Category Archive: Blog Posts

How to Shift Left: Your Six-Step Framework

Shorten the service lifecycle, improve customer relationships, and reduce service costs. Here’s your six-step framework to shift your customer experience left. 

The concept of shifting left sounds great but how can you, as a service leader, put this concept into reality? Is there a way to solve a greater percentage of field events remotely? Can more remote interactions be resolved through self-service? Is it possible to prevent problems before they even occur? 

It all starts by partnering with an AI engine that gives you meaningful and accurate insight into your customers and workforce. We broke it down for you in six easy steps. 

1. Collect data – Gather service data and understand how data flows through the customer journey. Understand how many self-service interactions, remote/call center interactions, and field interactions your team services on a regular basis. This will help set a baseline for identifying the opportunity areas in your business. 
   • Tip: Normalize data sanitation. Ensure that “clean” data can be easily accessed and analyzed to inform more accurate decision-making. You can do this by setting standards and best practices around your data entry process. 
2. Understand the service issue – The critical component to shifting left is to get deeper into understanding the types of problems that are being faced in all facets of the service lifecycle.  An example of this would be to understand what percent of service issues reported are related to a pump leaking issue. 
   • Tip: This is where Service Intelligence can help you. Service Intelligence can gather and clean your structured service data (historical data like machine logs, field work orders, customer support tickets, parts, and technician notes) and unstructured data (tribal knowledge from your top-performing workers) and distill data into symptoms and solutions. 
3. Extract critical insights from your subject matter experts – Unlike AI applications in other areas of the business, service is unique in that just because something occurs the most frequently in the data, that doesn’t mean it’s the best result.  More often than not, the best way to solve a problem is stored in the minds of your best experts. In fact, according to Aquant’s internal data, about 30% of the solutions leveraged by Aquant customers are not identified in historical service data, they are obtained from the data provided by experts. This emphasizes how critical incorporating the human element into your AI engine is. 
   • Tip: Don’t rely on historical data alone. Use the knowledge of your best employees to help identity which issues and solutions can be resolved remotely or via self-service.
4. Conduct analysis to identify the areas of opportunity – Every business is different, and identifying the area of highest impact whether it’s in the field, remote, or self-service is important to figure out where to focus first.
   • Tip: It’s common for organizations to look at metrics in silos, but looking at all of your metrics side-by-side can give you the best view into your workforce’s performance.
5. Attack the opportunity by operationalizing AI in your business – Leverage data-driven insights from the analysis to use different tools like AI triage and troubleshooting applications and predictive and performance analytics to begin affecting change in the organization.
   • Tip: Enable teams and optimize user performance by training users and sharing best practices on ways to take full advantage of the tool.  Empowering your team to get the maximum benefit from the tool is the most important part of onboarding any new technology.
6. Create a clear feedback loop to continuously improve – Ensure that you are able to measure the service interactions moving forward to clearly determine whether a positive impact is being made in the metric you are focusing on (ie. first-time-fix, resolution cost, etc)
   • Tip: Create a detailed plan using this newly uncovered data to start making strategic decisions. Once you have critical information about every aspect of your service organization, you can make data-based decisions that bridge the skills gap, improve customer experiences, and drive growth across your organization.

Time’s up. Why You Need to Shift Left Now 

The ability to accurately solve service issues quickly while using fewer resources is critical if organizations are to stay competitive. Only those who are able to navigate a rapidly-evolving service landscape, which includes changes to customer demands, workforce shortages, and economic factors, will survive. 

Customer expectations are rising significantly. Not only do customers demand a more immediate response, they expect the opportunity to self-serve and fix simple issues themselves without having to escalate an issue. According to the Salesforce State of Service report, 48% of customers have switched brands for better customer service, and 94% say good customer service makes them more likely to make another purchase. Organizations that understand this and take the initiative to respond accordingly will lead the market. 

The talent shortage and widening skills gap is further exacerbating service issues. More-tenured technicians are retiring faster than their replacements can enter the workforce—so the challenge is to upskill less-experienced workers quickly. On average, bottom performers cost organizations 67% more than top performers. In addition, the variance between top- and bottom-ranking companies has increased. The bottom line? Companies need to pay attention to the skills gap more than ever. If everyone had the knowledge and skills to perform like the top 20% of the workforce, service costs would be reduced by 21%. Teams that look at the bigger picture and approach service cases more strategically can address these issues.

The engagement crisis is just as bad. Data from the Service Council’s Voice of the Field Service Engineer survey reveals that 65% of Gen Z, 67% of Gen Y, and 54% of Gen X are either not sure they’re going to be or won’t be field engineers for the duration of their career, 40% of which are leaving the role within the next three years. Simply put, most teams won’t have enough resources to resolve a case via dispatch, therefore phone resolutions or self-service may be an organization’s only option. 

Lastly, economic uncertainty and rising costs are affecting every part of service. Successful teams know that these external factors are out of their control but they’re adjusting their operations and investing in the right technology to combat these issues. The very best organizations are taking it one step further by addressing the pressures to prioritize ESG initiatives. They understand that customers care about corporate social responsibility. Not only are they shifting left to avoid a costly dispatch, but they’re shifting left to reduce carbon emissions resulting from a truck roll. 

Are you ready to shift left? Request a demo today. 

How are Your Peers Solving the Skills Gap? Join Aquant’s Service Leaders Spring Break to Find Out

Service leaders, we’ll be frank with you: the old way of service doesn’t work, especially in today’s economically-uncertain landscape.

One of the top questions that service leaders are grappling with today is, “What steps should I take to improve service outcomes while managing costs?” If this sounds familiar, grab your (free!) one-way ticket to Service Leaders Spring Break. 

New data shows that top organizations are turning away from traditional service models and looking towards a new frontier — one that prioritizes remote- and self-service options, top-tier customer service, and service knowledge on demand. That’s why this year’s event is all about training and retaining all-star teams, data analytics for service leaders, and quickly and efficiently achieving accurate resolutions in an era of self-service.

Here’s how Service Leaders Spring Break offers a fresh perspective on service:

1. Learn how to upskill your service team in record time — and with record efficiency. Nearly one in three service leaders reported upskilling technicians and designing training programs as their most difficult challenge. But the best way to hire, retain, and upskill your employees is to invest in technology that offers the best knowledge-retention tools and professional support. Teams that feel empowered to take on the toughest challenges have better retention rates and provide unmatched customer experience. A bonus: if everyone had the knowledge and skills to perform like the top 20% of the workforce, service costs could be reduced by 21%. 
2. Get comfortable with data analytics for service leaders — even if you don’t have a data science degree. There are many routes that your company can take to start tackling the skills gap, whether it’s via centralizing intelligence, leveraging AI, or using documentation to improve workforce performance. Aquant created the blueprint for collecting, storing, managing, interpreting, and applying data in ways that drive your service goals forward. You’ll learn how to use your data to start taking action, so all emerging solutions will apply to your use case. 
3. Go from missing apparent signs of a customer escalation to using your data to create the seamless, preventative, low- to no-touch service experience that customers prefer. You can reduce costly service interactions by preventing escalations at every process step. We’ll explore strategies for quickly and efficiently achieving accurate resolutions in every service lifecycle stage.

Big problems require expert solutions, so we’ve assembled an all-star panel of service greats who have successfully charted their organizations’ paths: 

• In a chat moderated by Ashley Bewick (Aquant), Tamra Call (Johnson Controls), Amber Porter (3D Systems), and Paige Gourley (Thermo Fisher Scientific) will introduce you to the new faces of service — and share their thoughts about hiring, shifting work environments, and recruiting advice, especially from the female perspective.
• Juan Cruz, Jr. (Haemonetics), Chris Westlake (Generac), and Anthony Billups (Comfort Systems) are providing a crash course on closing the skills gap from the three perspectives that matter most: people, processes, and technology. 
• Lotem Alon and Tim Burge of Aquant share expert tips for collecting, analyzing, and applying data in ways that drive service goals forward.
• Sidney Lara and Rich Marchetti of the Aquant team show you how to create data strategies, establish internal benchmarks, and improve your baseline measurements to establish business goals.

If you haven’t yet secured your spot, there’s still time to celebrate Spring Break with us. Register today to save your seat.

Attention, Medical Device Service Orgs: To Minimize the Skills Gap, You Need to Make Data-Based Decisions

The medical device service industry continues to expand while other sectors are experiencing downturns. But increased demand alone can’t save it from costly challenges such as the skills gap, says Aquant’s 2023 Medical Device Service Benchmark Report. 

Read on to learn why the medical device industry’s top-performing companies decided that now is the ideal time to invest in data-driven tools that improve service outcomes.

This year’s benchmark data was gleaned from:

• 44 organizations
• More than 4.6 million work orders
• Over 15,000 technicians
• Over $3.4 billion in total service costs
• An average of 3.5 years of service data per company

This year’s critical findings include:

1. The medical device industry remained busy. With a 2.5% increase in field events and a 6% increase in technicians, the medical device sector had to keep up with the pandemic’s demands.
2. The sector experienced cost savings thanks to strategically-leveraged technology. Many organizations left behind traditional models to adopt remote- and self-service options, as evidenced by the 4.5% increase in First Time Fix Rates and the 34% increase in Time Between Visits. These improvements can be credited to technology, self-service options, and remote tools. Most importantly, this shift resulted in a 4% decrease in Resolution Costs.
3. However, the medical device industry still faces serious challenges like the skills gap. Even though there was an increase in the number of technicians on the field, these techs completed 3% fewer work orders, indicating Time to Competency and upskilling issues. As these issues compounded, lower-performing technicians cost their organizations an average of 86% more than top performers. In the bottom 20% of organizations, this gap was as high as 203%. 
4. It’s essential to make critical changes that bridge service divides. Thriving organizations are combating high service costs, upskilling challenges, and other service delivery hurdles by:

• Creating trust in data and normalizing data sanitation.
• Prioritizing a workforce with diverse skills.
• Investing in relevant tools and training.
• Shifting to proactive service models.
• Leveraging shared knowledge.
• Empowering your team is worth it.

To get ahead—and stay ahead—medical device service organizations should invest in crucial technology initiatives to enhance knowledge, strengthen teams, and make strategic, data-backed decisions that put them at the forefront. Investing in the right tools, such as AI, to help your team perform like the top 20% of technicians can reduce your service costs by 30%. 

Read Aquant’s 2023 Medical Device Service Benchmark Report to understand the state of the sector and how your org stacks up.

Aquant Earns Placement on Built In’s Esteemed 2023 Best Places To Work List

Built In announced that Aquant was honored in its 2023 Best Places To Work Awards. The annual awards program includes companies of all sizes, from startups to those in the enterprise, and honors both remote-first employers as well as companies in large tech markets across the U.S. 

“We’re thrilled to be recognized as one of the best places to work in the country,” says Shahar Chen, CEO and Co-Founder of Aquant. “I’m constantly inspired by our team’s focus, energy, and momentum. Delivering meaningful impact for our customers begins with our people reaching their highest potential. We’re proud to have fostered an inclusive, transparent, and collaborative environment that emphasizes the importance of well-being and personal development. We look forward to welcoming many new voices in 2023 and beyond.”

“At Aquant, teamwork is our competitive advantage,” says Assaf Melochna, President and Co-Founder of Aquant. “We encourage each and every one of our colleagues to have a beginner’s mind and to have the courage to innovate. This mindset allows us to provide exceptional and long-term value for our clients and motivates colleagues across teams to work together to achieve great things.” 

Built In determines the winners of Best Places to Work based on an algorithm, using company data about compensation and benefits. To reflect the benefits candidates are searching for more frequently on Built In, the program also weighs criteria like remote and flexible work opportunities, programs for DEI and other people-first cultural offerings.  

“It’s my honor to congratulate this year’s Best Places to Work winners,” says Sheridan Orr, Chief Marketing Officer, Built In. “These exemplary companies understand their people are their most valuable asset, and they’ve stepped up to meet the modern professional’s new expectations, including the desire to work for companies that deliver purpose, growth and inclusion. These winners set the stage for a human-centered future of work, and we can’t wait to see that future unfold.”  

New Survey Reveals Top 5 Challenges for Field Service Leaders in 2023

Finding and retaining talent with the right technical, organizational, and people skills has never been more difficult. This is a challenge across most businesses but it’s hitting field service and other trade jobs particularly hard right now.

We surveyed 100 field service leaders to tell us where they’re experiencing the most difficulty in their day-to-day. The data revealed that hiring, retaining, and motivating workers is the most pressing topic.

So how do service leaders solve this? First and foremost, understand your workforce and their needs. While competitive pay is a top priority, workers also want to feel supported by their employer, and feeling supported means having access to information and other resources so that techs of all skill levels can perform at optimum potential, without burning out. 

The secret to employee retention? Knowledge retention.

The best way to foster a talented, motivated service team is to invest in technology that offers the best knowledge-retention tools and professional support. Tools, like service intelligence, that share knowledge across an organization are the cornerstone of a successful service team. Job hopping is far more common now than it was 20 years ago, however, younger generations will tend to stay at companies that provide them with the technology, tools, and training to expand their skill set and successfully complete more jobs in less time. 

Technicians equipped with this kind of tech require less support from their more seasoned counterparts, which not only boosts company productivity but helps improve the confidence and overall morale of the individual. 

Rodger Smelcer, Executive Partner at United Services Technology has seen a positive impact across teams after investing in technology. “After equipping our workforce with intelligent technologies, we saw an uptick in employee morale, productivity, and retention, which has led to an overall improvement in customer satisfaction,” he noted.

While hiring, retaining, and motivating workers has been a top challenge for a while, the survey shows that service leaders are also facing additional pain points. The following are ranked in order from most challenging to least:

32% of respondents reported upskilling technicians & designing training programs as the most difficult: Ironically, attracting, retaining, and motivating workers will naturally become easier for leaders if they prioritize upskilling and training their existing workforce. Professional development is among the top priorities for Millennials and Gen Z. When asked why they were dissatisfied with a job or planned to quit a position after less than two years, lack of training and professional development ranked third for both younger generations, just behind pay and a lack of advancement, according to research by Deloitte.

Tip: On-the-job mentoring is an effective way to address these challenges. However, labor shortages, the retiring workforce, and burnout among seasoned workers are getting in the way of that. Service teams should adopt knowledge retention and diagnostics tools, like service intelligence, along with other digital tools that let them learn as they go and share their findings with colleagues.

27% of respondents reported pulling and analyzing data to understand organizational performance as the most difficult: When leveraged correctly, a company’s data holds a ton of insights into how to address challenges, but it requires the right analysis to reach a conclusion. 

Tip: Use technology that sources, organizes, and analyzes both traditional service data and institutional knowledge from its highest-performing employees. This offers entire organizations—from executives to technicians—access to custom reports, analyses, and insights that can help them understand their business and improve how they operate and deliver service.  

25% of respondents reported identifying the areas with the greatest opportunity to improve efficiency/cut costs as the most difficult: Service leaders are still struggling to pinpoint problem areas and devise strategic solutions to decrease or even increase spending. This is likely due to the fact that they are using outdated analytics dashboards to help them get to the root of the problem.

Tip: Service teams need technology and data built to understand the way their business operates. AI platforms that use a Service Language Processing engine as opposed to traditional off-the-shelf Natural Language Processing (NLP) are able to not only identify problem areas but will also generate data-backed insights that leaders can use to streamline their business. While NLP uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights like sentiment, Service Language Processing goes a step further by learning a company’s unique service language and mining the symptoms and behavior of the organization’s employees and customers

16% of respondents reported avoiding customer escalations as the most difficult: Demand for higher expectations of service is growing. Microsoft found that 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today compared to one year ago.  For companies to excel, they need to close the gap between customer expectations, and the actual customer experience.

Tip: Get to know your customers! Innovative service teams are going beyond traditional business intelligence tools. Instead, they’re looking at AI-powered dashboards to analyze customer data and generate predictive analytics that helps them better understand customer behavior and satisfaction so that they can get ahead of an issue before it becomes a problem. 

Learn how to turn these challenges into opportunities. Request a demo today.

Building a More Inclusive Service Culture: Lessons from National Instruments’ Global Field Services Director

Throughout the service industry, standards for customer experience are higher than ever. On each episode of Aquant’s Service Intel Podcast, we sit down with leaders that are raising the bar and creating incredible experiences for their customers. These top names in the industry have all agreed to share what they’ve learned about navigating today’s service landscape so our listeners can not only get inspired but put their own bar-raising service plans into action. 

Recently, we sat down with Anthony Bacak: Director of Global Field Services at National Instruments. Anthony’s story as a service leader is personal. He shares his experience raising a daughter with down syndrome and how she inspired him to help build an even more inclusive culture at National Instruments. Today, his company goes above and beyond to account for employees’ unique needs with diverse physical and mental abilities — from inclusion resource groups to understanding what each team member needs to succeed in their role. 

Here are just a few of the many great takeaways from our conversation with Anthony. 

Sometimes You Need to Take Change Into Your Own Hands

A couple of years back, National Instruments was working to improve its company-wide DEI efforts. Raising a daughter with down syndrome and seeing firsthand what she was capable of, Anthony wanted to ensure his company’s initiatives accounted for team members with different abilities.

So he took it upon himself to speak up and help build an even more comprehensive approach to DEI. He discovered that another employee had brought up the same topic a couple of weeks before he did. Together, they formed National Instruments’ first “inclusion resource groups”. If you’re hesitant to speak up and spark change at your company, Anthony’s experience is an excellent reminder that you’re likely not the only one that feels the way you do about an issue. 

Inclusion Starts with the Interview Process

Imagine you’re interviewing someone that has a stutter. Do you automatically come to conclusions about their job performance — even though you’d be impressed by the interview otherwise? 

Or maybe you’re interviewing someone with a vision impairment and they ask you for help reading something during the interview. Anthony says it’s important to educate team members that this is not a sign of weakness and no one should be ruled out of the interview process because they need a bit of extra support or communicate differently. It’s so important to stay focused on what they can bring to your team. 

Anthony has prioritized education and open communication about what it means to have a different ability so employees can more easily be attentive to it. Will people make mistakes as they learn to approach disabilities differently? Of course. And that’s ok, he says. The most important thing is leading with empathy and forgiving people when they say the wrong things. It’s an ongoing learning process. 

Disabilities Aren’t (Only) What You Think They Are

At National Instruments, inclusion resource groups aren’t limited to the disabilities we can see. Anthony wanted to challenge how people define disabilities and create spaces for team members with mental illness, migraines, dyslexia and other largely invisible disabilities. 

He shares how his own experience with migraines expanded his understanding of what disability looks like. It’s important to understand that a team member with migraines isn’t the same person they normally are when they have one. And that sometimes a migraine can last for weeks. Accommodating them so they can thrive in their role is so important. While this is just one example, it applies across the board when it comes to invisible disabilities. 

Sometimes the Smallest Adjustments Make the Biggest Difference 

Prioritizing what each employee needs to successfully navigate their disability and their role at National Instruments is often simpler than most would expect. In the case of migraines, it might be using a different light bulb in the office. Anthony shares how the wrong kind can set off a multi-day migraine. 

For someone who is dyslexic, fully justified text can be complicated to read. Of course, it isn’t done intentionally by the sender, but once someone is educated about this, that little change can be dramatic for a dyslexic coworker. 

Small changes will lead to a thriving team – across all abilities. We have a tendency to brush these things under the rug and “tough it out” says Anthony. But no one should have to do that. 

What’s Comfortable for You Might Not Work for Someone Else

Anthony shared the importance of understanding each person’s boundaries and comfort zones. Imagine you have a team member with social anxiety. For them, it’s difficult to get up every morning and face a team of 20 or 30 people at the office, but they do it anyway. And then you schedule a happy hour or holiday party and they decline. 

This doesn’t mean someone isn’t interested in being part of the team. What’s fun for you might be exhausting for them after a long, social week. While it isn’t easy, not jumping to conclusions because of the activities someone chooses to opt out of is so important. 

Listen to the full episode for more of our conversation with Anthony. And subscribe to the Service Intel podcast so you don’t miss any of our upcoming conversations with service industry leaders. 

Why LifeScan Records 100% of Customer Service Calls — And “Listens” to All of Them

On each episode of Aquant’s Service Intel Podcast, we sit down with leaders that are raising the bar and creating incredible experiences for their customers. These top names in the industry have all agreed to share what they’ve learned about navigating today’s service landscape so our listeners can not only get inspired, but put their own bar-raising service plans into action. 

Ehab Goldstein of LifeScan joined us on a recent episode to discuss how we can all better use AI to be proactive with call data. He serves as Global VP of Strategy and Competitive Insights and Head of Customer Service at the medical device company and says there’s so much untapped potential hiding in customer service call recordings. Ehab shares how his own team uses AI to improve compliance at scale, support market research and more. 

Read on for some key takeaways from our conversation. 

Collecting Data Isn’t The Same as Understanding that Data

It’s common practice to record calls for compliance reasons. But collecting data from customer service calls isn’t the same as understanding that data and leveraging it to make key improvements to your service org. 

It’s no secret that we need data to support decision making and many companies already pay to access databases to understand and act on industry trends. But, says Ehab, what if you treated call recordings as market research, too? What if you saw an unexpected result from a campaign and used call data to understand what might’ve gone wrong instead of sending a bunch of people to conduct customer interviews over the phone or face-to-face? These are the kind of things Ehab thinks about at LifeScan. It’s a perspective shift that’s come with great results. 

Listen at Scale — And in Real-Time

Of course, listening to all of those call recordings would be impossible. From a compliance perspective, says Ehab, a quality manager is required to listen to three to five calls per agent to ensure they’re following protocol. But LifeScan gets around 20,000 to 30,000 calls a month, so three to five calls per agent is a drop in the bucket. 

The company was sitting on a treasure trove of data detailing what customers are doing and what they’re saying about LifeScan’s products, messaging, service, and overall brand awareness in the market — country by country and region by region. So they turned to AI to transcribe recordings into text and analyze it effectively (and quickly), providing insights and helping the company improve in significant ways.

Leveraging AI doesn’t just help LifeScan improve after customer service calls are completed. Ehab and his team are also thinking about how it can help agents do a better job in real-time. For example, it helps agents adapt quickly based on feedback and change their approach on the very next call they have — instead of waiting until they’ve had a scheduled review with their supervisor. 

Better Understand How Customers Actually Feel — And Make Clear Improvements

Sometimes, there are disparities between tickets submitted from the field and what customers are actually saying about your products and services. It’s a traditional approach to look at service records to understand customer satisfaction, but these rarely tell the whole story. 

When Ehab’s team started leveraging insights from call data, they also looked at the automated customer survey that was currently set up for after each call. It was the usual set of questions related to net promoter score: effort level, satisfaction level, and first-call resolution. So he worked to improve the survey by asking more poignant questions — especially those that clearly separate service satisfaction from product satisfaction. 

Of course, updating the survey also gave greater accuracy into the customers that had legitimate reasons for providing a low score. A lot of it surrounded product and warranty, but a portion was also about the service itself. Being clear on this information allowed Ehab to act on lower scores with detailed agent feedback and training and more efficiently course-correct anything that needed to be improved.

Right now, call monitoring is happening on 100 percent of service calls at LifeScan, with AI analyzing each one and reporting on intents and sentiments. To hear more about how AI is being used at LifeScan, listen to our full conversation with Ehab. And subscribe to the Service Intel podcast so you don’t miss any of our upcoming conversations with service industry leaders.

Selling Service: Inside Philips’ Unconventional Team Structure

Standards for customer experience are higher than ever. On each episode of Aquant’s Service Intel Podcast, we sit down with leaders that are raising the bar and creating incredible experiences for their customers. These top names in the industry have all agreed to share what they’ve learned about navigating today’s service landscape so our listeners can not only get inspired, but put their own bar-raising service plans into action. 

Recently, we had a great conversation with Peter Lee, Senior Manager of Service Sales and Marketing at Philips. When the medical device manufacturer went through a couple of acquisitions, the experience shifted Peter’s perspective on the most effective approach to sales and service. He noticed that the acquired companies primarily used their field service engineers as a service sales channel — on top of their core roles. Seeing a better way, his team worked to shift away from a model where field service engineers sell service. Instead, they focused on one where a dedicated sales rep prioritizes driving service business. 

Here are just a few of many great takeaways from our conversation with Peter. 

Think Differently About Roles and Responsibilities

As far back as the 1990s, the service technicians at Philips had also doubled as dedicated salespeople. But following the multiple acquisitions, Peter and his team decided to shift the model: a transition from field service engineers selling service to an approach where a dedicated inside sales rep drove the service business. 

Of course, having a dedicated sales rep focused on driving the service business requires a different approach to structuring teams than many of us are used to. While face-to-face interactions are still important for these inside sales reps, they also do a lot of back-office work such as preparing quotes and helping with pricing. And, if they need additional help with this work, they turn to equipment salespeople, rather than field service engineers. This structure allows technicians to focus on delivering great service, further enabling Philips’ value proposition. 

It also provides growth opportunities that support the company’s recruiting efforts. Often, a team member will begin in one of these service sales roles and transition over time to selling capital equipment. And, it avoids a common conflict of interest for engineers: fixing something for a customer, but also wanting to sell something during the same visit. Having a dedicated team for service sales avoids that altogether. 

Focus on Selling Service Contracts Alongside the Initial Purchase

Every customer is going to need a repair at some point. And every customer is going to need to upgrade eventually, too. Because of this, Philips lets customers pay for service upfront as part of their capital expenditure or operating budget. Peter has found that this is the most effective way to sell service, despite what we might hear about customers not wanting to pay for a problem before it arises. 

At Philips, sales reps are trained to emphasize the value of investing in a service contract up-front — like a customer never having to spend the time to issue a PO and schedule a service call if a system goes down and the ripple effects this has on doctors and patients. Investing in repairs up-front can also minimize unexpected bills, especially for devices that have high-priced parts. 

Focus on Obsolescence at the Point of Sale, Too

Many Philips customers purchase systems over a period of time. For example, a hospital network is not going to buy 20 or 30 ultrasounds all at once. Instead, they might buy 10 this year, seven next year, and eight the following year. That results in the same systems, but different versions. 

So Philips has a technology obsolescence program to ensure that all systems are going to perform at the same level and entire fleets are standardized. This makes training easier, too, since everything has the same look and feel, workflow, and features. And of course, if they’ve invested in this up-front, the customer doesn’t have to hit the bank again to pay for upgrades.

Create a Service Partnership with the Customer

Many of Philips’ customers have highly skilled engineers that service a lot of their hospital equipment. Some of that equipment might be simple to maintain, but others are more complex such as x-rays and MRIs. 

Based on in-house teams and their different capabilities, Philips focuses on service offers that benefit the customer, but also still bring a benefit to them. For example, hospital engineers may take the first call and resolve the issues they can. While some issues might still require a field service engineer from Philips, this reduces the number of times it happens and saves the customer money.

Know That Team Changes Like this Take Time

Peter acknowledged that implementing a different approach to driving service business takes time. It’s important to have the basic building blocks in place before focusing on building out different programs. 

You want to make sure you have a good maintenance service program and are delivering on an SLS. But once you do, it’s great to look at opportunities to grow your business outside the traditional “break and fix” approach. There’s so much that customers will appreciate in terms of additional programs and additional features. Ultimately, all of those programs and features ensure they’ll benefit through the whole lifecycle of a system. And that leads to greater customer loyalty and a greater likelihood of future purchases.

Listen to the full episode for more of our conversation with Peter. And subscribe to the Service Intel podcast so you don’t miss any of our upcoming conversations with service industry leaders. Service Intel podcast can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you listen to podcasts!

New Survey Reveals Top 5 Challenges for Field Service Leaders in 2023

Finding and retaining talent with the right technical, organizational, and people skills has never been more difficult. This is a challenge across most businesses but it’s hitting field service and other trade jobs particularly hard right now.

We surveyed 100 field service leaders to tell us where they’re experiencing the most difficulty in their day-to-day. The data revealed that hiring, retaining, and motivating workers is the most pressing topic.

So how do service leaders solve this? First and foremost, understand your workforce and their needs. While competitive pay is a top priority, workers also want to feel supported by their employer, and feeling supported means having access to information and other resources so that techs of all skill levels can perform at optimum potential, without burning out. 

The secret to employee retention? Knowledge retention.

The best way to foster a talented, motivated service team is to invest in technology that offers the best knowledge-retention tools and professional support. Tools, like service intelligence, that share knowledge across an organization are the cornerstone of a successful service team. Job hopping is far more common now than it was 20 years ago, however, younger generations will tend to stay at companies that provide them with the technology, tools, and training to expand their skill set and successfully complete more jobs in less time. 

Technicians equipped with this kind of tech require less support from their more seasoned counterparts, which not only boosts company productivity but helps improve the confidence and overall morale of the individual. 

Rodger Smelcer, Executive Partner at United Services Technology has seen a positive impact across teams after investing in technology. “After equipping our workforce with intelligent technologies, we saw an uptick in employee morale, productivity, and retention, which has led to an overall improvement in customer satisfaction,” he noted.

While hiring, retaining, and motivating workers has been a top challenge for a while, the survey shows that service leaders are also facing additional pain points. The following are ranked in order from most challenging to least:

32% of respondents reported upskilling technicians & designing training programs as the most difficult: Ironically, attracting, retaining, and motivating workers will naturally become easier for leaders if they prioritize upskilling and training their existing workforce. Professional development is among the top priorities for Millennials and Gen Z. When asked why they were dissatisfied with a job or planned to quit a position after less than two years, lack of training and professional development ranked third for both younger generations, just behind pay and a lack of advancement, according to research by Deloitte.

Tip: On-the-job mentoring is an effective way to address these challenges. However, labor shortages, the retiring workforce, and burnout among seasoned workers are getting in the way of that. Service teams should adopt knowledge retention and diagnostics tools, like service intelligence, along with other digital tools that let them learn as they go and share their findings with colleagues.

27% of respondents reported pulling and analyzing data to understand organizational performance as the most difficult: When leveraged correctly, a company’s data holds a ton of insights into how to address challenges, but it requires the right analysis to reach a conclusion. 

Tip: Use technology that sources, organizes, and analyzes both traditional service data and institutional knowledge from its highest-performing employees. This offers entire organizations—from executives to technicians—access to custom reports, analyses, and insights that can help them understand their business and improve how they operate and deliver service.  

25% of respondents reported identifying the areas with the greatest opportunity to improve efficiency/cut costs as the most difficult: Service leaders are still struggling to pinpoint problem areas and devise strategic solutions to decrease or even increase spending. This is likely due to the fact that they are using outdated analytics dashboards to help them get to the root of the problem.

Tip: Service teams need technology and data built to understand the way their business operates. AI platforms that use a Service Language Processing engine as opposed to traditional off-the-shelf Natural Language Processing (NLP) are able to not only identify problem areas but will also generate data-backed insights that leaders can use to streamline their business. While NLP uses machine learning to uncover valuable insights like sentiment, Service Language Processing goes a step further by learning a company’s unique service language and mining the symptoms and behavior of the organization’s employees and customers

16% of respondents reported avoiding customer escalations as the most difficult: Demand for higher expectations of service is growing. Microsoft found that 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service today compared to one year ago.  For companies to excel, they need to close the gap between customer expectations, and the actual customer experience.

Tip: Get to know your customers! Innovative service teams are going beyond traditional business intelligence tools. Instead, they’re looking at AI-powered dashboards to analyze customer data and generate predictive analytics that helps them better understand customer behavior and satisfaction so that they can get ahead of an issue before it becomes a problem. 

Learn how to turn these challenges into opportunities. Request a demo today.