Customer service managers across every industry face pressure from all sides to improve customer experience and meet demand.

However, a new report found the field service industry is experiencing this pressure on a whole new level as inflation remains high and skills gaps widen.

So, how are field service leaders responding?  They’re turning to innovative service intelligence software solutions as they find themselves under growing pressure to deliver improved, cost-efficient service outcomes in a challenging economic environment.

The adoption of service intelligence software comes at a testing time for service professionals. As customers demand faster and more accurate results from field service teams, equipment becomes  increasingly more complex and difficult for customer-facing technicians to repair and maintain. Moreover, inflation drove the average cost of field service 7% higher in 2022, according to Aquant’s 2023 Service Intelligence Benchmark Report.

Delivery of “good” service on its own is no longer enough to guarantee customer satisfaction. Service costs are rising so rapidly that failure to invest in the right tools and training will cause significant challenges — perhaps even extinction — within five years if service teams fail to adapt to customer expectations.

What the data tells us

The Aquant 2023 Service Intelligence Benchmark Report gathered data from 113 organizations, including service divisions within original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as well as third-party service providers. Data was collected from organizations in manufacturing, medical devices, capital equipment, HVAC, commercial appliances and more. Information in the benchmark report was gathered from more than 16.2 million work orders and nearly 125,000 technicians.

Among the most striking findings: First-Time Fix Rate, the widely used measurement of productivity among customer-service teams, is an outdated KPI and doesn’t actually provide the information leaders need in today’s environment. When First-Time Fix Rate is measured on its own, it’s impossible to actually see the full picture. Service leaders often miss major costs that emerge a few weeks after a failed first encounter, including additional interactions to resolve the problem.

Instead, leaders of the best service providers rely on measurement of “Cost Per Resolution.” Calculation of the total Cost of Resolution provides visibility into work that involves multiple work orders, service calls and parts ordered to resolve the same core issue. By this measurement, the cost differences between highly skilled and lower-skilled workers are stark.

At one organization, a top technician has, on average, a First-Time Fix Rate of 76 percent, resolves problems in an average of 5.2 days and posts an average Cost Per Resolution of $908. (The top 20 percent of field-service technicians boast an 86 percent First-Time Fix Rate.)

A lesser-skilled technician, meanwhile, has a First-Time Fix Rate of 63.2 percent, takes 6.6 days to fix problems and posts an average cost of $1,225 per resolution —35 percent higher than the top performer, on average.

In all, low-performing technicians can cost their organizations as much as 67 percent more.

Closing the skills gaps

It’s clear the best service organizations strengthen the skills of their entire workforces to improve performance and efficiency. They focus on closing the skills gaps between top and average performers. They implement new service intelligence software that quickly enhances the skills of new hires. Equally important, they use service intelligence platforms to harvest knowledge accumulated by veteran technicians and share it across the workforce.

The results: Delivery of the right service solution on the first visit with the customer. Reduction of parts ordered by reducing guesswork and ensuring the right parts are used during the initial fix. And lastly, specific, accurate and actionable data that gives leaders of service teams enough visibility to allocate resources effectively and improve the skills of individual workers or entire teams.

The demand for service intelligence is growing

Large software companies are beginning to see the value in this kind of technology. For instance, Oracle, who has an entire business line dedicated to field service, saw the need for this type of technology when their customers started to express a pool of challenges related to improving the overall customer experience. In response, they entered an agreement with Aquant that enabled them to offer its Service Intelligence platform — an industry-leading tool powered by artificial intelligence — to existing and future users of the Oracle Field Service solution.

Oracle began offering service intelligence to their customers after seeing the value that intelligent triage capabilities brought to front-line ambassadors in call centers and in the field, and how it enabled users to quickly and accurately diagnose problems. Meanwhile, the management insights incorporated into the platform deliver useful data to service leaders on workforce performance, customer risk and product quality trends. The knowledge harvesting and triage capabilities helps get junior techs up to speed and operating at the level of more experienced techs, while the analytics dashboard gives leaders a clear view into their business and helps pinpoint problem areas so that they can see where they’re falling short and what actions they need to take to improve.

Answering today’s challenges

Inflationary pressures on service costs are likely to continue. Customers’ desires for better and faster service will only increase. Service professionals will continue to face greater complexity in their jobs as machinery becomes more difficult to fix. While service organizations can’t control parts costs or inflation, they can focus on areas within their control, like managing their workforce’s performance. With tools like service intelligence under their belt, organizations can prioritize:

• Closing the skills gap by hiring new techs and getting them ramped up faster.
• Reducing parts shotgunning by determining the best and most cost-effective part for the fix.
• Solving equipment failures on the first visit — as opposed to making quick, short-term fixes that address symptoms but not the root cause.
• Adopting a laser-focused approach to spending by reallocating resources and cutting costs where necessary.

The time for wide adoption of service intelligence platforms clearly has arrived. If service organizations hesitate to make changes now, they are risking greater economic impact in the long term.

About the Author

Sidney Lara is Service Principal at Aquant.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, field services changed in ways that continue to affect how manufacturers and maintainers run their service operations today.

These changes are driving different approaches to content delivery that call for new content management technologies.

1. Growth of self-service

Before the pandemic, there was already a trend towards increasing customer self-service. But this naturally became a particular focus for service operations when it became either impossible to send technicians to customer sites, or (if allowed) still preferable to avoid technician-customer contact if possible.

So it became more important than ever for customers to have reliable online access to technical information such as product manuals, instructional guides, answers to common questions and solutions to common problems.

2. Contactless knowledge transfer

Like so many others, technicians started working from home (when not in the field), rather than from a work base. And when they did go out on service calls, they’d often have to go alone rather than in pairs – not just to minimize contact, but because colleagues may have been furloughed or let go completely.

This more remote, more isolated way of working had several knock-on effects, one of which was the delivery of training in both formal and informal settings. Field service organizations could no longer gather technicians together with a trainer and the relevant equipment. And solo technicians no longer had a colleague to learn from while on the job.

Organizations therefore had to find new ways to deliver training – especially in regulated industries where technicians simply aren’t allowed to work on equipment without adequate instruction. And it became important to give technicians confidence that they could get their questions answered on the job despite not having a colleague present to consult with. This led to investments in platforms such as eLearning and augmented or virtual reality (AR/VR) for training, and a greater focus on delivering on-demand access to information in the field.

3. General move away from paper

For all sorts of reasons, field service operations wanted to move from paper-based processes to digital ones and use a field service app. With technicians at home, it was no longer practical to rely on printed schedules and job sheets picked up from base. Storing product and technical documentation at home could be a security issue, as well as a not-very-efficient way to arm technicians with the knowledge they needed for each job. And customers didn’t want to deal with paper invoices or payment methods requiring physical contact.

 The state of play for field services today

While much of the world has returned to pre-COVID habits, many trends that started or were amplified during the pandemic have remained with us. Field service operations can’t go back to the way things were, because:

• Many customers like and want the control that self-service offers.
• Many technicians like the flexibility of being based from home.
• Those who were furloughed or made redundant haven’t all returned or been re-employed, leaving teams lean and still relying on solo work.
• Investments in new ways of training have proved to be effective and efficient.
• In general, businesses quickly come to rely on the efficiencies and greater agility delivered by digital processes.

The issue for many field service teams is that pandemic-driven efforts to digitize processes, transfer knowledge in new ways and make information more available to customers were rushed and not as future-proof as they could be. Not all methods of delivering digital content are equal, with the result that many field operations are facing new content management challenges, or aren’t able to take full advantage of the efficiencies and new opportunities that digitization should bring.

 Challenges and lost opportunities

For example, it’s a problem if:

• Information is available to customers online, but in practice they can’t find what they need because of poor search functionality.
• A technician can’t access a knowledge base in the field because there’s no connectivity.
• The ease of creating digital documents turns into a version control nightmare, with searchers finding and using out-of-date versions of the content they need.

And opportunities for greater efficiency and agility are lost if, for example:

• Technicians have to access a dozen different systems to find all the different types of digital information they need.
• There’s no digital way to capture feedback from technicians and customers to improve the content they’re using.
• It takes a huge amount of effort to adapt training materials for an AR/VR system – or more generally to deliver content in different formats to different channels.

These are just a few examples of many content-related issues facing field service operations that aren’t as digitally mature as they ideally want to be. To address these issues and take the next step in their journey, they need to invest in new content management capabilities that can transform information availability, findability, accuracy and usability.

Future-proofing content for field services

As an intelligent content management system, Tridion Docs delivers these capabilities, giving field operations the technological foundation to take their service to the next level. It helps you:

• Create an easily searchable, single source of truth for field service content – which also works offline.
• Continually improve field service content through effective feedback mechanisms and collaboration across the business.
• Automatically get the correct information to the correct place in the correct format, on-demand and without duplicating content.

Learn more about how Tridion Docs helps field service operations become more agile, more responsive to rising customer expectations, and more efficient at delivering safe, prompt service. Find out more.

About the Author

Arpita Maity is Director Product Marketing at Tridion, RWS Group.

Around 72% of businesses say that improving customer experience is key to achieving their goals, yet only 63% of marketers have turned to new technology to help them achieve this goal, according to research by Forrester.

Sending confused clients support emails, considering handwritten rather than typed messages, or thinking ahead so as to ease customers’ experience with your products and services can help, but all these efforts need to be backed by technology if you want to stay at the top of your game.

In this article, we focus on new technologies and trends that will enable you to offer your clients top grade service.

Taking care of your most valuable tool: Your car

According to mileagetrakker.com, most sales representatives travel around 10,000 miles per year. Many see various clients in a day, meaning that they need to ensure their vehicle is in tip-top condition, and that it is covered for any breakdowns that may occur while on the road. In addition to taking out as comprehensive coverage as possible for your vehicle, you should also rely on smart car technology. Apps like aCar inform you of the cost of running your car  per day and per mile, predict when you will need to fill up your tank, calculate your fuel efficiency, and remind you of when your next maintenance is due. Therefore, you won’t ever have to call a client last-minute to tell them you can’t see them or deliver goods because of a vehicle breakdown.

Relying on team collaboration tools

Even if you work as a lone salesperson, you probably have to communicate with the rest of the sales team and your managers. Consider using a cloud-based collaboration tool such as Slack, which has different channels in which you can communicate within a group, or in private messages with a particular colleague. You can also use this platform to upload files such as Excel sheets or Word documents, which is useful when you are visiting a client and they require information asap. Slack never sleeps, so someone from the team will usually be online to respond quickly or send you information your client needs.

Cutting edge chatbots

You may not have the time to deal with every client personally and if you are on the move, clients should be able to receive answers to their inquiries and solutions to their problems while you are on the road. If you are part of a large sales team, your company may have chatbot technology in place. As noted by Forbes, “the best chatbots are able to not only respond to requests and questions, but also recognize when the customer is confused.” Chatbots can streamline the customer service process considerably, but they need to be capable of identifying when it is time to pass the inquiry to a human support representative. Top examples include Dialogflow (which integrates voice and text artificial intelligence applications to Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Amazon Alexa), and Chatfuel (which requires no coding ability and which offers live updates on data, news, and interesting information for clients).

Enhancing the client experience

If you are selling software, hardware, or any tech-based product, your customers will have more questions than occurs with other types of products. While manuals go a long way towards helping clients use the technology correctly, you should also consider live streaming (if you have few clients and your products are in the high-end sector) as well as dedicated videos or video courses that will take clients through everything from starting up to troubleshooting.

We have mentioned just a few ways in which technology can boost customer success and satisfaction, yet by doing so salespeople are ultimately killing two birds with one stone. Happy clients mean loyalty, retention, and word-of-mouth marketing. It also involves fewer complaints, inquiries, and calls, which can interfere with the goals you set out to achieve.