When something breaks in your home, your office, or in a venue you frequent what is your expectation? Is it that you will just deal with having a broken product, offline printer, or down elevator? Most of us would expect a service technician will show up to the rescue to return the given product or asset to operations so we can get back to productivity.
In IDC’s recent Product Innovation and Aftermarket Services Survey, service leaders noted a priority to improve service (quality and speed) to customers. But too often, aftermarket service organizations have focused on just ensuring a warm body arrives on a customer site within the service level agreement (SLA) with little importance put on actually achieving resolution or enhancing the customer experience.
As customers explore options for the services they receive, aftermarket service providers will need to get better at delivering more than just the minimum to enable the field service team to become experts on engaging a customer in a special and personalized way. Field service and the aftermarket are too often driven by meeting a SLA. This minimum requirement of meeting a service window of 4-8 hours after a failure has been reported, or processing a warranty claim within 30 days, or ensuring an asset is available 80% of the time has long been the norm. Meeting minimal requirements is quite profitable for the service organization, but can be short-sighted as competitors enter the market and begin to offer service, support, and enhanced experiences of the same or better quality.
To address this pending disruption of competitive factions and heightened customer expectations, field service organizations will need to prioritize value and not just meeting an SLA. This will raise the cost to serve in the short term but in turn result in having the right to request more share of customer wallet as value delivered improves for the customer or operator. This shift to value and enhanced/personalized experiences will ultimately require better quality data, contextualized customer insights, and freed up time to focus on delivering value. Artificial intelligence (AI) provides an opportunity to close the gap between data and insights on the front line. IDC defines AI as the ability of computers to learn without being programmed, applied to large sets of data for business advantage. But how should field service organizations reconcile the hype around AI to usher in the era of intelligence at the point of service? Field service organizations should prioritize the following as they explore the potential of AI in the coming weeks, months, and years:
- Understand the pulse of your employees and customers. Voice of customer and voice of employee activities often are established for the primary benefit of the organization (i.e., increase sales/margins, increase retention rates). In this new era of AI, field service organizations will need to listen to the needs and concerns of customers and employees. As AI becomes more pervasive across industries, field service organizations must tackle the elephant in the room around AI – privacy, and job displacement. Too much of the discussion around AI in the B2B world has been the fear that it will replace jobs or result in IP theft. This view of potential negatives neglects to amplify all of the potential positive outcomes of what AI can offer, Educating customers and service employees about the value of AI and how these technological capabilities can improve the service experience, customer outcomes, and employee productivity is crucial to adoption and comfort. Without understanding customer and service employees’ fears about AI, organizations will struggle to maximize the opportunities that will come with this innovative technological advancement.
- Shift the KPI that measure success in the field. The promise of AI in field service revolves around improved operational efficiency, predictive/prescriptive service outcomes, and improved productivity of the team. However, there is a bit of a gap between the current metrics that are being measured and what should be measured in the AI era. If AI is to improve the speed of service, technicians should be measured on the value they are providing to the customer and not on how many more jobs they can complete. The improved speed of issue resolution as a result of AI providing better answers to the reason for failure should allow the humans on the service team to focus on the customer. This shift in what role a field service technician can play in customer outcomes is profound, no longer is the technician solely in place to turn a wrench but to prioritize customer engagement. Therefore, the KPI that matter aren’t work orders closed in a given day but experiential and value based. These new metrics may be more difficult to measure but will tell a better story of customer impact, future revenue opportunities, and lifetime value.
- Highlight the positive and address the (potential) negatives. Right now, there are too many field service technicians that can efficiently get on site in front of a customer or asset but fail to resolve the issue on a first visit. Issue resolution is becoming more and more complex as assets are smarter, supply chain networks struggle with resiliency, and the field force ages out. The ability to have the right part, right skills, right insights, at the right time is becoming a fairy tale for too many service organizations. On the front line is the field service engineer who has to advise a customer or operator in need that service cannot be completed resulting in assets, products, and equipment remaining down. Service leaders must communicate to the field service team both the in office planning/dispatching teams and the engineers in the field the ability for AI to drive insights and efficiency while reducing non-value added task work. The skepticism of technology from service teams has preceded the AI era, but the AI conversation brings with it the fear of machines taking over to the detriment of the humans. However, fear comes from a lack of communication, visibility, and buy-in around strategy and execution. AI can enable service workers to be the expert in a time of customer need and also free up their time from rote administrative tasks. AI must become an opportunity for the service team and not a murky monster.
Artificial intelligence will have a large impact on the field service organization and the customer experience. Service leaders need to understand the opportunity, embrace the challenge, and educate customers and employees to ensure the AI era is a net positive driving growth of the organization.
For more information on CX and AI, read our other blogs:
- Expand Prospect Outreach and Engagement With the 4-O Marketing Matrix
- Empowering Sales Management With AI
- GenAI Marks a Shift to Intelligent Experience Orchestration
Learn what matters most to your customers with IDC’s AI Use Case Discovery Tool—find out more.
