Business trends and changes in technology have created new perspectives on how companies view their customer service teams. To better understand future trends, we should look closer at the evolution of the Everything as a Service (XaaS) model. XaaS is a term that stands for “X as a Service” and refers to several technologies. The “X” has been referred to as either “anything” or “everything as a service. The acronym refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over the internet rather than provided locally or on-site. XaaS is the essence of cloud computing. There are many gray areas when you analyze the three basic XaaS models.
Much of the content I read seems to oversimplify field service innovation. Maybe this is because I have so many conversations with field service leaders that, despite immense knowledge and vast capabilities, are still struggling to get a handle on the best ways to improve their businesses. You read about how companies are transforming with today’s technologies, and in many ways it looks easy, but the reality is it is just that – there are so many competing priorities, a multitude of options (a gift and a curse), and numerous paths to success.
As today’s field service organizations race to adapt to growing demands and new business models, we see technology after technology being introduced in an effort to maximize productivity, improve the customer experience, and share knowledge across the business. Your technology options today are virtually limitless, which is both exciting and intimidating. But as you evaluate how tools like a new field service software solution, IoT, AR, or AI can help you accomplish your field service optimization goals, you have to keep in mind one critically important thing – any of the technologies you have at your disposal will only have their intended impact if they are embraced by your workforce.
The disproportionate cost of the often chaotic and fragmented last-mile of field service delivery has been a recurring and growing issue in the transportation and logistics sector. While existing field service workflows may not exhibit the same “last-mile” pain points, improvements such as streamlined scheduling, job assignment, and routing optimization have translated into significant labor and fuel cost savings.
We’ve published a number of articles recently on the challenges field service organizations are facing with recruitment and hiring. In this article with Robb Origer of DISH and in this article with Roy Dockery of Swisslog Healthcare, we discussed how it is necessary for field service organizations to move away from hiring based on experience and begin hiring based on skills and abilities. However, despite this recognition, the field service industry is still struggling to diversify. You can read here the firsthand perspective of a female field technician on how the industry needs to up the efforts to become more inclusive.
There are various inputs and outputs that make an integrated IT systems infrastructure beneficial for a service organization when vying for Best-in-Class status, including the collection of data points which, when utilized properly, can have profound effects on sales, marketing, and service.
There is an old saying about “those who are well served — serve well.” Applying this motto might just be the antidote to what I call “HQ Syndrome.” HQ Syndrome is what happens when staff at a company’s headquarters loses touch with the company’s field employees. This often results in poor employee engagement. Whereas strong employee engagement correlates with good customer experience and improved profitability and business results; companies suffering from HQ Syndrome often have poor employee and customer engagement which results in high turnover and low customer ratings. Companies need to more carefully consider how closely related these two concepts are.
Annually, field service organizations achieve higher levels of technician productivity through technology, process improvement, training, quality assurance, and hard work. Productivity, as a field service objective, is defined as more output from the work produced. Consistently service leaders make productivity an annual focus to drive value and meet corporate objectives.
Believe it or not, change management often gets overlooked when companies are transforming their businesses. I think this happens for a number of reasons – it seems like a given, so not much time is put into really developing a solid strategy; the team is so focused on the project itself that managing the change gets rushed or overlooked; everyone thinks someone else is in charge of this; and so on. While change management is a topic that is discussed a lot, my conversations with field service leaders have revealed that many times change management in practice doesn’t look like change management on paper.
Global markets and increasingly demanding customers are accelerating the pace of business. As a result, forward-looking organizations are beginning to realize that analyzing data is not sufficient; they must also take action on it. Whether in marketing, HR, or operations, more businesses must systematically operationalize their analytics as part of daily business processes.
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