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May 26, 2021 | 26 Mins Read

Destigmatizing, Normalizing and Prioritizing Mental Health in the Workplace

May 26, 2021 | 26 Mins Read

Destigmatizing, Normalizing and Prioritizing Mental Health in the Workplace

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Sarah welcomes Johnny Crowder, suicide/abuse survivor, TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, and the Founder & CEO of Cope Notes, a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly 100 countries across the globe, to discuss the criticality of prioritizing mental health in the workplace.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be talking about the need to de-stigmatize, normalize and prioritize mental health in the workplace. Hopefully you are aware that this month, May, is mental health awareness month. Those of you that listen to the podcast regularly or read our content, know that this is a very important topic to me. And I am thrilled to have here with me today, Johnny Crowder. Johnny is a TEDx speaker, touring musician, mental health and sobriety advocate, as well as the founder and CEO of Cope Notes, which is a text-based mental health platform that provides daily support to users in nearly a hundred countries. Johnny, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast.

Johnny Crowder: Thank you for having me. I'm pumped up.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. So I found Johnny on LinkedIn and I am a big fan of his content and messages. I'm also a big fan in general, about how mental health is something that you see discussed more and more on LinkedIn, right? I think that's kind of a bit of what we're going to talk about today is this is not needed to be a conversation that you reserve for Facebook or Instagram or whatever your personal social media platform is of choice, it is a conversation that is important for us to be discussing in professional forums as well. So Johnny, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and your journey and how you got to the point of becoming a mental health advocate and public speaker.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. So the short version, I'll tell you the short version. The long version, I have a TEDx talk. So if you want to go listen to that, that's like an 18 minute breakdown of how the heck I got here.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Johnny Crowder: But the short version, I'm going to leave out a lot of details here, but essentially I grew up in an abusive home and I learned all the wrong things about myself at a very young age, started developing symptoms of mental illness much, much younger than most people. So I'm talking like toddler years, elementary school, middle school. So I never really had like a normal day, that like childhood day where you go play soccer and you eat a freezer pop or whatever. I had a lot of trauma and a lot of illness at a really young age. And it kept me from performing daily tasks for a long time.

Johnny Crowder: So like any child would I resisted treatment for like 10 whole years. I just wouldn't touch it. And then I started mandatory treatment in high school because of some behavior issues. And then I wound up taking psychology courses to prove my doctors wrong. It turns out they were right. And then I took more psychology courses, eventually got a degree from the University of Central Florida in psychology. And then I switched. The big shift was thinking that I wanted to become a clinician to realizing the power of peer support and just using what I had been through to employ empathy. So now instead of being a doctor, I just work with doctors and then I provide that peer perspective from someone who's actually been through it firsthand. And then those doctors can provide the book learn inside.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. Okay, good. So when did you do your first, I guess, public speaking thing related to this topic? How old were you, what was kind of the... how did that come to be? Was it your TED talk, or I'm assuming you've been speaking before that?

Johnny Crowder: No. I can't imagine the TED talk being like my first time talking about it. Well, I think, so it started, it's a really unglamorous start. I found out about NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, when I was in college and I was like performing, I was teaching and performing improv and I was in a band and we were touring and stuff. So I was a little bit familiar with stage, but definitely not talking about my own personal mental health on stage. And I met NAMI greater Orlando when I was in school, and they were like, "Yeah, we have people come up and speak at events and schools just about what they've been through," and I was like, "Oh, well, I'm still really sick. So like, can I participate while I'm still having a lot of issues?" And they were like, "Definitely, come get involved and volunteer."

Johnny Crowder: So I actually just got a LinkedIn notification that my 10 year anniversary with NAMI was this month. So literally 10 years ago. You got to picture me. I'm 18, still have pimples. I'm still trying to figure out the chest hair situation, whether or not I'm going to grow any. And I just started getting on stage at these really small, local volunteer type events and just trying to awkwardly share what I had been through. And over time it became... it started feeling more and more natural to the point now where if someone asks me about my mental health in a professional setting, I'm not like, bah, but they're seriously when I would apply to jobs, I would try to do everything within my power to prevent my employer from learning that I was taking anti-psychotic medication or seeing a therapist and so on, so the stigma was real.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think, going back to what I mentioned in the introduction with some of the content you see come up on LinkedIn and some of the conversations we've had even on this podcast, that dialogue is changing and I'm very grateful for that, but there's a long way to go. There's a long way to go. And there's a couple points in what you just said that I think are important. One is, normalizing this topic is everyone's responsibility, right? And it's not just if you struggle with it and it's not just if you don't, right? It's sort of understanding that collectively is how we make more progress in making this a more normal part of dialogue and a more normal part of our professional lives.

Sarah Nicastro: The other thing is, I like what you said about sharing even though you were still struggling. Right? I mean, I know when you and I connected last, I told you there's a woman, Glennon Doyle, for anyone that is not familiar with her, she has been a writer and a public speaker and an activist in different ways. She wrote a book in 2013 called Carry on Warrior that really, really changed my life. I read it on an airplane rides in California. And I remember I just had tears streaming down my face, but it was talking about her experiences with anxiety and depression. And it was really the first time in my life I felt that it was okay that I wasn't okay. Do you know what I mean? And it was, 2013 doesn't sound so long ago to me, but really it was before there was as much open dialogue about this in, whether it's blogs or podcasts or just on social media. It was huge.

Sarah Nicastro: She actually just launched a podcast and the first episode was last week. And one of the listeners asked something about her coping mechanisms for anxiety. And she said, "Well, the first thing is I had to admit I'm never getting better. It is who I am and it's not going to go away. So once I could stop waiting for it to disappear, I could breathe again, because I wasn't trying to fundamentally change who I am as a person. And then I could actually look at, okay, how can I cope with this? Not how can I wish it away?" And I thought that was super powerful. But anyway, all of that to say, you never know when sharing your own experience or being open to listening to someone else's struggles is going to really, really change things for someone. And so it's important for us to all acknowledge the role we can play in this topic. Does that make sense? That was a lot of me babbling. I'm sorry.

Johnny Crowder: No, I specifically remember clarifying with NAMI before I... I have really bad memory loss from medication like long-term, but this is one thing that I specifically remember. I was quadruple checking with one of the organizers before I first started sharing it, like in a peer support setting. I'm like, "Are you sure it's okay? Because I'm still pretty in the thick of everything and trying to figure stuff out." And they were saying, "That's actually great because you're not so far out of it that you're saying, 'Oh yeah, dude, read this book and take this vitamin and you'll be fine. And I'm fine. Look at me now.'" That doesn't help as much as someone explaining to you what they're going through and you're going, "Holy crap. Yeah, exactly. It is really complicated. I wish it was that easy, but it's not," like that is the essence of peer support.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So in terms of peer support, not only do you public speak and advocate yourself, but you've also created Cope Notes. So tell the people listening a little bit about what Cope Notes is and why it exists.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. So Cope Notes uses daily text messages to improve mental and emotional health. And the whole reason we're doing that is because a lot of people don't have time for like an hour appointment or they don't know what their schedule is going to be like, so it's hard to plan for traditional mental health services. Or they have privacy concerns. I know that that's something that I was pretty concerned with when I was first starting to use some online digital mental health supports. And then it's also for people who struggle with consistency like me. So I'm the kind of person who, with all the best intentions, I either over commit or under commit and the under committing is a result of over-committing. So I'll be like, okay, I'm going to run seven miles every day for the whole year. And it's like, dude, that's such a bad plan.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: Like you're going to burn out, you're going to... It's not going to work long-term. So I wanted to create something that could sustain the consistency necessary to improve mental health long term. So Cope Notes, one thing I want to clarify is Cope Notes isn't like a magical, it'll make you better overnight. This is something that, we're investing in you a year from now. Just like if you brush your teeth every day, it's not going to magically get rid of cavities, but over time it will prevent you from getting cavities. And Cope Notes is kind of the same thing, like low effort. There's a low threshold, low barrier to entry and it's pretty passive. So these texts come to you. It's not like you have to remember to use the tool, and over time, it literally trains your brain to think in healthier patterns.

Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Very cool. Okay. We've both shared a little bit about ourselves. And let's talk though, let's start talking about why it's so important to de-stigmatize mental health issues in the workplace. So as you know, most of the people listening to this podcast are in the business world and responsible for teams and responsible for employees, and we probably have people from different ends of the spectrum, people that are like, "Yeah, let's normalize mental health," and then people that are like, "What? I don't want to talk about that or think about that or address that." So let's talk about why it's important to commit to de-stigmatizing this topic.

Johnny Crowder: Well, I'm thinking if you're a leader right now, you're listening and you are a manager, you have a team, picture yourself like a coach for a second. So you're the coach of a soccer team. Because I mentioned soccer earlier. How important is it for you as a coach to create an atmosphere, an environment for your team to let you know if they're hurt? Like imagine if you were the type of coach... and this is what's happening in the corporate world, by the way, we have coaches proverbially who are saying, if you break your ankle, I don't want to hear about it. Your team doesn't want to hear about it. Don't show weakness, get back out there on the field and crush the opponent no matter what. And what you're doing is guaranteeing that you will lose the game. And you're guaranteeing that you will lose a star player. Because he only thing that will make a broken ankle worse is continuing to play on the broken ankle.

Johnny Crowder: And a lot of people who are in a corporate environment, they'll start experiencing like crippling OCD to where it's interfering with their, it's not only interfering with their work, but also with their work-life balance. And then that's affecting their sleep and it's affecting their eating, and then that's affecting their performance. And we have leaders who are saying that's personal stuff. No, it's not. No, it's not. If it's affecting work performance, it is not a purely personal matter. Anyone... And you know what I've seen, there's a little more talk about this lately, which I think is important, divorce. When someone is going through a divorce, have you ever met someone who was going through a divorce and it didn't affect their work performance?

Sarah Nicastro: Right. No.

Johnny Crowder: So you can't... It's important to establish work-life balance. But also leaders are in a position where, I mean, if they actually care about their company, they actually care about the progress of what they're building and they care about their team, you don't even have to have a heart for the people. Even if you're like this cold calculated spreadsheet person, you don't give a crap about how people feel, you should still care about de-stigmatizing mental health. Because imagine if you were in a boat that had a hole and you couldn't find it, and the boat was going down and you couldn't find it because none of the people on the boat would want to tell you where the hole was because they were afraid to get in trouble or get judged. Your boat's going to sink, period.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. So that's it, that's a good point. I mean, hopefully you care because you care about people.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah, definitely

Sarah Nicastro: But for anyone that's listening that doesn't... No. But I mean, it is a good point that this is, you can care, and let's say that's the warm, fuzzy side of it, right? Like I really care about my team or my employees, but there's also an element of needing to realize the impact on performance and looking at it strategically in the sense of it isn't just about being a warm, fuzzy, I care about my people thing, it is also an element of the same way that you... A lot of companies have programs that help employees with their physical health because they want people to be healthy and they want people to show up and feel good and be able to do their work. It's the same idea with the mental health, right? It's maybe not as visible in some ways as physical ailments, but it's certainly just as important.

Sarah Nicastro: And I would say, with everything that's gone on in the past year, pro and con. Pro is, I think even companies that before weren't acknowledging the criticality of this topic have realized that they need to. Con is, people are a bit more stressed, burned out and struggling than they ever have been, right? So I said this earlier, we all have a responsibility in this, but let me hear from your perspective. Why is it everyone's job to normalize and prioritize mental health within a business?

Johnny Crowder: Well, you can either be an example or a non-example. And I know that for myself, if I ever had a non-example, I would cling to that. So I'm trying to think when I was in college, if I knew nine people, this is hypothetical, if I knew nine other students who were engaging with mental health services, and I knew nine teachers who are opening up about mental health, but I knew one student and one teacher that didn't want to talk about it, that's it. "Oh, that's not for me. And I'm actually good." I would identify with that person every single time, because people are naturally looking for an excuse not to work on themselves. They're always sure. Yesterday I had a sunburn. I still have one. I don't know if you can see it. It's mostly on my shoulders.

Sarah Nicastro: You don't even look red.

Johnny Crowder: But it was a real sunburn and I wanted ice cream because I was so hot. And I had ice cream, and it was great. And I can virtually guarantee you that if I wasn't sunburned, I would have found another reason to have ice cream, because I wanted it. It works the same way with something, I'll relate this to physical health as well, exercise. I can find a reason not to exercise. I've been working out forever and I can find a reason to be like, oh, you know what? Well, today is Monday. And maybe I should start working on organizing my closet because I've been meaning to do that for a while. I will avoid working out when I'm tired. And if I have a friend who says, "Oh yeah, I skip the gym a lot." I say, "Oh, I identify with that person."

Johnny Crowder: So each time you turn down the opportunity to share about yourself, or you turn down the opportunity to engage in a mental health conversation, you are providing a, it's not even a safe haven, it's a danger Haven. I don't even know if that's a thing, but you're giving someone who might need genuine help and support an opportunity to not engage by setting the wrong example. So no one is exempt from this. Like kids, trust me, if you have an eight year old who's talking to you about feeling anxious, that'll change a parent. So forget status roles or forget ages or demographics. Everyone has an opportunity to lead by example. And by choosing to not lead by example, you are accidentally still leading by example, you're just leading by the wrong one.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Right. Yes. And it's, I think a recognition that you don't know when or how you're going to help someone in a significant way, but guaranteed, if you're avoiding, consciously avoiding the opportunity to do that, then you're not going to help someone, right? It is important for everyone to understand the role they play in normalizing these conversations and making this a priority within organizations. And I think that those negative examples hopefully are becoming few fewer and further between, and also standing out more. Right? That's kind of the flip side of this is as this conversation does normalize, those perceptions of this as a taboo topic or whatever are becoming less and less mainstream, that's... Yeah. So what would be your best advice for listeners on to create a company culture that's mental health friendly and/or what are some of the biggest mistakes you see companies make as they're making an effort to do that?

Johnny Crowder: So I'll start with mistakes. What I see really commonly is something like, "Oh, it's mental health awareness month. And for mental health awareness month, we're going to send an e-blast out to everybody. And then maybe if you reply to a poll, you can get entered for a chance to win a water bottle." And that's it. And then at the end of May, all the executives are patting themselves on the back like, "Yeah, we're so good. We're such good people." Or they'll do like, as for mental health awareness month, we donated $500 to a local mental health charity, and then pat, pat, pat on my back and then we'll do a press release about it. And then everybody's happy. I see a lot of that. And I also see it. I don't even have to tell listeners why that's not enough. So I'm not going to use time talking about that.

Johnny Crowder: But I will say that what I do see commonly as kind of like too much, too soon. So people going like, "Oh, now we're going to have yoga every morning. And then before the beginning of every meeting we're going to have this namaste moment where everyone goes around the table and talks about how they feel." And then productivity is lowered and people are like, "Am I really supposed to be honest in this setting?" So I see a lot of that, like too much, too soon where they're not really thinking about culture, they're more thinking about policy. And the best policy in the world won't save you from a bad culture.

Johnny Crowder: When I'm looking at something like a company culture around mental health, I think small incremental steps and including it in existing policy rather than drafting a whole new policy. I remember I was in the Carolinas and I was with my buddies kids. He has five kids. Five.

Sarah Nicastro: Can't imagine.

Johnny Crowder: And they were making lunch for the kids and they just, they don't like spinach. It's like something in the house where they're like, "Ooh, spinach is gross." So what she did was she put slices of spinach in a grilled cheese sandwich. Not slices of spinach, you know what I'm talking about, leaves.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, yeah.

Johnny Crowder: In a grilled cheese sandwich. And then she had them take bites with their eyes closed to see which slice of grilled cheese they liked better, one with spinach one without. And they realized they couldn't tell the difference with their eyes closed. And I was blown away. I was like, this is such an innovative approach to getting these kids eat spinach. And she's like, "Well, yeah, if I just pour out a big bowl of spinach no one's going to eat any. You have to work it into things that they're familiar with that they like." And I think the same is true for mental health.

Johnny Crowder: Don't just dump it all into a bowl and push it out to all your employees. You have to... it's lots of casual mentions. So using a term like anxious or anxiety or depressed or depression, even just those two very basic things or asking people like how they are feeling, or if you're too scared of stuff like that, and you're a leader, you can literally start with asking people like for a minute at the top of a meeting, what they did over the weekend and then encouraging people to follow up with each other to ask, "Oh, you said you rode BMX this weekend. How did you even get into that?" And fostering those interpersonal conversations. Because if all your work conversations are about work, I can guarantee that people will never be fully honest in the work place.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. That's a really good point. I think we had a gentleman from QIAGEN on the podcast a few months ago, and we talked specifically about how they've increased their focus on employee mental health, really seeing the opportunity or need that COVID presented, and making it a focus for their field service operations, and a lot... Go ahead, go ahead.

Johnny Crowder: I just wanted to mention, I just had a great idea. I mean, it's not even an idea, but it's, a lot of leaders that I speak to say, "Well, my people don't really know me like that" or, "I don't really want to be the one that initiates something like that." This is when you need a scapegoat.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Johnny Crowder: So this is like, I am a professional scapegoat.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Johnny Crowder: Because, if you're a leader and you say something and it falls flat or lands wrong and you're in your head about it, things can go sideways. But if you, "Hey, we're going to have a speaker come in or we're going to have someone come, like a third party," then you offload that like nervous responsibility.

Sarah Nicastro: Responsibility, yeah.

Johnny Crowder: And then you get to refer to someone who's not you. So it doesn't seem like, "Steve is deciding that this is the way it is." You say, "The speaker the other day mentioned..." and then you have like stuff to pull from.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah.

Johnny Crowder: So a lot of people are afraid of being like the bad guy or the mental health guy, the person to start the conversation. It's like the spooky taboo region of conversation for some reason. And I always tell people that's exactly when you need a third party to come in and start it so that you can work off the momentum of that conversation rather than you being like, "I don't know what to say or don't know what to do." Let somebody else start the engine.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes, yes. That's a good point. And I think, probably a necessity for some personality types or comfort levels, but I also think, don't be a chicken and don't try and shirk your own responsibility for contributing. Now, that could be following on a speaker or it could just be taking the initiative flat out. But I think that what you said is it's really a matter of baby steps into the already existing processes, right? And that can feel uncomfortable at first, but the stakes are low. I mean, you ask how everyone's feeling in a meeting and you might get a couple of weird looks, but if you do it often enough, then people will start to engage.

Sarah Nicastro: I also think that leaders have to understand that it's a two-way street. So it can't just be you asking, how do you feel, how do you feel, how do you feel, if you're never willing to kind of engage on that personal level in an authentic way, whatever that looks like for you, but you have to be willing to share some of your own feelings, thoughts, struggles, as well, so that you model the fact that that level of engagement is not just accepted within the organization, but encouraged.

Johnny Crowder: Yeah. I'm thinking of one particular board that I serve on where there's a doctor that leads the board and she will kind of, at the top of the meeting, everyone will like share for about a minute or so just very brief, very quick talking about stuff. And she did this thing especially early on when the board was new. I've been with them for a couple of years now, but early on, I was like, I don't know basically anyone here, so I don't know what I'm supposed to share and when I'm not supposed to share.

Johnny Crowder: And she did this thing where she was explaining, like we go around and share and she's like, "I'll go first. I had a paper due last Thursday and it was due for publication and someone messed up a submission number somewhere and it's been pushed off. And I thought about it the entire weekend. That happened on Thursday. Today's Monday. And I feel like I couldn't get my brain to think about other things because I was so anxious about the thing on Thursday and whether or not they'll let us submit late. So honestly I'm a little wiped out, but I'm looking forward to getting energy back from this meeting." And I was just like, holy crap, this is the leader of the whole thing. And then as people started sharing, I mean, you don't have to tell people to share something similar, they will do it naturally because they saw that there was no consequence.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Yes. But you have to humanize yourself, right?

Johnny Crowder: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Sarah Nicastro: So let's talk then about why sometimes I think people don't do that, which is this sort of misconception that leaders have to kind of have that stiff upper lip, that I needed to be in a position where I command respect and I shouldn't let any cracks in the foundation show or signs of weakness or what have you. So what would you say to that misconception and why that is sort of an incorrect or outdated view of what leadership should look like?

Johnny Crowder: I think outdated is the right word, because that used to be a thing. Think back in the previous century and people were going through a lot of stuff, they needed a fearless leader, strong. And they're like, "Oh, we have to cut a thousand jobs this week," and the leader is like, "I will make it happen." That was kind of, I guess it worked for a long time, but now it's you see something like that and you just think, did they even hear? That's bad news. The thing that I think maybe a few decades ago what people feared most in a work setting was like a spineless leader or a leader that couldn't take action or a leader that couldn't command authority. Now people's fear is like a careless, cold, callous leader. They don't want to follow a robot. Why do you think there's like authenticity and vulnerability trainings and all this stuff for leaders? It's because people want to work for somebody who they know is a real person.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: And that's why I think, in the modern era, like before technology, I think strength was important. But now with everyone being able to access, basically they can look you up and find out all this stuff about you, they don't want to see that, they don't want to see your resume in a work setting or what you've accomplished. They want to see, oh dang, okay, he has a three-year-old and his three-year-old threw up on him. And that's, I've been through that, too.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Who you are underneath.

Johnny Crowder: And all of a sudden you're like, "Man, you know what? I remember when my kid was three and I... Yeah, I want to give a little extra juice this week because I remember going through that" or, "Man, my kid is going to be three next year and I want to learn from this guy." So there's all of these opportunities to shift the way that you portray yourself in a work setting in order to provide more value. And in fact, most people think they're compromising authority and you're not. You're not. The people who have the most authority, if you think about virtually anything, the people who have the most authority are the people you like the most.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: For example, in my mind, if I've met you and I know you, you have more authority than the mayor of my city. Because I've never met the mayor of my city. So that, don't compromise, don't think that you have to compromise authority for showing your personality, because think about the people with the most authority in your life, they're most likely your friends and family.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. I was just going to say, I think the goal of authority in many cases is influence, right? And so I think that's going back to what we talked about earlier. Like hopefully you care about this topic because you just care. Right? But there is also an element of normalizing mental health discussions, not only because you care about your people, but because you don't need that hole in the boat, as you said. Same thing goes here. I wouldn't suggest trying to become more vulnerable as a leader just to exercise influence over people. Okay? It needs to be authentic. But when you can authentically connect with people in a human way, you do increase your influence over them. Do you know what I mean? There is also a correlation in terms of the positive impact on people, but also the positive impact on outcome. Right? So, that's a good point as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I know we're going to run out of time. I want to ask two other quick questions, Johnny. The first is, if you see an employee is struggling or if you know an employee, hopefully at some point it feels comfortable coming to you and saying that they are struggling, what is the best ways for a company or a leader to offer support?

Johnny Crowder: So, number one, don't be empty handed. Like don't say, "Well, no one's ever asked us for stuff so we don't need stuff." Wrong. Now is the time to have a few go-to resources. And I would say, make sure those resources are tiered. Don't give them three of the same type of thing. Like we have a red one, a blue one and a yellow one. Be like, what is your scale of need right now? Are you like a one to three? Are you a four to six? Are you a seven to 10? And then have at least one option in each of those categories? So I would say if you... Most people say, I want a suite of products to hand people, just make sure that they're covering different bases.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: And then I'll say, if you're identifying someone who might be struggling, the best thing you can do, best thing you can do is take them out to lunch. Best thing you can do. And no pretense, no anything like that, and just like spend time with them. Because I can almost guarantee, like food makes people let their guard down. If you take them out, you don't have to be like, "So how's your mental health lately?"

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Johnny Crowder: Just be like, "Hey, just wanted to take you out. And I had a gift card to Chili's, so I thought it would be nice for you to get out of the office for a little while," and just talk. But I would say in either scenario, make clear that if they share something, make it clear like, "Hey, you're not going to get in trouble for what you just said to me. So don't leave this office and wonder if you made a mistake or anything. You got to know, we're not going to be... I'm not going to like go to all these higher ups and be like, oh, listen, this is what this guy is going through." Just remind them as they leave like, what you just did was really important, now I'm clued in. I can help and we can see, we can actually work together to solve this rather than you trying to figure it out on your own. So you just made the best decision you could make, like reinforce that

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Positive reinforcement of articulating that need. Right? Yeah. That's a good point. Okay. Last question. Tell listeners what resources, offhand, do you recommend for folks that want to either expand their own knowledge on mental health or look at different resources for their organizations. What are your suggestions there?

Johnny Crowder: So I'm going to be biased and recommend Cope Notes and also my TED talk. But outside of that, I would recommend NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. I can guarantee there's an affiliate close to you and they'll have a pretty good finger on the pulse of what resources are available in your area. And also TED talks in general. They have a way of taking these really complicated like subjects and then distilling them down into like 15, 10, 20 minutes. And that helps. Even if you, from now on, you send one TED talk a month, or you watch it with your employees over lunch, or you send it out via email or whatever, you have it on your internal employee board and you have the TED talk of the month and it's related to mental health, people will watch that and it will make a difference, because education is key.

Johnny Crowder: If you make health education easy and communal in that, "Hey everyone, homework for over the weekend, you watch this TED talk, it will take 15 minutes. And then on Monday morning at the first 10 minutes of our all hands meeting, we're going to just talk about some insights that we gleaned from the TED talk." That's the stuff that changes culture.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Very good points. All right, Johnny. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate you being here.

Johnny Crowder: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: You can learn more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.com. If you within your organization are taking strides to de-stigmatize and normalize mental health, I would love to talk with you about that and have you on the podcast as well. The Future of Field Service podcast is published in partnership with IFS. You can learn more about IFS at ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Foxtel Masters The Contract Workforce Model

May 19, 2021 | 31 Mins Read

Foxtel Masters The Contract Workforce Model

Nunzio Bagnato, Director of Home Service & Advance Servicing At Foxtel, describes how the company has motivated its contract workers to be highly engaged, effective, and empowered to deliver the Foxtel brand experience.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today we're going to be discussing a topic that comes up, conversation after conversation with opposing views and a lot of questions. I think we're going to answer some of those here today, so we're going to be talking about how Foxtel has mastered the contract workforce model.

Sarah Nicastro: I'm excited to be joined today by Nunzio Bagnato who is the Director of Home Service and Advanced Servicing for Foxtel. Nunzio, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Nunzio Bagnato: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here.

Nunzio Bagnato: How are you?

Sarah Nicastro: Good, good. Doing great. All right, so before we get into the contract workforce discussion, start by just telling our listeners a bit about yourself and your role and your background and anything you want to share related to Foxtel.

Nunzio Bagnato: Yeah, thank you. Look, as you said, I look after the home service part of our business as well as the advanced servicing. Advanced servicing is more to do with our case, technical case management and secondary activities that require some additional case management. But around 50% of my role, even 60% of my role is the home service, field service part of the business, and I oversee the field service part of that business as well as the contract relationship, all the field activities that involve installation, servicing the customer, upgrading the customer.

Nunzio Bagnato: I've been at Foxtel for 23 years, I've got 30 years experience in field service, originally started as a field technician at one of our first pay TV companies when I was about 20, and have been in the industry ever since and made my way up the ladder, and have now enjoy running a successful home service team here at Foxtel.

Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. Okay, so 23 years, that's a heck of a tenure, and you have that first hand perspective of what the front line job is all about. So I think that's really cool as well. I want to start by saying the audience of this podcast is a global audience and so we talked about the fact, Nunzio, when you and I connected previously, that the contract model is a more common model in Australia, and so I think that factors in to this discussion in the sense of maybe giving you a little bit more of a comfort level around it, but I think the practices that you have put in place at Foxtel for really mastering and optimizing this model, or something that is easily transferable or good food for thought for any company in any region looking to better leverage the value of a contingent workforce.

Sarah Nicastro: That being said, there does seem to be some debate around, is our contract workers the way to go, are they not the way to go? Are they the way to go, or are they not the way to go? In Australia, it's more common. You had mention that when you talk with colleagues in the US, the number one issue seems to be concern over control. Why do you think is?

Nunzio Bagnato: Look, I understand that concern. For many, many years we had some of those challenges. We had a traditional contractor model. Very transactional, very volume based model and the field technician was probably single minded focusing on what they can get from the role. It was the way we shifted that model, moved up to a more service based model, less transactional. And transformed what the technician should do and what the contractor's responsibility is in that contract.

Nunzio Bagnato: And it wasn't until we actually shifted to the new model and changed the way we operate and the way we engage with our vendors or our contractors, that's when we started to see the results of what we see today. We needed to change the culture. Traditionally a contractor model is transactional, it's a master/servant sort of arrangement, and you're going to get those type of results, you're going to get that behavior, you're going to get that culture.

Nunzio Bagnato: So, how do get a contracted workforce to feel and behave like your own field workforce without crossing any of those legal lines and having a strategic partnership where you have your contracting workforce or your contractors in the same building, side-by-side, part of your team, an extension of my structure and then have the field workforce change the way they interact with the customer, the way they actually present themselves. Shifting that model, introducing a score card model. And I know that every organization has score cards, but we didn't want to introduce a score card that was just something that we look at and tick and flick, it really had to be a way of working. It was the Foxtel way, if you like.

Nunzio Bagnato: And it was the program of work that we married with the score card and the rankings, and I'll talk a bit more about the score card. We did away with all those penalties in a traditional contracted model. In the past technicians will be penalized for not hitting KPIs or milestones. We did away with that. Our view was that we're dealing with adults. We want to have adult conversations with our vendors, our technicians or our contracting leadership team and have meaningful collaborative conversations.

Nunzio Bagnato: If they're an extension of my team, then we're having the same operating with them. We have those weekly meetings, we have those strategic meetings that actually drives us to meet our strategic goals. So, they are the key areas that we changed. To colocation, the extension of our team, the score card and the culture, and by the way, it wasn't like we just flicked it overnight. It was a journey, especially the culture phase. Shifting an entire workforce from a traditional contractor model to the model that we have today, we still have challenges today, but by large, we have been able to shift the workforce.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, we're going to dig into all of that a little bit more, but I think one of the key messages that I want to get across to listeners here is that not only would you say that the cost efficiency of the model outweigh some of those concerns, but it doesn't necessarily have to be a trade-off. There are steps you can take and measures you can put in place to circumvent and alleviate a lot of the concerns that I think prohibit people from taking a deeper look at this model. Would you agree with that?

Nunzio Bagnato: Yeah. I don't disagree, no. You're right.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, so let's talk then about some of those steps that Foxtel has taken to really shift things from that transactional more penalty based environment to one that's more collaborative, and when you said that we've gotten away from penalties and we've shifted, I know what you've shifted to, so I have a little bit of a sneak peek, but it made me think of parenting. They say that when you can give positive reinforcement, it's much more effective than punishment, punishment, punishment. So that seems to be a theme here as well.

Nunzio Bagnato: Well, it's an interesting point you make there. That exact point was pretty much when it came to the score card and how we actually managed the score card and the conversation we have with our field technicians. We wanted to focus on the positives. Every conversation had to be around the positives. What are we doing really, really well? And how? First of all, how did you get there? Not by luck. Not by sheer luck. You got there because you did something, you followed a particular sequence or you followed the process, or whatever it may be.

Nunzio Bagnato: Understanding how you got there, so we can continue to do that or improve on that is critical, so positively reinforcement and then what else can we do to improve? What are some of the other areas we can improve on? That is definitely how we approach our conversations. And that is at all levels. What I do when talking to my direct reports, when they're talking to the vendor or leadership team, we're talking to the field leadership team, when we're talking to the tech leadership team, it's the same, same conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: Yes. And I think that another aspect here is, if you're looking more for positive reinforcement, then how do you incentivize or reward these workers in a way that promotes those positive behaviors rather than simply penalizing them for a negative outcome. We're going to dig into that. Before we do, you mentioned that the score card was one pillar of this overall journey. Walk us back through the different areas of this, and then we'll dig into the score card specifically.

Nunzio Bagnato: We really needed to shift the way that the technician focused on the day. And prior to the score card or prior to our command center model being rolled out, our technicians focused on the traditional metrics like the completion rates, the misdeployment, blah, blah, blah. Really important, really important, but it was definitely drove a volume base behavior. Bang, bang, bang, bang, just get through the day as quick as I can, get the volumes through, because the more I do, the more I get paid.

Nunzio Bagnato: But that obviously impacted the way we actually serviced our customers, it impacted quality, it impacted safety, it impacted a number different areas of our business that we felt that needed to be addressed. And we lost the reason, we lost focus on why we're here. We needed to realize, we needed to take a step back and really make sure that everyone in our business understands why we're here. We're here to provide a service to a customer. In my case, we're providing entertainment to a customer.

Nunzio Bagnato: There was no focus on the customer when we're out there, so let's focus on the customer. We introduced the score card collectively with the leadership team, we introduced the score card that focused on four quadrants. And the first quadrant was all about the customer. It's about customer surveys and arrival on time. That's it. That's all I want to know about. If we go out there and we get a really good survey and great verbatims to go with that, and we've met their expectations by arriving on time, we've done what we had to do in that particular quadrant.

Nunzio Bagnato: And then we have our cycle quadrant, which is your traditional metrics, which is your completion rates and that type of stuff. The other quadrant is finance, and we wanted to focus on the finance component of what the technician does, because we do have a free issue model in our business. There are things that we need to keep an eye on and the contractors are a sub-contractor, their own business. So they need to understand how they impact the financial component of the score card. Nothing major, just something small, just for them to keep an eye on, but it's really important for us to keep track of our free issue and inventory.

Nunzio Bagnato: And then the last quadrant is quality and safety, of quality mainly. I'll talk about safety a second. Safety doesn't sit in the score card for us, safety is the qualifier, the gateway. If you fail any safety audits, then you are disqualified from your score card for the month. It's irrelevant how good you are in your score card, you fail safety, then you fail the whole lot. So safety is a gateway into the score card.

Nunzio Bagnato: And in the quality quadrant we have revisit, so the amount of times a job needs to be returned within 30 days. And what's important for us is having the set top box connected to the internet and the work involved in doing that. There isn't a lot of KPIs and it was by design. We don't want to have too many, but we've identified the key areas of our business that we want the technician to focus on. And each quadrant has a 25 point rating. So you can get a maximum of 25 and there are some thresholds.

Nunzio Bagnato: That score card is important to the field technician, because we lend idea from Uber and have a ranking, and the ranking, which is our bronze, our silver, gold and platinum, determines the priority of routing. So when it comes to routing, if you're a platinum technician, and you're been a platinum technician for that month, then for the next month you're going to enjoy priority routing, so you'll be the first technician to be routed. So all the platinum technicians get routed, all the gold guys next, all the silver guys and if there's anything left, the bronze guys will get the rest.

Nunzio Bagnato: That's really important for our business. Especially important for a contractor, a sub-contractor if you like, because this is their business. They have to ensure that they've got continuous work coming in so they can actually run their business. And for us, we're driving a culture. We're shifting the way the technician manages the customer. They sit down with the customer, they have that interaction with the customer, they service the customer, they really deliver what we want them to deliver and then they're doing everything else on the job they need to do. Making sure they complete the job, making sure they do this, they do that, from a quality point of view.

Nunzio Bagnato: When we first started this journey, it was five years ago, and we launched the score card model, 70 odd percent of our field workforce were bronze technicians. And we're really proud that right now, 70 odd percent of our field workforce is predominantly platinum and a little bit of gold. And that's taken a lot of work from our leadership team as well as the contractor leadership team. It is a lot of side-by-side compensations to get that team, the field team to operate where they need to be today.

Nunzio Bagnato: The score card really is identifying those KPIs that you want to focus on as a group, and introducing that KPI that's going to shift the way you operate, the way you service the customer and not put in any type of KPI, I mean, you can have a laundry list of KPIs, you can really get carried away, but we chose the eight. And we chose the eight for a reason, because we wanted to shift the way we operated, shift the way we serviced our customers, and we felt these KPIs did that.

Sarah Nicastro: There's couple things that I think are really interesting. The first is this recognition that I think a lot of the hesitancy around the contractor model, when you look at why do people feel they need to maintain that control. At least in my conversations it's primarily to protect the customer experience. Yet, when you're running a volume based business, you're working against that objective to some degree, just by incentivizing volume, volume, volume.

Sarah Nicastro: The incorporation of those customer focused metrics was an important step in helping your contract workforce understand, "Okay wait, we've realized the volume is not the only thing that's important here, and we need to prioritize the customer experience a bit more." I also think though there's something to be said about the simplicity of what you're choosing to track and how. So to your point, if you had a quadrant with eight KPIs in each square, it just becomes convoluted, it's harder for people to understand, they might not be as engaged in paying attention to what their rank is, and really simplifying that.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, one of the things we talked about though, is that those KPIs, you like to focus on two per quadrant, so the quadrants are identified, you like to set two KPIs for a quadrant to keep things simple, but those KPIs can change based on what the business' biggest priorities are. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nunzio Bagnato: Absolutely, and it's really important to know that this score card is, all the KPIs that make up the score card, is fluid. There are some KPIs that will not be removed. I mean, customer satisfaction is one of them, that is always, that's cemented in, and that's important that we understand that, that is a number one focus.

Nunzio Bagnato: But from the moment we raised or launched the score card to where we are now, we've replaced these KPIs. In the early days when we launched the model, that's the command center model, and we introduced a new field service scheduling system, we needed the technicians to change the way they interacted with us and how they use the system, and I required them to follow a couple of different steps, click button here, click button there. And we just couldn't get the field workforce to do that. So we included it in the score card. Button compliance was critical to our success. Especially when you're working a workforce scheduling system that we share that depends on the technician clicking on-site and clicking off-site, so we can get accurate timings, get the data we need to be able to run an efficient business.

Nunzio Bagnato: So we had button compliance. We also had time on the job. We identified early on that technicians were doing seven minute service calls. And in a contract in the old world, that make sense, because you're pumping through a lot of volume, but in our world now, it's like, seven minutes, how do you actually knock on the customer's door, rate the customer, diagnose the problem, fix the problem, explain the problem and then take the customer through the ending of the interaction in seven minutes? It's not possible.

Nunzio Bagnato: So job timing were as important and trying to change, not asking the technician stop doing jobs quickly, it's about can you explain to me how this seven minutes service call happened? Can you please explain to me how we can actually increase the time? Have you gone through each of the steps on the scope of work? And it's just educating the technician on what we expect from them, and what our customers expect from them and what you should be doing in each of your jobs.

Nunzio Bagnato: And we're not suggesting for a moment that every technician spend an hour, an hour and a half on every job, you're going to have different technicians spending different times, but ruling out those little job times or those smaller job times, because you know we're not offering the customer the level service we need, was important. So we introduced things that we needed to focus on, that we knew that needed to shift. Either shifted from a performance point of view or shift from a behavior slash culture point of view. And we continue to look at what kind of areas of our business do we need to now reintroduce.

Nunzio Bagnato: Now, we don't do it as often as monthly, in actual fact, we went early days we did six months, now we've extended it out every year. So every year when we enter into our new financial year, we will review our score card and we will have a look at what we're going to include this year, what is our focus, so what is our strategic focus this year, and how does the field actually contribute to that. Do we need to change our score card, or do we need to change the target, and do that.

Nunzio Bagnato: And by the way, we don't just decide in this office and then roll it out, we have the conversation with our service provider or our contracting company, then we pressure test it with our field leaders and then we pressure test it with a focus group of technicians and we get feedback. And when they're comfortable, we're all on the same page and we got the right feedback and we're going to achieve what we need to achieve, then we'll formally roll it out as a change. In our model, we don't just do things for the sake of doing it, or we don't just change things and expect the rest of the business to fall in line. They're the ones that actually going to be delivering this, so we need to understand, is it something we're going to be able to successfully achieve?

Nunzio Bagnato: The score card is not only for the technicians. The score card is aggregated all the way up to me. So the score card the technicians look at, and we'll talk about the other score cards in a second, that is how everyone's measured. It's not only for the field techs, the score card model is aggregated all the way up to me, so everyone's got skin in the game here. I don't have a different set of KPIs, we all got the same KPIs, we work off the one score card.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, tell us about the other score cards.

Nunzio Bagnato: We've got a command center and planning team that's co-located as I said to you earlier, and they have their own score cards. So the command center have their own score card and the planning team have their score card. There are shared measures or shared KPIs, things like customer satisfaction, completion rates, they are shared. They are things that we believe that everyone in this group has the ability to influence, and there's a couple of other KPIs that are shared. And then there are KPIs that are specific to their role.

Nunzio Bagnato: The difference with that score card is, they're employees of the contracting company, so they're not sub-contractors, so they're on salary. Their score card is linked to their bonus. For example this year, the target is gold. If they achieve a gold average throughout the year, they get a 100% of their bonus. If they don't then they get a percentage of their bonus, and it's really, again, same sort of operating rhythm, a weekly side-by-side conversation. Going through the score card, focusing on the positives, identifying the opportunities, having a look at other peers and bringing in those peer-to-peer conversations, the coaching, the mentoring to help that individual be successful.

Nunzio Bagnato: But the way it operates here, is that we have, an example be the Victorian Command Center Optimizer, we'd sit down with the Victorian Planner, we'd sit down with the Victorian Field Leadership Team in their weekly meeting and they would share their KPIs and work through their plan of attack for the week. Now, there is a focus, and then they go away and hopefully that plan they put in place is going to yield them the results they planned and then happy days. We keep moving and get better and better with it. So they work really closely together.

Nunzio Bagnato: And you've got a combination of contractor versus Foxtel employee in those conversations as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's one of the things you said earlier about even when you're making changes to the field score card, you're asking for feedback, and I think that's another good point, is just because you choose to leverage a contractor model, does it mean that you can't value and treat those employees as a part of the business. I think there's sometimes this perception that its internal or external and it sounds like you guys are doing a good job of making sure that you're listening to that feedback, incorporating that feedback and prioritizing those employees' voice in a similar sense of W2 employees.

Nunzio Bagnato: Well, we value the technicians, we value... My view is they have a voice. They have a very strong voice. They're the only face-to-face contact we have.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Nunzio Bagnato: When you look at our business, every interaction the customer has, is going to be over the phone or via chat or online. The field technician is the only face-to-face they have. So they are prime to tell us exactly how we can improve the customer experience, they are in a perfect position to tell us how to improve our business, because they are doing what they need to do to get the jobs done at the standard that we expect from them. They've got a voice in our business. Our field and myself, my field leadership team, my leadership team, have always been front and center in toolbox meetings or any type of technician gathering. They're out and about. We don't just sit in an office and cut ourselves off from the world, because I think having those face-to-face relationships, not only are you getting the feedback from them, you're helping them understand our strategy, the reasons why we make decisions.

Nunzio Bagnato: We are helping them with our message. We're actually developing a really strong relationship at every level. We're not hierarchical at all. I mean, I've had conversations with multiple technicians. I have technicians call me, text me, and I'm okay with that, because that is a window, that is a portal into their world that I need. So how do I improve my business if I don't have the relationship with the guys and girls that are doing the hard yards every single day?

Nunzio Bagnato: And I was a technical as well, so I've got a soft spot for them as well.

Sarah Nicastro: Right, right. Now, we talked about the tiers of technicians and the prioritization of routes. So the platinum technicians get the best routes. Are there other incentives tied to their achieved tier or is that the primary, I guess, incentive for them to work toward platinum, gold, etc?

Nunzio Bagnato: Well, as soon as you're a platinum technician, you've been given the opportunity to actually take on additional work or other types of work, for example, our VIPs and escalated customers are only serviced by platinum technicians. When we make a promise to our VIPs and we're sending out a technician, we're sending the best of the best, because they have a proven record. They're excellent customer experienced, they're excellent in every other KPI on the score card, but they've got a history of being a platinum technician.

Nunzio Bagnato: And any other type of additional event sort of work or any type of additional work that we need highly skilled technicians, they've been the first guys we go to. So there's a benefit of being a platinum technician outside of just the usual work. We just recently introduced the platinum plus, and that is because we identified that there is a group of platinum technicians who have been platinum for a very long time and they go the extra mile, but it's not captured in the score card. Like, they've always getting five out of five in their surveys and then another platinum technician is getting four point nine or four point eight, but they're always achieving, so they are high achievers. And we felt there's an opportunity for us to introduce platinum plus for those high achieving technicians. Allow those platinum guys to go the next level, to provide the next level of service. Really drive that customer interaction, really drive the way they service the customers and the way they operate, and recognize those guys that are continually hitting platinum. So we introduced platinum plus.

Nunzio Bagnato: From a routing perspective, it doesn't change, but we've got other benefits. Benefits like tickets to premiers, tickets to the football, any of that type of additional benefit, we're happy to provide to those platinum plus guys. And we've already got, we introduced this, what, in June? Sorry July, and we've already got close to 10% of our workforce sitting at platinum plus.

Sarah Nicastro: That’s great.

Nunzio Bagnato: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So talk a little bit more about the impact this journey, the score card has had on I guess A, service delivery and B, the contractor engagement.

Nunzio Bagnato: Well, from a service delivery perspective, I mean, we have achieved and we're enjoying probably the best patch of our journey ever. Our KPIs, our performance, the way we operate from an efficiency point of view, the level of service we offer our internal customers here at Foxtel and external customers, is probably the best that it's ever been. So when I just sweep through the KPIs in our business, we're not just improved, we've blind them out of water in a lot of cases, but for me, what's really important about that is sustaining that type of level of performance and keep the team striving for more.

Nunzio Bagnato: Our completion rates for example in the early days when we first launched this, now five years ago, we were kissing 87% completion rate, which means 38% of our customers were being not missed, but jobs waiting to get done. We're enjoying now an average of 94, 95%. It's not unusual for us to hit 95%. In actual fact, when we don't hit 95%, we scratch it and say, "What went wrong?". But that's where we are right now. Customer satisfaction, we never used to measure that, we introduced that as part of the command center launch, but in the early days that was sitting at three out of five. We are now averaging four point nine and four point nine five. And the verbatims we're getting from our customers is nothing but complementary about the level of service we provide our customers, the time we do, turning up on time, spending the time going through each of the scoping out of the job, providing the level of service that they expect from an organization like ours. And that's what we want to see. But there are other opportunities for us to improve on that.

Nunzio Bagnato: We're enjoying a patch right now that we've never experienced at Foxtel and we're not done. We believe we can do a lot more, a lot more. This is an ever changing environment, especially pay TV, field services is becoming tougher and tougher every single day. There are pressures that every field service organization around the world is dealing with. And we believe there is another iteration of what we've got here. We call it the command center model, but we believe there's another iteration that we want to tap into that is organic to where we need to go to.

Nunzio Bagnato: But from a partnership point of way, I think we've identified that the level of engagement we have with our field team, as well our contracting team, it's the best it's ever been. And that's because we moved away from that master servant model, allowed them to be in the driver seat. Sit beside me, let's work through this together, my KPI is your KPI, that type of stuff. But what's more important is that they drive the program of work. They focus on, they provide the areas of focus. They're the ones that are actually driving the change on our behalf, and we're giving them that control in allowing our vendors or our contracting company to set the agenda, so they're highly engaged.

Nunzio Bagnato: And that's because they're running this like their own business.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, when you decided to make this shift, the whole journey, part of that was a plaids word customer-centricity, and you talked about the fact that the technicians are the face of Foxtel, they're the ones that are interfacing directly with the customers, and so part of this was moving from that transaction and volume based approach to having them present and interact in a way that was in line with Foxtel's brand and persona and quality levels.

Sarah Nicastro: How did the score card method help in achieving that outcome?

Nunzio Bagnato: Well, we had to take a step back and we had to look at the Foxtel technician. What does a Foxtel technician look like? What is the future of the... What's the Foxtel technician of the future look like? And at that point in time the Foxtel technician looked like a standard trainee. I mean, if you had a plumber stand beside one of our Foxtel technicians, you wouldn't know the difference. They looked the same, they spoke the same and they serviced the customers the same way.

Nunzio Bagnato: And I'm not suggesting that plumbers don't service customers, but I was trying to illustrate here is that the Foxtel technician felt and look like a trainee. And when you look at what we were delivering, we're delivering entertainment. That's what we do, and we're providing a customer a form of entertainment. And does a Foxtel technician need to be in a trading uniform. Our old technician used to be in high V's vest with, we call them silicone snot marks all over his uniform, scruffy looking dot dude, turn up to the customer's house, grunt his wife through the job and get the hell out of there as quickly as he possibly can.

Nunzio Bagnato: That wasn't in line with the product we were providing. It wasn't in line with our brand. So we had a look at what does a Foxtel technician, what should it look like? And it needed to be somebody who was groomed, well groomed. Who presented himself really, really well in a standard Foxtel uniform who had really good soft skills. So we changed the way we recruited our technicians. We had technicians that were highly skilled when it came to installing Foxtel and servicing Foxtel, but when it came to the soft skills, there was an area of opportunity. So either we had to train up those guys in their soft skills, or when we were recruiting new technicians, they were really good with the soft skills stuff, really good with the customer experience, really good with the interaction stuff.

Nunzio Bagnato: And we can train them on the technical stuff. We've got a really good training program to get them right up to the standards we need to provide them that highly technical ability, but that soft skill stuff, that interaction, that was critical to us. So we made sure that our recruitment strategy shifted and we focused on those type of men and women. And that, together with the score card and the way we actually discussed the score card, a program of work with the score card, shifted the type of technician we had out there.

Sarah Nicastro: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Nunzio Bagnato: They are 100% focused on providing a service to a customer and they know that they need to turn up with their ID, with their uniform, well-groomed and interacting to follow the scope from A all the way through to Z, because that is what we expect from a Foxtel technician. That is what's getting sure that they provide the level of service the customer expects from us. That is what helps them achieve a good score card. And if that all goes into plan, then they are almost guaranteed work.

Sarah Nicastro: It makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So the other thing that you've mentioned that was key to all of this is the command center. The score card method and the command center work together to give the technicians the ability to focus more on that service experience. Talk about the command center's role in allowing the technicians to focus as much as possible on that customer interaction.

Nunzio Bagnato: When we designed the command center, we designed the field component to empower the technician to have full control over it, his or her day. We wanted the technician to be able to do everything from their device, control their day. But we also said is that we want you to focus on the job that you have in front of you. The old technician would be doing the routing, the jeopardy management, the rescheduling, the whole lot. Your role, let's define your role, your role is to go into a customer's house and service them and do what you need to do, do whatever is on the work order, but when you're at that house, you are 100% focused on that customer. You're not worrying about your next job or your route or whatever, tomorrow's route or whatever, 100% focused. But I'm giving you full control over that job.

Nunzio Bagnato: If a technician's day goes to plan, the command center will never interact with the technician. And we have technicians that go through days where they're not interacting with the command center. The command center only gets involved when the job or the route goes off path. And they only manage by exception. They're there to provide them support, but they're also there to take away all those admin type of tasks. If the day doesn't go to plan, the command center will identify that before the technician knows that your day is going off track. A job or some jobs in the afternoon present themselves at risk. The command center will reach out, the technician validate that, that's the case, because sometimes it's not exactly, the technician may be finishing off a job and as soon as he finishes that job off, the day corrects itself. We just want to reach out and make sure, the technician confirms that he's still on the job and may be out there for a while, and the command center will manage those jobs that are at risk, utilize or reroute them to another technician in the area to make that point of window.

Nunzio Bagnato: In most cases we will do that or bring another technician to the area to meet that time stop. In worst case scenarios that we're not able to meet that time slot and the command center will manage the customer.

Nunzio Bagnato: But there also is a where's my tech solution out there when the customer can self-service as well, so they can actually have a look the way the technician is and work out exactly when he or she is estimated to arrive and obviously job out their day to ensure that they, they do not have any inconvenience any way. So the command center really is there to provide them that support and level service and manage by exception. Again, if the day goes to plan, the technician would not speak to the command center. But there are scenarios where they have it.

Nunzio Bagnato: You've also got a planning team which is part of the command center and they are all part of the planning component leading into the day and they are highly important to the technician's score card, arriving on time, it's all about the planning, completing your job, it's all about the planning. Planning team have weekly discussions with the field leadership team about improving the quality of routes, improving the capacity, utilization rates and all that type of stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I think what's interesting to me is, you've recognized the need to enable your technicians to focus more on the customers, you've incentivized them to do that through the score card, but you've enabled them to do that by eliminating a lot of that administrative parts of the job so that they have the capacity to focus more on that interaction instead of those other manual or time consuming tasks.

Nunzio Bagnato: Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay, all right, last question is, if someone's listening who is thinking through how to begin to leverage or how to better leverage contract workers, can you first summarize the value. What is the reason that this model can work and work well for organizations?

Nunzio Bagnato: I think a contractor model and the reason why a lot of organizations go to a contractor model is because it's not a fixed model from a cost perspective, and the attractive component of that is it becomes variable. And it depends on what kind of contractor arrangement you have, but most contractor models are variable and that's the attractive component of it. But with that comes a lot of pain if you don't manage it right. If you don't have the right relationship, if you don't have the right partner and you don't treat them like a partner.

Nunzio Bagnato: If you treat them like a contractor, you're going to get contractor results, guaranteed. So we've been able to take a trade-like sort of service and make it feel like a Foxtel service. But it's not unique to us, I mean, we can take this model anywhere, because it's not specific to Foxtel. What we've introduced, what we've built is transferable to any type of industry or any type of work I should say.

Nunzio Bagnato: If you treat your vendors like a contractor, you're going to get contractor results. It's about having a really strong strategical partner that can work with you and work side-by-side. And you're going to have to be okay with being challenged. In actual fact, we get frustrated, because we know we don't get challenged enough. We want to be challenged. I don't have all the answers, but the contracting company that we've engaged to do this type of work, that's what they specialize in, that's what they do really, really well. So they need to bring that to the game. They need to bring that to the table and you need to allow them to do that. And it's okay if they challenge you.

Sarah Nicastro: What's your best advice for someone to get started with incorporating a model like this, a score card model? How can you begin that transition from, all right, we're looking at this like a contractor thing, it's a volume based thing. We realize we need more. What's the best advice to begin that journey?

Nunzio Bagnato: For me it's don't try to do too much too soon. Understand exactly what is your desired end state. What is your desired outcome from that field workforce, and just keep it simple. Just really start off simple and then try to remove any of that complication. Allow your field, your leaders to understand exactly what you're trying to achieve and then build on that. Just start off slow and build on that.

Nunzio Bagnato: Focus on what you want to do and be very clear with that message, and everybody involved, from you down, needs to be singing from the same hymn sheet, they need to be with the same messaging. And it's okay to mess up, it's okay to mess up. In actual fact, as long as you don't break something, it's okay to mess up. Go ahead, mess it up, because it will only get better by messing up. Got to give them the freedom, you've got to make sure that they feel safe in the environment to do what they need to do, but they're not going to be losing their job over it.

Nunzio Bagnato: You can't penalize somebody for having good intent. I'll never remove a technician from the platform if his or her intent was to service the hell out of a customer and they've gone outside of the process. Processes are guidelines. I'm taking them as a guideline. As long as you've done what you needed to do to get the customer online, happy, enjoying Foxtel, it may not be the standard process, but I'm okay with that. That's what we're in the business to do.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's another good point, is that empowerment, because empowering the technicians to deliver the customer experience in a good way, even if that isn't picture perfect or whatever, it shows that you trust them and value them which goes back to that engagement and that buy in of what the mission is. But I like the point of keeping it simple. Again, the way that you've se the KPIs so that it's a consumable amount of things to focus on at once and if you can prioritize, here is what's most critical, then incorporate that, start there, and as you start to see progress and improve, then swap out some of those KPIs to get to that next wave.

Sarah Nicastro: You're not set in stone, you just need to figure out where to start and get started.

Nunzio Bagnato: But then I need the KPIs and score card, it's the processes or the way you've structured the team. I mean, start off small. Start off in a controlled environment and then keep adjusting. Don't stand still, keep adjusting and then you'll find your sweet spot. Once you found that sweet spot, bang, you're off and running.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. All right, Nunzio, well thank you so much for joining and sharing, I really appreciate it.

Nunzio Bagnato: Pleasure. Thank you for the conversation.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can learn more by visiting us at www.futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Cimcorp’s IT Strategy for Working Smarter

May 12, 2021 | 24 Mins Read

Cimcorp’s IT Strategy for Working Smarter

Pekka Nurmi, Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp, talks with Sarah about the company’s efforts to modernize IT to increase its ability to be strategic, nimble, and most impactful.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to be talking about how organizations can work smarter when it comes to their IT strategy and IT operations. I'm joined today by Pekka Nurmi, who is the Director of Corporate IT at Cimcorp. Pekka, thank you for joining us today.

Pekka Nurmi: Thank you. Nice to be here.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay, so we're going to talk about how Cimcorp has made some changes in IT to work smarter instead of harder. Before we do that, tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Cimcorp.

Pekka Nurmi: Well, like you mentioned, I'm head of the whole of our corporate IT systems in six countries and three continents. And maybe a little bit different about my background is that I was actually a management consultant prior to working as a IT director, and I think has helped me a little bit in this transformation.

Sarah Nicastro: So your consulting background was in management? So on the business side or on the IT side?

Pekka Nurmi: In the business side, but I always ended up doing something with IT. So I sort of all the time, every year, I gravitated closer toward the IT topics all the time. I did have IT background. I'd been programming some software to couple of companies in way, way, way down the line, but the IT, of course, always something that I'm always seem to be gravitating toward that, so I think the current position came naturally.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think some of the conversations we've had on this podcast, folks talk a lot about how traditionally IT and the business side, in many instances, were fairly siloed, and there's more of a need to really merge that together. So I think having that business background and bringing that to an IT role could be really helpful in creating that closer collaboration.

Pekka Nurmi: I really think so, that that is the case, and a really good idea I think to having the background.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, I've talked to folks where the two within a company are at odds, and it doesn't work very well, right? So everyone needs to be friendly and work together, and I think when you have some experience seeing the other person's viewpoints, it's helpful in being able to do that.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. So tell us, how would you describe Cimcorp's IT strategy overall?

Pekka Nurmi: Well, I think the big idea, like a really big scale, is that we have six offices all around the globe, and the idea is that no matter where you go, you would always have that similar technology and back-end systems waiting for you, so you can just hop on the plane and arrive to another continent, and start working. That's the big idea.

Pekka Nurmi: But more about the strategy is that we seem to be and we are always reducing the number of the systems in house, because we really started from a situation where the number of different systems was just immense. And we were in the continuous loop that update, upgrade, and then you would [inaudible 00:03:56] to lag so much in behind. So we really decided, okay, we need to cut down the number of systems and concentrate on the core systems in general.

Pekka Nurmi: And also what we're doing at the moment is we're trying always to find things to outsource, and there is so much of new stuff we have to take care of, like a compliance, information security, and embedding IT and IT processes to be since development. And that seems to be the core, so we really always are trying to find things that, okay, we don't have to do this anymore. This is a ... Well, it wouldn't be fair to say trivial things, but less important stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Outside of your core competency, right? You want to be able to focus on what matters most, and not have to become an expert in everything.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. And I've been discussing with many of my colleagues in similar positions at similar companies, and we seem to agree on the thing that unless you're a little bit proactive in replacing and updating and upgrading, you will be on the worst side of the slope, and you always are playing catch. And that's not a good place to be.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. And so from a high level, it sounds like global consistency is important, and then looking at simplification of complexity in the systems that you're using. And simplification in management, so that you're focusing on what matters most instead of trying to focus on every single thing.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. It's like when we start discussing with business, okay, what can we do and where can we improve? I really hate to say that. We could do that, but then I'd have to update system number one, system number two, and system number three, and maybe then, if all things go forward, we can do that. And that would be six months later. I prefer to be able to say that, okay, we are almost there. We have this one system, maybe two if things aren't bad, and then we can move forward. But the complexities, that can drag you down a lot.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and so the idea of consolidating to less systems and also the idea of outsourcing in the areas where you can leverage external expertise, it's almost the management of IT, the planning, the strategy has become the job versus the management of systems, right?

Pekka Nurmi: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: So it's more of, like you said, staying ahead of things and looking at, okay, where do we need to be in six months? Where do we need to be in a year? So the more you can rely on folks to be a part of getting you there, then the more you can focus on staying ahead of that strategy, right?

Pekka Nurmi: Yes. And finding suppliers and partners who have a vision of the future, what can it be, because we cannot be inventing everything in-house. We are relying on our partners insights on many of the topics, so it's about finding who has the right vision, who has the capability to execute that, and things like that. So it's like managing a network of partners who are on the same page with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I'm curious to ask you, Pekka, though, I would say the majority of companies that we would have listening to this podcast would agree with the concept of focusing more on core competencies, right? So however you get there. Simplification of systems, outsourcing of different areas of expertise. But I think there are some that really, really struggle with the concept of relinquishing control, and so they're fighting their desire to do it all, and that all is growing and growing and growing and growing, and it becomes harder and harder and harder to do it all. Because as digital matures, there's just more sophistication, more capabilities, more opportunities. And so the world is expanding, and they're trying desperately to keep it all within their grasp.

Sarah Nicastro: So what would you say to those folks about the value of letting go, and then also how to shift the mindset, and know that it actually could help you more to not try and control everything in-house?

Pekka Nurmi: That's very familiar topic. That's where I started when I got this position. The IT department that, okay, we've done all, everything in-house, and this is how we want to operate, but through a lot of discussion and opening the idea that how management sees IT department, I think that opened up the idea that ... Like if we're trying always to do everything, we will be so slow that ... We would be a focus of top management, like a gaze on the IT department. "Why are you so slow all these things?" And through that, and a lot of discussion, and more discussion, and meetings, and staying in the different offices and talking to IT people, we gradually were able to see that. Okay, we just cannot go on like this. There's just too much to do, and being able to prove the point that, hey, we actually are quite slow on certain topics. So my team gradually realized that you have to do something.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's the idea, I think, that in today's landscape, the pace of innovation I so fast that it becomes almost impossible to keep up if you're trying to become a master of all, right? It becomes advantageous to rely on the experts in those different areas versus ... It's almost unrealistic to think that you can take the time to do all of those things and stay ahead to the degree you need to be competitive and all of those things.

Pekka Nurmi: And it's fantastic to see those small wins. Being able to prove that we're on the right path because being able to do something in two weeks with our partner that would have taken six months in some other way. So it's like, okay, this is good. This is a good way. People are happy about it, and we get compliments from the management. "How did you guys able to do that in such a short note and timeline," and the cost wasn't actually that bad.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, and it comes back to the idea of any change, right, or any evolution. If Cimcorp was used to doing this all itself, and you come in and you say, "No, we really need to shift and look at outsourcing more," the first few times you have those wins, you have more and more light bulbs of, "Oh, okay. This can work. It wasn't a failure. Everything's okay," and then the comfort level increases, and you start to see how you can really expand there. That makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: So talking about innovation, I came into this space, Pekka, in 2008, and have been interviewing folks like yourself on a daily basis since then. And it's been really interesting to see how digital environments have matured and become more sophisticated, and just the wealth of opportunity that exists to companies today with the technology that's out there. How would you say the focus of IT innovation today differs from IT innovation of a decade ago? What are the major shifts?

Pekka Nurmi: I had a fantastic discussion with one of the colleagues from another company regarding this exact topic, and we were thinking, okay, 10 years ago how we would have solved this item at the time. And we would be selecting really dedicated IT people that is into IT, but they're probably thinking that, hmm, actually regarding one of the topics we were discussing about, we decided that actually we don't want to have IT staff on that at all. It's more like we were starting to discuss that wouldn't there be some business consultant that has some capability in IT that would define that area?

Pekka Nurmi: So I think that this goes back a little bit to where we originally discussed about the consulting background and things like that. So the business is much more involved and should be much more involved. It's not like the IT side has become any less important, but in order to get things done and the complete ideas, it's like the scope of things has increased. It might be 10 years, but it's enough that you solve the IT side. But today, you have to solve the IT and business side on the same time.

Pekka Nurmi: So I think that this is the core change that has happened in the 10 years.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, that makes sense. I think the importance of it is has it even increased significantly. You look at all of the digital transformation that's underway in every business today. I think the importance is critical, but I think what we're talking about here is the idea that it's shifting from the criticality of internal execution to the criticality of strategy, right? And how that allows you to scale the way that you need to be innovative and competitive.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So I wanted to come back to the title of the podcast, so talking about working smarter, right? So I think we've touched on some of those things, and we're going to dig in a little bit more. So we talked about simplification of systems. We've talked about outsourcing in areas where you can really benefit from leveraging external expertise. Is there anything else you would say is a characteristic of how Cimcorp is looking at IT in terms of working smarter instead of working harder?

Pekka Nurmi: Yes. We've done a lot of work on that topic, and I think the core thing is trying not to over-complicate any of the processes and topics. If we look at ERP systems or software in general, they already have a built-in processes, and tried out ways to work. And all the jobs I've had and all the customers I've had, I always saw that idea that everybody was trying to over-complicate that. "My process is so special. Our business is so special." And as an outsider, you could always say that I've seen this a thousand times. It's the exact same process repeating itself time and a time and a time and again, but the people running it are always saying that this is special. "We need special software." And the loop starts from there.

Pekka Nurmi: So the idea is to have an open mind that maybe somebody has found the golden nugget or golden egg of approaches that's already built into the system. Like ERP systems, they have tens of thousands of clients, and that have been running for decades actually. So the process, it might have been already evolved. And in many cases, I've found that accepting the ERP system might actually be already really smart.

Pekka Nurmi: And having the talks with the people that "This is really so special," or is there someone we can do a benchmarking on? And finding the ways that, could we just use this? There might be some idea in the background, and try it out, and if it's not, then we do something.

Sarah Nicastro: It's such a good point, Pekka, because I think the sense I get in talking with people is almost customization is a badge of honor. It's like, "No, we could never use an out-of-the-box solution. That's just preposterous. Our business is far too important for that," right? And I think, again, going back to evolution over the last 10 years, there probably was a point in time where that was more accurate than it is today.

Pekka Nurmi: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: Where the solutions were not sophisticated enough, or weren't incorporating best practices from 10,000 customers, or what have you. To the degree where it was x-percent there, but you needed to add onto that. I think you're making a really good point in that, while businesses have been maturing and evolving and transforming, so too have technology providers, right? So the point you're making about, hey, maybe it's worth taking off that badge of honor and not looking at it from the context of we need to make this super complicated because we're important and we're different and all of these things. And looking at, wow, could we make our lives a lot easier, maybe spend less money, have a faster implementation, maybe get better value if we open our perspective a bit and just consider that.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a really, really important point, just to think about the progression that's occurred, and next time you're evaluating software, why don't you think about looking at it a little bit differently, and not staying stuck in the history of it, but looking at what is out there right now.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. And also in my career, I've had a chance to look at ERP systems that were implemented two or three years ago, and I was invited to check that, how are we doing today with the system? And that always ended up like 60 to 80% of those modifications, the customer started paying for the ERP provider that, okay, we remove these customizations because the ERP system was right in the first place. But they just didn't accept that. So I've been seeing that happening so many times over.

Sarah Nicastro: And to your point, it's probably beneficial to, like you said, try it and if you do find areas, proven areas, where you need something, that's fine. But don't go into it with the expectation that you could never, because you might find that you could make things a lot easier. Okay.

Pekka Nurmi: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good.

Sarah Nicastro: So from an IT perspective, part of your job is helping Cimcorp to stay ahead of customer demands, and to enable internal operations and enable externally for a good customer experience. What would you say are the top demands of today's customers that end up falling into necessity from IT? You take customer expectations. How does that translate into what you're expected to deliver?

Pekka Nurmi: We are using IFS ERP system, and they are talking about moment of service in their topics, and I actually fell in love with that slogan, "moment of service." Because that describes quite accurately what we need and what the customers need. So the IT systems really have to be there, present, and have a real-time information that you can provide that. There's no other way. When the customer contacts you, they might have a spare part they would need desperately delivered overnight, or something, other issues going there, and what the customer wants to hear is that, okay, it's a can-do answer. And within that first email, phone call, whatever support ticket you might have done, and they really want to hear that, that, okay, we are on that, and we know what's going to happen, and when we going to be able to fix it.

Pekka Nurmi: So the moment of service is actually really fantastic word to describe the need of IT.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, I agree, and I think there's a lot that relates to that moment of service in the sense of it's a moment, but it's far more than that, right? So that moment of service is a moment of experience, but what happens in that moment, that can mean it's brand perception, right? It can be customer loyalty. It can be the difference between revenue growth or revenue loss. Service as a differentiator is where we are, right? And so how you align your infrastructure and your people to be able to, like you said, what do they want? Boom. We're ready. We have it. We're there. We're giving them what they need. It really is the name of the game. Everything you're doing is working to ...

Sarah Nicastro: And we're going to talk about this in a minute, but it's really this game of mastering complexity. And I say "mastering," not "simplifying," because you can simplify to a degree through some of the steps you've talked about so far, but the rest of it you have to master. Customers don't care. They don't care how much effort you're putting into delivering when they need it, but you have to be able to do it, right? So, yeah, that's a good point.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. There is a huge amount of complexity in the background, but like you said, the customer doesn't care. They want their issue solved in as fast as it's possible.

Sarah Nicastro: Huge and only multiplying. It's not a huge amount of complexity that's going to stay level, right? The more sophisticated everything gets technology-wise, and the more consumer experiences that impact what customers want, that level of complexity keeps climbing and climbing and climbing.

Sarah Nicastro: And going back to the beginning of our discussion, that's why I think it's such a good point for folks to understand the idea of mastering it all yourself is not sustainable, right? You have to start looking at how to work smarter instead of harder because you can't do what you need to do in that moment if you're trying to ... I'm thinking about little people inside trying to master all of this complexity. You have to look for ways to streamline that.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So let's talk about the IFS ERP and then your recent transition to IFS Cloud as a real world example of the things that we've been talking about so far in action, right? So this is an example of how you're walking the talk of what your strategy is in real life. So just tell us a little bit about the migration from IFS ERP, which I think you deployed around 2016, and then transitioning to the new IFS Cloud, and how that touches on some of these themes.

Pekka Nurmi: Well, I've been doing exactly like we discussed before that. What I've been getting people to accept is that the baseline in the IFS might be acceptable for the business process. And for us, IFS has been able to provide many of those. I'd say they're like blueprints for our operations, and they've been giving us areas where we can work smarter. We've been even getting ideas on how to set up our VDM systems in the background based on what IFS, how the architecture has been formed in that system.

Pekka Nurmi: Really, the idea is that we've been trying to accept that what the platform enables, and we've been trying to channel our energy to provide value to the customer using that. But the innovation in that is really about we are accepting IFS as a platform, and we already discuss about limiting the number of those systems. We did our homework, and we decided that IFS is a good platform for us.

Pekka Nurmi: So it all comes together. And in our case, it seems to be working quite well.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Now, how would you articulate the difference between the IFS ERP deployment circa 2016 to what IFS Cloud offers?

Pekka Nurmi: The change has been immense. The first feedback we are getting is that the HTML5 interface is huge improvement. People love the face that you can access with your mobile phone all the time. That's big plus. And it has developed a lot.

Pekka Nurmi: Back in 2016, we knew where IFS was going in the future, and I think with IFS Cloud, we are getting that system that we bought in 2016. So I'm really happy about the roadmap for IFS really came to reality for us.

Sarah Nicastro: And that goes back to the point you made at the beginning about if you're going to rely more on partners ... So if you can acknowledge the fact that you can't do it all, and then you know that you need to choose smartly who you want to work with, right? Because you're trying to work with less people. As you said, you're trying to really simplify the ecosystem in terms of eliminating too many disparate systems and looking for more of a platform relationship. It's a good point of don't just look at what's there now. Look at what that roadmap looks like, and think about how the organizations that you're choosing to work with, how are they innovating and what are their plans, right? Because you want to future-proof yourself in the sense of, do they have what you need now to run the business and deliver the moment of service the way you need to, but then also as your business evolves, are they evolving too so that you're not in a position where in too short of a time you're like, okay, well, this worked, but now we've outgrown it, right?

Sarah Nicastro: Really it's the same concept we talk about with a lot of the folks that we have as guests on the podcast of moving away from a transactional relationship and moving more toward delivering outcomes and building partnerships, right?

Pekka Nurmi: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: Good.

Pekka Nurmi: And I think one third of the decision to select IFS back in 2016 was actually that. How do we see IFS as a partner for our future? So we have a pre-finalist system in that one, and that this was really clear that with IFS we decided that we can trust them to be our partner and guide in the future as well. And that's really important.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay, so we talked a little bit about the fact that a lot of what IT is responsible for today is that concept of minimizing but also mastering complexity. So like we said, customers don't care how hard Pekka is working every day, how hard Cimcorp across the board is working every day. They just care that you're delivering what they need when they need it, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So when it comes to delivering that ultimate simplicity to customers, what are the keys to doing that? So how does a solution like IFS Cloud or other tools that you use ... What are the key ingredients to mastering that complexity to be able to deliver an experience that really hides all of that complexity from the customers?

Pekka Nurmi: I think I'm getting back to the basics that we cannot invent everything in-house. We absolutely have to be able to trust to the partners we select and the people we do business with. And we don't want to select partners that wouldn't be giving us anything in return. Like, okay, we pay you money, and you provide us the service, but we really want them to be providing innovation and the platform actually. Like with IFS, they are giving us the service platform in so many ways.

Sarah Nicastro: And I think it's worth revisiting that point of why a platform play versus disparate solutions makes sense. And I think what it really comes down to at the root of it all ... There's many reasons, right? Part of it is just for you the complexity of managing multiple relationships instead of one relationship. But I think when you look at it from the customer perspective, and when you look at it from the ability to deliver in that moment of service, it comes down to eliminating failure points. The more systems you have tied together, the more opportunity there is to falter in mastering that complexity, right? The more cohesiveness you can create behind the scenes, the better your chances of delivering that simplicity to customers.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. Of course, we do alternative scenarios. That's what we do, and we started one alternative. And when we discovered that we would have to build 19 interfaces between two systems, and most of them two-way interfaces, so that was immediately the point that we don't want to do that. We don't want to be spending the time working the interfaces, all the changes in the system that will affect the interfaces. So, once again, we found a position where we would be digging a hole underneath us with those interfaces.

Pekka Nurmi: So, once again, one platform, one solution will help us to focus on the business actually.

Sarah Nicastro: So another area I want to talk about, Pekka, is around data. So we talked about how complexity has increased and it's continuing to multiply, and I think a lot of that has to do with the criticality of data, and data as a resource. So you mentioned the real time data is essential for delivering what you need to in the moment of service. So there's leveraging data within Cimcorp to do that, right? And then there's the idea of the potential for leveraging data externally, right? So with a customer base.

Sarah Nicastro: So tell us a little bit about what that looks like, and how you're looking at data and its limitless potential both internally and externally.

Pekka Nurmi: Oh, this is a topic. We always seem to have multiple data improvement programs ongoing all the time everywhere. That seems to be the thing of today. There's always something to fix, and especially now that we've expanded to new countries, and there's different cultures and people with very different backgrounds. And the most reason we have found that we need to have a ... What would be a right way to say it? We want to enable people to understand that the importance of why they are entering the data, and if I'm not entering this, this will affect this and this many departments after themselves.

Pekka Nurmi: And we've been finding that when it comes to data, we have to provide more understanding to the whole organization around the data, and also we've invested heavily into data warehousing because that is the big thing in future development.

Pekka Nurmi: But it's a really big topic, data, but that's a big focus area, and in my mind, I return to the situation where we have multiple systems. And with multiple systems, we would have to worry about the data. And, once again, we would find ourselves being farther away from the core idea.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And I think there's so much to sort out yet about the real potential for all of the data people are gathering now, right? And how to make use of it, like I said, both within the company and within the customer base. And I think part of why it's important to relinquish some of the control of the systems that allow your business to run is so that you can focus more of your energy and efforts on sorting out how do we leverage data better in the future, right?

Sarah Nicastro: So that's a strategic focus, right? That's something that is worthy of thinking and time and resources and energy, whereas you don't want to spend those time and resources and energy managing a bunch of configurations on a bunch of different systems because it's not bringing value to the future of the business.

Sarah Nicastro: And I don't think anyone has a real good handle on exactly how powerful the data side can be into the future, but that is a really good argument for why you need to focus less on systems and more on strategy, right?

Pekka Nurmi: Exactly. I'd say this is exactly the way.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So I wanted to ask, Pekka, you mentioned a couple times throughout the conversation interacting with some of your peers, and I think that's a really good point because that's the premise, honestly, of Future of Field Service is being able to learn what other folks are doing. But how do you do that and how is that important to you being able to stay in tune with how other companies are tackling challenges and handling their own innovation?

Pekka Nurmi: What I actually do is I continuously encourage my staff to find these benchmarking companies, and be active in ... There's these end user groups we are finding. There's an internet-based communities where people have discussions, and I've granted them time to help other companies, and also search help from other companies. So I think we don't want to be stuck inside the walls of our department, and I think it's more like encouraging that we discuss with the outside all the time, more and more, because we can only win. Of course, you cannot spend 90% of your time discussing with some other companies. You have to have some limits on that, but still the basic idea is that every week you should try to find somebody to help, find somebody to get insight on what you do.

Pekka Nurmi: And we seem to be finding. Today, we are getting emails from other companies that have heard about us and want to discuss. So it took one or two years to get us started, but we're finding really good partner companies we can discuss with. And also some of the partners have active ... They provide also insight that this company might be benefiting you, and maybe you two companies should discuss.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Right. Yeah, I think there's so much power in building that collective knowledge, and it is very important to make the time to look outside of your own company and your own day-to-day. Because I think creating that space is what allows you to not mimic what someone else is doing, but survey the landscape to get different ideas to bring back into your own business. I'm a huge advocate of that, and I think it's a really good point, particularly if there are folks listening that some of the things we've talked about relinquishing control and outsourcing makes them nervous. Talk to some other people that are doing it to see if you can increase your comfort level a bit.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah. Of course, you have to be really careful to which companies you talk to and which people, but generally, I'd say I really recommend that. It has provided a lot of value for us.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay.

Sarah Nicastro: Last question for today is what do you envision the IT strategy of 2031 looking like?

Pekka Nurmi: That's a big question. First thing that comes to mind is obvious there's going to be more public clouds being used, and information security will by any mean be of lesser importance than it's today. But I think along the lines about what we discussed earlier, it's going to be more about businesses' IT strategies aligning in many ways. And I would say that there would be more partnerships with the IT suppliers, just like we discussed before, as sources of innovation and platforms and new ways of working.

Pekka Nurmi: And maybe there would be more deeper level partnerships on IT with our customers, too, just thinking about all the IOT data that we discuss about. All of that I see as a big part of IT strategy for in about 10 years' time.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. So that will keep you busy.

Pekka Nurmi: Oh, I'm sure.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Well, Pekka, thank you so much for joining and sharing your story today. I really appreciate it.

Pekka Nurmi: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: I think there's some excellent points in here for people to consider, and I certainly appreciate your perspective.

Pekka Nurmi: Yeah, thank you. It was nice to be here. So very good discussion. Gave me a lot of ideas, too.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Thank you. Yes, yes. All right, you can find more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 by visiting IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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

May 5, 2021 | 39 Mins Read

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

Chris La Fratta, Vice President & Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips, talks with Sarah about embracing a broader view of what outcomes-based service can mean for your business, how Philips is evolving its service offerings, and some of the key changes necessary in order to deliver.   Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to answer the question; is your view of outcomes-based service limiting your success? We talk a lot about outcomes-based service and delivering greater experiences and guaranteed results to our customers, but today we're going to dive in a little bit more to what that really means and how you may be keeping your view too small of the opportunities for you with your customer base.   Sarah Nicastro: I am excited to welcome to the podcast today, Chris La Fratta, Vice President and Head of Professional Services and Solutions Delivery at Philips. Chris, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.   Chris La Fratta: Hey, Sarah, thanks for having me. It's so nice to virtually be with you here today. It's everybody's reality all day, every day.   Sarah Nicastro: I wish we were doing these on site in a studio. Maybe we'll get there someday, but for now, virtual, yes, and happy to have you.   Sarah Nicastro: So, Chris, before we dig into the topic at hand, tell our listeners a bit about yourself, your background, and your role at Philips.   Chris La Fratta: Thanks, Sarah. First, let me tell you a little bit about Philips and I'll dive into my role. Philips has been around for about 130 years, we're 80,000 employees worldwide, and our purpose is to improve the lives and wellbeing of people through innovation and technology. We're very specifically focused on healthcare. And that's actually been a transformation from Philips. People who are familiar with the brand would know we've sold consumer electronics like flat TVs, and lighting, and things like that, but we've divested the portfolio and we're 100% focused on healthcare, so it's been a big shift for Philips. And also, part of our strategy, another big shift and what I want to talk to you about today is that we're shifting from a company that primarily sold products to a company that sells solutions.   Chris La Fratta: And just to use a simple definition of a solution, for me, that means hardware, software, services, kind of bundled together, both Philips developed content as well as third parties, and that together, these things solve a customer's problem and deliver an outcome better than a product will on a standalone basis. So, that's kind of, in a nutshell, who Philips is.   Chris La Fratta: I've had a long career in healthcare. I've worked at HP, Hewlett Packard, back when they had a medical device product group, I've worked at a company called Elekta, which is an oncology focused medical technology company, but I've spent most of my career at Philips and most of my career in services. I've run call centers and technical support groups, I've run field service teams, both on the software and IT side as well as on the capital equipment side. And these days, my job is really, as you said in the title, it's around solutions delivery. So, as we make the shift into solutions, how do I repurpose an organization that was designed to deliver break/fix into an organization that sort of consults upfront with our customers around how to design a solution, and takes them through an implementation, and then at the end, it's really all about helping customers adopt the technology so they can achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve.   Chris La Fratta: So, a lot of words there, but that's what my job is, is to run these teams. I have team members who are solution architects, I have team members that are project and program managers, technical consultants, which I've converted... and maybe we can talk about this, I've converted a lot of field service engineers and technicians into a role called technical consultant. Then for us, because we're in healthcare, clinical application specialists who do training and consultation on the products and solutions.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay, excellent. So, there's a lot we're going to dive into and I'm very excited to do so. I said in the intro and you kind of mentioned in your introduction of yourself, the conversations I have with people across a variety of industries these days are in some way all tied back to this concept of solving customer problems instead of delivering a product, a service, right? So, this idea of, however you want to say it, for a product organization moving this way, often servitization, delivering more outcomes, that sort of thing. So, you already defined that for us, and I think it was a very simple but very good definition, which is putting together solutions that solve customer problems, right? So, that makes perfect sense. Let me ask you, why do you feel this is the path every company, in some form or another, is on right now?   Chris La Fratta: That's a great question. I think about it, maybe what's going on in the IT space where everything is as a service today, or maybe companies like Uber and Lyft, they've kind of set the world on fire with their business model. So, if you think about Uber, the car companies model was to build and sell you a car, and they make all their money, then they service it after and keep it running, but you as a consumer, do you really want a car or do you just want to get from A to B. And I think that's kind of what it's all about.   Chris La Fratta: So, I think that we have a demographic shift going on in society where people have grown up kind of around these business models, but if I think about my business space in healthcare specifically, hospitals are stretched. They don't have the capital they used to have. A lot of them don't make a huge operating margin. So, these innovative business models where you're tied in as a supplier to the customers' outcome and success, I mean, it just works well because of the economic model there. And I think we've seen it happen in other industries. I think IT was the first place it really happened. I think IBM started this revolution, whether they wanted to or meant to or not, when they kind of got out of the mainframe business and got into web services and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: So, I think those are some of the variables going into it. I think the digitization of everything enables it to happen. I think that's also part of the reason why you see these shifts happening at the moment.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. So, in the headline, we said, "Are you limiting your view?" Okay? So, as an organization, whatever industry you're in, if you're thinking about how do we act more as a trusted adviser? How do we sell solutions instead of products? Oftentimes, the first thing people think of is, "Well, we need to guarantee uptime," that must be the answer, uptime, right?   Sarah Nicastro: And our argument today is that there's nothing wrong with guaranteeing uptime, but if that is where you sort of stop, in your thought process or in action, you achieve this, and then you just end there, you could really be limiting your potential to expand your service revenue, because if you can step outside of maybe your historical role in your customer's landscape and think more about how you could potentially solve some of the problems they have, you may find different opportunities to contribute to the outcomes that they need to drive.   Sarah Nicastro: So, tell us a little bit about some of the different ways that Philips has expanded its portfolio to deliver more customer outcomes.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. And it's funny that you started off with the uptime comment, because as I told you, I've had a long career in service, and I think that traditionally it was about, keep my system up, and so it was about making it available. And I think over the past 10 years, at least in healthcare technology, it kind of shifted from, "I want it to be available, but I also want to integrate with the rest of everything else that's going on." So, in healthcare, it meant sending data from devices to an EMR, so it's about integration. But now, I think it's really about, "Help me adopt it so that I can be successful."   Chris La Fratta: So, in healthcare, hospitals talk about a quadruple aim, their targets as healthcare providers is to achieve this quadruple aim, and its financial outcomes, clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, and staff satisfaction. I'll give you a couple of examples of where Philips plays in this space and why we've been successful. So, in an intensive care unit, you have a system of patient monitors, and they connect to a network, and nurses are able to centrally monitor the vital signs of patients and they respond when an alarm goes off. So, we've always sold that as a capital equipment with some services bolted in. And there's uptime and bench repair and all these things that go on to make the monitors available. So, that's the way we've always done it.   Chris La Fratta: Last year... actually, a couple of years ago now, we had a first of kind implementation in a big hospital in Florida where we actually offered this as a service. So, instead of getting paid for the monitors after we've implemented them and sold them and then going on a service contract, we actually get paid per patient day. And so, what is the customer is trying to do there? Let me talk about the outcomes that we're looking for.   Chris La Fratta: We're trying to make sure that they're efficient. We don't want patients to stay in an ICU any longer than they need to stay in an ICU. We're trying to make sure that as they move around the hospital from the OR back into a post op recovery area and what have you, that we don't lose any data. It's really important that the data gets captured through the whole journey. Then of course, we don't want them to be readmitted and things like that. And so, through this offer, we're able to completely upgrade a hospital where they wouldn't normally have the capital to do at all, every unit of the hospital is using the same technology, so a nurse can move from one place to another. They get software upgrades through the lifecycle of these things, because it's Philips's assets at the end, not the customers, and we'll keep them up to the latest and greatest and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: And what we're seeing, and last year was a great example because COVID happened, and when COVID happened, all of a sudden, it was a different subset of patients that needed really specific care. So, we were able to adapt and get monitors where they need to go in the hospital without the customer spending an extra penny, right? So, that's one example of where we've done it. We've done some great studies at this customer, whereby we asked the staff, "Hey, how do you like the new technology?" And there was just off the charts positive. This hospital was literally at a place where a new patient would get admitted and they have to check to see if they could find a monitor that worked. If it was from brand X or brand Y, they wouldn't necessarily know how to interact with that monitor. So, the patient, or the staff satisfaction went up really high.   Chris La Fratta: Obviously, the financial outcome was a big improvement for them. Instead of spending this huge amount of capital upfront, they moved their spend from CapEx to OPEX, so if they have a lot of customers, their bill goes up for the month, like our gas or electric bill, right? But if they don't have a lot of customers, when they have a down a month, their fees go down accordingly.   Chris La Fratta: And then we saw some clinical outcomes too. So, specifically, because they had this hodgepodge of technology, it took a long time for them to transfer a patient from one unit to the other, which meant patients sitting around kind of in limbo. So, now that we have all the Philips equipment in-house, they're able to transport patients quicker, the nurses are happy with that, and the patients spend less time kind of just waiting for something to happen. So, that's one example.   Chris La Fratta: Another example that I would cite is that we have something called Managed Technology Services, it's an offer that Philips has, where we actually go in with the hospital staff, assess their installed base of technology, and help them make a 10-year plan for replacement. So, Philips will finance that equipment, we will service it for them, regardless if it's ours or a third party, but the key is that we really help them to adopt and utilize the equipment well. So, we have counters on all of our equipment, we can zoom in and see if an MRI is being 65% utilized in one unit and you have another unit that might be 120% utilized, maybe they run it on a second or third shift or what have you, we can take that information back to the customer and say, "Hey, look, you can utilize this one asset better, or maybe it's time to retire it because the service costs are too high."   Chris La Fratta: So, really, partnering with their capital asset planning, because let's face it, what our customers, and my case with healthcare customers, are really good at is providing care to a patient, not capital planning for medical equipment. But at Philips, that's what we do all day long, and so we're able to kind of help and assist. And that's an example of helping a customer drive a financial outcome. And we've had some really good success stories with that.   Chris La Fratta: It's not an easy model to shift into, and it takes a little bit of courage, and it's kind of risky, because a lot times that you move in, the model is not always perfect, but you go out, and you get your feet wet, and you start to learn from it, and then you hone the model. So, I think the real key, though, Sarah is, if you have shared goals with your customer, now, they're partners and not customers, and when you win, they win, and vice versa.   Chris La Fratta: So, in the first example I gave, if we could increase the number of patient days that the customer is being monitored, because we're consulting with the customer and helping them put these devices in the right places, then I get a higher patient per day price, but they also get better utilization of the asset. So, uptime is keeping the thing available, but what we're talking about is making sure it's used and used well, and used to deliver these quadruple aim outcomes. That's probably a good way to state it and kind of summarize the points.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's perfect. And I think it is interesting, and I've mentioned this on the podcast before, Chris, there is a great overlap there for companies that are willing to find it, of needs customers have, real needs, real value opportunities, not forced, not, "Hey, we need to increase our service revenue, so what can we try and sell them?" But real opportunities to help that can help your business build revenue. I mean, it really can be a mutually beneficial place that you can get to, and this is a good example of that.   Sarah Nicastro: Before we talk about some of the complexities, I did want to just go back to the examples you shared. So, obviously, there is a real thing of, for a lot of these hospitals and health systems, modernizing the equipment they have and the lift that can bring in patient care itself, right? But to your point, there's a lot of planning that goes into that, there's a lot of knowledge about what's needed, and where it's needed, and what the right patient flow is, and things like that, on top of this change in model that we're going to talk a little bit more about to being OPEX versus CapEx. But the other thing, and we're also going to talk more about this, but I want to clarify it before we dive in is, some of the opportunity from a services perspective to kind of expand the skills that you're leveraging to bring value to your customers, and I know from one of our earlier conversations, there's a couple we talked about that I'm hoping you can touch on.   Sarah Nicastro: One is, knowing that this equipment is part of a hospital's bigger IT infrastructure, there's some opportunity there, and then I think a really big one, because I think it covers a lot of different industries and a lot of needs people's customers have is this idea of, "Hey, we see you're only using your MRI machine at 65% capacity," to your point, maybe they have an extra one they don't need or something like that, but it could be maybe their staff is struggling because they're not good at using it or they need some extra training. And so, I believe you've also kind of expanded into some more services there to help assist your customers in making sure that their staff as effective as well. So, can you speak to those two aspects?   Chris La Fratta: Well, yeah, I'll take the first piece about how things have really shifted. When I first started my career, when we hired a field service engineer, we were looking for somebody who had a mechanical engineering or electrical engineering background, and then we taught them customer skills. Back then, most devices were standalone, they didn't talk to themselves or each other, they didn't connect to the hospital's network and things like that, and if they ran software, it was proprietary, for the most part. Now, everything is on common platforms, Microsoft and things like that, everything is highly integrated and talking to each other.   Chris La Fratta: About five or six years ago, I was really involved in our patient monitoring solutions, and they were really highly networked. So, we started to realize that we needed to get network experts on the team, and so we kind of went down this path of, we think our guys are really smart, our guys and girls, and they can get Cisco trained and certified, so we provided them that opportunity to make the shift. At the same time, we were growing, so as we were hiring new people, we brought in Cisco trained and certified people that were really good with networks. And then there were people who were in the ranks that realized, "The way things are going, maybe this isn't the job for me anymore."   Chris La Fratta: So, we kind of went through a five-year journey where some of our internal folks stepped up and learned the skills, as we were hiring, we hired people with those skills. We hired a lot of people, actually, from the military who have been network trained, but also people from data centers and banks and things like that, and we had to teach them what healthcare was. And then we had some turnover. There's kind of a demographic thing going on in terms of baby boomers retiring and things like that. So, it was about a third, a third, a third, if you know what I mean.   Chris La Fratta: So, that was a big shift we had to make, and now we're seeing it again where networking is kind of not enough, we're seeing a few specialties that we have to get really good at. So, cyber security is one. We're starting to hire staff that has some experience and background around cyber security. Microsoft OS's, Microsoft server and things like that. Virtualization is really a big things. So, all of those skills have been important for us to realize we needed them and then either acquire them or train people to get them. So, that's kind of a little bit about the first question.   Chris La Fratta: I think the second question, I'll give you a really good example. So, Philips has trusted advisor and consultative partners. If you're in an ICU, there's all these alarms going off all the time. It's really, really a stressful place to be. If you're visiting a loved one, it's stressful, if you're sick in the hospital, it's really stressful too. It's particularly stressful for nurses. They're hearing these beeps, and the beep turns into a page on their phone, there's a central monitor, there's things going on all the time. And it turns out that a lot of them are false positives or alarms that don't need to be responded to.   Chris La Fratta: So, what we are able to do is to go in and consult with the nursing staff and make decisions around their alarm policies. They can lower thresholds, they can silence alarms and things like that. It's a really collaborative process. I mean, as Philips, we can't go in and tell them what their alarm policy should be, they need to make those decisions on their own with information from us. So, we can say, for example, "At hospital X, we see a best practice whereby they set this alarm here." And then they make those decisions, and we can implement them on the monitors.   Chris La Fratta: So, we've had to take our clinical educators, who are nurses, for the most part... well, almost every clinical educator in Philips has credibility and background as a nurse, but we had to teach them how to facilitate that discussion. So, they went away and learned how to run a Kaizen so they can get a group of nurses from a hospital site be open and have this conversation. And we just have great results from that as an offer.   Chris La Fratta: And it's great because it's done in conjunction, and you see the hospital nurses, sometimes, they start a conversation like this, and they just don't want to hear it or know it, and it's something outside of their day to day job that they don't have time for, and six weeks later, they talk about it being a life changing experience, having participated in something like that. And now there are fewer inoperable false alarms, there's less noise and they can focus on what's really important. So, that's a good example. And it took time not to build that skill on the team. Nurses tend to be really good at it, for whatever reason. I think they have right levels of empathy, but it's a good example of where we do that.   Chris La Fratta: We do some cybersecurity consulting, helping hospital CIOs prepare a plan and a strategy for things that live outside a data center. So, we're in a world where everything is a connected device, and IT people tend to be really good at connected devices than are computers, but when it's an MRI machine, or patient logs, or an ultrasound, they don't typically know how to apply an OS patch to a device like that. You can't just say, "Hey, there's going to be a maintenance window in the ICU at three o'clock on Sunday," it doesn't work like that, so it's a different problem set. So, we advise and we help with things like that, I mentioned some of the capital planning, and of course, utilization of the devices. So yeah, it's a special skillset. We've taught some of the staff how to do it, like the clinical educators.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, there's a couple things I want to touch on based on what you just said. The first is, going back to the title of our podcasts and not limiting your view of outcomes, right? So, what you just described to me is a perfect example of, you start with your core competency, and maybe you even servitize that well, right? So, instead of just offering products, now you've bundled that with services, so you are Philips, and you offer X equipment, and you can service it supremely, right? But now you start looking at what is your customer journey, right?   Sarah Nicastro: So, how much pain would it cause your customer if you show up and say, "Hey, great, I have this industry-leading piece of equipment, I can sell it to you, we'll take great care of it, we'll make sure it has uptime, but this network stuff, good luck. So, see you next time we talk," right? And then they're sitting there like, "Okay, now we have to interface with another person and bring them in? And do those people know the Philips equipment, etc." Right?   Chris La Fratta: It's the worst experience for our customer, right? When they say, "Hey, Philips, your system is slow." And we say, "No, our system is working fine. It's a problem on your network." And they call Cisco, or they call their internal... and everybody's pointing at each other right? And so we decided, you know what, we're going to just help them solve the whole problem end to end, and if we have to be the middle person and work with Cisco or whoever it is, we'll take that role and do it, because to your point, they can't get what they want unless that problem is fixed. And for us in this example, the network infrastructure is such an important component of it all that it's just absolutely fundamental to what we're doing there. So yeah, I agree.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So, by eliminating that friction for your customers and improving their experience, you're expanding your own value proposition and your revenue potential, right?   Chris La Fratta: Exactly.   Sarah Nicastro: So, it's just a really good example of looking... I think sometimes companies get really... they're kind of stuck in their history, and so when they start thinking about innovating, or servitizing, or delivering outcomes, they have really good intentions of innovating but they still kind of are on this lane, right? And so, just being able to kind of expand the view a bit and just think about, "Okay, what are these friction points? What do we hear? What do we see? Where do we know our products connect with other systems in our customer's infrastructure, etc?" Because sometimes it's a situation of not communicating enough with your customers to the point where you're not asking the right questions for them to share their pain points, but sometimes they might not know to ask you, right? So, sometimes it's observing instead and going to them with suggestions, right? So, that was just one thing that I thought was important to mention. And there was another one, but I forgot it now, so hopefully, it'll come back to me.   Sarah Nicastro: But I think that those are fantastic examples of really being able to look at your customers' journeys and look for those opportunities to really help them, and in turn, help yourself by creating more potential.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. I've got a mentor of mine who always says, "Chris, we have two ears and one mouth, right, and you've got to use them in those proportions." So, you said it a few times, but it is really listening. And I think sometimes it's also... when you talk about that trusted advisor comment, sometimes it's about being brave enough to tell a customer, "Hey, I know you want to do that. That's not the best practice." We had a customer who wanted to use Active Directory in a certain way. No other Philips customer does what they do, and we should have said to them, "Look, you're taking a risk doing that and we're not sure we can support that." But I think a lot of times our tendency is, " We want to close this deal, so let's just give what the customer wants."   Chris La Fratta: But I think one of the reasons why customers want to work with an industry leader is because of the experience you have as an industry leader, especially when implementing very complex things like this, they want to know what the best most successful customers have done and how they've done it. So, I think you got to kind of own that and bring it to the forefront.   Sarah Nicastro: And you just reminded me of my other point, so thank you, but it was exactly that, which is when you have a wealth of assets that are connected assets across a variety of customers, and you can look for those insights that your customer base is going to find value, and that in and of itself is another opportunity for that revenue, diversification and to differentiate yourself to build that relationship, to stop looking at it as a transactional product, sale, break/fix service to that partnership, because there's so much value, in your case, to the hospitals, of you knowing, based on fact, based on data, "Hey, actually, the best practice other hospitals do is this. Let me show you a couple examples. A customer we have in this state does this, this state does this."   Sarah Nicastro: They don't have that information, so that information, that data is power you have that you can use to educate your customer base that no one else has, right? So, a lot of times, that data in and of itself, is an untapped opportunity to expand these relationships and diversify revenue, because companies might use it operationally internally, but they're not looking at it from that perspective of what's this telling us that is insights, best practices, information that our customers would potentially pay to know or that we can bundle into this overall thing?   Chris La Fratta: Yeah, no, it's fascinating. Again, one of the customers that have bought into this as a service model with us around our patient monitoring, I was at a quarterly review with them not long ago, and we were reviewing their statistics. And so the monitoring gets broken into three segments, there's high acuity, mid acuity, and low. So, the most sick patients are in high acuity, your sort of middle patients are mid, and then when you get checked into the ER or the general ward, they put you on these low acuity monitors. And so, by looking at their statistics over the last quarter, and we're reviewing this from a billing point of view, like eight years, this is what your quarterly invoice is going to be, but they saw this huge spike in mid acuity, and they start to ask operational questions about why? "Why did it go up so much? I don't understand." Well, it was driven by COVID volume.   Chris La Fratta: But it's to your point that, if you have this huge install base of information, not only can you help one hospital compare itself to the other and get some best practice, of course, the information is completely anonymized and de-identified and things like that, also, even within the hospital, they're not always seeing operationally what's going on. Everything from our equipment is being used, and I gave some of those examples earlier, to where is the equipment? I mean, we have a patient-worn device that allows people to walk around the hospital when they're recovering while still being watched. Well, things get lost all the time. And I can tell the last time it made a network connection were in a hospital that it wasn't. So, even as simple as, "I lost my keys. Help me find them," sort of thing.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, for sure.   Chris La Fratta: So, it's all about data. And I know there's a question that we'll talk about maybe at the end about my vision of what's next, and it's all about how do we better use all this data that's being generated, whether it's to deliver an economic or patient outcome. I think there are clinical outcomes that could potentially be better achieved if we can somehow... And Google, Apple, GE, Siemens, Philips, we're all trying to get there, but nobody's really cracked the code yet, but if you think about all the sick patients that go to a hospital, so much information about them, and their symptoms, and their treatments have been captured, that's a place where we've got to start applying AI and machine learning and things like that so that we can get some better treatment plans, quicker diagnosis and things like that. That's sort of a vision of the future that I have.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. We're going to get there.   Chris La Fratta: All right.   Sarah Nicastro: All right. So, everything we've talked about is really exciting. You guys are doing an amazing job of becoming that partner to your customers instead of a vendor or supplier, and really looking at modernizing the relationships you have with them. But this process and that shift, it's a fundamental change in how you're doing business, right? And that is, in no way do I want to touch on the good points and have people think like, "Oh, Philips is doing it, it must be easy," because it isn't. It's really, really hard. And I think that the deeper and richer the history in developing, manufacturing, selling, servicing products, the harder this transformation can be and this shift can be.   Sarah Nicastro: So, you're obviously doing an excellent job at it, but I want to talk about a couple of the major points, and you can maybe share a little bit the challenges and how you've either overcome them or are working to overcome them. And the first thing I want to talk about is just this idea of transitioning to the as a service model, right? So, for Philips, I understand the value to the customers loud and clear, but to you guys, you're moving from these large influxes of revenue to more of a recurring model, and then you're risk sharing. So, to your point, if the hospital doesn't use as much one month as another month, that dips. So, explain how you kind of get on the same page about why and how that's worth the risk and what that takes to migrate too.   Chris La Fratta: Well, there's a lot in that question, so let me try to touch on some of the topics there. The first thing I would say is, as you start to make a transformation like this, think about Philips, as I said, it's 130 year old company, when I introduced myself, and for 125 of those years or so, we sold a thing, we manufactured a thing, sold it, and then did some service on it, right? So, all of our processes, all of our back end systems are designed to do that thing.   Chris La Fratta: And so, a few years ago, we decided to get into the solution space, and all of a sudden, SAP doesn't want to allow us to transact business that way, or our service system is really good at break/fix service, and dispatching engineers and doing things like that, but not so good with other things. So, there's a lot about kind of tuning up your back office systems to allow these business models to work and things like that.   Chris La Fratta: Then you start having discussions with your CFOs and folks, because they used to get in the sort of episodic revenues, what I would call it, and install a huge capital deal, and there's a little bit of services that go along with that, but that's how we forecast revenue, but we're basically getting all the revenue up front. So, let's just say we're going to do a million dollar deal, we get a million dollars up front, we get a $75,000 a year service contract, and that's kind of the model. Now we've gone towards that million dollars that gets spread over five years, and oh, by the way, there's some risk in it, because if the customer doesn't achieve their outcomes, you're going to make less money in that month. And we actually saw that.   Chris La Fratta: A lot of our solutions... we have a paper use solution for our picture archiving services, so when you get an image done on an MRI, or a CT, or whatever, it gets stored digitally and clinicians retrieve that and they work the images, and they read them and all that stuff. Well, during COVID, a lot of elective procedures were postponed. So, for the whole year, last year, people getting MRI scans or going in, in some cases, for things as serious as a bypass surgery, a lot of that was postponed for a long time, so the usage of those images went down and our revenue went down, and it's a big hit. So, why would you still do it?   Chris La Fratta: I think why you would still do it, first and foremost, is this is the direction that industry is going, so if you don't make the shift, you're just going to become irrelevant in a few years. That's one reason. But I think the second more compelling reason is, it deepens the partnership with your customer and it makes what you do really, really sticky. So, these customers that have been using your service as a service, it's not easy to switch. It's really, really difficult to migrate that data that might be in our systems, the competitor's systems, or what have you, once you kind of make that shift, but I think you become sort of indispensable as a partner so the long term is worth it.   Chris La Fratta: The other thing I'd say is, if you go from that episodic revenue, and all of my peers who are listening to this podcast will tell you, you've got these huge fourth quarter hockey sticks. You got to make that Q4 number, everything's being discounted, there's so much pressure to make that revenue number. I mean, somebody has to sell it, supply chain has to deliver, I have to go out and install it, and all that stuff needs to happen. But if it's recurring revenue, that recurring revenue just builds on itself, and builds on itself, and builds on itself, and builds on itself, you still have to renew it, and hopefully over the lifecycle, you're expanding it, but it's a lot more predictable, and it just makes running your quarterly business that much more sustainable. It's a little bit easier.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's just that initial transition. It's this big hurdle and then you can start to see how it can be an improvement.   Chris La Fratta: I'm jealous, so jealous of the companies who started this way, like salesforce.com, because they didn't have to make the shift. And then there are companies like IBM who said, "We're not going to be in mainframes anymore, we're going to shift totally to services," and they kind of like made a bold decision. At Philips, we still do both, so it's sometimes hard to kind of run both-   Sarah Nicastro: Straddle, yeah.   Chris La Fratta: ... but there's good reasons to do it. And I'll tell you, the number one reason to do it is not every customer is ready to consume this way either. There's still quite a few big customers that just aren't interested. They want to buy capital and depreciate it over 10 years because that suits their operating model better. So, for us, it works being in both worlds at the same time. Sometimes I wish it wasn't the case, because I think we can move faster, but we're balancing it as well as we can.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Okay. So, that's a big one. The other one I'm wondering if we can just touch on quickly before we get to the other big one. And I say quickly, because I know that service is your world, not necessarily sales overall, but obviously, this is a complete shift for sales too, right? I mean, it's a different value proposition, it's expanding, really, the stakeholders within a customer organization that you need to be selling to, when you get into these adjacent services and all of that.   Sarah Nicastro: So, what have you seen in relation to what it takes to transition to selling that as a service model?   Chris La Fratta: Yeah, a few things there, I think. First of all, it's not a department level sale anymore. You can't go to the head of biomed, or the chief nurse of a unit, or the chief radiologist, it's a C suite sell. So, that means the salespeople have to really up their game and learn how to talk to and sell to the C suite, because these tend to be longer term, and they tend to be enterprise wide. They are big bets on both sides of the equation.   Chris La Fratta: Second of all, the incentive schemes have to be taken into account. So, we have a really good sales executive within Philips who came over from Microsoft, and at Microsoft, remember, you used to buy Windows and Office and pay $300 for it, and you got the CDs, and Microsoft shifted from that model towards 360, which everything is online and downloadable. They had to change the comm plans for their people because of that. It means they weren't getting the one time episodic hit any more. And so now you need to comp on total contract value over time and things like that, and that's very different.   Chris La Fratta: And I think the last piece is, and I alluded to this a little bit in my last answer, but the renewal becomes a really important conversation, and expansion becomes a really important conversation. So, out in industry, you'll hear people talk about success managers, customer success managers, which we're still figuring out what that means for us in Philips, but part of it is making sure that when the renewal conversation comes up, that customer is so happy with the value that you've added that it's not even a conversation. But it's also things like, "Hey, you're doing really well in these units of your hospital with the solution. Why don't we go to the west building now, or why don't we go to your children's clinic, or whatever it is?" And so, it should provide you with a base to do that stuff. So, if you're doing it well, you're not hunting business as much, but it's a different art form or different science, or however my sales colleagues would describe it. It's just a new methodology.   Chris La Fratta: So, those are some of the thoughts around sales. I can't emphasize that first point enough. Upping your game to be able to talk to the C suite. At Philips, we've sort of developed playbooks around how to do that. We have account executives who are identified as those people who should go in and have that conversation. And yeah, I mean, we're on our journey. I can't say we've solved it all yet, but we've had some success there. And even identifying the right customers. So, in the US, there's a lot of consolidation going on around healthcare and stuff, lots of small hospitals, now you have these big integrated delivery networks, and some of them are kind of taking this journey and making this leap of faith with us. But like I said earlier, someone who just aren't ready yet, they'll be ready on their own time, so I think timing is really important as well.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I would imagine it forces a closer relationship between service and sales too, right, because it's just kind of a continuous cycle of that. Like you said, you don't want to get to a point where it's, they're sold, they're serviced, and then they need to be sold again, right? You want it to just be cohesive.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. So, my sales counterpart, "Hey, I sold the equipment," and he gets all that order intake and all that revenue, and I get the service. And so in a way, we kind of had our own P&L. There's a dependency, of course. And that was just one thing. The solution is the equipment and services integrated as one thing. So, we can't split it up anymore, we have to be side by side, and it forces that, and that's actually a really good thing.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And that's probably a whole separate podcast on its own, right? Because I think the companies that are trying to do this with to P&Ls are the companies that are trying to innovate this way without the top level commitment to taking the business in that direction. I mean, it's really tough to make this transition if everybody isn't working in the same vein. But we'll tackle that another time.   Sarah Nicastro: I want to get into one more big thing before we finish for today, which is, the thing we've alluded to but haven't really discussed in detail yet is the fact that this requires a real significant shift in skillset, mindset of your technicians. And so, you touched on the fact that you gave them a choice, empowered them to decide, do they want to kind of expand their skillset and all of that, but I know you've also increased your use of contingent workers to be able to eliminate some of the, we'll say, more traditional break/fix non value add work so that your technicians, you can focus on upskilling them, re-skilling them, expanding their skills, to have those consultative relationships and to do these different things. So, talk a little bit about that and what you've learned in making that work for Philips.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. It's a good topic. I mean, at the end of the day, you can only focus on so much, so you define what your core competencies are. And our core competencies have shifted from people who are really good mechanically and electrically to people more IT oriented, as I said, or people more consultative, which I think is even more kind of a unique skill.   Chris La Fratta: So, what we've determined over time is that that's where we want to focus and develop folks. But guess why, at some point, when we ship product, there's a loading dock where there's tons of boxes of our stuff. And so, we used to pay our staff whatever their hourly rates are to unbox things, and to stage things, and to prep them so that they can go into the hospital. So, that's a really easy example of where we've used third parties to kind of supplement. It's not a skill that's highly specialized, it's not something that we want to develop a core competency in, and there's some variability around demand. So, if we have a really big fourth quarter, I don't want to hire 100 people and have them part of my fixed costs as we enter the next fiscal year, I want to be able to ramp them up and down as needed. So, it's really helped there.   Chris La Fratta: But even if I say, "Okay, that's some basic stuff. I'll take it one step further," we do a lot of staging of servers and equipment like that, and that's pretty standard and can even be done remotely. So, there, even in the IT space, when it's something fairly basic like loading an image onto a server or doing some configuration of a server, we start to work with third parties as well. If I have a third party that shows up on site, they are part of the Philips team, they get treated as if they were a Philips employee, they get the same training, in many cases, that our employees would get. We really do a lot to ensure the quality is there. It's a little bit more difficult to control, if I'm honest with you. I mean, probably the worst story I can tell you is one of our third party guys fell asleep on a patient bed or stole a dessert off the lunch tray. I mean, these things kind of happen from time to time, so you do need a process to check in and make sure that the quality is there.   Chris La Fratta: But for us, I think the main benefit is being able to focus on what's core, and it offsets some costs, of course, that's part of the reason why we do it, and it allows for a lot more flexibility. So, it's a tricky road to go down, but I think it's important. Like I said, the approach we've taken is we're allowing and promoting the development opportunities for our internal folks, so as we shift, we want them to come with us, but at the same time, where it doesn't make sense for us to unbox equipment and to do basic configurations, we're just going to use the contingent help. I mean, I think it's happening everywhere.   Chris La Fratta: And it's kind of interesting, people talk a lot about the gig economy, and I don't know if a guy who works for Philips can change his field service engineer jacket and go in and work for Siemens, and on the next call, go in and work for GE. I don't know if we'll get there in healthcare because we're a little bit specialized, but definitely, I see it as an increasing trend that any activity that's not core, you're working with a partner, and they are partners, and you're giving them the training and you enable them to work on your behalf.   Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And I think what you said at the beginning is spot on. You can't do everything, right? So, if you're going to work toward this world of creating more value, then you need to focus on fueling the skills to do that value added stuff instead of unboxing things, right? I mean, you're not going to want to pay W2 employees to do all of those things, and this gives you that opportunity to unburden them with some of the things that you can leverage these other resources for so that they have the time, bandwidth, energy to commit to where you're going and build their skills, right? So, I think it's a really good point. I actually think that's another area we could do a podcast on, because I agree it's a direction we're going in, but at least based on my conversations, I still have more people asking me, "So, what do you hear around contingent workers, and how, and how do you make sure they don't fall asleep onsite? And how do you train them? And how do you control them?" All of those things.   Sarah Nicastro: So, I think it's an area that will grow, but there's a lot of people trying to sort out how to make it work, and I think that's a different conversation. But the premise of incorporating that into your labor mix to free up your resources to progress and build skills in the direction of those solutions I think is very, very smart. So, we'll have to hopefully have you back sometime.   Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So, last question, Chris, and you touched on this earlier, the future is data, right? That's where we're going, right? So, tell me a little bit more about that.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. I mean, my vision of the future starts with Philips being an indispensable partner and helping hospitals achieve these outcomes that we've been talking about. So, we'll become trusted advisors, bringing to bear all the experience and everything that we've learned by being a leader in healthcare, and pretty much present in every hospital and every health system in the world, but especially in North America.   Chris La Fratta: And so, I think about it this way. In certain segments, we have like 50, 50 plus percent market share, and that means for patients being treated with those devices, one out of every two, we're collecting their data, and it's all being saved now, right? Everything's being saved, it all gets dumped into the data warehouses and all that. So, I think, like we were talking earlier, being able to harvest that data, I think it starts out with simple things like dashboards, like, I want to watch the patient flow through the hospital. I want to have a sort of command center where I can see everything happening. And we have that, in some senses. There are central organizations where they can monitor all the cardiac monitoring of the hospital in one place, and there are people behind all these LCDs, it's kind of like a NOC but for healthcare.   Chris La Fratta: I think it starts with things simple like that, but then it gets into more advanced like, "How can we really harvest this information and use it to drive a better outcome? Is it machine learning and AI?" I'm actually not smart enough to tell you whether that stuff works because there's a lot of hype about it, but there aren't really good examples. But I certainly think that you can say, if a patient came in and he had these symptoms, and he was a man, and 50 years old, and whatever else his demographic information was, if you've seen 1,000 of those cases, how were they treated and which one had the best outcome? In my simple mind, those are ways that you can really provide a valuable service, that not only helps my customers, it helps mankind, it helps us stay in the hospital less, get diagnosed more precisely, and get back to our healthy lives.   Chris La Fratta: Philips actually is a big player right now for monitoring people at home. So, when you're chronically ill, you don't want to be in the hospital, doctors don't want you in the hospital, so let's figure out better ways to deliver telehealth, and that's a big play for us. And I think data enables that and enables better outcomes there as well. So, if I were in school right now, I'd be becoming a data scientist because I think that's where it's at. And for companies like Philips, I think it's yet another area where we can develop services and solutions and continue on this journey that we've started.   Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely, yeah. I have two sons, and my five year old son has type 1 diabetes, so I've never cared so much about medical data as I do now. But I mean, he has a continuous glucose monitor, and he has an insulin pump, and those two things don't yet, at least the type he has, work together, right? But the advancements that you're seeing in being able to leverage that data, to, if not find a cure, which hopefully is coming, be able to have the, they call it the artificial pancreas, right, it's really cool.   Chris La Fratta: Yeah. And COVID, I think, last year forced a lot of that. There's a healthcare provider out in the Midwest somewhere, huge, huge system, and I think they were doing like 4,000 telehealth visits a month before COVID, and now it's like 80,000 telehealth visits a month. And it's something that nobody wanted before the pandemic, now, docs like it better, patients like it better. I mean, they don't have to leave the house and travel if it's not that serious of an issue.   Chris La Fratta: I myself, I think it's great. I'd rather call my doctor on the phone and say, "I think I have a rash," and answer a couple of questions and get a prescription than interrupt my day and go into the hospital or in the doctor's office where there are other sick people. So, I think it's inevitable and technology will certainly enable it., and it's just now even a bigger pool of data to pull from. So, yeah, I think that's definitely a big part of what we'll see in the next five to 10 years.   Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming and sharing. I love the vision. What Philips has accomplished is fantastic, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. I think it'll be really helpful for our audience, and I'd love to have you back sometime.   Chris La Fratta: Sarah, thanks so much. It was really fun to talk about all this stuff with you, and yeah, I'd love to come back any time.   Sarah Nicastro: Awesome. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 at ifs.com. As always, thanks for listening. </div> </div> </div> </div> <div class="col-12 col-lg-3"> <div class="form-wrapper"> <h2 class="form-tittle">Stay Connected</h2> <iframe src="https://info.ifs.com/GM-CP-CU-2012-12-FoFS-Newsletter_IFrame.html">

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Pressing Pause to Reflect After the COVID Sprint

Jason Prokop, Director of Field Service, and Alesia Magon, Sr. Manager Technical Support & Repair Center, both of global laboratory diagnostics firm DiaSorin, take a deep breath after the massive growth, major pivots, and immense perseverance of the last year to talk with Sarah about their lessons learned.

Sarah: Welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we're going to take a moment and press pause to reflect back after the COVID sprint. While we certainly aren't completely past the pandemic, we've reached a point where a lot of businesses are stopping to take a look at the lessons learned and the experiences they've gleaned over the last year.

Sarah: I'm joined today by Jason Prokop and Alesia Magon, both of DiaSorin. Jason and Alesia, welcome to the Future of Field Service Podcast.

Alesia: Thanks for having us.

Jason: Nice to be here. Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you for being here. Let's start with some introductions. So why don't you tell us a little bit about DiaSorin, your roles and anything you'd like to share about your backgrounds. Alesia, do you want to go first?

Alesia: Sure. My name is Alesia Magon as Sarah mentioned and I'm the senior manager of technical support in the repair center at DiaSorin. I'll let Jason describe DiaSorin too in a little bit, in a global sense. But what I'm responsible for, is the 24/7 technical support team at DiaSorin Inc., across the U.S. and Canada, as well as the repair depot and internal service for equipment that we have here at the DiaSorin Inc. site.

Sarah: Excellent. Jason, can you tell us a little bit about DiaSorin and your role?

Jason: Yes, hi. I'm Jason Prokop. I'm the director of service and support here at DiaSorin Inc., out of Stillwater, Minnesota. So I'm responsible and our team's responsible for the field service across the United States and we also have a subsidiary up in Canada. We directly manage our customers install base. We do preventative maintenance, repairs, et cetera.

Jason: So DiaSorin is a global manufacturer of immunodiagnostics products. We're very multi-international company from that perspective and we really specialize in specialty diagnostics. That's why if you see our brand, DiaSorin's called the diagnostic specialist from that perspective. So we try to come out with niche and innovative products, that fit gaps in our customers' needs from that perspective.

Sarah: Okay, great. So I wrote an article, I think it was, I believe it was late 2020 and it was my love letter to the service industry for surviving such a crazy year. Alesia, you actually reached out to me, after coming across that article and saying, "Hey, this really resonated and I think that we experienced a lot of this and we have some interesting stuff to share." So here we are. So can you tell us a little bit, what about that article resonated most with you?

Alesia: Yeah, during the pandemic, there was a lot of news and media about the frontline workers, as there should have been. That's completely appropriate. There was people, many, many industries and types of people that were serving the communities, that weren't as readily noticed. When I read that article, I thought, "Absolutely, yes. This is the love letter to the people in this community and the community of the service industry, that are trying to help in their own retrospective ways for the customers that they serve." And thinking specifically about the service industry at DiaSorin, I thought, "Yes, this is what we went through." We had unbelievable challenges, but we had a lot of lessons where we learned about perseverance and we learned about how to stay strong and you wrote and touched on several of those points in the letters and I shared it on LinkedIn, as an effort of expressing the same level of gratitude back to the service department that we represent.

Sarah: Yeah, you make a really good point, which is there's many layers and types of essential workers, right? So some that have experienced maybe different things first-hand, like those that are on the front lines in the healthcare industry, certainly I think deserve to be top of mind, when you think about what this last year has looked like. But to your point, there's a lot of things that are a little bit more behind the scenes and a lot of people that have worked really hard to serve those front line workers and to make sure that those front line workers have been able to do everything that they needed to do for patients and for people that have been impacted most. I think that that's a really, really good point.

Sarah: Now, DiaSorin being in the industry that you're in, just so happened to be in a position to provide testing for COVID and therefore, had maybe a doubly crazy year last year, because you experienced some really intense growth. So Jason, can you tell us a little bit about sort of, what's the core business? So what were you kind of up to before COVID hit? Then, what has that growth looked like? How did you sort of pivot and start providing that testing and what did that kind of mean in terms of the impact on the business?

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So pre-COVID, it was typical business as usual for our organization. We had our national commercial meeting laid out at the end of February, where we were given our strategic objectives of an organization, with the products that we were going to come out with and launch and what our focus was going to be for 2020.

Jason: So we were all out on our plan. Everybody, all the information was cascaded to everybody in the commercial organization, as well as internally. Then come mid-March, things changed. Now we're in the midst of the pandemic, so as an organization and being we're very innovative from that perspective, we saw what was needed in the market place. So we quickly, our molecular colleagues out in California, came up with the PCR test for COVID. Then our global colleagues in Italy and internally here in Stillwater, came out with some amino acids, both for IgG and antigen testing. Now we have another IgG testing for post-vaccination from that aspect.

Jason: So then we saw much interest in the market place, because no vendor was ready with the supply to meet the demand from our customers. So then we quickly had to collaborate with all of our colleagues, both from a corporate level and in the U.S., as well as our instrument manufacturers, to look at what we could do with our supply to meet the demand of the public and I think from that, we saw the communication across our organizations really increase, even though we're in this virtual setting from that perspective. We all had to communicate with one another on a daily basis, to make sure that we could get done what we needed to get done for the organization, as well as our communities and society from that perspective.

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative), okay. So can you give us kind of a base line to think about, like, "Okay, before COVID we were producing X units." Like how much did that really boom the business and like a scale for what you had to adjust to.

Jason: Yeah, so I can talk a little bit from an instrument standpoint. So from a molecular standpoint, our install base more than doubled in 2020. From immuno standpoint, we had a couple months where we installed more instruments than we ever have in the history of the time that I've been with the organization and I've been here almost 27 years from that perspective. I think from an immuno side, in one month we installed over 50 instruments in May, I believe. Typically, we do maybe 10 a month. So it was all hands on deck, to get our customers the instrumentation and the testing they needed to keep up with their demand that they had.

Sarah: Yeah. I think it's interesting that we think about, I think a lot of times when you talk about reacting to change, you think about in the negative sense, right? So like a lot of the organizations we've had conversations with around COVID, unfortunately what that looked like for them was, a significant reduction in business and some people had to make layoffs. So I think there's this perception of the challenges of COVID being more on the side of that contraction. But I think it's just interesting to point out that, challenges can also come in the form of opportunity, right?

Sarah: So I mean let's set aside the fact that you're all employees of DiaSorin and DiaSorin now has this opportunity to provide this testing in this time that it's needed, which obviously has a growth impact on the business. But you're all still human beings, dealing with the same fear and uncertainty and trepidation, in your own lives, right? But there's also a real business aspect of like, "Oh my gosh. Like we have the chance to step in and do this thing and being able to do it." Right, I think the recognition of the opportunity is one thing, but the ability to pull together quickly as a company and execute on that opportunity is a totally different thing.

Sarah: So I think kudos to you guys as an organization, for being able to see where you could have an impact and get to work, doing what needs to be done. You're talking about a global company, right? So all of that communication. The logistics. Everything. We'll talk a little bit about that. I think the other thing that's interesting to look at here is, not only was it a really hard year in many ways, even though for you guys that meant really, really rapid growth. During that, you ended up with the strongest NPS score that you've had since you started measuring it. So how? Like, how did you do that and why do you think that is, or how do you think that was accomplished?

Jason: Man, I can speak to that. So, if I look at it from my perspective, it's all about the great people that we have within our organization and I'm just not talking about all of our people in field service from that perspective, but that's internally, across all of our organizations, everybody stepped up. Did we all have some anxiety? Absolutely! I think everybody in society had some anxiety about stuff.

Jason: But we also knew that we were doing something different and really making a difference from that perspective. So all the people across the organization really stepped up, both internally and in the field and I think our customers saw that. They saw us as an organization, that's going to continue to provide excellent customer support, innovative products, to meet the needs that they have at this time, in a very quick and nimble fashion. Nobody ever stopped. I mean, whatever we asked people to do, of course everybody had a little anxiety about it and we were empathetic to that for sure, because we had the same type of anxiety. But they knew that they were doing the best they could for our organization, as well as the customers out there and all the people within the organization deserve all the credit and I think we had some of the best people of any organization that's out there.

Alesia: Add to that, Sarah, that the industry was, we saw it in the media everywhere. "We need more testing." People were saying, it was March, the middle of March, when the U.S. really became impacted by the pandemic and the number one response was, "More testing, more testing, more testing." Our organization a lot of great people within this company, who are very innovative in the scientific industry, were able to come up with that solution and the customer saw that DiaSorin is a solution provider, right? So we're able to come up with the plans.

Alesia: There was a lot of shortages of a lot of things, but testing was one of the things that was most talked about. When we did that and then you couple it with something that we were already providing before, but our employees dug deep and did it even better this year, was we really provided that customer support and that's not just like the front line people who are talking to the customer, although they are extremely valuable to that, being the face of DiaSorin, it was the people who were staying late and making sure that everything was received on time. It was the people who were processing the orders when they didn't necessarily have to. It was the people who were taking care of their children at home, while still working.

Alesia: I mean it was a lot of people who had to do things that they've never done before. But realizing the importance of why they did that and it was visible to our customers. We were able to say, when they were saying to us, I'm having to show up in the lab and to do the testing, we were saying, "And we're side by side with you, we're helping you." They saw that.

Sarah: Yeah, yeah. We're going to talk a little bit more about kind of the people part of this too and I think that's the most important part. But before we do that, I want to talk about the logistics. The operations of things, right? So in this case, you're talking about growth that was spawned by this crazy once in a lifetime, hopefully, event happening, right? But any company that experiences really, really rapid, big growth, struggles with how to scale and how to react quickly and nimbly to accommodate that.

Sarah: So I think there's a message here, not just, "We grew so much because of COVID", but just, "We experienced this rapid growth, period and here's how we adjusted our business operations to be able to navigate that." So can you guys talk a little bit about some of the areas of operations and how you sort of made some changes and pivots to be able to react and respond to the opportunity that was there?

Alesia: Yeah. Yeah, there was quite a few of those moments. So starting on day one, after we realized what was happening, was about the safety of our employees and what we were going to do. So what do we need to implement in order to get people safe? So for technical support, it meant, "You're working from home immediately." Well that meant that we had to set up their home offices and structure their home offices and ensure that there was business continuity with the phone lines and we had to ensure that there was no major disruptions. Other companies experienced that too. Our customers saw no difference on any of our phone support whatsoever. From a repair center perspective, where we had people who were having to work here at the office, in order to accommodate the needs, it was making sure they had the right PPE. That they had the right safety protocols.

Alesia: It was moving things around in the space and the lab, so that they were able to do that. It was making sure that we had procedures that they could all have their own laptops, where they were making sure that they were reading them without touching other people. It was making sure their badges were only allowing them into certain areas. There was a lot of things that we did, in order to say, "Okay, first is your safety and how are we going to do that?" From a field perspective, we did that as well and Jason can talk a little bit about the safety that we did for the field service employees.

Jason: Yeah and that was working very closely with our corporate colleagues, as well as internally with our health and safety teams and stuff like that. So you know how it went from a PPE perspective, where now everybody needs masks and there's no masks available and you're trying to find lab coats, you're looking for gloves. We were looking to make sure that we could find alternate suppliers, than our base suppliers, to make sure that we had a backup, in case there was a need from that perspective. We had to work with our corporate colleagues up in Canada, because now we can't ship stuff across the border, from that perspective, to get people PPE. So a lot of that comes back to that communications that we had within our teams.

Jason: So that really helped us get ready for that. Then even to keep up with demand, we had to hire some new head count, to make sure that we had enough people in place and then as Ally said, we had to look at social distancing between our confined space, to make sure that we could keep people a safe distance apart. Then we had to look at alternate shifts that people could work, as well. We had people in the field that had daycare needs. So they had decided, instead of working a normal eight to five, that they would work five to one PM, to be able to take good care of their customers still and that's kind of the ownership that we see from our service department, as well as all of our departments internally, is that they really were owned the situation and were very accountable for everything that needed to happen, from that perspective.

Alesia: Yeah and a lot of those pivotal operational things, head count, shifts, safety, working with colleagues around the world, they seem at a glance, something that you could breeze over, but they all took several hours of conversation to figure out, "How are we going to do this and how are we-

Sarah: Yeah, at least, I would think. I mean and it's easy to kind of look back. They say like rose colored glasses, or what have you. But the other thing is, in those very early stages, the circumstances were changing, almost every day, right? So it's like you figure it out once and then you get going and then next week it's different. Then you figure it out again and then, so it wasn't like, we've kind of as this has gone on, we've fallen into a norm. It's not the norm anyone wants, but we've kind of reached a more level state. But in the beginning, I mean it was different requirements and regulations and stipulations being introduced, really all the time. So I think the attention to detail and again, that level of cross-functional and regional communication, is really important in being able to make the changes you guys did and continuing refining them, as you went along. Any other things to note, in terms of logistically or operationally, how you guys kind of accommodated the growth?

Alesia: The main logistics points when it came to servicing, were really about working, when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, besides the staffing and how we had to manage that, was about the logistics of the parts. The logistics of the instrumentation. We really had to collaborate and communicate much differently to our corporate colleagues, in the way that it wasn't that we were speaking about things differently, but we had to speak about things much more rapidly.

Alesia: So instead of weekly communications, it was daily communications, because guess what? "Today we need this, this, this, this." They had to say, "Okay, now we need to gather up the people here that need to help with that. We need to talk to our suppliers. They need to talk to their suppliers. Who's our alternate suppliers? Where are we getting it? How are they going to be imported? How are they going to be exported?" There were so many meetings where we just had to come up with those solutions very quickly and get the right stakeholders in place immediately and there wasn't a person who didn't try to respond to that need.

Alesia: But the logistics of service, although PPE was something that many organizations were contending to get at that time, it's also a lot of those parts require special metaling, special people who are working on manufacturing lines that all were impacted by COVID, as well. When those production lines were shut down, because of a potential COVID case, which did happen multiple times. We had to think about, "Okay, now what are we going to do in the supply chain and how are we going to react?" That was something that we tried to make sure did not impact the customer. We were going to do everything that we could as an organization, to make that transparent to the customer.

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah.

Jason: Yep and when we had such an increase in our install base, I mean we had to keep from an inventory standpoint, from spare parts, to be able to service our customers. Like you said, it changed in a month. We would have to manage our reorder points and everything and what our consumption is, pretty much on a weekly basis, to keep up with the growing install base that we were having. Because, we need to make sure we're supporting them in the best possible way that we can. Did we have some challenges? Of course we did. I think every manufacturer that's out there had some challenges from that perspective. But I think we, through a lot of dedication and commitment of our people, we made our way through it quite well.

Sarah: Yeah. So thinking about reacting to this. If you look at it from the business perspective, you're talking about being more nimble, more flexible, more creative, more probably organized. All of the things. What would you each say is the biggest lesson, business-wise, that you've learned, that you think you'll carry into the future? Like out of this experience, what's the one thing that you think will kind of persist?

Alesia: For me, from a personal perspective, right? Yeah, so for me, I would say that I really just want to continue to look at employees' individual situations with the business needs, because not just during COVID, but other times, people have various challenges and you have to be able to say, "Okay, how can we respectfully accommodate those needs and still meet what the objectives are of the organization?"

Alesia: So that's one important thing. But retaining being nimble. It's how to communicate with the other people. I know we've said that word multiple times, but really that was one of the things that came out is, we realized, "Okay, well forget the phone call. Now we're going to do a video chat. Now I'm going to chat you all day long about little individual things, in order to get the end goal done."

Alesia: When we're being nimble with the solution, it's, "Okay, so this is the way we've always done it. We've now proved to some people who have hesitation about that change, that we can do it and we can be just as effective and we can be just as efficient and let's figure out a way to get through it." I think a lot more open mindedness has definitely come out as a result of the COVID experience.

Sarah: Yeah. Jason, what would you add?

Jason: Mine would be similar from that perspective. As leaders within the organization and being we managed a lot of field based staff from that perspective, we want to make sure that they're still engaged from that aspect and we used to have a lot of regional meetings. Go to customer sites and visit. Now we don't have the opportunity to do that. So we're continuing to look at ways that we can keep people engaged from that perspective, where it used to be, well we'll have three regional meetings, we'll go visit some customer sites.

Jason: Now we have to look at alternative ways that we can keep all of our employees engaged from that perspective. I think we've been okay at it, but we still have some work to do from that perspective, because it's hard to be as engaged as you can be, when you're talking through a video monitor or on the phone, from that aspect. I also think that from this and the virtual environment, when we look at jobs that can be done remote, via all the time, or at least provide our employees that flexibility when they have personal needs, to be able to work from home.

Jason: I think from an executive level and leadership level with the organization with the tremendous job that everybody did this year, there's a lot more trust in that aspect, where the old school mentality is, if you're not in the building and you didn't punch your time card, I don't really know what you're doing. I think we actually saw our productivity probably increase with a lot of people working remotely. Probably a little less distractions. Probably a little less meetings being called, that you really didn't need to go to, but people spent half a day in meetings, rather than utilizing that time in a value-added activity. So I think that's going to help us in the long run, for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So we talked about the fact that your people was the biggest key to being able to survive and thrive over the last year, in terms of the business. So you guys have mentioned I think, one of the important pieces, which is, there seems to be this pulling together, because everyone realized they were working toward a common good, right? So you guys were navigating this growth, because you were doing something that was having a direct impact on this life experience that we were all having. Alesia, talk a little bit about that kind of interconnectivity and how you think that played a role in peoples' commitment to working harder, or doing whatever it takes to scale up the way you did and to meet the outcomes that you needed to for your customers.

Alesia: Yeah, for sure. There's very few experiences that one goes through in a lifetime, or even generations, in which we all can say we experienced the same thing at the same time. That in itself, creates a connection between the people, right? So it's not the weather that we're talking about, because I mean we were all experiencing the weather that day, but we're talking about how this is impacting us. But it's impacting us in real ways, like real ways where, maybe you've not seen your grandmother for months and months at a time. Or your mother, you have to take care of. Or you're nervous about the fact that your child didn't have childcare, even people who had come with just very unique life experiences, that seemed heavier than normal, right?

Alesia: What made it different was that, a lot of people were having that same feeling, at the same time and it was a result of this. Like what it meant to be stuck in your home for several months. Or for me, I'm in the same building as a part of my team and I couldn't even see them for some months. I had to talk to them virtually, even though we were in the same building. All of those sort of things, really impacted peoples' moods, right? It should have. It did and we're all human. But, one of the things that that meant was, "Okay, I'm having this challenge in my life and my colleague in Italy, in Germany, in the United Kingdom. My colleague who lives in Massachusetts or California, they were all kind of experiencing that."

Alesia: So when I said, "Hey, today is a harder day for me", or that employee said that, we were all saying that. Then, you still saw your colleague next to you, digging deep and trying hard and working the longer hours. Or taking a rest when they needed a rest and you're covering for them, right? So somebody said, "You know what? I need this day off. I have bereavement, I have COVID leave." When that happened, people said, "Okay, I will do more." Because their turn was coming up, right? They kind of knew that. The people who didn't have those turns, felt, I saw a lot of gratitude and feeling fortunate for that. I still see a lot of us feeling connected, "Oh, I see that Italy is closed down again, for instance, last week. That must have been really hard on Easter not to be able to see your family." "Oh, yes that was." Or for all the other holidays that were going on and people didn't get to see their families. Then we were saying, "And when you can work, please come in and help." And people did and they replied to that.

Sarah: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. Yeah, no. I think that makes sense. I think there's definitely this sense of deeper human connection to one another, after the last year. I think that that's the one thing that I hope out of all of this sticks, if anything. Because I think that we just view things differently and I think it makes us kinder to one another. I think it makes people, I'm not a patient person. So I'm not saying like, ultimately patient. But like a little bit more patient and just like I said, a little bit more considerate of what someone else is going through, knowing that we're all going through something and I do hope that that is something that we cannot dismiss when we do get back to an increased sense of normal. Because it is really easy to be kind of wrapped in your own world and your own experiences. But I think this connection that we all have to one another, has been one of the biggest positives out of a really bad situation.

Sarah: So I love the fact that you guys had such a positive response from your teams, in terms of that banding together and working toward a common good. I know we talked before about how important empathy was in leadership over the last year. Can you guys maybe talk a little bit, or give an example about how you have employed empathy with your teams throughout this experience?

Jason: Yeah, I think that was probably one of the most important things that we did as an organization, from that perspective. Because, we're all experiencing the exact same thing. First part is really listening to them, because we're not all in the same situation. Everybody has personal challenges that they have to go through, from that perspective and we all understand that. We listened to all those situations from that aspect.

Jason: We had COVID situations that happened amongst our teams and what we kind of really found from that is, the team work amongst the regions and departments that we have within the organization, that's where I really saw a positive change, because everybody was going through the same thing, "Okay, so and so has COVID. I can take his spot for a little bit. I'm going to go step in." Without any hesitation.

Jason: So I think the biggest thing that we really had was listening. We all had anxiety about what was going on, specifically at the beginning of the pandemic. I think that anxiety has lessened a little bit, but everybody still has a little bit of that there for sure, but really just listening to what their needs are. "If you have to take time out, it's okay. We'll figure it out and everybody else will just step up from a team aspect to get done what needed to get done."

Sarah: Alesia, what would you add?

Alesia: I mean empathy is a word that has gotten thrown around quite a lot, like you know, if you're a servant leader, then you're going to be empathetic to your employees. But what does that mean to really show empathy for one situation is, to be there other words that we described. Empathy for someone's situation is also to say, "We can be creative in this situation and we can allow for that to happen."

Alesia: For those reasons, there was huge kudos to the HR and executive team at DiaSorin, because they allowed the managers to express that creativity. It didn't have to be broad streaking policies that, of course we have policies, that's not the point. But they weren't so broad streaking that it didn't allow the manager to express empathy in a very specific way. I think that the other thing is that when you do show empathy for the employees, it's a double empathy. They show empathy for you, because there were multiple days where I had bad days too. I was experiencing some hardships too. My employees said, "It's okay. You don't have to be perfect today. We're not expecting more from you today."

Alesia: That sort of thing, again, going back to the human side of what COVID left. I mean we were asked to be, like you said, sprinters of this experience. We were asked to sprint through months and months and months of work and we were asked to live during this time, as well. They were sometimes contradicting one another. But that empathy portion of it, how to express it. Not just how to listen and not only to just say, "I am empathetic", but to be empathetic, was something that we were able to do this year and both from an employee side and from a managerial side.

Sarah: Yeah, I think we've had a number of conversations now on this podcast, about the reality of leading by example when it comes to vulnerability and normalizing conversations or making employees feel comfortable saying, "Hey, I'm struggling. I need a break." Or, "I have this going on." There's certain people, certain situations, where it's really hard for folks to speak up, or to feel comfortable, or not scared right, of, "Well what's the reaction going to be? Should I just force my way through it, or what have you?" Related to COVID and not.

Sarah: I think that we've had some really good conversations about, if you can figure out appropriate ways as a leader, to show a little bit of your own humanity and be a little bit vulnerable with your teams, then it shows them that it's okay to do the same thing. I think that that's a good thing. The other thing I think Jason, you mentioned earlier. Some of the field technicians were able to switch their schedules from eight to five. To five to one, right?

Sarah: That might sound like a really small adjustment, but I mean for a lot of people, that probably made the difference of, their spouse not needing to leave their job, or their family not losing an income, or it's just the amount of stress that that situation, in and of itself. People that have kids that couldn't be in childcare or in school, that were both working. I mean we've also talked on here and have relayed a lot of statistics about the number of women that have had to leave the work force in the past year, because of that situation. So those are real tangible things that you can do, right? They're concessions you can make, changes you can make, that don't detract from that employee's ability to do their job, but are just a different way than the norm, that allows them flexibility that probably was priceless to them. Do you know what I mean?

Sarah: To me, that is what empathy is really about, is taking action on what those needs are finding a way to have that common ground. I think that throughout this conversation, you guys have said again and again, like how much your employees cared and how much they wanted to pull together. That's a two-way street, right? If DiaSorin wasn't wanting to hear what those needs are and make adjustments and be creative, those people may not feel as passionate about their part in everything and vice versa. The more you saw them respond and the harder that they wanted to contribute, the more they wanted to contribute, the more you valued their contribution and thought, "Okay, we need to make this work. Like there has to be a way to achieve the right outcomes for everyone."

Sarah: So I think that it's a really good illustration of what needs to happen in that give and take with valuable employees and just thinking, Jason, to your point about not being stuck in the old way of doing things, or some of those thinkings that maybe, over the last year the company is kind of realizing, "Yeah, we felt that way, but it's not proven to be accurate." So yeah. I think those are really good examples and I think it's a really cool story you guys have about how the company has come together, how the employees have contributed and how you've made it through hopefully, the hardest part of the sprint and now you can, whew, breathe a little bit at least. So just one last question, in terms of what are your final thoughts in terms of the biggest lesson you've learned? The biggest take away you have from this whole experience?

Alesia: The biggest take away that I have is that, there's two things. One is, that we're strong and capable and we're able to do things. So I shared with you once before in a conversation. My son learned how to play piano virtually this entire year. I would have never thought that possible. Okay, so there's a lot that we can do, that we never thought that we would be able to do and we walked away with it. Like don't self-limit, right? Then the other piece of that is that, although the virtual is great and there's a lot to it, the other piece that I've learned is how much I enjoy just being around people and what kind of energy that brings and can bring to an environment.

Alesia: So when there is more people around and in the office and you're able to communicate with them face-to-face, or you're able to have a meeting with somebody who's experiencing something and you want to have that meeting face-to-face, there's nothing that really replaces that. I don't really want to replace that. So although I'm able to do things in a lot of different ways, I want to always be able to carve out time to do things face-to-face, when we can, so.

Sarah: Yeah, that makes sense. Jason, what about you?

Jason: Kind of what I learned from this is, if we have the right people in place across the organization, as Ally said, we can do it. When we had to ramp up, not only from a manufacturing and service and installation aspect, it almost sounded like it was impossible to get all the stuff done that we needed to get done. But then we really saw how good the people that we have within the organization and how committed and dedicated they were to the group. Which makes me very proud to work with the team that I work with, as well as everybody else across our entire organization from that aspect.

Jason: The other piece is kind of like Ally's, is I really miss the face-to-face aspect. I'm okay with the virtual, but it's just not the same. So, I can't wait until we're back to a little bit of normalcy, so I can get the field team together and we can have a regional meeting and have face-to-face discussions and continue to build our relationships from that perspective and hopefully sit at the bar and have a beer or something like that, as well, because we can really do a lot to build relationships in a face-to-face setting, that I truly miss. I miss going to our customer sites and seeing all of our colleagues in the field, as well as internationally. So I hope everything continues to whatever the new norm is, the quicker we get there, the better from that perspective.

Sarah: Yeah, I'm with you on the face-to-face. I work from home as my norm, so pre-COVID. But I always traveled a lot and so it's still been a big adjustment, in terms of I really enjoy getting together with colleagues and people in the industry and going to events and all of that. I really miss it, so. I'm with you guys on that. I think there's something to be said for a little bit more flexibility, or hybrid situations and certain things that really don't need to always be done on a location, or in an office. But there's just certain aspects of this that really are better in-person, so. Hopefully, I'd say I'm counting down until the next time I have a beer at a cocktail hour at an industry event. But I don't know when that will be, so I can't be counting. But I'm very much looking forward to it, so.

Alesia: Absolutely.

Sarah: Well thank you both so much for being here and sharing your story. I think it's a very, very impressive feat that you guys have accomplished and it definitely sounds like there's been some really good lessons that have come out of it and if we had to go through it, then that's all we can ask. So thanks for coming on and sharing them with us.

Alesia: Thanks for having us.

Jason: Thank you.

Alesia: It's been a great conversation.

Sarah: All right. Great. You can check out more by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 by visiting IFS.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Michael Blumberg, President of Blumberg Advisory Group, shares with Sarah how he sees companies falter when it comes to successful marketing of services.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast, I’m your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be walking through five biases that hinder effective service marketing. I’m excited to welcome back to the podcast today Michael Blumberg, president of Blumberg Advisory Group. Michael, welcome back to the podcast.

Michael Blumberg: Hi Sarah. It’s really a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. So as we progressed towards more advanced service offerings, outcomes-based service, servitization, all of those trends, the way that organizations market those offerings becomes increasingly important. And it’s also an area that can be challenging if we’re looking to do some things differently, more creatively than we’ve done in the past. So Michael, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, kind of the way that you’ve collected your thoughts on this topic and why it’s a topic you’re so passionate about?

Michael Blumberg: Sure, Sarah. I started in this industry, this I call it the services industry, I think we all call it that, many decades ago as actually right after I got my MBA. In fact, actually I interned while I was going for my MBA and it was in a company that actually my dad started. And he saw in around 1985, that there’s this emerging industry called services, aftermarket services, product service and support. And he pivoted his consulting firm from being a generalist consulting firm to focusing on the service industry. And the work that the company did and then I did when I joined the firm was around strategy, coming up with strategic plans to move a manufacturer’s service operation from a cost center to a profit center. And I started working in market research. And then I progressed along in the company to doing strategy work and M&A and benchmarking and productivity, efficiency, improvement, and systems recommendations.

Michael Blumberg: But early in my career, I got my first experience of learning the difference between being book smart and real-world smart. And book smart was in the sense that when you go in for an MBA, you do your work, you do your research, you do your analysis, you make your recommendation. And the professor says, “It’s great. It’s good work.” Thank you. In the consulting projects we did, it was often involving the situation where a manufacturer, somebody in the manufacturer’s organization like the CEO said, “You know, we need to build our service business. We need to generate more revenue from services.” And we’d come in and we do a strategy for them and do quite a bit of market research to demonstrate there’s a market for their services and how’s it growing and who they be competing against. And often what would happen is there’d be somebody in the board meeting or in the meeting to senior management that said, “How can we do this?”

Michael Blumberg: Yeah, the data is there. Yeah, we’ll take the data and face value, but we’re struggling with growing our service business to begin with. We can’t get anybody to buy the services that we’re offering today. How is it you think we’re going to be able to grow? Even though you’re saying, offering new services and putting a new systems, what makes you so certain that this business is going to close?

Michael Blumberg: And I realized that at that time that it was more than just the data, there was a psychology behind it. And you might hear me say this, that 90% of successes is psychology and other people have said that too. And so at that point, I really wanted to learn as much as I could about why companies are having a difficult time marketing and selling their services and what they could do to be more effective. So we wouldn’t be on the strategy to getting into the tactics and the execution and a psychology about around how do you effectively market. And that actually become my passion and my lifelong journey is to learn and understand and help companies do it better.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. Okay, great. So from those experiences and the insights that you’ve collected over your time in the space, you’ve developed five areas of bias that can impact an organization’s ability to effectively market their service offerings. So we are going to dig into those and talk a little bit about each of those areas. So to start, let’s talk about what you refer to as the OEM bias.

Michael Blumberg: Sure, sure. Yeah, let’s unpack that. That’s the perception of the OEM that they have a captive market. The fact that they manufactured equipment, your customers should naturally buy the services. And unless you have established some competitive barriers and created a monopoly in the aftermarket, you don’t have a captive market. In fact, I don’t know about other countries, but in the United States, it’s a violation of anti-competitive practices and monopolistic practices if you have these barriers. So you can’t have them to begin with, so that’s the first part. You don’t have a captive market. And because of that perception that the OEM is a captive market, sometimes what happens is at the board of directors level or the CEO level, isn’t making the necessary investments in the service organization to grow particularly on the marketing side. They may very likely make investments in the technology to improve the operations to deliver a better customer experience, but not necessarily making investments in the portfolio design, in the pricing, in the go-to-market strategy.

Michael Blumberg: And that can often lead to another aspect of the bias is that the manufacturer discounts the competition. And ran into this quite often, when I began doing management consulting studies, strategic planning, studies around growing the revenue, we often ask the senior management, “Who do you think your competition is?” And quite often they’ll say, “We don’t have any,” because they’re only looking at it with this bias that says they are the manufacturer, they own the aftermarket. But as we get into the organization and start interviewing people in the organization, as we get even closer to the customer, like to the service technician level, they’ll say, “Yeah, we have competitors.” Their competitors are, they’ll say mom-and-pop service organizations or third party maintenance companies. So when we begin a study where we’re helping a company grow their revenue, we want to really dive into who are the direct competitors, but also the indirect competitors. That’s also something that companies can discount.

Michael Blumberg: Fifteen years ago, IT manufacturers and IT service providers would have never believed that Amazon would be their competition.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Michael Blumberg: It is, because Amazon as you know as cloud. So anyone that was servicing on-premise IT equipment were in for a real awakening a few years later as Amazon starting to take market share for them.

Michael Blumberg: Another aspect of the bias is that they view the service salespeople, whether they’re salespeople selling services or service people selling services as order takers. We’ll just make our offer. We’ll ask people if they want to buy and we’ll leave it at that. And when people don’t buy, what starts to happen is the management thinks, well, nobody wants it. Nobody needs our services. There’s no market for it. And that’s usually not the case. The difficulty is they’re not giving the customer compelling enough reasons of why they should buy their services.

Sarah Nicastro: Right.

Michael Blumberg: And the last part of this bias is though the management views past behavior is indication of future performance.

Michael Blumberg: I found one will make a recommendation about me changing the portfolio or changing what you say in the sales pitch or how you market it. They’ll say, “Well, we tried something like that before in the past, it didn’t work.” And what they tried was offering a service, but they didn’t look at all the complexities that are associated with it. So you really have to be open to changing, re-engineering, rethinking, repositioning how you market a service. You can’t just rely on past experience and look at the data. You got to look at what worked and also what didn’t work and see where you can tweak.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. I like the point you made about almost this idea of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to manufacturers. Sometimes there can be folks within the organization that are a little bit skeptical about the role that service can play when it comes to strategic differentiation or growth. And by not investing in the sales skills necessary, the marketing of those services, et cetera, and then not seeing them take off, right. You can kind of feed that mentality inadvertently because you’re not really putting everything you need to in place to have success with what your value proposition is resonating and the way that it’s sold, like you said, being more of a trusted advisor instead of just waiting for someone to give you an order, et cetera. So, I think that it is important to think not only about the systems, but also about the skillsets and the strategic thinking that’s necessary to kind of balance that out.

Michael Blumberg: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: That makes sense. Okay. So let’s talk a little bit about bias number two, which is around service delivery.

Michael Blumberg: Yeah, sure. Again, a multi-part answer to that. The first part is that there’s the bias among the organization, mostly by the product salespeople because they tend to drive the organization and manufacturing. And that is that service is only there to support the product sale, not the fact that there could be a profitable stream of revenue from offering additional services beyond just the basic installation and maintenance and repair. And another one which I think is the biggest challenge and bias is that the failure of the organization to understand the difference between bad service and not enough service. We’ve done studies for our clients and we talk about them growing their service business, offering new services, expanding their portfolio, making investments.

Michael Blumberg: Someone in the organization with some level of resistance will say, “Well, we’re not doing a good enough job with what we’re currently offering. Why would they buy something else?” Or, “We can’t invest until we fix what we have.” And we’d say, “Well, how do you know?” And they say, ” Well, they tell us.” So, “How do they tell you?” They say, “Well, we ask one question about satisfaction.” And that’s not enough. And so what we’ve done is we’ve dug in deeper and often what’s really happening is the customer is not getting enough service. So what they’re saying, it’s bad service. What they really mean is they want more.

Michael Blumberg: I think a good example is let’s say manufacturer who’s not very mature. Their service organization is not very mature. They’ll might say, “We’ll provide you with field service, onsite service,” but there’s no service level agreement. They’ll say, “We’ll just send somebody out there at some point.” Right? And you dig a little deeper and say, “Well, industry standards next day. So we’ll try and get there somebody there by next day.” And that’s what customers saying they’re unhappy with, is because they would, if they had their druthers, they would like somebody there the same day, maybe even there with four hours. That’s really better service. But if you’re just asking a basic question, like how satisfied are you and not uncovering and digging deeper about what’s the cause of satisfaction. You might think you’re not doing enough. As a result, you’re investing more money, spending more money, it’s costing you more money.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So going back to what you mentioned about the perception that services only role is to support product sales, how do companies move past that perception?

Michael Blumberg: Well, I think it really starts with them doing a market analysis and understanding that there’s this huge revenue opportunity and a profitable one through services. So without that, I think it’s all academic, it’s theoretical to the management team. That should be more than just supporting the product. And also understanding that more services actually sell products. If a company sees your organization as offering great service or offering a value-added services or professional services, design services, productivity improvement services, they start to associate your company with the product. So when it’s time to get a new product or buy more products, they’ll have view is these guys do services so well. We should buy more products with them because we’re getting this experience from the services. Imagine what will happen if we have their products too, more of their products also.

Sarah Nicastro: So the ability to elevate the entire brand experience.

Michael Blumberg: Exactly.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So bias area number three is around product. So let’s talk about that.

Michael Blumberg: Yeah. So for the less mature service organizations and manufacturers that have less mature service organizations, they tend to focus only on the tangible aspects of the product. And one of those is parts. Now we’ve all seen that servitization journey where it often starts with selling parts, but sometimes companies just get stuck on selling the parts and they’re not expanding their portfolio and giving the customer what they want and need.

Michael Blumberg: One example I have, it’s a horror story where we had a customer, a client who wastrying to build up their service organization, but they kept thinking it in terms of the tangible aspect of service the parts. And in interviews with us they said, “Our customers hate to see us coming into the door. They actually run away from our people because they think they want us to sell them more parts.” And like they said that, “Some of our customers, they’ll walk us to a closet and open the closet and see like a stockpile parts, because they can buy the parts that they don’t need.” So you got to go beyond just the parts, finding what services they need.

Michael Blumberg: Another tangible aspect is just focusing on the technician. And so what you have to be able to do is focus on the intangible aspects like the response time. Not just that you’re going to have a technician out there, but what are you going to get the technician to arrive? Focus on the uptime because that’s what they’re buying, in a way that’s an intangible. That’s a very difficult proposition to sell.

Michael Blumberg: It’s also tying into perception that when companies are buying services, they’re not just buying the reality. They’re buying the perception of what the service can do for them. Like uptime is a perfect example. One of the ways we try to explain that is you’re looking at other types of services, like a law firm, a lawyer. You might be sitting at home one day, maybe you’re ill. Actually people are sitting at home a lot now these days and they’re watching TV and they see an ad for a lawyer that it’s helping their clients with insurance cases or accidents. And we couldn’t have an image of that. In fact, we have a name for it. We call them ambulance chaser. Right? And we have kind of an image of what their office is going to look like, right? And then we have an image of what we might be watching the news and see high profile celebrity who’s charged with some crime and they talk about the dream team. And you could imagine what the lawyer looks like, how he acts or she acts and dresses and what he or she’s office looks like.

Michael Blumberg: You think it might be very plush luxurious whereas the ambulance chaser may have a storefront, iron cabinets, iron desk, an old-time style of a desk. And all of that is perception and that perception influences your choice. It influences the price you may have to pay and you may have to pay. So that’s part of the bias is understanding that if you’re going to deliver premium service, you have to deliver premium service. You have to be able to define what that premium service is. I’ll add a little bit more of this is that, in this product bias is that not understanding there’s a difference between the actual service and the capability to serve.

Michael Blumberg: So when you’re selling services and when people are buying, they’re buying both the reality, that’s the tangible part. That’s the technician going to be, that it’s the parts going to arrive, but they’re also buying the capability. So you have to be able to articulate in your marketing and sales messages what that capability is. How do they know technician is going to be there in four hours? How do they know the part will arrive the same day, or you have to explain.

Michael Blumberg: And as part of that, understanding that there’s really three inputs to this engine of service delivery. And again, the service delivery is both the capability and the actual delivery. Three inputs, there’s people, and those are the technicians. Those are the call center people. Those are the people in the parts warehouse. Then there’s the parts, right? Okay. And for many years in any company, we always looked at there’s material and people. And that’s all there is to the engine of production. But in service, we’re catching on now but we saw this 25 years ago that the other input to this is data. Okay. And now people are starting to understand the importance of data, but the data is an input. It helps you determine what you can sell at what price and how well you can deliver it. By looking at the data, you can find and identify new services to offer and even monetize those services.

Sarah Nicastro: I want to go back to the point you made Michael about actual service versus the capability to serve. So when you talk about the capability… I have an opinion and that’s why I’m asking you, how do you articulate that capability to your customer base in a way that will resonate well with them?

Michael Blumberg: Well, there’s a couple. One is what’s the promise? What’s the portfolio you’re offering them and what’s the promise you’re making? Another part to that is to talk about the service delivery infrastructure. What do you have that makes it possible, the one you show them. And I learned this a couple of years ago, well, many years ago where people started to evaluate the service organization based on whether they had a mobility solution, right? So that’s an example. That’s how to demonstrate the capability. Another one is define the process, explain to them what the process will be like, not only when they signed up for the service but when they need the service. Another part of this is testimonials. Giving testimonials, customer satisfaction scores.

Sarah Nicastro: Sure. Yeah. I think the customer testimonials thing is certainly important. I just wonder and I’m sure this varies industry to industry and I think also in terms of within your customer base, the persona that you’re targeting. But I think less and less do people care about the how, until you haven’t delivered on that promise. I think that that capability in terms of here’s what we can guarantee to you in terms of the outcome, the experience and the value to your business is the number one most important thing to clearly articulate and articulate in a way that is very simple for folks to understand. I just think with the ease with which we can attain outcomes as consumers today, I think people want the provider to take on the complexity of the how, and maybe aren’t as interested in that complexity unless it becomes important to them, i.e. things have gone wrong. If that make sense?

Michael Blumberg: Well, a couple of things, though, you have to pre-frame it because when things go wrong and they not understand how, then they understand why it might gone wrong and they’re more forgiving because they understand what was involved. And also you have to show them like, let’s look at Uber, right? Right now, if you didn’t know what Uber could do, you might still pick a taxi. Yes, call a taxi company to pick you up. But you know, it’s that experience that you have with Uber that you can take out your smartphone and see where driver is and who the driver is.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, no, I think the experience is very important. Okay. So the next area of bias that we want to cover is around the pricing.

Michael Blumberg: Yeah. So sometimes companies think that the way they’re going to sell more services is by lowering their price. And that might be because of a bias from the customer that when you ask them, why are they not buying the service? They’ll say, “Well, it cost too much,” right? And that’s what people always say, no matter what it is, whether it’s a product or a service, a car, house. If there’s no value for them, they’re going to say it cost too much. So you got to really be able to define the value. The other one is the failure to understand the value -in- use. So to be able to price effectively and not have to lower your price, you need to understand what it’s outcome going to do for the customer, right? Again, if you don’t understand that you get into debate, why is it cost so much? Can’t you lower that price?

Michael Blumberg: But if you get somebody there to the customer site within four hours, again, I like to use that example because that’s easiest one to understand. They’re going to save themselves a lot of money. They may save themselves a hundreds of thousand dollars an hour. So when you understand that they know you understand that and you can guarantee that I’ll get somebody there, they’re going to pay the higher price. But when you’re unable to do that, they’re going to knock down on price or they’re going to find something else. Some other reason why the price should be lower.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. That makes sense. All right. And then the last area is around infrastructure bias. So what does that mean?

Michael Blumberg: Not making the necessary investments to deliver on the services. Some of these services that are available today like uptime as a service, for example, you need to have the infrastructure to deliver it. And so it’s almost a catch-22. Some companies don’t want to offer this service and generate greater revenue because they don’t have the infrastructure. Others have the opposite, right.

Sarah Nicastro: They have the infrastructure, but they haven’t…

Michael Blumberg: Yeah. They haven’t leveraged.

Sarah Nicastro: … created the service.

Michael Blumberg: Right. And understand that because they have the infrastructure in place, they can deliver the service.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. So what type of infrastructure are we talking about? What do we think are the most important considerations around… Because to me, it seems less risky to have the capabilities and not have the service developed around them versus promising any sort of outcome and not being able to deliver that. I mean, that seems like a death sentence for an organization.

Michael Blumberg: Yeah. You do want to have the infrastructure to deliver all your promises. So I call it a smart tech stack, smart being for service marketing tech stack.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay.

Michael Blumberg: So you want to have your basic infrastructure in place which is your service management system in place. If your portfolio calls for offering uptime as a service or outcome-based services, you want to have remote monitoring and IoT so you can ensure the equipment is up and running. You want to have augmented reality solution so that if your technician is in the field and they run into a problem, they can resolve it quickly. So they’re not spending time searching for the solution. Depending on how large you are, I would add analytics, an AI to speed up the time frame which is required to predict and diagnose and correct an issue. Okay.

Michael Blumberg: Smaller organizations may not have enough of the data. If they have a very small installed base, they may not have enough data to take advantage of that technology, but as you get larger you want to have that. So that’s the foundation for service delivery and I think you and I would agree that that’s the foundation for delivering great customer experience. But on top of that, to market obviously you need a good sales CRM system to keep track of your customers and what they’re buying. You also want to have tools to configure pricing quote, your services. And you also want to have some form of marketing automation so you could stay in touch with your customer.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. It makes sense. Good. So those are our five areas of bias that can get in the way of folks effectively marketing their services. So all really good points, any summary thoughts on this topic as a whole.

Michael Blumberg: Good question. I’d say that you got to keep working at it. It’s not just once and done. You have to keep reevaluating and refining your service offering and your marketing approach. And again, don’t overlook perception that there’s always a way to improve the marketing and that’s with anything.

Michael Blumberg: But I was just thinking the other day I was speaking to a client and they said, “We’ve launched a product as a service offering and we hear that’s what we should be doing. You know, that’s what the data says. That’s what the analyst says, but we’re not having people buy from us.” I said, “Well, why? And he said, “Well, because they turned the conversation into what’s the interest rate because they know that we’re going to finance the product through this as a service model.” I said, “Well, first of all, maybe that’s not a good idea to bring that up early in the sales process.” But more importantly, I asked them, “What are you offering or promising to your customer that’s going to make them believe that as a service, they’re going to get better value for their dollars on an OpEXand CapEX.. And he said, “You know, you’re right. We haven’t defined that.”

Michael Blumberg: So that’s what I mean by perception is you got to take a big picture view and you look at all the different angles and possibilities about why something’s not being sold.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think that for companies that have traditionally sold products, there’s some average product life cycle or lifespan. And I think that on the services side, in the pace of change is so fast in terms of that continual need to understand what your customers need, what will most impact their businesses or their lives and the different ways you can address that. So it does need to be a very continual process of staying engaged with your customers so that you’re designing and delivering services that are really created for them and continually looking for what those opportunities are.

Sarah Nicastro: I see a lot of companies that are having such great success with the closer they get to their customers, the more it starts to open up different channels of opportunity for them because they learn their customers’ businesses more. They look at areas of adjacency and they can see ways that they can kind of expand and progress what they’re doing. And it can be kind of a big hurdle to get over at first to think in more of this way. But once you’ve conquered that there is a lot of opportunity which is really exciting for folks.

Michael Blumberg: Yeah. And you mentioned something earlier that also, I want to add I found common is, you really need to be clear about the value proposition and that’s sometimes the problem is that they don’t define their value proposition very well. They say, “We’re going to offer a product as a service because that’s what we should do. That’s what everyone’s doing, but not defining it from the customer’s perspective, the planning in terms of what problems and pains this itself for the customer.

Sarah Nicastro: Exactly. Yup, I think that’s a very good point. All right, Michael. Well, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing your perspective with all of us. I appreciate it.

Michael Blumberg: You’re welcome, Sarah. And as always, it’s been a real pleasure.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you. You can find more by checking us out at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 by visiting www.ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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Cox Communications’ Service-Based Revenue Diversification Strateg‪y‬

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Cox Communications’ Service-Based Revenue Diversification Strateg‪y‬

Richard Culberson, Executive Director, Smart Home and IoT Strategy & Operations, talks with Sarah about lessons learned in working to diversify revenue streams with service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Today, we are going to be taking an inside look at Cox Communications' service-based revenue diversification strategy. Say that three times fast. I am joined today by Richard Culberson, who is the executive director for Smart Home and IoT strategy and operations at Cox Communications. Richard, welcome to the podcast.

Richard Culberson: Thanks for having me, Sarah.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. All right. So to get us started, why don't you just spend a few minutes telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and your current role at Cox?

Richard Culberson: Sure. So I've been at Cox now for about nine years. I'm trying to be a reformed consultant, coming from Accenture, where I toured two tours of duty, one on the technology and process side of the house, and then another on a corporate strategy growth, strategy group within Accenture. Joined Cox about nine years ago. As I mentioned, was in the corporate strategy team during typical strategy work, but more often than not partnering with our new growth team. So that's where we investigated gaming and health. And the one business that really stuck was home security, which we rebranded eventually for Homelife to extend its reach into some of the IoT areas we'll talk about. So I've now been working with Homelife for about six years. I'm responsible of both the strategy of the business, as well as the day-to-day operations. So one foot in both, and that's kind of what's kept me interested in the business as we change a little bit every day.

Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Okay. So this division was created about six years ago. Tell our listeners a little bit about how you and the team at Cox identified the opportunity for this line of business, and then the process around kind of creating it. And two reasons for that question. One is just to share your experience. And two is many of our listeners are regularly looking for those opportunities to sort of add adjacent or complimentary services to diversify or even pivot a bit to diversify. So I want to keep that in mind as we walk through your story so that folks can kind of learn maybe some tips or tricks for what to look for.

Richard Culberson: Sure. So if you don't know much about Cox enterprises and the larger Cox company, a long history of innovation. It was started by Governor Cox as initially with newspapers, and then expanded into seeing opportunities in radio as that came as a new medium, and then broadcast television, which led to cable, which is now one of the largest of the two divisions that we have, Cox Communications and Cox Auto.

Richard Culberson: While Cox Communications, we started obviously through your traditional cable company and long history of finding new opportunities to join in with subscription businesses. So for example, we were the first cable company to launch phone, and people don't know about that. And as we look at constantly, what's next and what else can we go in and enter to help out consumers with some of the other opportunities and needs they have around the home? So what you'll find is it all centers around the home and how can we help out our customers?

Richard Culberson: Specifically with home security, if you look at that traditional home security marketplace, it's about 20% of households passed, traditionally are entered in, and it's growing a little bit, but obviously what we'll talk about a little bit later down the path. Now, with smart home is where the big boom is. But we saw there was a huge opportunity, even in the legacy home security business. Traditionally, someone comes at the door, they sign you up, you never see them again. You're paying for something every month, but you've got Ving Rhames at the front door, protecting your house. We saw that consumers really want more of a peace of mind. So whether it was from burglaries, whereas even with cameras and some of the forward-looking technologies that we have right now, we knew that consumers weren't being served to the need. But also we know with our video, our data and obviously our internet products, we have relationships with depending on the market, 60, 70% of households.

Richard Culberson: So this is an opportunity kind of giving customers that one throat to choke. Whether it's from billing or internet connectivity, how do you tie all these together to make a better service for customers? So we knew this is an opportunity for us to enter and explore. And as I said, about six years ago, we really started dabbling and testing in that, but immediately it started resonating with customers as a different business model and a different operating model. So we've been growing off that ever since.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. All right. So based on your experience six years ago, kind of creating this new division within Cox, but also your history in evaluating some of these other revenue options or opportunities, what advice would you give folks that are listening on the different evaluation criteria? How do you determine what's a worthwhile pursuit and what might be a good fit to kind of branch off into?

Richard Culberson: Sure. We kind of look at it in three lenses and we always start with the customer. So if you look at it from the customer perspective, from our front lines, so whether we're talking about technicians, or sales reps, or customer call reps, or if you're talking about the business model and the financials behind it. So we try to look through all three lenses. What we found is we've had the most success when we always start with our customers, of finding what a customer need is, and is it being met right now or not. And even if it is, so for example, in the home security marketplace, is it being met in a way that they want, or is there a way that we can improve on that, which was definitely the case for the home security marketplace.

Richard Culberson: Then we talked to our front lines, and that addressed... They have a different lens on the customer because sometimes if we do just market research and if you follow what customers say, how they act, isn't always directly in alignment. It's well intended, but when it comes down to the pocketbook, or push comes to shove, how they act it might be a little bit different. So what we found is it's really beneficial to talk to those front lines. And that's where as a cable business, as an MSO, it's really beneficial because we already have an existing billing relationship, our technicians are in the house. I mean, more than not, we have customers baking brownies for technicians when they're in their house, feeding them pizza. So there's no better frontline of really understand what's going on in the home.

Richard Culberson: If then you combine that and start looking at our operating model, that really sets us like, "Well, how do we set ourselves apart, and how do we differentiate?" More often than not, we found that that decides how we'll be successful or not. To be blunt, when we first started this home security model, we kind of replicated what was already happening in the industry; so very consultative, dedicated sales, someone comes in, spends a long amount of time setting this up, and then kind of removing ourselves from that and just letting the product run ourselves.

Richard Culberson: We, to be honest, didn't get the traction we wanted to get. So we knew we had to pivot a bit and said, "Wait a minute, if we want to sell more, we know that we have to go where the existing customer transactions are. Where are we already talking to them? And what are customers expect when they're interacting with us?" So that taught us two things. We changed our sales channel strategy to move distribution more to where they're interacting with us, but we also changed our model. So we started saying, "Well, it's less about expensive device sales. No one calls into their cable company and says, 'I'm expecting to fork out $200, $300, $500 upfront.'" So we pivot our model and good to our strength of subscription model. We'll say, "Let's put a little bit more on a monthly payment, but that removes that barrier to entry for the customer, and at that unexpected, 'We need this much money upfront.'"

Richard Culberson: That spreads it out, which again, we already know their credit, we know their credit worthiness. We have lots of insights as an MSO, that we can use on that relationship. So we changed both our sales strategy on that front, as well as basically how we serve, and being more engaged. That allows us to put more focus on retaining the customer and reaching out to them more proactively, because that's one of the biggest pain points they always say is, "I can't get a hold of people. I just wish they would check-in." So we invest more on that relationship as it goes.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. There's a couple points you made there that I just want to revisit briefly. One is, we have a lot of conversations around this idea of developing advanced services and looking for different opportunities to deliver outcomes, experiences, et cetera. I think that what you said about sort of the interactions with customers, but also the market research just made me think of a conversation I've had recently around the idea that you certainly want to lead with what your customers are telling you, but you also want to look for the opportunity around the things that they might not know to say. Right? And so to kind of temper those conversations and that firsthand perspective with a little bit of research and brainstorming around what needs might be there that they aren't articulating is one point. And then the idea too, of a lot of this, you're sort of figuring out as you go, right?

Sarah Nicastro: As you said, you identified the need, you launched the solution, but then realized, "Boy, we could get much better results if we just reshaped the financial model of this a bit and offered it as a service, instead of expecting an upfront investment from customers." So it wasn't starting over, it was pivoting and keeping the offering, but doing something different in terms of how you're financing it and packaging it. And I think that that's another important point is you don't have to have it all figured out before you start down the path. I mean, you obviously want to have a strategy and you want to do your due diligence, but you're going to be learning as you go, and you can incorporate those learnings to improve your outcomes. Right?

Richard Culberson: Sure. It's very helpful. What we tried to do a bit is established kind of a strategic framework and then say, "Well, how does this fit in as the next change, the new marketplace comes out, a new device? How should we think about it?" The most common framework that we use is we actually go broader than, I know industry terms are all over the place these days and we confuse ourselves as well as our customers, but we consider Smart Home to be one component of the broader connected home strategy. And what I mean by that is you can think of it as three concentric circles, almost like Russian nesting dolls, if you will.

Richard Culberson: At the heart of everything and this is why we think we can be very successful, it starts with connectivity. So broadband connectivity, obviously we are a leading provider of internet and we're a mass market provider. We've got great penetration in the homes already. If you don't have good solid connectivity, you really can't build out from that. So obviously that's the bread and butter of our business. We've got one of the best networks out there, but we know we need to piggyback off of that.

Richard Culberson: So if you go from that inner circle to the next circle out, that's where we get into this smart homes, smart homes as a service model by saying, "Well, wait a minute. If you take that connectivity, right now, consumers can add all sorts of devices on it. But the barriers to entry that we've seen is these devices, they don't work together. They have a hard time getting them installed. What happens if it breaks? There's an affordability issue." So we really set our smart home as a service, or as we call Homelife automation up, we said, "Let's establish this to remove the mass market barriers to entry, so with the affordability and just giving peace of mind, whether that's setting things up, getting them to work together, or if something breaks, we can fix it.

Richard Culberson: So that smart home is that second concentric circle, and that's largely how we're taking to market today and the way that that's really taught us so many things is we're very careful not to use device-centric thinking or device-centric language. This space, as you know, there's so many shiny objects. You can do connected to anything. If you can think of it, it can be connected, it can be made smart these days. But what we found, it's a long tail. There's so many devices down there, but if you can really knock out the top three to five devices that enable use cases. That's the language we always refer to is what are the use cases in the home that we're trying to enable? And then, what are the devices needed in the home to do that?

Richard Culberson: So therefore, that helps us be able to say, not this long tail of all these... We always make the joke of the connected toilet. Sure, we can build it, but what's the marketplace for that? What consumer need are you meeting? Just be careful about how far you go down that long tail? So in this middle ring, we started with use cases, and the three use cases that we prioritize based on what customers are buying and what they've been telling us, it really starts with cameras and being able to see them in their home, and being able to protect what they have in their home, both inside and out.

Richard Culberson: And the second really comes with lighting. So whether it's a switch, a plug, a light bulb, anything to do with lighting. We'll start with just those two. But the good news, I'm going to tie these two rings together before I go to the third ring. But at the end of that, when you call in to buy broadband, the first question you'll always hear us ask is, "Well, how do you need to use that?" Because we're already asking the questions of how much speed do you need? What bandwidth do you need? Is low latency an issue for you for a gamer? We already know these questions, but in that learning process, we said, "Well, do you have children that are in there? How often are they interacting to drive more devices in the home?"

Richard Culberson: Well, that same question we can then pivot and say, "Well, do you want to be able to see when your kids come home from school? Do you want to know when the dog is playing in the backyard?" More often, they want to check on their dog more than their kids. It's amazing. So we think from that use case of what they can see, or do they want a light to come on at night? We need all those use cases to fill out the second ring of smart home. But then that's interesting because that is what's really turned on the open spigot for adjacencies, if you will, for other areas we can go into. And we say, "Well, if they're using us for that, we can use the same platform, the same devices, the same analytics to help starting into energy management." So if I know how much power you're using, I can help you control that and work with your utility of a lower your power bill. So energy management is that new buzzword that's coming out.

Richard Culberson: Or whether it's home health. We ran a trial for a PERS solution, personal emergency response system, the "I've fallen and I can't get up," service. We found that almost using the same services, we can help out seniors who in the pandemic, as you know, they're more removed and the caregivers can't reach them now. So more now than ever, that's been a critical service that we've been able to turn on using the same platform. Or even a in apartments and condos for MDUs, property management. So there's a certain level of control of the same devices for the tenant or the resident that's living in the unit, but also the property manager, when it's vacant, they can control.

Richard Culberson: So we use all those same devices and that same platform to enable that third ring of what we call connected services. So it's that connectivity to smart home, to connected services, that make up the connected home that we are proudly pursuing on a few different fronts.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay. So we touched on this a bit, but I want to go into specifics on some of the different areas that you are leveraging economies of scale. Right? So first you talked about you're expanding the in-home value proposition. Right? But talk a little bit about how branching out into these different areas creates sort of customer stickiness or more intimate customer relationships.

Richard Culberson: Sure. And that's kind of what we built this off of. There's as we were talking about, when we look at devices and the options that consumers have in this marketplace, you can go to Home Depot and there's probably 10 different camera manufacturers. So some of the most capitalized largest companies in the world, the Amazons, the Googles, the Apples of the world are really product leaders in this space. So we knew that we want best of breed products, and we even want to work with many of those large competitors because the consumers want those all to work together. We want to try to enable that as much as possible. But at the end of the day, we know that we're not going to sustainably differentiate by having the best camera.

Richard Culberson: So instead, is we focused on service and we knew that that's something that we've already established, a relationship with the customer, we have call center assets. We have technicians in the home. That's where we said, "Wait a minute. As we were talking about the barriers to entry, we knew that they want us to set it up for them. We wanted our platform to have all of these work together. And we know if something breaks, "Who's going to come and fix it? I don't want to worry about that." That's that piece of mind on the service mentality. So we've taken a lot of the same assets that the company already has. We've got thousands of in-house technicians and third-party technicians. They're doing a great job in home, already doing technical work? And they know the customer. Why don't we leverage those same assets and say, "Wait a minute, stay a little bit longer in the home and help them get these devices up and going."

Richard Culberson: So it's cost efficient and actually, we were rather surprised, all of our technicians love it. Because it's a new skill set, it's new capability. Customers were already asking them to help out with the cameras that they had anyway. And now they're able to meet the needs, that they weren't previously able to. So as a service provider, we're getting some of the highest employee NPS, as well as customer NPS off of that. And because it's all coming together and from one provider, we've seen now using some aggressive analytics and new things we've been learning that having our Homelife, whether automation where security is one of the number one differentiators, and basically churn reduction drivers for broadband.

Richard Culberson: There's a stickiness naturally that comes with it, because now they're seeing, "Well, wait a minute, I've got a camera that works off of this. This is how all of my home is working." We're basically the operating system of the home now, so there's a lot more stickiness and we have a deeper relationship that we might not have had with the customer otherwise.

Sarah Nicastro: Now, IoT is the other aspect of your title. So from a technology perspective, how does this build off of the IoT and technology that's already in use in other areas of Cox?

Richard Culberson: So we've been working with both residential and commercial IoT for quite a while. We do have a strong point, one of the first things we want to make sure we enter in, because we've got a fantastic footprint within the home and residential. But we also have very large and growing commercial business, whether it's small business, mid-business or enterprise customers in our footprint.

Richard Culberson: The first example of launching on the commercial side was Cox Business Security Solutions. What we call CBSS, in-house. That's somewhat traditional-minded security, but also has an automation flare to it. You can add cameras and other devices as well for that service. But what we also stood up was a group that we called Cox2M, and they're really focused on commercial IoT and all of its different flavors, whether we're talking about smart communities, as almost as an expansion on the smart home, smart communities and smart cities.

Richard Culberson: So now we're working with builders on seeing what we can do to enable the property, the homes, before they're bought, because we know that increasingly residents in MDU or buyers of single-family homes are expecting this to be there. If it's there, that's even better. But we're also starting to look out of home and we're seeing more press on our smart cities, whether that's really, we're seeing some intelligent parking solutions, lighting solutions across cities. Other examples are smart agriculture. What we found is farming has a massive need for this.

Richard Culberson: But the first trial we executed was actually in partnership with our Cox automotive business. We have several Cox owned properties, whether you're talking Autotrader, Kelly Blue Book, but also Manheim Auctions is one of the largest auctions in which to turn used cars. So there's quite a marketplace there, but people know there's thousands of cars moving in and out of the lanes, constantly being sold. But right now, that the requires a driver, and constant checking of where those cars are. And literally, they're going with key fobs around a thousand-car parking lot, trying to find cars. If you've ever struggled with that in an airport, try doing that with thousands of cars.

Richard Culberson: Now, they're able to be so much more efficient and it reduces our costs because they can find that car quicker, and they can have additional information that's present, using a new technology that we're able to lean in through or activate in through Cox2M.

Richard Culberson: So we're trying to do as much as possible as we go to market, is trying to like, "What's kind of that bringing all of those assets together?" And recognizing because quite often, for example, if someone has a small business and they're using the CBSS product, they also have Cox Homelife in their home. And quite often they might also need some of these other assets that we have from Cox2M. So we're trying to be as intelligent as we can about common platforms, common use sources. So for example, both on residential and commercial, we're leveraging some of the same technicians because it's a lot of the same skill sets.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Okay. So you talked a little bit about the response from customers and employees. Tell us a little bit more about the feedback you've gotten on... I know it's not a new division anymore. You said you were six years into it, but on this area of the business.

Richard Culberson: It's funny because we're so close to it. This is one of the reasons why we constantly do customer research and go talk to our front lines. It's easy to forget that while we feel that we're pretty mature being about six years in market, our brand awareness is significantly lower still than overall Cox. That's why we make sure we never say on the marketplace, "Homelife." We always say Cox Homelife, because we still, even though we've got great spots out, great commercials, and some of the highest scoring that we have for the company, people are still learning about things because there's either just entering the smart home marketplace. It's easy to become probably for you and for I, this focus group of one of, "Well, of course, everyone has 10, 15 devices in the home." We're really trying to open up smart home for the masses.

Richard Culberson: We commonly use the phrase, it's like a speakeasy. There's this cool thing that people have heard of, but they don't know what it is or how to get in. We're trying to make sure that the mass market has a way to get into this. So because of that, a lot of our potential customers aren't aware because they haven't been in the market before, but we want to make sure that when they come into the marketplace, that we're in consideration. So we are running more in commercials, you'll see us more out in presence. And all of our sales interactions are driving that a little bit more. So it's still definitely a new or brand newer brand. But specifically what we found on a marketing return on investment, when we run a Homelife commercial, there's a halo to the rest of the business. There's a positive halo because consumers see this and see us as being so much more for them. So we've seen as much as a 1% to 2% increase on our return investment just by running Homeland spots against our broadband business. So again, seeing tremendous halo benefits for some of these capabilities.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I mean, it makes sense that people are looking to simplify as much as possible, right? So the more you can do in one place, that is I think increasingly important for folks, so that makes sense. Okay. Let me ask you this question. In your experience, if a company is looking to determine best ways to differentiate revenue, what's the biggest mistake that gets made?

Richard Culberson: I think this is pretty common across the board and especially in the space that we're in. If you look at marketplaces and valuations of companies that are out there, there's so much of fear of missing out these days. Of, "Wow, there must be money there. People are making money. I must be able to make money too." What we've always found is that whether you're talking about consumers or businesses, they really do care about their pocketbook. You have to know how deep you're reaching into their wallet and what the wallet share you're trying to extract. So I think it's easy to get excited about so much press that's going on. It's clearly a growth market.

Richard Culberson: People either do one of two things. They jump in, feelings that, "Oh, wow, everyone has a right to win," rather than focus on what their right to win is and looking at what assets they have as to, "Why me?" I think that's one and one we've made mistakes as we've gone, but I think we've continued to tighten up a bit in saying, "Well, why us as a cable provider, as an MSO?" Well, wait a minute. They know they have the connectivity. We have this relationship, but that's an honor and a privilege. So it's easy for us to go too far down that path of, "Look what else we can do." We have to be very cognizant of how much they pay on a monthly basis because we're a big portion of discretionary income for a lot of consumers.

Richard Culberson: So I think as other people are looking at this, looking at revenue adjacencies, you have to know what your right to win is and what a customer thinks of you, which is why we're trying to do a lot of things to make sure we're supporting the community. We're out there increasing brand awareness as a cable company, but also for this specific business, because on a month to month basis, they're paying us a lot of money and that's ours and we have to live up to it every month.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense.

Richard Culberson: So for that, we're were doing a lot of work. We started obviously, with just acquisition, but we have a big focus on customer engagement now. So segmenting out each one of these customers, are they online? And if they're not, what do we do to proactively bring them back online? What are they using the product for? How can we drive that up to show that there's more value for them? Because every month, when they sit down at their kitchen table and say, "Well, what can we cut to bring down our budget?" We need to be above that red line and make sure we're a value to that point.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. Right. That makes sense. What do you see as future potential for diversification for Cox?

Richard Culberson: When we look at going back to that connected home space, adjacencies, they're so numerous because it's really a platform strategy at the end of the day. We have a platform which has the analytics and it's collecting data from the home, which can be used to help enable customers live a richer life in one way or another. So we look at that. And while, as I said earlier, we try to keep a tight portfolio of devices. We do that by saying, "What use cases are we enabling?" But there's so many more new things that are opening up, and coming out of the pandemic hopefully, we've learned a lot of things.

Richard Culberson: People are spending so much more time at home, they look at their homes differently. All you have to do is look at telehealth and the numbers are staggering of how many people now are comfortable talking to a doctor or being given clinical advice from the home. I mean, to be honest, that's not being run well. There's so much more opportunity to connect those dots, remove that fear, but it's all rooted in that same peace of mind that we talked about.

Richard Culberson: Another good example is education. Teachers is doing the best they can, but what you found is that they just don't have the tools and the platforms to do this. I have three young daughters, so very, very happy to have them in school whenever we can because of the environment. But we know that there's a good chance that more often than not, that this will be one of the dimensions that has to be available in the future. So as a company, we're doing as much as possible to expand affordable access to broadband, as a company. And many programs in partnership with the FCC and internally, we're driving. But the same piece is here, but that's education. If they have broadband and if there's needs at home, there's so many pieces that are being underserved right now. And again, it all goes back to where are the customer needs? We think that there's a lot of areas that we can serve that are readily available.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. It seems like there would be a lot of opportunity. And to your point, it's a matter of, like you said earlier, sorting out not what the opportunities are, but what you specifically can provide when it comes to those opportunities.

Richard Culberson: And we are particularly looking at partnerships too. Not all of the funding... I've listened to a couple of your podcasts and it's a good point in talking about what's revenue versus a business model. And if we're talking about all this revenue, the cost can't be fully burdened all the time by consumers. So perhaps if there's a win-win where a utility bill can come down, utilities, they're all building out capacity to that prime hour. Well, if we can shift consumption of that energy, the utility wins and the consumer wins, so perhaps some of that burden of the consumer can be born by the utility now. So if we look more and more at some of these different value propositions, it doesn't all have to be born on the back of the consumer. There's lots of people that can win.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. And what will that inner connectedness of that ecosystem look like as we go forward? I think that that's going to be a big part of the next phase of service and looking at the customer journey from the perspective of connecting some of those dots. Right? That makes sense. Okay. All right, Richard, any other comments, thoughts or words of wisdom for our listeners?

Richard Culberson: No. Probably the most important, you learn something new every day. Probably flexibility. I think the things that we've really learned are making sure you focus on what are your core, sustainable differentiators and build off of that. And what can you use as a pivot foot? It is March Madness, so we can talk about using the pivot foot. From what you do well today, to what's that next step you can take, rather than making a leap. It's kind of when you leap from one cycle to the other, when you go a little too far astray, and we've obviously made a couple of those mistakes and learn as we we've gone. But I think coming back to the first question we talked about, as long as you're coming back to consumers and their needs, and customers in the business side, you tend to be a lot better off.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It definitely needs to be led from that direction. But I think that going back to a couple of the points I made earlier, you're learning as you go and you guys are doing a good job of having a vision and a strategy, but being fluid in how you get there. Right? So you try something and then you recognize an opportunity to do it a little bit differently and a little bit better. And then you adjust. Right? So I think that's one of the important points is, you need to know where you're going, but you don't have to have every step mapped out. In fact, it might be smart to not try to map every step out because the path is going to wind a bit as you work toward that vision. So yeah, that makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: Well, thank you so much for coming along today and sharing the journey with us. Certainly appreciate it. And we'd love to have you back in the future and talk about where things have led to.

Richard Culberson: No, this is great. Thank you so much, Sarah and I appreciate you having me on.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 solutions by visiting ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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QIAGEN’s Focus on Employee Mental Healt‪h‬

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Jordan Argiriou, Director, Service Solutions APEC at QIAGEN talks with Sarah about how to normalize a focus on mental health in the workplace, how to grapple with varying comfort levels, and how to navigate cultural differences around the topic.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. Very excited for today's episode. I even, for those of you watching the video, wore a shirt specific to our topic today. Today, we're going to be talking about one company, QIAGEN specifically, focus on employee mental health. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today Jordan Argiriou, who is the Director of Service Solution for APEC at QIAGEN. Jordan, welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast!

Jordan Argiriou: Hi, Sarah. Thank you for having me.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you for being here. So before we dig into the topic at hand, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. Anything you want to share about your background and your role at QIAGEN.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. So I guess initially my background consisted of studying to become an IT engineer many years ago. I then decided to move away from that and get into field service, which was something that I was always interested in, even from an electronics point of view, IT point of view. So I began at a couple of smaller companies, eventually moving onto Thermo Fisher Scientific, who acquired a company that I was working for here. Stayed there for quite some time, and then eventually joined the team at QIAGEN, and haven't looked back since.

Sarah Nicastro: Cool. Now, tell us about the scope of your responsibility at QIAGEN.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. So in the role right now, I've got a team of service managers reporting to myself. In addition to that, there are back office functions and technical service functions as well. Literally based all around the region. They are scattered around all of southeast Asia, Australia. We have more of the mature markets. We have a lot of the emerging markets as well in developing countries. So quite a complicated region to be in because, in some areas, you're dealing with very mature, very focused groups in terms of even customer base, other areas. It's still developing. We're still creating awareness, and trying to get their buying into service.

Jordan Argiriou: So it's actually quite an exciting role, quite an engaging role. Within the team, there are approximately 65 field service engineers in the field, and amongst other activities that we do. So it is quite a complicated role as in having to manage field work and how they operate and function, and then also having to manage the back office functions. Especially during COVID, it's been a really fun ride, so to speak.

Sarah Nicastro: A wild ride.

Jordan Argiriou: A wild ride, yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. So, Jordan, the first time that you and I spoke, it was an introductory call, and so we did our, "Hi, I'm Sarah, here's what I do." "Hi, I'm Jordan, here's what I do," and we chit-chatted about some of the different things you're working on and things that are relevant to your role. And then I said, "So if I were to have you as a guest on the podcast, what would you want to talk about? What's the topic you're most passionate about?" And your answer was mental health, which I was super, super excited about, but a little bit surprised about as well.

Sarah Nicastro: So I'm pumped to have you here talking about this topic today. It's something that I think is super important, and something that I personally am a strong advocate of de-stigmatizing and normalizing more in our everyday conversations, particularly in the workplace. So tell us to start why this is the topic that came to mind for you that you were passionate about talking about on our podcast today.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. I remember the discussion very well. We were talking about just general service and everything else. Your third question of "Tell us about yourself and the company" and everything else, and what I do, typically, all of us will pretty much give a similar answer as to our daily operations. The reason I highlighted mental health, I think, especially at that point, for me, with the COVID impact onto this industry and every other industry globally, this is the first time in our lives we're experiencing a global pandemic like this, which has really obliterated the traditional view of how we do things. And that's in every aspect of life.

Jordan Argiriou: The reason mental health is something that I'm quite strong about and something that I really focus on is purely because during this time, looking at our media and just speaking for people in general, and it could be someone at the supermarket, it could be in your professional world, it could be anywhere, mental health is something I think that right now is not being neglected, but people are trying to put to the back because they're dealing with something that's right in front of them and challenges that they're facing every day.

Jordan Argiriou: So, for me, switching that back to the professional world, you've got field service engineers in the field, you've got tech service representatives in our offices, and trying to get to and from work. On top of what's going on, they've also got to tackle their own mental health side and worry about specific lockdowns, not seeing family for an extended period of time, and things like that. Which, overall, has an impact on their daily function, and also their own personal mental health. And health overall. Because, for me, if the brain is not right, if your feelings aren't right, then nothing is really going to be right with what you're doing day-to-day.

Sarah Nicastro: Right. That makes sense.

Sarah Nicastro: So COVID and some of the things that have happened in the last year are what really put an emphasis on the importance of this conversation and this focus in the workplace and in your role. What are some of the ways that you as a leader of teams, and even you yourself, how have you reacted to the recognition of this becoming a more critical focus area?

Jordan Argiriou: I would say for me, personally, it has been a highlight of something ... And obviously from my accent, you can all tell that I'm from Australia. It is quite a big topic here for many years and many generations. And, look, I'll be very open. Coming from a European background where emotion isn't something that you just lay on the table for everyone to see. It's a bit different, especially my father's generation and others. Right now, for the past I guess five years in Australia, it has been quite a hot topic because of high mental issues that have happened amongst especially young men, and something that is quite critical, the high suicide rate amongst young men and even women. But in Australia, it's mostly young men that suffer from mental health issues purely because people aren't really talking about it.

Jordan Argiriou: So when I saw that starting to arise, you start to think of your own mental health. You start to think of, again, if I was in the field, or if I am in the field, as a sales rep in the field having to deal with everything that's going on in the world ... And I guess COVID highlighted it immensely. That there are so many balls you've got to try and juggle, plus meet your commitments in the workplace and at home.

Jordan Argiriou: So, for me, that was a huge focus as well. There's a lot of burnout that happens amongst people, and people don't really see it. I guess it's not really discussed quite often. It's certainly something that you put up as a KPI, and something that you try and focus on, and try not to have people burn out, but I guess from a professional perspective, depending on the culture you're from or depending on the country you're from as well, it depends on whether you would be so open to talk about it, too.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think that when you talk about the impact of this last year, and everything that's happened, I don't think we've even begun to see how that will play out in terms of mental health, and just processing those emotions. It's impacted us all in different ways, but it's impacted us all, right? And I think, to your point, there's a certain tendency, I think, to focus on the crisis at hand and to just "Okay, what do we need to do?" Kind of in survival mode, quite frankly, and I think that as we come out of that, there is going to be a whole host of things that really need to be dealt with. So I think it's smart and beneficial to start the process of let's have these conversations now, let's start talking about these things now, and let's know that this impact is on everyone, and we need to address it.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other thing I was going to say is that the point you brought up about young men in Australia, and those statistics. I'll be honest in saying one of the reasons I think it surprised me that this was a topic that you wanted to talk about is because I don't have people beating down my door to talk about mental health on this podcast in general, but the conversations we have had around it have been myself and another woman. And so I think that it is a very valid point that mental health overall is not discussed enough, but when it comes to how mental health can impact men, it's discussed even less so. And I think it is very important to understand that it impacts everyone, and that folks like yourself in roles like you are in industry and things like that leading these conversations has a huge impact in reaching people and making people feel more comfortable talking about any challenges they may be having. So that's why I'm glad we're here having this chat.

Sarah Nicastro: So you recognize overall that this is an issue, but then COVID hits, and it's significantly more so. So what advice can you give on ... How have you taken that information and that understanding and turned it into action? So what are some of the things that you as a leader have done in reaction to that recognition?

Jordan Argiriou: Look, I think initially it is sharing a lot more from my side to my team. So direct reports. And I'll give you a really good example. Whilst we're in this Zoom era of Zoom and whatever else we're using, Teams, and I'm not speaking brands here. Typically, everyone is on Zoom, everyone is on camera like you and I are today, and this is quite a common thing now. I think we've lost that personal feel of sitting down in the room and picking up certain cues, or ... How do I put it? Just a general feel of where someone is mentally while they're talking to you.

Jordan Argiriou: So as a really good example, and I'll be very open about it, typically in Asia-Pacific, it's not quite often that someone will share emotion on a camera or share a feeling on a camera as to how they're really feeling about a certain topic or a situation. So not being able to sit in the same room as someone and pick up on those cues has made it really difficult to really communicate in this way.

Jordan Argiriou: So I think the first thing for me and what I started doing was to openly communicate with people, and share from my side challenges that I'm facing professionally. And I guess you're venturing into the realm of your personal area, especially, as everyone or most people will know, Australia was put into quite a strict lockdown very early on in this whole piece. Obviously, we're an island. We try to keep everything contained.

Jordan Argiriou: So from my perspective, it was very quickly around us. The walls were closing in. We had home schooling going on and everything else, and you're trying also to work at the same time, and dealing with different time zones, et cetera. To avoid the burnout, you've got to openly talk about it.

Jordan Argiriou: So some of the strategies with my team, and it wouldn't be an agenda item, but it would be in the way I engage with them, it wouldn't be so much the professional chat of, okay, let's talk about your numbers, let's talk about your KPIs. Let's talk about what's happening in the field and customer issues. It would be all of that, obviously, but then on top of that, in between, you throw in "And this is what's happening here, and what's the situation there?" And you start to ask questions about "How are things going on your side? Forget about the professional side. How are things with your personal situation? Is everything okay?" Recognizing certain critical issues that may be in the background that they don't want to talk about.

Jordan Argiriou: From those conversations, it then leads onto their direct reports. So certain situations will arise. They may bring something up. As an example, we had a situation where a staff member was a little bit hesitant in going back home after being in the field in certain labs, purely because of what they're testing, and with COVID in the air. And we had to make arrangements for that person that were suitable for them to have a happy home life. So that would bring that to the forefront.

Jordan Argiriou: And then obviously with your direct reports, you would quickly flip it over and say, "Look, is everything okay on your side? Are we handling things?" The point I'm making is you break down that initial barrier of resistance, or the fact that they're trying to tell you that everything is fine. Once you get through that, the conversation then becomes much more fluid, and then the next time you catch up, it seems to be that that's the first thing you're talking about. "Hey, is everything okay at home?" "Hey, is everything okay with" even your commute to work. Things like that. Small changes you make to the way you conduct yourself in one-on-ones and the way you steer the conversation, and picking up on cues via Zoom, which is extremely difficult, like I said.

Jordan Argiriou: Because, typically, you get a vibe from someone. You can feel it in the air when you're sitting there and you're talking about a difficult topic. You can really see it. You can see it through body language. You can see it through their tone. On Zoom, it's a little bit more difficult. We have a lot of digital voices going on. We have noise cancellation, so you don't get to hear the background of what's typically happening in their world.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. And so there's a couple points I want to touch on. One is I think that your point of leading by example. The best way to start having the conversations is to start having the conversations. And so you said in the circumstances you're used to, people don't necessarily share feelings or emotions. It's all kept very structured and professional. So if you break that mold, and you are a bit vulnerable, then you open the door for people to do the same thing.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think that that's one important point is that, even if it's not completely comfortable, if you can lead by example talking about some of the things that people might not typically be comfortable talking about or being vulnerable in ways that isn't necessarily the norm, it allows people that are maybe having some challenges or need some help or want to voice certain concerns to feel more comfortable doing that.

Sarah Nicastro: The other point that I think is really important is when you talk about cues. I've admitted on social media before I have pretty significant anxiety, I have depression here and there, and I've struggled with those things most of my life, and so I know very well that a lot of times when you're struggling, you're least likely to reach out. It's when you're having the hardest time that you're least likely to ask for help. So as a leader, I think it's important to understand that, no matter how you're welcoming or think you're welcoming that outreach, if you're waiting for people to flag that to you, you're probably missing a lot of what's going on. So I think that point about looking for those cues and following up on them.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that if you have good intentions, the worst you're going to do is follow up on a cue that you read wrong, and someone is going to be like, "No, really, I'm fine." And you say, "Okay, great."

Jordan Argiriou: Yep. Yep. Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: But you can't just expect it to all flow out to you. You really do have to dig around a bit to see what's going on with your team, and where there might be some struggle.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. And I guess part of picking up on the cue is, quite often, as you just mentioned before, people who struggle with anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues such as that quite often will want to tell you, and quite often will want to say, "Hey, you know what? I am struggling with this." Even if it's on the professional side.

Jordan Argiriou: The tricky part is when it comes to language barriers. Obviously, different cultural cues, especially in APEC. We're obviously extremely diverse around this region. As I said earlier, you have countries which are extremely mature, others which are emerging, but then you've also got the language barriers. As an example with a country like Korea where English is not an easy language for someone with a Korean-speaking background to grasp and to express themselves in, and it's not very commonly in everyday life. It's not like you see English everywhere in Korea, whereas you do in other countries like Singapore, et cetera.

Jordan Argiriou: So trying to pick up those cues from them, and also trying to break that initial barrier. It's not just a barrier. It would be that the makeup of the person is to say, "You know what? I'm fine. I'm all good. I'm going to continue on." But once you push past that, and I think part of it as well, as you said before, when you normalize the discussion and you start to have that discussion with someone every time you speak to them ... And not to bring it up and say, "Hey, how is your mental health?" Or "I heard you're struggling." It's just opening it up slowly, and then finally getting to the point where you're very comfortable in saying, "You know what? I am struggling. I need some help."

Jordan Argiriou: And "struggle" is not the best word to use, but "I am experiencing a bit of an overload at the moment," and once you get to that point, it's so much easier to manage the situation because, even from a professional perspective, you can delegate the work elsewhere. You can help them. You can add resources into their team. I can take things on that they're not comfortable with that I am comfortable with. It just makes it a lot easier.

Jordan Argiriou: I guess the other side as well is opening it up to an entire group within your team meetings, and this is something that I have to give credit to one of my very first ... He was actually the director of the company, but it was a very small business, and we dealt with him daily. Every Wednesday, he would have a round table where you would sit in a circle in the middle of the shop floor so to speak. That's what we call it here. And you'd have the techs, the accountant, the CEO, you'd have everyone in there, and you would just openly talk about whatever you wanted. It could be literally something extremely ridiculous that you just wanted to say. It could've just been a joke, but it was just opening up and breaking down that initial barrier.

Jordan Argiriou: And I remember when I first started with the company, I was sitting in that chair going, what am I going to talk about? I'm quite young. I'm still new. I'm having a great time in life. And then you start to get into it, and it actually makes it a lot easier as you get older. And, literally, I will give credit to that for keeping it in the forefront of my mind when it comes to managing a team.

Jordan Argiriou: So, yeah, that was my first experience with it.

Sarah Nicastro: I like that, too, because the examples you gave it was cross-functional, right?

Jordan Argiriou: Yes.

Sarah Nicastro: So it's not just giving people the forum to speak freely, but you're also opening it up team to team and department to department so that people can learn about other things that are going on within the company, whether that's function-related, or person-related, or what have you. It helps the whole group get to know each other better. You may feel more comfortable for whatever reason going to someone outside of your team, so you're nurturing those relationships in a way where you're expanding the network of the support people have.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's a good point. People in certain roles have become very isolated over the last year, and I can speak for myself saying I'm on the phone all damn day. I am literally on this video conference probably six, eight, nine hours a day, but that doesn't always mean I'm connecting with anyone. You know what I mean? There's a lot of days that it feels like I am exerting energy but I'm not necessarily having a connection that makes me feel like, yeah, I could've opened up here.

Sarah Nicastro: So it is a whole different world in which to try and provide an experience like what you're talking about when you can all sit in a room, but I think it's very important to try, right?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: I want to go back to one of the points you made about ... We've touched on that there are some cultural, regional, even gender-related differences in the comfort level around this topic, how discussions are approached, how open or not people are wanting to be. But I know that you and I both believe that, regardless of those differences and any hesitancy that may be there, it's important to continue to figure out how to lead these conversations more into work/life so that people can become more comfortable. So, as someone that deals with a lot of those cultural and regional differences, et cetera, what's the best advice you have on navigating this topic with someone who is less comfortable or less receptive to discussing it?

Jordan Argiriou: For me, as I said earlier, it's all about introducing it into the, say, a one-on-one discussion initially, right? As a good example, you're never going to get someone who is already a little bit, I guess, maybe new to the role or anxious in their everyday life ... They're never going to open up, even on a Zoom, into a group full of Zoom attendees. Even if you're making it completely normal, and everyone shares. There's always going to be the person who, for whatever reason as you just mentioned ... It could be a cultural difference, it could be a personal thing, but I think you're never going to get them to really open up in that room without already setting the scene in a one-on-one.

Jordan Argiriou: Look, one-on-ones can go one way or another. Sometimes you have to have difficult discussions in one-on-ones about professional side and whatever else. However, you need to make time in that one-on-one to also have a discussion about ... Just generally, as I said before, opening it up slowly through that avenue, sharing things about your own personal life, and it doesn't have to be specific details about personal life or a specific area of it. Just in general, "You know what? Today, they announced that they're going to lock us down for another three weeks," or "I got some bad news through a friend," or whatever else. You start to open and share that. That person on the other end will start to then ... This is just from my perspective, but it's actually worked, will start to then relate to you have certain things that they can share as well, and they will slowly start to open up.

Jordan Argiriou: Once that happens and you recognize it, you then do introduce it to the group setting. Literally, one of my gender topics is the health of the team in our group sessions. And, obviously, we discuss things like who would be a potential flight risk and things like that. However, within that discussion, the health of the team is also about the health of how they're feeling in the field. Are they comfortable going out to an area that is now in the third wave, as an example? Are they comfortable talking about things with customers? Are they comfortable opening up to their manager who is on that call with me, and telling them "I have some genuine issues that I need to address from a personal perspective," or from wherever else? I think that once you open that up, and now that we've added it as an agenda topic, it's actually become an easier conversation to have with your team because they will now bring it up. When I have one-on-ones, I don't have to prompt anything anymore.

Jordan Argiriou: I think, look, the cultural differences are very difficult to tackle, and especially because we can't be together physically, and it's all via Zoom. It is quite hard. Everyday business, we're used to it now, it's become part of life. But, initially, it was quite tricky to navigate. So this is where we are today, and it's actually working quite well.

Sarah Nicastro: Good. So I wanted to ask, Jordan, what has the feedback been, and I don't mean in specifics, but just generally speaking, from your team and their teams in terms of making this a priority? Have you had anyone that has acknowledged the emphasis on this outright, or is it just measured in the ease with which the conversations happen now versus when you started focusing on this?

Jordan Argiriou: Without going into specific areas, in some areas, there has been a very strong acknowledgment of the support that's being provided and the mental health initiatives that the manager themselves has undertaken for their team. And even without calling it mental health, just the general initiatives that that manager has taken, subconsciously thinking of the mental health side.

Jordan Argiriou: And I think that's another thing. I think people are much more comfortable having a discussion in general without putting that banner on it. So, obviously, that is something that is quite critical to everyone, both personally and professionally, and to a lot of companies in this world. However, I think when you put that banner on, people start to freeze up a bit, and that's when it comes back to the cultural side. It's yes and no.

Jordan Argiriou: So whilst some of the managers in my team will openly talk about it and say, "You know what? This is what I'm undertaking. I'm actually going to put it in some goals of my own to drive this forward," on the other side, just hearing the fact that they're acknowledging certain events and thinking forward about certain things that will potentially happen, or, "Hey, let's do this to improve the culture of the team," that, for me, is a huge win because we never had that before.

Jordan Argiriou: And, again, I'm not going to specifically point out cultural sides, but in some countries, it's unheard of to address that side because it's like work is here and personal life is here, and that's that. There's is a clear line between them. And as we're all aware, and we're all sitting in it now. We're all at home, wherever we are in the world. That line between professional and personal has now just been not just blurred, it's completely gone. As an example, I'm here at the home office. I literally will have my kids come in the afternoon, and they're here at home as well. So you've got to acknowledge the fact that there is no more office home life or field home life. It's all blended in together.

Jordan Argiriou: But once we get past that, and now that it is all together, we have to recognize that, yeah, hey, there are things that we need to address. Some people may feel a lot more comfortable, like my managers, like you said, coming out and telling me, "Hey, this is what I'm doing." I don't want to repeat myself, but others will address certain topics where you'll say, "Great. You've acknowledged it now. That's fantastic." I don't even have to prompt it anymore, so it's great.

Sarah Nicastro: I think the other thing, too, is we talked when we spoke the first time about you had ended up being involved in a round table discussion at an event where this topic came up, and you spoke about it, and had a conversation with folks about this. I think that's another important aspect of normalizing the conversation is just bringing it into different forums like that to talk about it, because it's something that more and more people are focusing on, and an area where there's going to be more and more lessons learned. And, "Hey, we did this approach, and it really worked," or those sorts of things.

Sarah Nicastro: And there really is no reason that it shouldn't be another talking point on an agenda of an event related to field service, because it's a very real part of what's going on, right?

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: So I think you speaking out in that type of setting is another way to normalize the conversation, right? Because you're not just doing it internally with your team, and doing it to impact the wellbeing of your workforce, but you're talking externally about how you're doing it and why you're doing it so that other people can learn from that as well.

Jordan Argiriou: Well, that's a really good point you raise. Sorry to cut in.

Sarah Nicastro: That's okay.

Jordan Argiriou: That's a really good point you raise. At that event, that specific topic of that round table was supposed to be about health and safety of engineers in the field. Now, we have many plans that we've put together, and, again, we don't want to keep saying the COVID word, but it was a time where we really had to have our own OHS and EHS sides very structured and very ready to react. It was a very reactive situation. Still is today, right?

Jordan Argiriou: So when I entered that discussion, and I was hosting that round table, I brought it up because the discussion around COVID safety and general EHS safety was done. We've talked about it a million times. We've done it by then. And then the line came out from me of "What about the mental health of your field service engineers being in the field?" And then the discussion, I was actually shocked. I wasn't expecting that reception from the group that I was in because we had people from mining. We had people from electrical backgrounds. We had people from biotech backgrounds, such as myself, sitting in that room, and then everyone just had this common place where we all met and said, "Okay." I guess, for me, it was quite eye-opening that everyone is actually paying attention to it whether it's a structured plan in their head or not, that the attention is already there. So it was actually quite refreshing to see.

Jordan Argiriou: But then, obviously, you had others who were not so receptive to that discussion. So it was interesting.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. I think it is something that more and more people are aware of and understand that there needs to be a bigger focus on, but going back to the points we've made, unsure how to talk about it, right? So that's why you were the one that was like, "Oh, I'll just bring this up," and then people were like, "Yes, we're doing this, or we're seeing this." But it's still one of those topics where someone has to be comfortable initiating a conversation around it, and then people are willing to weigh in.

Jordan Argiriou: Absolutely.

Sarah Nicastro: One of the things we had talked about a bit is your thoughts on, as the younger generation of workers comes in, why this topic is going to be increasingly important for service leaders to get comfortable with and be able to focus on. So talk a little bit about why you think that is.

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. Look, the way we are growing as a society, especially most of us have kids at my age, and you look at the media and everything that is in culture today surrounding social media and everything else. The generation that is growing up heavily invested on that side, there is a huge focus on mental health. I think a lot of countries, and specifically in APEC, are focusing on the mental health side. The US is obviously doing it, Europe. So it is something that they're growing up with.

Jordan Argiriou: They also live in a world where everything is quite fast-paced. Things today, as we're talking literally now, are quite uncertain as well about little things in life that we used to take for granted and things that are changing. So they're growing up through that.

Jordan Argiriou: And I feel as though the younger generation that are coming into the workforce now have an expectation that your employer will have this plan moving forward, will have the support network for them, with everything else. So I think that's, number one, the reason why on the younger generation I do focus on it. Well, it's a topic.

Jordan Argiriou: And, two, the younger generation do live in a world of, as I just said, very quick interactions. I think we said it the first time we spoke. If you look at a phone and apps, it's instant ... I don't want to call it gratification, but it's an instant result. You click something, it happens, right? So we grew up a bit different, where the younger gen will have that immediately at their fingertips. And I think that want that same response from a workplace or an employer when it comes to these sort of topics and others.

Jordan Argiriou: So given that they are so fast-paced, they are growing up in a culture where mental health is something that you do talk about, and there are many support networks as well external to your professional life that you can tap in to, companies and I guess us as managers and whatever other role we play in a company needs to be focused on that. Because if we don't support them on that side, then, in my opinion, you're going to have a lot of people departing and going to the company that does support it.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. No, it's a good point, and a generational difference that I think people need to big cognizant of along with others.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. Two more questions, Jordan. The next one is ... So we have acknowledged this, but I will state it again. There are going to be people that listen to this podcast and think, "Yeah, I am totally uncomfortable with this," or maybe even people that still want that strict delineation between professional life and personal life, and don't think that these sorts of conversations have a place in the workplace, et cetera. So for someone that is really uncomfortable with this type of topic that's in a leadership role, and we know and are advocating that it's important, what are baby steps you could suggest to them to force themselves into becoming more comfortable and taking some little initiatives to incorporate this into their leadership?

Jordan Argiriou: Sure. Look, in terms of three steps, right? So I guess the first one is quite obvious but something that we don't do constantly, and that's open communication within your teams. I guess from my side, you have to not be afraid to show a bit of weakness, so to speak, and I don't like using that word to say you're showing weakness, but show your vulnerability in certain situations.

Sarah Nicastro: Your vulnerability.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah. So you openly communicate with your team. I guess the first step really is breaking away from that purely professional relationship with someone, and not making it personal as in "Hey, we're best friends," but making it personal as in, "Hey, you know what? I care about what happens to you after you leave our premises, or this call," or whatever else. So once you break down that part, that's that first step, right? So that open communication, willingness to show the vulnerability at the first step is something that will gain someone's trust. You will gain their buying into things that you're doing because they're saying, "Hey, you're in the same boat as me."

Jordan Argiriou: The second step, and I wouldn't call it a baby step, but it is. Normalize that discussion as well, right? So not just openly communicate, but normalize it completely. So, from my perspective, having that discussion not just constantly but in a very casual manner instead of making it, "Okay, here we go. Here's agenda item three. Let's talk about how great you are with this stuff." Just bring it up slowly, or at the end of the conversation you have, or the end of the meeting that you're having. At a round table, I would say if you normalize the openness, and like I mentioned my first company that I really worked for, professional life, normalizing that discussion amongst all levels was actually something that made it a lot easier just to open up and tell people things.

Jordan Argiriou: So that's the second side. And the third one, and I'm on the fence on this one because I have put down a few points, but I'm on the fence on this one. But I am not on the fence. I'm on the fence of whether to put this down as a third point. I would say make it part of your agenda. Make it part of the agenda item in most calls. Once you get past the first two, and you hit that third step here, and you say, "Hey, you know what? It is now an agenda item," you don't have to call it open communication or mental health. If you just call it we're just doing to discuss the health of the team, we're going to discuss in general where your team is today, and then switch it over in a one-on-one the health of you. How are things at home? Things like that. They sound really simple, but they are quite complicated to get right down to it before someone really opens up.

Jordan Argiriou: And if I can add one more to that third point is that if someone does give you the feedback of you're putting way too much pressure on me, or whatever else, don't lock up and get offended, and start to give that feedback. Because then it will become a two-way street. Openly talk about it. Let's talk about what's happening professionally. Am I doing something wrong? These are basic management tools that we already have, but just changing it to talk about this particular topic and about the person versus professional life altogether.

Jordan Argiriou: And still have fun with it, too, right? So when people are talking about their kids and everything else, their home life or whatever they're doing on the weekend, make it about them. Make it a round table discussion.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. It's a good point of needing to be ready to take action, right? So maybe there are certain situations where you initiate a conversation where someone just needs to vent, and you're there to listen, and that could be fine. But if there is a situation where the response is, "Yeah, actually I'm burnt out and I need X from you, or X-less from you," right? Then you have to be ready to put some action around what that looks like. So that's a good point.

Sarah Nicastro: All right. So last question, Jordan, is I believe that it would be at best difficult and at worst impossible to put a real focus on this topic in terms of leadership if you aren't prioritizing your own self-care. So how have you navigated the crazy last year, and what do you do to make sure that you stay in a good place?

Jordan Argiriou: To be honest, it's been a difficult year across all fronts with everything that we've obviously just spoken about and been through, and still going through today. From my side, and this is going to sound really simple, I bought a bicycle not long ago. And even with our five kilometer lockdown and things like that, it's just taking the time potentially at a lunch break where you would typically go out for your lunch or whatever else to go for a quick ride. Put in a podcast in your ears and just keep going until you just need to turn back or you want to turn back, and just zone out for a while as well. I think taking your mind off certain things.

Jordan Argiriou: One thing that I will say has helped is taking my mind off what is happening just outside our door, because if you were to watch the news every day or whatever else, that can certainly send someone into some sort of spiral in their head, thinking there is no way out of this, et cetera. This is what's going to happen.

Jordan Argiriou: So I think spending time with your family, obviously, and friends and loved ones, and whoever else you can spend it with, but for me, yeah, the bike riding and just switching off, trying to separate the professional life from home life has been a challenge, but something that I'm still trying to do. I can't say I've won that one because it is quite difficult. But, yeah.

Jordan Argiriou: Yeah, and just really opening up to your team. That helps immensely. Having those discussions, knowing that there's someone on the other side not just from your personal life but from your professional life that you can share things with, certain things that you want to, has also helped. Yeah.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah. Yeah, it's been an important time for solidarity, and everyone feeling like we're in this together, and we'll help each other through it, and all of that stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: So, good. Well, Jordan, thank you so much for coming on today.

Jordan Argiriou: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: And for sharing openly. I really appreciate it, and appreciate your insights, and thank you for your time.

Jordan Argiriou: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure. No, really, thank you, Sarah, for highlighting this topic here. It's something that I want to continue as well, and hopefully this is something that becomes a focus for everyone.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. I think it will become a more and more normal part of the conversation. I think maybe COVID kind of sped that up, and we'll see if it becomes a normal staple on the event agenda once we get back to that stuff.

Sarah Nicastro: But thank you again. Appreciate it.

Jordan Argiriou: Thank you.

Sarah Nicastro: You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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 by visiting ifs.com. As always, thank you for listening.

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March 31, 2021 | 30 Mins Read

A CMO’s View on Mastering Service Marketing

March 31, 2021 | 30 Mins Read

A CMO’s View on Mastering Service Marketing

Sarah talks with Jennifer Deutsch, CMO of Park Place Technologies, about the musts and must nots of marketing service.

Sarah Nicastro: Welcome to the Future of Field Service podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Nicastro. I'm super excited for today's podcast, because we're going to be tackling a topic that I think a lot of listeners can benefit from digging into, which is understanding a CMO’s view on how to master service marketing. As companies move more toward advanced services, outcomes based services, as some of our manufacturing listeners move towards Servitizing their businesses, it's becoming more and more important to rethink marketing strategies, or in some cases, develop new marketing strategies to be effective at marketing those new service offerings. I'm excited to welcome to the podcast today, Jennifer Deutsch, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Park Place Technologies. Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.

Jennifer Deutsch: Thanks so much, Sarah. It's great to be here with you today.

Sarah Nicastro: We are excited to have you. Okay. To get started, Jennifer, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, your role, and just make sure you tell folks a little bit about Park Place.

Jennifer Deutsch: Sure. Just to kick things off, Park Place Technologies is the world's largest TPM, third-party maintenance, provider for data centers, but we're much more than that. We've been very acquisitive over the last three years. We've had 16 acquisitions, which has taken us way beyond TPM. We're now in the software business. We have actually an entire portfolio of products that includes Entuity, which is network analytics, and ParkView, which includes discovery, hardware monitoring, and much more. I'm actually going to talk a little bit about that later.

Jennifer Deutsch: A bit about me, I have a long history of marketing. I've been in marketing for the last 38 years. I have marketed food, hotel brands like Marriott, and Ritz-Carlton, Renaissance Hotels and Resorts. I even did a stint on branding Bvlgari Hotels & Resorts. I worked for Nestle, where I launched Lean Cuisine globally. I worked on also Nestle ice cream. I ran an advertising agency for 10 years. That was also very interesting because I worked on businesses, anything from industrial vibrators, which was pretty fascinating, too GE light bulbs, Sherwin-Williams paint.

Jennifer Deutsch: I did work in the retail space, did an awful lot in the healthcare space where we focused on hospital systems. That gave me a really interesting background on lots of different categories. I've also had global experience. I've had a great opportunity to prepare for my role at Park Place Technologies.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. That sounds like they're very lucky to have you and have all of that experience. I think, Jennifer, some of what our listeners grapple a bit with is there's companies that I would say are similar to Park Place in the sense of really expanding core offerings, the same way you said that you've acquired these different companies, and you've really expanded the capabilities of the organization, and therefore the services you provide to customers.

Sarah Nicastro: A lot of our listeners are in that process, whether that's through acquisition or just through the exploration and addition of different services. Then as I mentioned at the beginning, the folks within our audience that are in the manufacturing sector, a lot of those are really focusing on moving away from the habit and the process and the skills that it takes to market products and learning how to better market services. I think your insights are going to be really helpful on both fronts. We'll dig in by starting, if you had to summarize Park Place's approach to marketing IT services, how would you describe that?

Jennifer Deutsch: I would say that we lead through innovation. I would say that we're an organization and also a marketing department that's fearless in our innovation. Through innovation, we've been able to change the dynamics of our brand, our products, but also the category. We work hard to position Park Place as a thought leader and an innovator, and we do that on lots of different fronts. We use lots of different marketing tactics to do that from analyst relations to public relations, to truly innovating new products, innovating claims, et cetera. I can talk a little bit about that later.

Jennifer Deutsch: Innovation helps differentiate your product from the competition, helping to set you apart. Because at the end of the day, customers want to know, what's the difference? Why did I buy your product or service versus somebody else's? If you can add features and benefits that go beyond price like innovation, that helps differentiate your product and brand. I think that's key. I guess I can say that there are some recent examples of innovation in our category, which quite, frankly, has left our competitors flatfooted, and some of these things take a while.

Jennifer Deutsch: About two weeks ago, we introduced something called the First-Time Fix Guarantee. Because in our business, it's all about uptime. Uptime is actually our brand promise. We promise to drive uptime. Because if you're running a data center, it must be up. To offer the First-Time Fix Guarantee, we are really putting our money where our mouth is that the first time we are going to fix it. Guarantee means that if we don't fix it, we're actually going to service that piece of equipment for a month. There's a penalty for us. That was such an innovation that is such an innovation for the category. It took three years for us to get it together to make sure that we could actually fix things truly.

Sarah Nicastro: Right, deliver on that claim.

Jennifer Deutsch: Exactly. It's three years in the making. Another example is when we grew beyond pure play TPM and we were bringing to the market discovery products, marketing products, and products to help organizations optimize, we knew that we had to create and invent a new category, and we did that. We launched a category in December called DMSO, discover, monitor, support, and optimize. That was two-and-a-half years in the making. Quite frankly, these ideas come from listening to your customers, listening to their pain points, and hearing opportunities.

Jennifer Deutsch: Also, you must innovate. Because if you don't innovate, you die, you lose your relevancy. Could we have continued and been an organization that's simply focused on TPM? Absolutely. We have a dual brand promise, it's not only uptime, it's also future proofing our customers, so that we're staying ahead of the customers, we're staying ahead of the puck to bring innovation. I think it's important for marketers to have a roadmap for innovation, not only new product development, but claims and features, all of that takes time.

Jennifer Deutsch: You've got to have essentially a portfolio of what you're going to be bringing to the market. If you think about it, the First-Time Fix Guarantee took three-and-a-half years. DMSO took two-and-a-half years. There are lots of other pieces and parts, but you've got to have short tail, mid, and long tail tactics to keep your brand fresh. The other thing for us is to clearly communicate features and benefits simply. As Aristotle said, "The real genius is simplicity."

Jennifer Deutsch: When you take a look at our tagline all about uptime, it's a very simple tagline, which quite frankly, delivers a message, what we're focusing on. We're using one of the most impactful important words in our category, which is uptime. We drive uptime. It's important that when you have new products or you have new features that it's easy to understand, the messaging is simple, and that immediately, customers understand what it is that you're launching.

Sarah Nicastro: Very good. I want to go back to a couple points. I, especially, like how you gave the example of the time that it took to bring the First-Time Fix Guarantee to life in terms of messaging. It was in the works for three years before you went public facing. I think a lot of our listeners have innovation in the works. I think that, generally speaking, there's different degrees, I suppose, and different struggles along the way. I think many of them are working hard at innovating.

Sarah Nicastro: I think though that one of the things that's lacking is the articulation of that new value proposition in a way that really resonates with the customers. I've had countless people say, we invested in an IoT solutions so that we could monitor our customers assets in real-time and none of them want to buy it. It's because they're selling on the innovation, not the value of that innovation. I think that's one of the biggest struggles. It is, I think, important for our listeners to hear you say some of the things that you're working on now.

Sarah Nicastro: I think for a lot of the folks within our audience that could be their remote service strategy or their migration toward predictive analytics and things like that, those things that you're working on now you need to be thinking, now, what the message will be in a year or two years or three years when you bring that to fruition. The other thing I was hoping you could just expand on a bit is the advice you have on how to articulate that value in the language that is going to have the greatest impact for customers.

Jennifer Deutsch: Yeah. You bring up a really great point. I'll also say it also works in the reverse. You may have product innovation, but from a marketer's perspective, we might want to make a claim. For example, we did claim research where we threw a whole bunch of claims out things that we could put a stake in the ground and had customers respond and react. Three-and-a-half years ago, we tested the First-Time-Fix. We did not have a solution for it. What we then had to do is develop the technology, so we could actually launch the claim and make the guarantee.

Jennifer Deutsch: Sometimes it starts with the product. Sometimes it starts with the idea. We actually had a product, ParkView, that was in the works. Literally, we could make the guarantee once we had enough of our customers that had actually installed ParkView. The end of the day, you can start with an idea and then work backwards or you can have the product. The most important aspect is to take the proof points and explain to the customer what the benefits are, how will this help you.

Jennifer Deutsch: By the way, if a product sits on the shelf and isn't really gaining traction, sometimes there are trends or things that happen in the environment that may actually help you to accelerate your product. I must say the pandemic helped us with ParkView, because remote monitoring became a necessity, during a pandemic, when people could go into their data centers. You have to be able to also very quickly respond. I've given some examples of things that took two-and-a-half years, three-and-a-half years, et cetera.

Jennifer Deutsch: You also must be able to respond to trends, respond immediately to needs and be very quick on your feet. At the end of the day, to be able to very simply explain the benefits to the customer is the real beauty in communicating and marketing very simply, very quickly. If you can do it in an arresting way, so you have a headline that catches somebody so that they proceed to read more and learn more, then you have a winner.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that's a really good point. I love what you said about it can start as an idea as well. I want to come back to talk about that a little bit more in a moment. Before we do that, there's a couple things that I want to have you speak on. The first is something that you mentioned to me when we spoke before called a brand activator. You talked about the importance of a brand activator. Explain what that is and how it works, and any advice you have on developing brand activators.

Jennifer Deutsch: Sure. A brand activator is a tactic that brings the brand to life. When you think about a brand and the personality of the brand and you've gone through your branding exercise, at the end of the day, you need proof points, so that you can say, yes, that is my brand. I think a great example might be the Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz-Carlton is known as the ultimate and luxury. Their credo was ladies and gentlemen. The message there is the staff are ladies and gentlemen, they're genteel folks who are serving connoisseurs of consumption, someone who stays at the Ritz-Carlton.

Jennifer Deutsch: A Room is a room is a room for $79 at the Red Roof Inn or $779 at the Ritz-Carlton. It's four-walled, got a bed, what is the difference? The Ritz-Carlton brand is a brand that caters to connoisseurs of consumption, people who want to be recognized, people who want the best of the best. Brand activators, which are very easy to understand for a brand like Ritz-Carlton would be that in the brand guidelines, and by the way, I developed the brand guidelines for the Ritz-Carlton, there are no fake flowers at Ritz-Carlton. All flowers are real, and they're fragrant.

Jennifer Deutsch: Because when someone walks into a Ritz-Carlton, they should be able to tell with all of their senses that they're at the Ritz-Carlton. It's what they see, what they smell, and what they touch. It's fine silks for the furniture, fresh flowers, like a Stargazer, lily, et cetera. When they're greeted by the staff, there's a language guide. Very often, someone at the Ritz-Carlton will say, "My pleasure." Staff is different at the Ritz-Carlton than it is at another Marriott brand, let's say, Renaissance Hotels. People are screened for their service orientation.

Jennifer Deutsch: I think it's easy to be able to identify and source brand activators for a brand like the Ritz-Carlton. Everything from their blue water glasses to dress code, et cetera. At a technology company like Park Place, a brand activator might be a little more difficult to define. I would say that we had to invent them. Some brand activators for us would actually include our client advisory board. We've got 36 customers. We're on our advisory board, and we touch base with them. We provide them the opportunity to beta test new products. We listen to them.

Jennifer Deutsch: We understand what's going on in their environment. We provide them with the opportunity to surface topics that they want to talk about, et cetera. We have a huge E-services initiative that Nicola has really been spearheading, and included in that is, is that we were the first to bring a mobile app to the marketplace. We have live chat on our portal. We conduct business in real-time in 170 different languages. We actually also have what we call PPT tracker. That's like a pizza tracker. You can track your pizza from Pizza Hut.

Jennifer Deutsch: You can actually track your parts and your engineer from Park Place, so you know when the part will arrive and the engineer will arrive. The First-Time Fix Guarantee actually also is a brand activator. Other things that we do, we have an end of service library. It's not just that we keep the information to ourselves, we push it out to all of our customers. Because if they have something in their infrastructure that will become end of service life, they should know and we can help them. Those are tactics that bring the brand to life for us as a brand that positions ourselves as all about uptime, that we're driving uptime, and that we're helping our customers to future proof.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, I love those examples. I think that talking about the Ritz-Carlton example first helped, because like you said, it is very easy to visualize. You're right that it's a little more challenging for a marketer like yourself as you come into this world. I think that a long, long time ago now, we had Joe Pine on the podcast, who wrote the book the Experience Economy. I think that it's similar to that thinking in terms of what are the things we can do big to small that differentiate the experience we can provide our customers from the experience our competitors are providing and thinking about how to bring that to life. That's really good advice. Let's talk ... Go ahead.

Jennifer Deutsch: I just wanted to jump in, Sarah, and say that I think that if you really want to make an impact in the category, you should own the best customer experience. That's something that drives us, something that Nicola is working on, we all work on it, that that is a core differentiator that our customer has the best experience given the competitive set. Everything again, from the cab to First-Time Fix, to all the E-services that we provide, from billing options, et cetera, but the entire experience should be the best.

Sarah Nicastro: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I want to talk next a little bit about taglines. You said yours is uptime all the time?

Jennifer Deutsch: All about uptime.

Sarah Nicastro: All about uptime, okay. Very intuitive to me in why that matters so much to your customer base, and I like it. What is your advice for listeners on developing a tagline that grabs the attention of customers?

Jennifer Deutsch: Well, I think first, when someone is thinking about a tagline, a new campaign, et cetera, you need to start by listening to your customers, understand their pain points, what are they struggling with, understand keywords, et cetera. What's really important, aside from getting insights and input from customers, is creating a message that's very short, very simple, very easy to understand, it's arresting, the line should be evergreen, it should be able to last, it should be memorable, it should be short, and it should be easy to understand and easy to play back and ownable.

Jennifer Deutsch: If you think about “just do it” from Nike. Just do it from Nike means the freedom to perform. In those shoes, you can do anything, you can jump higher, you can run faster. With us, all about uptime, we do everything to make sure that your data center is up. It is more than just a data center now, it's your infrastructure. We do network analytics to make sure that your VPN tunnels are open, that you know how to give your users, your customers, if you're an IT, the best experience possible as the workforce is bifurcated.

Jennifer Deutsch: Some people in the office, a lot of people are at home right now, making sure the people have access to a VPN that they can use and is open, is extremely important. Getting back to the tagline, that's a lot that I just said. It should be lasting, it should be memorable, it should be short. In other words, your tagline really should not be more than five words. It should be easy to understand so that somebody gets it. All about uptime is pretty easy to understand, just do it, quite frankly, makes you think of a lot of different things, and your performance, but it must be ownable. It must be easy to play back and easy to read. Those are a lot of the same criteria, quite frankly, that you evaluate as you're looking at logos.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay, that makes sense. I think I love all about uptime. I mean, I think that's great work and really, really well done, very relevant for the industry. I want to talk about a couple more things before we come back to I want to ask you a question around the customer advisory board. Let's talk next, and you mentioned earlier, that the key to much of this is simplicity. Okay. I think that there can be this tendency, particularly in a company, not only, but particularly in a company evolving away from products to maybe be too detailed, too verbose, and thinking that the more we explain upfront, the greater our chances of getting the attention of our customers.

Sarah Nicastro: If you could, maybe just talk a little bit about why the opposite of that is actually more effective. If you have an example of how to take a more complex offering and summarize it down to something very simple, but how you can leverage that simplicity to capture enough attention to talk about some of the details.

Jennifer Deutsch: I think simplification is so important, because for a number of reasons, people have shorter attention spans than ever. Space is limited the way that we're consuming messaging, whether it's a social media post, et cetera. You can't have a lot of words. Also, you need to work hard to find a few words that really communicate your message. When I first got to Park Place, one of the things that was very interesting to me is, is that our engineers have 15 years of OEM experience.

Jennifer Deutsch: Then we train them to be able to essentially fix all the different models that are out there, all the OEM product, et cetera. They can fix anything, but how do you say that in shorthand? We came up with a line, been there, fix that. That's the headline. You read that headline, you have confidence that Park Place, with 22,000 customers and 154 countries, probably has seen it before, knows how to fix it. The headline is arresting and it draws you into the body copy, so that you can then receive and read the proof points so that you know that the headline is true.

Jennifer Deutsch: If you don't have an arresting headline, you're not getting the reader to read the rest. I think that briefer is better. As I said earlier, Aristotle said, the real genius is taking the complex and making it simple. I have another example, and that is, is that the entire infrastructure scenario is very complex. I'm a marketer that came from the food industry and the hotel industry, really, into the tech space. I needed to make things easy for me to understand. When environments are really cluttered and they're complex, we have a product that simplifies things, what does that mean?

Jennifer Deutsch: We came up with the line, from chaos to order. We actually created an infographic that showed chaos, and then streamlined. That was the line that we use to introduce Entuity, network analytics. Because if you have the analytics, you can take your chaos and turn it into order.

Sarah Nicastro: One of the thoughts I just had, and certainly, I don't want to speak out of turn or paint the picture that we don't have any listeners that are doing a good job at marketing, I mean, you guys are doing a great job, which is why I asked you to come on. There are others as well, but I do think the point you just made about coming into this space having been marketing for food and beverage or hotels or different consumer things, it does make me want to pause and point out to our listeners that if you're really looking to innovate around the way that you're marketing, it may be worth looking to get some outside perspective.

Sarah Nicastro: I think there can be a real thing of being too close to what you've always done or too close to those details, and that need you had to simplify the messaging in a way that you could understand it coming from the outside in, I think, is what helps make it so catchy for all of your customers to understand it. If you think about the different personas within your customer base, of course, there are technical people that would understand all of this complex message. There's also business leaders, business owners that don't care about all of those specifics.

Sarah Nicastro: They want to know that they can come to Park Place for uptime. It's the synopsis of what matters to them. I think that what you just said just made me think about the fact that for some of our listeners that are struggling with marketing in a new or different way, the benefit of some outside perspective might be worth considering.

Jennifer Deutsch: Yeah. I was also in banking for a while and marketing is marketing. If you learn the industry and you put some filters and lenses on them, it works. The other thing that I will share with you is, is that if you can draw somebody in with a short, concise, easy to understand headline, et cetera, then you have the ability to explain more to them. I'll give you an example. When we debuted all about uptime, we did it at Gartner. We had a big booth. The banner up on top was all about uptime. People were streaming over to our booth. I said, "What drew you here?"

Jennifer Deutsch: They said the word uptime, because that's what drives us. It's not stumbling upon it because it really is research. There's a lot of work. It takes a lot of work to make things simple. It's much easier to describe a concept in 25 words than to describe it in five words.

Sarah Nicastro: Absolutely. Talk a little bit about with the different messages you've developed for the different services you provide, for the company tagline, all of those things. Talk about how you AB test some different options to find what's going to resonate best.

Jennifer Deutsch: Long, long ago, you would AB test in controlled environments, and it was expensive. Today, with digital, it's very easy to AB test. You just simply run two campaigns and see which one tests better and then change your variables in real-time. That's what the digital environment has provided to us. You can analyze your data against very easy with digital. We've got some technology that we employ from Sigstr to Drift chatbot. We can change things immediately and see if there's lift. Because for us, at the end of the day, it's all about getting the lead. [inaudible 00:30:18] the lead, then we're winning and we have a very high conversion rate. AB testing today is easier and more cost effective than it's ever been because of the digital environment.

Sarah Nicastro: With all about uptime, what was an alternative that you tested out? I know I'm putting you on the spot.

Jennifer Deutsch: We actually have three campaigns. One of them was literally focused on the hardware, showing the hardware. When you develop an ad, when you develop creative, there are really two parts, there's the design and the graphic and then there are the words. Sometimes you can change them around to make things better, to make it more impactful because the site of the visual and also the words need to be impactful. The truth of the matter is, is that all about uptime was so overwhelmingly positive, that concepts two and three didn't make it.

Jennifer Deutsch: The other truth of the matter is, is that when you find other concepts that are actually strong, you keep them. Often, they swap out a tagline in four to five years, et cetera, or if it starts to get stale or if you get negative feedback. That hasn't been the case with us. If you do come across something that is very positive, it lasts a very long time. You're building equity in your tagline, in your logo for your brand. It all ladders up to be positive. Because in addition to driving leads, we were also, as marketers, very, very focused on driving brand awareness. If you don't have brand awareness, you're really challenged, and we’ve been able to drive Park Place brand awareness tremendously over the last three-and-a-half years.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. How long have you been at Park Place? You may have said at the beginning and I didn't catch if you did.

Jennifer Deutsch: I'm coming up on my fourth anniversary.

Sarah Nicastro: Okay. I want to talk a little bit about your customer advisory board. Because I think if there's a general theme that I think is really important, in every answer you've given during our conversation so far, it's really that you need to be speaking the language of your customers. You have to know what that uptime term is to them. You need to be developing around what is going to draw them over to your booth and droves and make them line up to want to see what the heck you're talking about. Tell us a little bit about the customer advisory board.

Sarah Nicastro: You mentioned that you have it. I'm curious, what other functions within Park Place engage in that group? Do you have your own just for marketing? Is their involvement on the product side, et cetera? How frequently are you engaging with them? Because, again, not to make too many assumptions, but I think that that might be another missing connection point for some of the folks that are having challenges in this, is that while they may be gathering customer feedback in different ad hoc ways or not, I don't know that there's that sort of concerted effort to really dig deep, understand the challenges, understand their businesses enough to identify that language that's going to have the biggest impact.

Jennifer Deutsch: I am an insights-driven, customer driven marketer, because I am a focus group of one. My opinion is one individual. I must talk to customers and have a very, very deep understanding of what they face, what their environment is like, and what they need. That's the greatest inspiration for me, personally, as a marketer. Our customer advisory board is made up of, as I said, 36 customers who have varying titles from CIO to data center manager and everything in between. It's great, because we get a diversity of thoughts and opinions.

Jennifer Deutsch: From our side, from the Park Place Technology side, the chief revenue officer participates. The COO participates in it. Our CIO participates. Our CSO participates and Nicola participates. In fact, she drives quite a bit of it, as does the SVP of ParkView and Entuity. It's the senior leadership team, because we all need to be hearing the same thing from our customers. We might be hearing the same thing from our customers, but interpreting it differently, but also working on our end on how to improve the customer experience, how to evolve our roadmap, and then how to develop our messaging.

Jennifer Deutsch: I will tell you, and I hate to say this, but when we have our client advisory meetings, which is on a quarterly basis, our participants actually, I think, have the most fun with the marketing section, where they can be creative, they love it. They love when we ask them to evaluate creative. Separately, I send invitations out to our cab members to participate in focus groups, where we'll be chatting about anything from what are your plans for the edge to, can you take a look at these wireframes from our new website.

Jennifer Deutsch: Just want to understand whether the organization is right and intuitive to you. We have a huge cross section from Park Place participating. We meet on a quarterly basis, but I do reach out probably once a quarter for focus groups. We have limited times, and by the way, our cab is global. We have people from the UK, from Ireland. We have our first member from Singapore who's going to be joining us in June. All the cab meetings have been in-person until the pandemic. Now, they've been virtual for the last year.

Sarah Nicastro: I assume you're looking forward to getting back to in-person.

Jennifer Deutsch: I am. In fact, we have the next cab meeting June 24th. I had a couple of cab members tell me that they've been fully vaccinated. They're hoping that they can come to Cleveland, to Park Place, to have the cab session in-person, optional in-person or virtual.

Sarah Nicastro: That's great. I think this is another super important point. I mean, the things that you're talking about, how do you take the complex and make it simple, how do you create a tagline that resonate, to your point throughout your answers, it all starts with understanding the voice, the language, the needs of your customers. I think that having that regular communication, having that open dialogue is critical, and perhaps something that other folks aren't doing enough of. I have to just guess that the First-Time Fix concept came from customers, right? I mean ...

Jennifer Deutsch: Actually, it didn't.

Sarah Nicastro: No?

Jennifer Deutsch: No. I'll tell you the evolution. Claim generation is an art. I learned claim generation when I was working in the health and wellness sector, specifically for hospital systems. Because if you can make a claim about a condition, so if you can cure someone and you can claim it that your cure rate is higher, you win. If you say that you're curing cancer every day, which was the line that we came up with for university hospitals in Cleveland, people are coming to you because you say you're curing cancer, but you have to be able to justify the claim.

Jennifer Deutsch: When I first got to Park Place, I wanted to do some claim testing. We did ask customers, if we could make a claim, what type of claim would you want? We generated claims internally, and then presented all of those claims, let's say about 15 of them, and the claim that bubbled up to the top was that we could fix it the first time and guarantee it. It was so strong, that when we spoke to customers who were not our customers, but they were prospects, they said that if we could make the First-Time Fix Guarantee, if we could support it, they would switch to Park Place.

Jennifer Deutsch: It then became a switcher strategy. Again, we had to be able to deliver it. When I was at Renaissance Hotels, we made an offer to guests that we could deliver fresh hot coffee with their wake up call. That's before people were using their cell phone alarm. Obviously, dating myself, but even if you have a cell phone, I think people still ask for a wakeup call. To have the wakeup call timed to, I answer the phone, it's 7:30 in the morning, thank you for calling me. You get up.

Jennifer Deutsch: You walk outside your door and there is a fresh pot of coffee just the way you want it with all of your condiments, et cetera, is pretty amazing. Okay. Now that's marketing and operations connected at the hip. You make the claim, you'll have coffee, at the very same time that you have your wakeup call, and it's going to be hot, and it's going to be perfect. We had to make sure that we could deliver. We had to make sure at Park Place that we could deliver the First-Time Fix Guarantee, that we're fixing it first the very first time.

Jennifer Deutsch: What if you got your wakeup call, you went outside and your coffee was cold? That's useless. You want hot coffee when you first wake up. You want it not only to be hot, but you want it to taste good. That was a real operational challenge. That's why in my lifetime as a marketer, I have literally always been connected to operations very, very closely, and also if we say that we can do it, we must be able to deliver. It is a promise. If you can't deliver on the promise, you've let your customers down.

Sarah Nicastro: You just gave me a really good idea for another podcast we could do together, which is talking about the alignment and the sync between marketing and operations. It's a very good point. If you start making these claims and then don't make good on them, you go from improving your brand awareness to ruining your brand perception pretty quickly. That's a really good point. Okay. I know we're running out of time. Two more questions for you, Jennifer. The first is, what would you say are the biggest lessons you've learned in marketing Park Place Technology services?

Jennifer Deutsch: I think that the first thing that I really synthesized and crystallized, for me, was really the value of customer service and to be the best in the category and that you need to keep innovating. Because I have to tell you something, we run so fast and we run so hard to come up with innovative thoughts and ideas. Our competitors sit back, watch, and then they emulate. I can tell you that we have the tools to see who was sitting on our website. Literally, seven minutes after we launched the First-Time Fix Guarantee, we had 15 people from our key competitors sitting on our website evaluating the claim.

Jennifer Deutsch: We see competitors sitting on our site. We know that they're going to spend the next six months probably coming up with something to attack us on the First-Time Fix. We've got to be thinking ahead. The customer experience is paramount. The other thing which is not only learning from Park Place, but it's a sign of the times, really, is the impact of video content, the reach of video content and quite frankly, supporting it with a little bit of social goes a long way, the number of views, et cetera, so serving up your video content to the right people hopefully at the right time goes a long way.

Jennifer Deutsch: Here's something else, about two years ago, I read an article that said that by 2025, marketing teams will be sitting besides AI, next to artificial intelligence. I remember reading the article and telling my team that we're ahead of the game. Because three years ago, we adopted AI through our chatbot who we named Parker, we personified him, we've turned him into not only a character, but a trademarked visual identity. We are working beside AI. I can tell you that Parker has a revenue stream. He converts people online. We are sitting beside AI.

Jennifer Deutsch: I consider Parker our Drift bot, which is about $1200 a month to be part of a team. We are so pushing our Drift bot that we're on the advisory board for the organization, basically, for Drift. Because we are pushing it and pushing it so they can do more. To summarize, I know it's a long-winded answer, the three biggest lessons, the value of customer service, the impact of video content, and quite frankly, boosting it, and then also the impact of working alongside artificial intelligence.

Sarah Nicastro: I love that, and Parker is another brand activator, right?

Jennifer Deutsch: Parker is another brand activator.

Sarah Nicastro: I love it. Good, good. Alright. Last question, Jennifer, for today is, as a marketer and just as a leader, what are your favorite resources for marketing knowledge, inspiration? How do you keep feeding your own continual education and keep your innovative hat on?

Jennifer Deutsch: I'll break that into two parts, one is knowledge and the other is inspiration. From a knowledge perspective, I read the Wall Street Journal, and I read it because it comes as a business perspective that I spin in my brain into marketing. How can I take this knowledge? What does it mean for me, my business, our brand, and our category? I read the Wall Street Journal and I find it too ... I think it's inspirational, but it's also stimulating. It really makes me think. The other ...

Sarah Nicastro: Do you read paper or online?

Jennifer Deutsch: I read paper. I have it delivered to my house every day.

Sarah Nicastro: I like it.

Jennifer Deutsch: Yeah. I also think that analyst relations is extremely important. I can't read everything. I can't know everything. Having a conversation with an analyst is extremely important. I'll say there are some analysts who can break it down and speak to me as a marketer, and vice versa. We have a relationship with a fellow by the name of Roy Illsley, who is from Omdia. He is the fifth most influential analyst in the tech space. Talking to him is like taking a rocket ship into the future. He explains things so simplistically that I feel that I'm really ahead of the curve.

Jennifer Deutsch: The guy who reads all the technical papers, talks to all the technologists, and he synthesizes it, and conserve it up to me in a way that makes it very easy to digest. Then that helps me to understand where we should be taking our roadmap, how we, in marketing, should be creating content and how we should be talking to our customers. From an inspirational perspective, I get inspiration from my team. For the size of our business, I have a fairly small team, I've got 11 people on my team, and I am the oldest on my team.

Jennifer Deutsch: We have people that range in age from, I'll say, 23 to 58, on the team. From the young talent and the diversity, I learned an awful lot. A 25-year-old looks at social very differently than I look at social. I've got a 25-year-old who runs our social program, and I've got a content guy who used to write for Rolling Stone. I also have a guy on my team who was an agency veteran for 20 years, who was never in the tech space. He writes copy for us beautifully. The team inspires me.

Jennifer Deutsch: Again, I think that the diversity in age, interests, et cetera, really helps us to be a very well rounded team. The other thing that I do for my team, which I actually think is really helpful and beneficial, is we have a ... First of all, we meet every day. Now, during the pandemic, its cameras on mandatory. Everybody has to be in the daily meeting with the camera on. Once a week, we do a deep dive into technology, into our own technology. Because if we don't understand the technology, we can't write about it. We can't speak eloquently about it. We can't explain it.

Jennifer Deutsch: We can't develop pitches. We also work with HR. If HR can't have a recruiting script that clearly communicates, we're not going to have the right people on our team. Again, another long-winded answer, but I'm inspired by my team and by folks within the organization.

Sarah Nicastro: I think that's really cool. Jennifer, thank you so much. I really, really appreciate you coming and sharing openly and giving such great examples and food for thought. I would say to our listeners, I approached Nicola who, who's been on the podcast before to connect me with Jennifer. Because just through watching what you guys are doing on LinkedIn and the different messaging that you're creating, I was impressed. I think that you probably don't need any more companies coming and sitting on your website looking for inspiration, but I would actually urge everyone that listens to this to do just that.

Sarah Nicastro: Follow Park Place on social and check out what they're doing, because it really is good. It's something that I think a lot of folks could learn from. Good for you for setting the bar and doing such a great job. Thank you very much for coming and sharing. I'd love to have you back sometime.

Jennifer Deutsch: Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure chatting with you. If any of your listeners would like to have a conversation, I'm very open to it. I would love for you to check out our website. I would also love for you to be our customer and join our client advisory board. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

Sarah Nicastro: Thank you, Jennifer. You can check out more of our content by visiting us at futureoffieldserviceref.ifs.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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