Check out The Future of Field Service Trends
As the market continues to evolve field service organizations must continue to invest in more advanced solutions capable of acting with greater autonomy to improve productivity. In this episode, we speak with leading expert Kate Leggett from Forrester on what to expect in 2024 on service innovation and market direction. In addition, Kate will explore why companies need better access to more data from field assets that can be readily shared with other enterprise systems and explore more utilization of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies to predict future issues and resolve remotely while improving the customer experience.
Check out The Future of Field Service Trends
As the market continues to evolve field service organizations must continue to invest in more advanced solutions capable of acting with greater autonomy to improve productivity. In this episode, we speak with leading expert Kate Leggett from Forrester on what to expect in 2024 on service innovation and market direction. In addition, Kate will explore why companies need better access to more data from field assets that can be readily shared with other enterprise systems and explore more utilization of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning technologies to predict future issues and resolve remotely while improving the customer experience.
Welcome to Speaking of Service, the podcast that uncovers practical ways to grow service, revenue control costs and improve customer satisfaction. If you're looking to innovate, gain a competitive edge, or just learn about the latest service trends, you've come to the right place. Tune in to today's discussion, where Chris Wolffe speaks with leading expert Kate Leggett from Forrester on what to expect in 2024 for service innovation and market direction. 20 years ago, technology really transformed the front line of service. And when I'm talking about service, I'm talking about customer service usually delivered in a contact center, enabled with all kinds of transformative technologies. Well, now that same spirit of transformation is coming to the new front line of service, which is field service. Makers of industrial equipment have all the same objectives that those early contact center operators had, which was to improve service delivery, reduce cost involved with service delivery, speed up service, and enhance the overall customer experience. I'm delighted to have Kate Leggett here as my guest today. Kate cut her teeth looking at the way front line customer service was delivered almost 20 years ago in the contact center, where software technologies and automation completely transform the agent experience as well as the customer experience. Kate's taking that same mindset now and looking at the front line worker providing field service for industrial equipment. Welcome to Speaking of service, Kate. Tell me a little bit about yourself and the work you've been doing. Happy to do so well and delighted to be here. Thank you. Yeah. Like you said, I started my career working for customer service software vendors. goodness. 20 years ago, building these digital customer service technologies that would support, for example, telecommunications companies and being able to service their customers. And I spend a lot of time sitting next to agents being able to understand the calls that they were getting from their customers and the technologies that they needed to be to be successful. And being successful sometimes meant a truck roll. And so a decade ago I came to Forrester and I head up the CRM practice at Forrester. And field service is part of my coverage area Field services. Again, one of these technologies that hasn't had a natural home in enterprises. Some folks see field service as part of ERP or some see it as a separate technology disconnected from from others. Some companies see CRM, see field service as part of CRM. The way that I look at this space is it's an ecosystem and you want to be able to support your customers and goals. And to be able to do that, you need to be able to support your customer along their end to end journey from marketing to sales to the contact center, because that is where your calls, your inquiries will come in. Or it could come in from an event, from a connected device. Then what do you do with that, that inquiry, that call, perhaps that alert from your connected device, Are you able to solve it remotely or do you actually have to dispatch a technician to your site to be able to to physically address that issue? And so field technologies are the most intimate way of being able to represent your brand to your customers. And so I look at field service as, again, that continuation of of the CRM journey. That's putting my first job out of school was wearing a headset for Shawmut Bank and we would take inquiries in just first call and the queue would end up in your headset. But then there is this advent of being able to do skills based routing. So a particular type of call would go to an expert, the ability to drive a screen pop so that the information that agent needed to answer the question was provided to them just in time. And that required a tremendous amount of integration with the marketing systems, expert systems. IT And infrastructure systems. I've got to imagine you're seeing so many of the same parallels with the front line worker. Yeah. You know, it's groundhog Day all over again. Yes, it's it's done in a different way, but the concept is still the same. You know that field tech who shows up on the outside, you want to be able to pop in our customer details, asset details, work order, history details. You want to pop up guided flows for the field tech to be able to follow related incidents, the right knowledge to make them successful, to be able to fix the issue upon first contact. So same. That's like back to the future. Same same. Same concept, which is doing it really differently today. And similarly, those those contact center agents used to be a low cost workforce meant to just field calls and complete them. But then we realized that they could be a profit center. They could be driving incremental revenues through upsell and cross-sell functions. Are you seeing that same trend with field workers? Absolutely. Because, again, your field worker is the most intimate representation of your brand and there are valuable resource who is on site understanding how your connected machinery or assets are being used to meet your customer goals. And they can look at your ecosystem and be able to recommend perhaps different ways of using an asset or additional products. And so one of the big trends that we're seeing is that field service organizations are really becoming revenue generators because first of all, they are in a trusted relationship with the customer. They really understand a customer's goals. They understand how these assets are machinery are being used and are again trusted to make the right recommendations. And it can drive revenue, but more importantly, deepen your customer relationship and that customer intimacy that keeps your customer satisfied and loyal to your brand. Well, there was a time when industrial equipment was all about the physical parts and machines, but now software is eating the world and increasingly those frontline workers are needing to fix software related problems rather than hardware related problems. How are they working in conjunction with maybe technologies backstage to enable faster fixed rates or greater efficiency? Your field tech may not necessarily know the right thing to do or may not have the right skills, and they have to be able to quickly, when they're on the job site, reach into the back office and find that subject matter expert who can recommend, who can guide them through the right fix process. That takes collaboration. That takes skilling. And that as well takes new technologies like AR and VR to be able to help that technician that's right in front of the assets, be able to understand what they're looking at. And for the back office worker to be able to guide them through a resolution process. It also means that it's a collaborative effort. You're swarming around an issue where you're sending data straight back to the back office, or perhaps there is some out of band analysis that needs to happen or you're sending incidents back to perhaps that's your engineering department that may need to recommend a fix and then ultimately push it to that asset without even the tech being involved. Kate, I know you've spent a lot a lot of time trying to understand both the CEO agenda and the CIO agenda as it comes to trends and enabling efficiencies in the front line of service and the contact center and now with field service. Take us through some of the trends that you see most compelling. Yeah, that's a great question. We'll see. You just look around, Macroeconomics right now aren't really looking great. And so we are projecting a growth slowdown going into next year. And at Forrester, we recently polled CEOs across all industries about where for next year and in all geographies what we found was what tops the list was a focus on efficiencies to be able to improve productivity effectiveness and in third place was about improving profitability. About it wasn't about growth at all costs. It was about responsible revenue growth. We polled CIOs about their business priorities, and their priorities skewed even more towards improving efficiency and productivity, because in their world it's all about cost optimization. And perhaps that also means reducing tech debt and modernizing applications. So we also ran the same survey and looked at results by industry. So for industrial manufacturing, high tech manufacturing, even software, the priorities were the same. And then in another survey, we looked at, you know, what are the software investments that companies are making next year? And what we found was that customer service and field service applications topped the list because these two technologies working side by side together really help optimize help companies optimize costs. But they also do a great job at being able to deliver those experiences that keep your customer satisfied and loyal. That ultimately drives customer retention and enrichment, that impact top line revenue. And but these two technologies also help companies unlock new revenue opportunities. For example, allowing companies to offer their assets as services, for example, instead of products, which deepens the relationship that you have with your customers over time, lets these vendors get more embedded with their products into their customer ecosystem. Again, being able to deliver value in an ongoing way to to to help support your end customers business business needs. So what you're saying really echoes a lot of what I've heard from other guests like the Services Council, where their members are seeing that every dollar of new bookings, revenue of a piece of equipment, for example, is setting the manufacturer up for $8 of recurring services revenue post-sale. Now, I think of the contact center and the frontline field service worker in the past being all of us, a necessary evil, a back office function. But now they're moving to the front office as a sales and marketing organization with real brand implications. That's got to be incredibly challenging given the technical debt and the fragmentation of infrastructure that many of your your customers have are facing. Yeah, it really is. And this move to service station, it's great because what it does, it allows those companies to extend the relationship that they're having with their customers beyond that, that that first sale and beyond just a tactical firefighting service interaction and what service type station you're looking for opportunities to deepen your customer relationship, to understand what are your customers actually doing with your products, with your assets. And it allows the vendor to be able to recommend perhaps different usage patterns or perhaps additional products, a cross-sell or a whole other add on to be able to enhance and support your customers and goal. But to do that, like like you said, Wolffie, it's really hard because a lot of the times field services completely disconnected from other technologies that that that a an enterprise would have. It's disconnected from sales and marketing tech. It's disconnected from customer service. It could be disconnected from ERP. And so what you want is to be able to empower that filter. That's the real the most intimate representation of your brand, that's on your customer side to be empowered with all the data, all the insights that they need to be able to deliver those great experiences, like what is the customer history, the account history? What is the details of the work order? What is what is the history of the asset? And does the field tech have the knowledge, have the insights to be able to address to fix that issue in one visit? Do they have that guided flow? Do they have the knowledge? And if they don't, how can they reach back into the back office and find the right subject matter experts to to to to help them out? Can they use new technologies like AR and VR to be able to help them through really complicated processes and workflows, to be able to fix that issue on one visit? So empowering your field force to be able to deliver these great experiences, to be able to solve the issue, to be able to show up with the right parts on your truck takes a lot of data, a lot of insights, and this connected ecosystem of enterprise technologies that puts the customer at your account at the center of all interactions and conversations. Well, here at PTC, we talk about the digital thread that allows information from engineering to flow down into the factory for a manufacturing of a complex machine and then be used by a service out in the field. But we've encountered many of our clients facing fragmentation because they've grown up buying best of breed applications in particular areas, and they're anchored into that technical debt very deeply. When you talk to a, let's say, a strategic population of clients who are looking to transform and enable that digital thread, what is the distribution of that curve look like? You know, what's the what's the hump in the middle? Are they laggards? Are they right on time or are they early adopters? Where is the state of the industry right now? boy, I would think they're really laggards because like you said, you you want that end to end visibility from, you know, developing, planning, manufacturing, distributing your product, and then understanding how your products are working out in the field, How what are their usage patterns? When did they start trending on the healthy and then being able to service them to be able to meet your customers KPIs? And like you said, it takes this connected ecosystem of products. And what I found and so over time, companies by best in breed technologies that are focused to to to support the. The business metrics, the KPIs of the organization who is purchasing that technology. So engineering can be buying product lifecycle management solutions and field force could be buying a fragmented field service solution. They may go to a best in breed knowledge management vendor. They may slap on an AR VR solution, they may purchase a contact center solution. But disconnected from their sales and marketing CRM. And so what you're left with is internally silos of data and process and workflows where employees don't have full visibility of the customer, their history assets. And from a customer's point of view, it's a really fractured, fragmented experience, which frustrates your customer, which gets them angry because they think that they've been communicating all this information to the to the company that they're working with, and they think the company should know who they are and understand their business problem, understand how they're using their product and support them to meet their business goals. I mean, your customer has told your company this over and over again, and most enterprises can't deliver that quality of service bad back and customer expects. So this is kind of a good news, bad news situation, right? If I am surrounded by laggards and I am going to get my digital house in order, there's a real opportunity for mover advantage here to be more competitive than the average bear. Absolutely, because it doesn't take a lot to delight the customer these days. And more than that, the customer already knows what good is, what great. And I mean, just look around you and you're in your life as a consumer. I mean, you're surrounded by Amazon. You're surrounded by Uber, who takes all friction out of getting to your destination. Amazon, I hope, knows me better than my husband because it's able to recommend products that I really want to buy because they know if my entire history Netflix same thing and knows what I'm watching and it keeps me engaged with the right content because it knows everything that I've watched and how I've raided different shows. Those are the experiences that your customers demand in their lives as consumers and in their business lives. They want those personal experiences where the company has a know, has a full understanding of who they are and what they've done, and they can recommend content products, experiences to satisfy their business goals. Customers also expect easy and effective experiences. You know, self-service digital experiences. How many companies are able to do that? So like you said, there's a great advantage for companies that really, truly digitize at the foundational layer instead of digitizing and pockets and still don't look at that overall end to end customer experience through the lens of the customer. When you're advising the C-suite on how to get their digital house in order. You've talked about agreeing on the right architecture, the right metrics, and perhaps you've even talked to them or advise them on the experts that could help them architect and lay in the foundation properly. How does somebody get started in assessing where they are and setting that pragmatic. Year one year to year three objectives here. It's not only about technology, right? It's about a strategy. It's about operations. It's about people. And so what I always say is, let's walk away from what you have today. What are your business objectives? What are the high level KPIs that you want to to achieve? And then is is it cost optimization? Is it unlocking new revenue opportunity is to be able to to get to that profitable revenue growth. Is it increasing at a foundational level, your efficiencies? Now, is every organization aligned and working towards those goals or are they at cross-purposes? And then once you have your high level strategy in place, what does that actually mean in terms of workflows, in terms of use cases that you want to be able to roll out and be able to support? And once you have that in place, you need to figure out how are you doing today? So it's that assessing your operations, how is your strategy aligned? How is your organizational departmental strategy aligned to your overarching company strategy? How are your processes all interconnected so you can really actualize that digital threat to be able to get better efficiencies or better products or deliver better experiences? Is your data in order? Are you able to have clean data or you're able to trace, for example, the history and the health of an asset and act on that data? Once you have that data and you have your workflows in place? You know, you can then at that point start thinking about automation. You can then start about thinking about AI But again, the way I counsel our clients is you start with that high level strategy. You break it down into that that, that the workflows that you want to be able to support that that that that will that are aligned to your your high level KPIs then you assess your operations and then you pragmatically put a roadmap of modernization in place, which involves technology, which could involve processes and your people. It could be upskilling your people, it could be moving people around and different within an organization. It's making sure you have enough resources in the right geographies where, for example, your assets are to be able to deliver upon your strategy. So, Kate, I know you've been following our colleagues at Service Max for some ten years now. You must have a point of view on how PTC and ServiceMax together may be able to help customers move past that. You know, that incredibly daunting task of transformation and get really tactical moving at least a couple of steps forward. Yeah, I was so happy with the acquisition. I've been following ServiceMax for a really long time. And I think PTC is a perfect home for for ServiceMax because I think that, first of all, field service is not just a singular technology. If you if you think that way, you end up with these islands of best in breed technologies that are all disconnected from one another. And it's not doing anyone a favor. It's not doing your employees a favor. It's not doing your end customers to favor. So you really have to look at a broader suite. And so field service is part of service. Lifecycle management is just it's NSA three step. But what what PTC offers is that full continuation from product lifecycle management and with the compliment of service lifecycle management or product lifecycle management, again, that's those are the technologies that will you develop your plan, your manufacturing, your district, your products and service lifecycle management. I think of it as that physical component. You know that people component where you're you're managing your assets, you're managing your, your, your, your products, your machines, you're managing their service, their parts, your managing that, that customer communication. You're managing the end to end operations and maintenance of the products of the assets of the machines that you've created. And it's creating this virtual loop where you're understanding how your assets are failing, and then you're feeding that back into engineering to improve asset quality, to perhaps understand how your your customers and customers are using your assets. Perhaps that's giving you new insights in designing your products differently or you're understanding how your customers are using your products. And perhaps you want to bundle products together and and unlock perhaps new revenue opportunities or you're able to optimize your cost structure by being really disciplined at demand management, for example, or parts management or warranty manager. So again, ServiceMax being acquired by PTC is just this virtuous combination that yields so much more value than Service Max Just alone. But we've certainly found that they've brought value to our clients. It's not just about understanding where failures may be in a machine, but our early adopters are seeing the ability to take serviceability in mind and bring that back up to the design of a piece of equipment that we had some guests from IDC here talking about making sure if you if you know what's likely to fail the most, you ought to put access to that part on the front side of the machine and not the back. So it makes it easier for a field tech to do their job. And I'm with you. We call that the infinity loop, where you have the digital world and forum in the physical world and then back again. But let's put data to the side for a second and let's talk about human beings. I mean, what you're really describing here is a cultural change for an organization and the way it interacts with its users, how our frontline workers respond, adding to these recommendations to use advanced infrastructure, technology, AI as well. And do you see any parallels in the way Contact Center agents initially reacted to technologies and how they expect technologies to serve their jobs today? Yeah, that is a fundamental question because, you know, we're all humans and we approach any new technology initiative with fear. You know, whether robots come and take our jobs, how and it's employees tend not to have that open mindset to be able to understand how technology shifts can actually make their lives better. I mean, we've got a skilling issue now. We got a labor shortage now. And the your field techs who are on the front lines, they have a really tough job. They don't know if they have the right knowledge, the right insights, the right information to be able to do their jobs. They don't know if they've got the parts on their truck to be able to to to fix the the asset the first time they're on a job site. And so what it takes is to take that fear of a new technology and communicate to your techs or to your broader organization that these technologies don't eat jobs. What they do is they take off all the rote administrative work. First of all, think that a tech has to do and they empower the tech with all the right information and knowledge that they need to be a superhero, to be a the best tech that they can possibly be, where they may not have the right skills, but then they're put through a workflow to be able to help perhaps diagnose an issue, and they're hand held and supported and they learn to trust the technology and it makes them do their job better. So I always think of it as, you know, like Tony Stark, an Iron Man, and you've got Jarvis, and it's not that sharp as the eye is taking Tony Stark job away. JARVIS It's just making Tony Bay like the best superhero he can absolutely be. And I think about all these new technologies, whether it's AI, predictive AI or automation, or even digitization. You're making these checks into superheroes, being able to be equipped with everything that they need to be successful. It's not that the AI is going to take their jobs away, but that takes a lot of skill by the change management, a lot of communication to get your your your your front side employee. It's like bottom to this whole concept. So here at speaking of service, I've had the luxury of talking to two really innovative companies on different ends of the spectrum. Cinematic makes industrial cleaning equipment they deliver as a service. Karl Storz is innovating with optical tools and imaging used inside of operating rooms, and they talk about the machine whisperers who are on the front lines, able to use their intuition and experience to diagnose and make repairs. That might not be intuitively obvious to the layperson. And we've created technologies that enable them to capture that expertise and play that forward to the next generation of service techs. I think with the addition of ServiceMax, to the portfolio, we can assure that we support those techs with making sure the right parts are on the track, that the things that they need are proximate to where they are to to your point, to make them the super hero like Jarvis does with Tony Stark, I, I like. Like even figuring out like, who's the right tech for the job, you know, how do they get there? What's the optimal route. Again, suggesting next best actions and then doing all the work that they don't want to do like, you know, summarizing a work order or capturing knowledge. But I like that. I like that framework. So I come to our conversation as a member of our sales organization, focused on our partners at PTC. We really believe that we make amazing software technology, but it requires expert practitioners to deploy the software to help our customers use it safely and effectively, to use it in new ways until it hurts and then it doesn't hurt any longer. I often equate this to having surgery, occupational therapy, and then you've got a new lease on life. What types of ecosystems of services organizations are you seeing? Users of our technology embrace to help their projects go successfully? Yeah, that's that's a great question because at the end of the day, you want your end customer to be successful in meeting their business objectives. And that doesn't just take software that takes a whole ecosystem that's working together, collaborating, co-creating with the customer to be able to support customer's business, because ultimately that is the only way that the software vendor that the consulting partner that the ecosystem of independent software vendors and perhaps marketplace applications are will be successful. So it's all of these ecosystems working together. So your partners have to be aligned with you, the software provider, and you have to be working together with the customer to collaborate, to co-create, to give feedback, to evolve your products and services, to be able to not only meet market demand and understand where the market is going and innovate, but to make your end customer successful. And then you can add on ISV, you can add on perhaps third party marketplace components that have things like little point solutions that may offer a feature that's not part of your product, but has to plug in and have to share data and it has to conform to architectural standards. So it's all of you all working together with the customer. Again, at the center of your strategy to make them successful because they're the ones that count. It's only if they're successful that they're going to keep the relationship with you and with your consultancies. So we've had a great conversation. You know, we open the conversation talking about your research with the C-suite and the priority for efficiency and effectiveness, followed by responsible profitable growth that most of the organizations that you advise are mired in some degree of technical debt but have aspirations to be able to enable the digital thread so that what happens in the front of the House follows out to the front line worker, and that information from those service experiences flows back into engineering and design. You've talked about trying to get your digital in order and get your p your team to agree on what the right metrics are, what the right objectives are for a major project. Let me leave you with the last words. What advice would you have for companies setting out on this journey today? It's really hard to do and you won't be successful without commitment. True commitment in terms of resources, time and money from your C-suite, because these are not grassroots initiatives that each organization can, can, can fund and fuel and sustain from the bottom up. You really need that cross company alignment from sales market doing engineering your product organizations, your support organizations, your field organizations, your back office organizations. And so these initiatives really have to be driven from the top, and all parts of your company have to be moving together to be able to to to effect real change within your company. And yes, you can modernize and pockets and that will support part of your journey. But to get that true transformation where you're able to to to perhaps move from reactive engagement to predictive engagement, where you're able to really fundamentally change and support your business objectives takes a full alignment of the company. So I don't know if that's what you're looking for, but it is it's a hard job. So what I would say is start socializing the value of transformation at all levels of the organization with data, you know, with pragmatic business cases, exact studies are a wise to be able to get by in again at all levels of your organization. Well, you've set me up nicely. We've had the lecture here. It's speaking of service, of talking to quite a few organizations who've taken that elephant and eaten it one bite at a time. Kate can't thank you enough for being with us today and congratulations with all the good work you're doing at Forrester. thank you. And pleasure's all mine. Happy. Happy to be part of this conversation. Thanks for listening to the Speaking of Service podcast brought to you by PTC. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating or review and be sure to check out other episodes to hear new perspectives on improving life for aftermarket professionals, service teams, and the customers they support. If you have a topic of interest or want to provide feedback, email us at speakingofservice@ptc.com or visit us at ptc.com/ speakingofservice.