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Upside down and inside out – a new perspective on IoT

Boardrooms need to change the way they look at IoT and frontline service teams if they want to retain customers and grow the business, writes Joe Kenny, the senior director of  Global Customer Transformation for field service management specialist, ServiceMax.

Good ideas can come from anywhere in a business – not just management. In fact, the boardroom is often the least likely place to find innovation, because the board is typically the furthest away from the minutiae of company processes and customer pain points.

The key, of course, is proximity to the customer. Customer service is the front line of any business; a key touch point with customers that not only drives satisfaction but can also drive innovation – if you let it. With sales increasingly taking place online, front line service teams often know customer business issues better than sales teams.

Timo Okkonen, the chief operating officer of inspection, testing, certification consultancy services firm, Inspecta, believes advances in field service management technology have enabled a radical rethink of his business. Where there were once departmental silos there is now an integrated approach, where field service (due to its field service management software) is helping to re-shape the company’s entire approach to business. And with new IoT, cloud, and mobile tools and analytics, there’s a whole new set of operational metrics about service performance available for the first time.

Imagine that: field service helping to re-define business strategy. It’s becoming more common than you think. The integrated approach that Inspecta and hundreds of other companies are embracing is something which Aberdeen Group analyst Aly Pinder refers to in a recent report, but Pinder also talks about the growing importance of a knowledge base for a business fuelled by field service intelligence.

“The view into the field by an integrated technology engine isn’t intended to just be a one-way mirror,” writes Pinder. “This real-time intelligence is valuable in that it can and should shape the interactions of other teams. In particular, the sales team can glean a lot of information from service interactions, seeding cross-sell/upsell opportunities, proactive renewal conversations and more customised offerings.”

This need for a knowledge base turns the field service professional into a strategic asset. After all, field service people work at the coalface. They see problems and solutions every day. They can identify the upsell opportunities and identify where there is unnecessary waste or inefficiencies. It is a unique position but is this recognised enough? Do boardrooms fully utilise their field professionals and learn from them? They’re starting to.

By empowering and mobilising service technicians with connected, cloud-based, real time tools in the field they can do work-orders, request parts, schedule and be scheduled, look up manuals, take payments, renew maintenance agreements, use social channels to communicate problems swiftly and effectively and upsell and cross sell products and solutions where appropriate. Strike while the iron’s hot, so the saying goes.

What sort of value does this add to the business? A substantial amount as it turns out. Companies report average increases of 22% in service revenue, a twelve per cent increase in contract renewals, and a 19% decrease in average repair times. This level of service and personalisation can also act as a barrier to entry for rivals.

One company, Top Con, actually empowers its field service teams to glean information from customers and feed it back to other departments within its organisation via a field service automation system. This has included details, concerns and potential renewals for customer warranties, feedback on pricing and even invoicing and ordering issues. It is this level of intelligence that can transform a business reputation but also provide invaluable ammunition for innovation.

So if knowledge truly is power, then field service engineers should in theory be the most powerful workers in the business. Of course the real measure of this is return on investment. The share of worldwide manufacturers using performance-based contracts jumped to 65% in 2015, with more than 70% of manufacturers relying on services as a key product differentiator. Happy customers renew contracts, but what we are advocating here is that field service can not only help retain existing business but also grow it.

Boardrooms need to turn traditional thinking on its head and recognise the growing value and insight of field service teams to the whole business. Don’t just measure it in terms of customer satisfaction. That’s doing service a disservice. It can be so much more than that now.