other organizations that collect information and never do anything at all with it. I know for example, that one of the critiques that we've received over the years is that our customer surveys, the field service management and others are long. There are many questions. And what we find is that we process the same data every year and do some trend analysis, but there's some data from some questions that we ask that we've never really done anything with. So in the past couple of iterations of our surveys, we started cutting back on some of the data we were collecting because we knew we would never use it and it would not be that important in the overall scheme of things anyway.

Bill Pollock: But then the converse of that is if we're collecting it and we think that it may provide some information, that it may be of interest, then we sit down and we analyze it and then we write about it and we share it with our clients or our clients share it with their customers. And it's the same thing with the data that's being collected. I do not believe that you can move from a break-fix environment where you're scheduling your PMs four times a year and your performance is measured on the basis of, "We have to arrive on site within four hours or eight hours the next day." You can't move from that model to servitization where everything's measured in terms of outcomes, without breaking away from collecting the right data and not collecting the wrong data.

Bill Pollock: I think that Brian Wilson said it so succinctly in the song Wouldn't It Be Nice. "Wouldn't it be nice to have this data" is not a mandate for collecting that data. I need to know is your mandate for collecting the data. So there's need to know and there's nice to know. And you might want to take a step in every once in a while because you might find something that you wouldn't have found otherwise, but you really need to focus on the need to know and your KPIs, and metrics that you use to measure your performance have to focus on those sets of data so that the data you're collecting is actually used in a proficient way to allow you to enact change management, make things better.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I also think this is a really clear example of where today's digital tools come into play in the sense of having strong business intelligence and business analytics tools and being able to leverage the data you have to look at different scenarios and plan accordingly. I mean, you mentioned a couple of times the impact that COVID has had related to this topic and it comes up in almost every conversation I'm having that these organizations have moved from reviewing data and making business decisions weekly or monthly or quarterly to day to day and even hour to hour, right? Because the circumstances are just evolving so rapidly. So it's just a really important area for these businesses to consider. I agree with you that as you move toward outcomes-based service, you need to focus in on the data that's most important, but you also need to be very, very proficient at processing data and deriving valuable insights from it.

Sarah Nicastro: So I was hoping, Bill, if you could share with our listeners all of the things we've considered. So we talked a bit about the historical perspective, we've talked a bit about what is changing and what has changed and some of the pitfalls to avoid, I guess. But if you, based on your research, based on your expertise were to suggest five key KPIs for the new world of service, what would they be and why? And I understand, just to put the disclaimer out there, that there is no prescriptive approach for every service organization. But if you had to look at what, in your opinion are five of the most important, what would those be and why?

Bill Pollock: Well, obviously I'm a prime advocate for always measuring customer satisfaction. If you're a services organization, you've got to measure your service revenue trends, your profitability trends and your cost trends. But there are other things, like for example, I wrote a report once on contract and warranty management, and I thought, "This is going to be not the most exciting report I'm ever gone to write." I didn't really appreciate the value of things like contract attach rates and contract renewal rates and things of that nature. But what I saw is the difference between those organizations that are using a solution that helps them to basically annuitize their contracts that takes the work off of their table from having to say, "Oh yeah, it's two months before this client renews. I better send them an email."

Bill Pollock: What they found is that they were able to annuitize their revenue stream and bolster it. You still have to work at it, but much of the heavy lifting is already done. So what I would advise any services organization is to look at the solutions and the modules that are available to them from IFS or whomever they're using, and to say, "What difference is it going to make if I improve our activities in this area?" Whether it's a service contract compliance or contract renewals, or just things like, "Why don't we look at total revenue per field technician as a ratio and see can we still generate the same revenue gifts because of COVID-19? We're losing some workers that we had to furlough them or they've gone elsewhere." Look at the opportunities. And then you need to establish a baseline first. "Where are we before we execute this change?"

Bill Pollock: And then six months, or most likely one year later, "Let's revisit this again. Let's ask the same question. Where do we stand today?" And in most cases, a year later, you'll stand in better shape because you're using a solution that helps you to generate more revenues or cut costs or increase the contribution of individual employees or field technicians. Very rarely have I seen organizations use new solutions and one year later it just costs a lot of money and they didn't see any improvement. So the rule of thumb would be where you're most vulnerable, measure that. Start measuring that now if you're not, and take steps to remove your vulnerability. And it could be something as simple as your Salesforce is not as good as your competitors' Salesforce is. It could be something as simple as you might have the best product around but you're not promoting it well enough, so your marketing needs to be stepped up.

Bill Pollock: So in that latter case, it's a matter of, "Well, let's start measuring marketing dollars spent toward increases in our market awareness or increases in our sales." So the thing is, it's almost like you're building an exoskeleton for yourself, and it's going to make you stand up straighter, walk faster in the right direction and improve everything. But each element of that skeleton really has to address areas that you're looking to improve in, areas that you're looking to avoid, some of the pitfalls that you had in the past few years. If you know you're going to be merging or acquiring another company, what do you need to know before that happens to ensure that the metrics you're measuring now, you can separate and measure a year from now under a new scenario? So it's a matter of what fits you the best.

Bill Pollock: But I think what we're seeing in servitization and outcomes-based, if all you've been measuring in the past is your ability to be in compliance with your contracts, to arrive on site at the right time, to fix things on the first visit, and you're not looking at new metrics for measuring throughput rather than system uptime, you can't have throughput, you can't be processing something on an assembly line if your systems aren't working. But the question is, "What do we have to do as a company, as an organization to make sure that our volume, our capacity, our throughput is maximum for what we have as tools and resources and staffing? And if there are any breaks in the fence, what do we need to measure in terms of ensuring that those breaks don't become catastrophic breaks and cut our throughput?"

Bill Pollock: So it's a mindset from the overbearing manager who looks at individual metrics and says, "They were five minutes late to arrive on time. Our system uptime was one tenth of a point short of the 90% they guaranteed us." Instead of nitpicking like that, you've got to change your focus to, "What do we need to measure to make sure that our throughput goes through cleanly, regardless of how many times there were prevented failures and how many times, God forbid, there were real failures that had to be fixed?" So it's a change of mindset. Some companies get it, some companies don't get it. And in fact, I just wrote something for the Future of Field Service about, are you getting a servitization? And if not, why not? When are you going to get it? So those organizations that get it are already making the migration or transformation from the old way of measuring things to the new way of measuring things. And those that aren't doing it yet really need to [inaudible 00:29:49] so they don't fall further behind.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. I agree. So I understand, like I said, the variability from organization to organization. So you started off with customer satisfaction and service revenue and profitability. Are there others specifically that companies need to be thinking about or considering?

Bill Pollock: Well, sure. If you've got a field force that's still going to the field, some of them, many of them are shrinking from what they used to be because remote diagnostics and remote repairs are taking over in those areas, you really need to focus on field service utilization. Again, and that's how much time you're spending actually doing repairs divided by the total amount of time you're spending that day working for the company. There's a few field technician productivity, and historically that's been based on the average number of calls per day. But in many cases, that metric is changing substantially because you may have fewer field texts and fewer needs for onsite calls. So the metrics are changing, but there's so many organizations that need to measure that. What I like is a third in that hat trick, if you will, field technician efficiency, which is the average daily calls completed by the total calls assigned.

Bill Pollock: So what are the total calls are dwindling on a daily basis from 10 to eight to six? How many are they completing efficiently divided by how many they had to do that day? And then all the other KPIs that we've been talking about, fixing right on the first time and those kinds of things start to fall into place. There is one thing, it's tough to measure, but I'm a strong proponent of this, and that's fixing the customer while you're fixing the equipment. You can imagine that if you're walking into a manufacturing plant, the assembly line is down. The plant manager say, "When is this going to get fixed? We're processing milk. We're going to have to throw out thousands of gallons of unprocessed milk. It's going to cost a fortune then we're going to have to add a third shift tonight."

Bill Pollock: And what you need to do as a field technician, or if the technician doesn't go on site, what you need to be able to communicate, whether it's through chat or chat bot or whether it's by telephone or however you communicate with your client to let them know from the outset that, "This is a minor thing, we'll take care of it in about 20 minutes." Or, "This is a major thing. It could take an hour or more to fix. We'll keep you apprised along the way." So it's really tough to measure that. That's more customer relationship management, but I would venture to say that any of these quantitative KPIs that we've been talking about are important. So is the more qualitative KPI of fixing your customer while you're fixing the equipment.

Bill Pollock: And there are surrogates that you can quantify the percentage of time that you communicate with a customer before an anticipating failure, during the failure, following up after the failure, what they could do to prevent a similar failure later on. So there are ways to communicate that. So if you're running an organization where you do not believe that your field technicians or your dispatchers or any of the employees are really treating the customer while they're treating the equipment, you might want to look at those kinds of quantifiable metrics to see what percentage of customers that have had problems with you or complained with you, what percentage of them had actually been communicated with in terms of, "Here's what you're likely to face. Here's what we're going to do about it. Here's the estimated time for completion."

Bill Pollock: And if you find that you're not talking to them enough, that may be enough of the reason for why they're unhappy with your service tech or your company as a whole. Nobody wants to hear bad news, but if it's bad news, then they need to hear it. And once they hear it, then they're not as likely to complain to you about your performance afterwards if they know why it was caused and what you've done to prevent it from happening again.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yep, that makes sense. And that is along the lines of how we see the field technician role evolving, right? So as you said, as we look at organizations utilizing technology to enable more remote systems, remote assistance, remote service, remote repairs, what is required of those onsite visits is changing to be more of a face of the brand, a personal touch, a consultative relationship, those sorts of things. So, yeah, I think there's probably a lot of areas that companies are looking at in terms of how metrics and how measurement needs to evolve to reflect the way that the field technician role is changing, along with the way service delivery itself is changing. So, that makes sense. Any final thoughts or comments, Bill?

Bill Pollock: Yeah. I'm as guilty as any other research analyst or consultants of using the phrase new normal. Nobody wants to hear new normal anymore. I thought that I was a little different by originally talking about there's not going to be a new normal, there's going to be a series of new normals. And then others started saying the same kinds of things. When you get right down to it, nobody a year ago could have foreseen exactly what shape we would be in a year later today. And we don't even know what our fall, winter and spring are going to look like right now. So the thing is that whether you call them new normals, old normals, a new way of doing things, whatever, just be prepared to change. And there's one phrase that one of the major computer manufacturers used the year I started my business and it was the use of the expression "agile adaptability."

Bill Pollock: And I loved that because agile to me doesn't convey even half the image. Agile means, well, I can move this way. I can move that way. But what way are you moving? Adaptability means that you're adapting to your new situation, your new scenario. So you've got to be both agile and adaptable to be able to sustain your business through COVID-19, and quite frankly, through any normal circumstances. But we've got turmoil in the streets, we've got economic crises, we've got medical and healthcare pandemic, and they're saying we're going to have locusts later this year, too. So yeah, it's really a mess out there. And whether you can predict what's about to happen or not, and I don't think you can very well, you need to have that agile adaptability to make sure that your service organization can turn virtually on a dime and deliver to the marketplace, to your clients and customers, and especially to your prospects what it is that you can do for them tomorrow, regardless of what tomorrow is. So I think that that's a parting phrase.

Sarah Nicastro: All right, Bill, well thank you so much. I appreciate you being here and sharing your perspective with our listeners. You can find more on service transformation and how companies are grappling with COVID-19 challenges and working towards servitization by checking us out at www.futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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3 Pillars of Redefining Service Delivery

September 2, 2020 | 19 Mins Read

3 Pillars of Redefining Service Delivery

Brad Resler, President and COO at Brady Services Inc., talks with Sarah about three pillars Brad feels are critical to service transformation success.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about three pillars of redefining service delivery. We talk a lot on this podcast about the different journeys that companies are on when it comes to transforming their businesses to better meet the needs of today's customers. The reality is there is a lot of foundational work that goes into structuring a business to be able to evolve to meet those needs.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Brad Resler, president and COO of Brady Services to talk with us about Brady's journey and the foundation that they've set in the business. Brad, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Brad Resler: Thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thanks for being here. Before we dig into the topic, Brad, can you just tell our listeners a bit about yourself and your journey and Brady's business?

Brad Resler: Sure. Well, let me start with Brady. We are a mechanical contractor, HVA service provider, and a building solutions organization that is headquartered in Greensboro, North Carolina. We were founded in 1962 by Mr. Don Brady, who left the train company and moved down to Greensboro from up north. Since then, our company has grown to almost 500 associates and we've diversified into parts sales service, building automation. We even have a large integrated security division, all in the commercial and industrial space. We do business throughout North and South Carolina.

Brad Resler: As far as my own journey is concerned, I've had the privilege of being here at Brady for about six years now, starting in a sales leader role, and for the last three years or so have had the opportunity to run our organization from an operational standpoint.

Sarah Nicastro: Great. Good. Well, thank you for that. I was obviously really excited to dig in. Brad, you and I connected not long ago and had a really in-depth discussion about Brady's journey and the way the business is evolving based on the current landscape of what customers are looking for, and how that differs from how things may have been one or three or five years ago. We've talked about how you're leading the company through this journey in an effort to find new and different ways to serve your customers.

Sarah Nicastro: One of the facets of that conversation is us discussing how building a strong foundation upon which to build that evolution, how important that is. That's why I asked you to come and join us here, because I think that that foundational work that you've led Brady through is very, very important. Because I think sometimes it's that foundational work that companies race past and then ultimately end up having to go back and fix. Based on the conversation you and I had, we broke the foundational work into these three pillars.

Sarah Nicastro: As we talk through those three pillars today, I want to talk about the foundational changes that you've made at Brady that have allowed you then to move past that foundational level and start building upon that. The first pillar we're going to talk about is culture. That's the first pillar of this idea of really redefining service delivery. Talk to our listeners about culture and how at Brady that needed to be evolved foundationally and how you've been able to build upon that.

Brad Resler: Yeah. At any organization, the foundation of success is its culture. Brady has long had a very strong family-friendly culture, a culture of performance excellence. Those are things that we certainly didn't want to change as we looked at how we were going to continue to evolve our business. As strong as that culture was, it was also in some ways our biggest challenge, because as we've grown to the size that we are now, we've had to change. We've had to scale the business and it requires doing things a different way.

Brad Resler: Sometimes when you've been successful in doing things a certain way for a long time, it's hard to understand why you'd need to do something a different way. We've really focused in the last several years on our culture and have been very intentional about how we wanted to preserve the good and evolve as we've needed to. It's really come down to getting good leaders in place and having a culture that is very performance-based, very data-driven and very process-focused, and helping everybody understand that that's not a bad thing.

Brad Resler: That's a good thing and it's going to help us continue to grow and continue to distinguish ourselves from our competitors in the marketplace. Sounds easy, but it's a lot of work to take an organization in that direction.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of good points you made. The first and I think the most important I want to go back to is the way I asked that question I think set it up to sound that you had to build this culture. The reality is, to your point, you had a really good culture. This idea of evolving the culture isn't an idea of going from a bad culture to a good culture. It's about taking a good culture and making it even better. The reality is it's human nature for both people and businesses to get comfortable doing what they're doing if it's working.

Sarah Nicastro: You can go on for a long stretch of time and have success and you just get in a good rhythm. When there's market changes, technology changes, business changes that require significant change, it's not a matter of making a bad culture good. It's about making a good culture comfortable with evolving, right?

Brad Resler: That's right.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really good point and I think the more you can acknowledge the good and make people feel appreciated for the good and not just drive change, the more open they'll be to that. In terms of the foundational aspect of culture, you mentioned a couple of things related to being more process-based, being more metrics and performance-driven. Are those new things that you had to put in place and introduce, or are those aspects, again, that you just evolved?

Brad Resler: Well, both. It certainly evolved. We certainly had measures around our business. What we didn't consistently do was apply those measures at the individual level and set really good expectations and communicate what good performance means, which for us, is tied to good outcomes for our customers and have a way of measuring that and rewarding people for that. Or, if it's not working, correcting the course. One way that we've done that is a couple of years ago we revised our core values.

Brad Resler: One of our core values that as an organization now we talk about constantly is the value of continuous improvement. That really gave us a language and a structure to talk about how we get better without it indicting anybody for what's happened in the past. It's let us say, "Hey, it's okay to be where we are. Let's understand where we want to go and let's figure out together how we want to get there." That's a different conversation than, "We're not getting it done," or, "You haven't done it right," or, "You're not getting the job done."

Brad Resler: A lot of that is really in how you frame the conversation and how you frame the goals. We, over the last couple of years since we've had those core values, have seen some pretty significant improvement in our engagement survey scores. It's working in that we're able to engage our associates, get voice of associate into the change that we're driving and really have an organization that embraces getting better.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. I think there's a couple of common things that come up when we talk about this idea of cultural shifts and change management, and you touched on a few. I mean, one is, people want to feel heard. To your point, they want to feel that you're listening to their input and their insights. Another is, I think that the more you can explain what the driving forces are for the changes you're making, and most importantly, how adapting to address those forces will help the individual.

Sarah Nicastro: To your point, setting up not only measurements to be able to measure performance, but tying that back to if we can, as a business, meet these needs, here's how that will benefit you. I mean, it just makes it personal. The other is, to your point, I think that people like to know what's expected of them. I think that when you have a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty, that doesn't make employees feel comfortable. That's stressful.

Sarah Nicastro: Even if some of these performance measurements and things are new and more structured than in the past, I think once employees can learn them, I think oftentimes we see uptick in engagement and satisfaction because it's just the expectation is clear and they know what they need to do, and they can focus on doing it well. That tends to make people feel more comfortable.

Sarah Nicastro: With some of the foundation you've put in place, the core values, and some of the things that you've done around the idea of continuously improving the company culture, what do you see as the next steps in terms of continuing to build upon that and continuing to innovate?

Brad Resler: Well, in all the things we have been doing in terms of innovation is actually redefine what innovation is for our associates. We've learned this the hard way. Innovation isn't always transformational or redefining your business. Innovation comes in a lot of little improvements as well, and little improvements that affect the day-to-day activities of our associates. We like to try to get innovative about how we complete our service paperwork in the field so it's easier on our technicians, it's more thorough, it gets processed faster to our customers, quicker.

Brad Resler: Those don't seem like innovation in a grand sense, but for us, it has a very big impact on our productivity, on our customer satisfaction and on our ability to get onto the next job. Those types of things are very important innovative aspects of our business. Some of that recasting the perspective on innovation has really helped us zone in on what's important. The other thing that we've had to do is really focus on and get discipline around creating standard work.

Brad Resler: We've got a lot of folks who have grown up and worked in this organization for a long time, do great work, but they may do it differently than one of their counterparts. The result of that is a different service outcome to our customers. If we've got a customer in Raleigh, we want them to have the same excellent experience as a customer may have in Greensboro or a customer may have in Wilmington. It's really important that we have systems and processes in place that guide that standard work. We're now in the midst of becoming ISO certified, which is the benchmark of having good standard work.

Brad Resler: That's helped continue to drive that process, but it's just so important, especially as you continue to grow geographically that you have that strong standard work in place. We spend a lot of time on that.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. You're actually giving me a really nice natural segue into the second pillar, which is around process standardization and optimization. That's the next foundational aspect of this service delivery evolution, is making sure that you do the work of standardizing and optimizing the processes. What's interesting is I think the reason it comes up on an answer around culture is there's a huge intersection between those two things.

Sarah Nicastro: If you have that employee that is used to doing things their own way, you have to balance the desire and business benefit of standardizing without making them feel too unappreciated for their own way of doing things. Does that make sense?

Brad Resler: It does. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Tell us a bit around what some of the work is you've had to do in terms of process standardization and optimization and how that sets you up for the future.

Brad Resler: Yeah. A couple of years ago when we started the journey of transitioning to IFS, that was a natural time for us to start thinking about how we look at our standard work in the field. We certainly want to do the work that our customers expect of us, and we have customers that have a wide range of requirements. If we're working in a pharmaceutical company facility then we have to meet certain FDA standards. If we're working with a customer who makes aircraft, then we have FAA standards we have to meet.

Brad Resler: It's difficult to have consistency from job to job, so we had to figure out how we create some broad processes that let us get on the job and get off the job and deliver paperwork and be safe, and fulfill whatever the scope is in a consistent manner. There was a lot of work done to think through that and create boilerplate scope where we could, and also build a system that allows us to meet the needs of our customers. That's a unique challenge that we, and a lot of our competitors in our industry have. The other thing that's really important is the consistency aspect of it.

Brad Resler: This isn't a flash in the pan, or a focus that's going to wane. This is who we are and how we're going to do business for now and ever more. It's really making sure that, again, you have local field leaders who understand that, buy into that and help drive that into the field through their quality assurance and oversight. Leadership development has been a huge part of how we've come at this because that's ultimately what is going to win, is having good leaders. We've also put a lot of investment and time into organizing our data and creating internal dashboards.

Brad Resler: We use Power BI, and how do you take an enormous amount of data and structure it, summarize it, make it available in a usable, actionable way? That has evolved significantly in the last two years and will continue to evolve significantly as we go forward. If you're a database, data-driven organization, you've got to figure out how to use your data as effectively as you can. That's been a challenge for us.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I mean, the reality is, every business is a data-driven business today. I mean, or should be. It's like you said earlier, these are things that sound simple, but are not at all simple when you have to actually do them. That's why some of these areas are the areas where companies fall down the most because they try and race past this foundational work and then have to come back. It's the same thing with the standardization and structure of processes. I mean, you're not going to automate a poor process and get a result from it.

Sarah Nicastro: I mean, you have to do that examination and that refinement before you can really build upon that. It makes sense. The third pillar is around technology. You alluded to your use of IFS. Talk a bit about the idea of putting foundational technology in place and what that process looks like at first, and then how you can build upon that.

Brad Resler: Yes. Technology comes in a lot of different forms, obviously. For us, we view technology as impacting how we work, how we demonstrate our performance and how we train our associates. If we start with how we work, as a service provider, in the old world a lot of times we would wait for the phone to ring. The phone would ring and somebody would say they're hot in the building and we would dispatch a service technician to the site. Hopefully, that service technician knew what to do and fixed the problem and then hopefully we got paid for it.

Brad Resler: In today's world, we often know, or have the ability to know about problems before a building owner even does. We're connected to hundreds of buildings and have all of the building data from their automation system at our disposal, and receive thousands of alarms a day that we have to sort through, decipher, and again, make actionable, and oftentimes can respond without even sending a truck to the site. Just a massive transition or difference in how the industry works and therefore what our customer's expectations of us are.

Brad Resler: Technology has been a big element of how we manage that, how we offer service around that, and how we track our activity around that. Certainly, a service software platform is important, a building automation system is important. We look at those almost in sync to determine how we can take data out of a building, make it actionable, understand what the problem is, get it into our service platforms so we can dispatch and provide a technician with actual data before they get to the site so they know where to go, or they know what piece of equipment to start troubleshooting.

Brad Resler: Again, a big efficiency time-saver and opportunity to provide a differentiated service to our customers. That's how we work. How we demonstrate performance is a big part of what we do as a service provider. Oftentimes, since we're working on very large and complex machines in industrial and hospital or other complex environments, it's difficult for our customers to even understand exactly what we did. We certainly try to convey that in a written service report, but we've also adopted video recaps of our service events.

Brad Resler: Our technicians, when they complete an event ... and they may get some before footage and then show some after footage and can describe exactly what it is that they did so a customer has a better understanding of what happened and what they're paying for. Every one of our service reports and our invoices as well, contains a link to a video recap of that service event. It's a pretty simple piece of technology, but it's been very effective to convey to our customers what it is we do.

Brad Resler: Then in terms of our training, really at the end of the day, what we sell is the expertise of our people, so training is a huge area of focus for us. Being spread out all over the southeast, we've really turned to technology to up our training game when it comes to providing virtual training events, different ways of making content available upon demand, even in the course of a service event, that can help our staff be more effective. Technology is really embedded in every aspect of what we do. Some big, some more so.

Sarah Nicastro: Again, looking at the building upon what you have in place, from a technology perspective, what do you think are some of the next iterations or next steps for Brady?

Brad Resler: Well, some of it is what I described. It's how do we respond more effectively to what buildings are telling us and working with our customers more as a business partner than a contractor to help them solve their problems. Just even having a good technical understanding of the data and of what's happening, is only part of the picture. We need to understand our customer's business objectives. How they want to operate that plant or that facility, what exactly an operating room needs to be set up as in order to do those procedures.

Brad Resler: We have to know those requirements of our customers and marry those with our expertise to provide them proactive service. That's really the future of our organization. That's how we're trying to differentiate. That's how we evaluate technology in order to make good investments and implement it appropriately in our business. That's what we'll continue to do as we go forward.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because on one hand I see that customers really want simplicity. They want you to take on the complexity of doing all of those things on the backend that makes the service to them seem simple. It's just things are working the way they should without a lot of complexity on their behalf, but on the other hand it's interesting what you mentioned about while that is true in terms of wanting the service to be executed with simplicity on their behalf, they also want the insights.

Sarah Nicastro: In that sense, they want more information than maybe you were giving in the past. It's not just, "Hey, yep. We were here, we did the job. You're welcome." It's, "We were here. Here's what we did and here's a video of it." They want that reassurance that they are getting their money's worth or what have you. It's interesting that on one hand they want super simplicity and on the other hand, they want more context maybe than they've had in the past. There's a ton of opportunity in terms of the move to more predictive and how you expand to meet more of their needs and all of that.

Sarah Nicastro: One of the things that I also find interesting is, a lot of the steps you've taken within these three areas or these three pillars has given Brady progress in improving the customer experience and providing better service to the customers, but also improving efficiency and productivity for the business. Is that a correct understanding? It's a lot of these areas of focus or areas of investment are double-focused?

Brad Resler: Yeah. If you're doing it well, they certainly go hand in hand. You're streamlining your operations to only provide the outcomes that are important to customers, that makes you more efficient, that makes you more valuable to your customers when you can deliver on a consistent basis exactly what they're looking for. Even the next level is really justifying the value of what you provide customers. Customers are increasingly looking to us to help with energy modeling and helping with ROI type of data on either replace or repair machines or just overall operation of their facilities.

Brad Resler: Again, that's how we become a business partner and a trusted advisor rather than just a service dispatch operation. A lot of that's driven through technology, but it's understanding that at the end of the day, it's about expertise, it's about speed, and it's about doing business in a way that the customer wants to do business with you. All of those things are part of how we evaluate and implement any technology that we would adopt.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That makes sense. Good. You've shared what you see as the future for Brady coming up. Anything you would add in terms of what you expect on Brady's journey over the next 12 or 18 months?

Brad Resler: Well, the next 12 or 18 months are going to bring a lot of change, just like the last 12 or 18 months. Certainly, in the age of COVID our customers' needs in the last four months have changed significantly. They've got, in some cases, less people in the building, or they need to get a better understanding of who's in the building, where they are. They need to introduce fresh air into the building more often when it's occupied. They need better ventilation and air quality.

Brad Resler: Change is just really coming at us very rapidly, but through all of that, we've got to remain focused on the fundamentals, because while you've got a lot of change happening and a lot of change in the world, our fundamentals won't change. Our fundamentals are providing a good, fast service that our customers can rely on. We've got to be able to continue to do that as we deal with the rest of the change. We never try to stray too far from the fundamentals.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Would you say that the foundational work you've done in the three areas we talked about today, so culture, processes and technology, helped you be more adept in how you've responded to COVID and the changes that it has brought?

Brad Resler: Yeah. I really think it has. Yeah. Focusing in those areas that has allowed us to develop some great customer relationships and communication now is more important than ever because we've had to navigate with, when can we be onsite? How do we go onsite? How long can we stay onsite? Are we restricted to work in certain areas? It's just introduced a lot of friction in our operations that without having those good relationships and those good fundamentals in place, would be even more disruptive than they are.

Brad Resler: I think it's certainly been helpful. We certainly learned a lot and we fully expect to come out of COVID with a better understanding of how we can do those things than when we went in. We try to look at that as an opportunity as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Last question, Brad, and I like to ask most of our guests this question, I just find it very interesting, is, as you've led Brady through all of this foundational work or fundamental work to be able to adapt and evolve and innovate, what is the biggest lesson you've learned?

Brad Resler: The biggest lesson I've learned. Probably that faster isn't always better. I like to do things fast and check things off the list and accomplish something, and pace is just so critical when it comes to managing change and evolving culture and adopting new technology. You certainly don't want to go too slow or you'll miss the boat, but you definitely can go too fast. That's been an adjustment for me. That's something that leaders of the business that have helped me with, leaders in the field have helped me with in perspective of everybody involved.

Brad Resler: It's just something you have to learn as you go in some cases, but I definitely have a different perspective on that. It just requires more planning, more discipline and a better thought out strategy than maybe you would otherwise. That's been a real eye-opener for many of these last several years.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a very, very good point. I'm like you, it sounds. I'm a little bit ... I like to move fast and I'm not the most patient person so that discipline is important and that's a very good point. Well, Brad, I really appreciate you joining us today and sharing your story and Brady's story, and look forward to staying connected and having you back at some point and seeing how things are progressing. Thank you for being here.

Brad Resler: That sounds great. Thank you Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: You can find more content by visiting us at www.futureoffieldservice.com. You can also find us on LinkedIn as well as Twitter, @TheFutureOfFS. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS Service Management by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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