Last week, we shared a recap of the Day 1 keynotes from the Smarter Services™Executive Symposium, which focused on people–enhancing the experiences of your team, your customers, and your frontline.
Day 2 was all about Process. Doing more with less has been a consistent theme over the past few years, and for companies looking to enhance efficiencies, refining processes around service delivery is critical.
Thanks again to our sponsors for elevating this event particularly our platinum sponsors: ServiceMax, a PTC company, and Aquant!
Going Platinum: Getting Your Team in the Groove
Rocking into Day 2, Alan Schaefer, professional musician and CEO of Banding People Together, kicked things off with a presentation that focused on how to remove team friction and help employees become aligned to a core set of values. Schaefer helped the leaders in the room identify their leadership style based on a behavioral analysis of the different types of executives you might find at an organization. Based on each leadership style, Schaefer was able to provide insight on how to best motivate people to get them “in the groove.”
Want to take the quiz to assess your rockstar leadership style? Check it out here.
Service Leader’s Agenda: People, Process, Technology, Data, Parts
Next up, Stephanie Peters, Vice President of Operations from Hobart Service delivered her keynote, “How to Align People, Process, Technology, and Parts.” The key question: How can leaders prepare and rewire their organizations for a digital evolution?
As Peters noted, leaders have to set the vision for their teams. They must also strike a balance between high-level deliverables (that often feel unattainable) and a few discrete items that create incremental change. Having the right talent is a big part of ensuring success in your evolution. Peters was also joined onstage by Jon Scruggs, IT Director, to discuss the importance of data security and partnering with IT for organizations moving through their digital transformation.
Field Service Journeys: Excellence & Scalability
How do you scale your company while creating effective customer experiences? Erik Sheehan, Vice President of Global networks and Operations, and Doug Sullivan, Global Vice President of Network and Field Operations from Verizon shared how they were able to reduce nearly $400M in business costs and improve culture across the organization through the digital transformation process. Their frontline also brought in $250M in revenue and customer experience improved overall, as noted by their NPS scores.
The key message: you can have it all–cost savings, better employee engagement, and improved customer experiences. It comes down to being proactive, harnessing AI and AR, and meeting the customer where they’re at.
Supply Chain Journeys & Reaction Panel
One thing is certain: Digital transformation is a career-long journey for service leaders. No organization embodies the digital transformation journey more than technology leader IBM, and no one understands that journey better than its VP of Supply Chain, Shannon Beecher. Beecher’s team supports the service of 9,000 different machines – all of which have a lifespan of about 12 years – and equate to more than 350,000 active field replaceable units. Beecher notes that digital transformation for her teams is a way of life; it’s just a matter of determining the difference between continuous improvement, episodic change, and true transformation. Most recently, they have evolved their call management approach with their clients. In addition, they’ve looked at cognitive planning, transforming their logistics operation, and improving standardization and consistency of quality for their client base. Beecher’s team is also moving toward predictive planning with AI, and how that can assist with parts provisioning.
For organizations with complex supply chains undergoing digital transformation or moving toward more predictive models, you’ll want to watch Beecher’s keynote at ServiceCouncil.com.
Following Beecher’s solo keynote was a premier reaction panel that included Jason MacIver from Dell Technologies, Vito Minneci from Hobart Service, and Justin Simpson from Avnet, who shared their key takeaways from the discussion and how they’re moving forward in terms of visibility, transparency, and agility.
Service Journey Deliveries: Predictive, Proactive, & Outcome-Based
The more reactive your service delivery journey, the higher the costs. However, Service Council research shows that organizations who have achieved predictive, proactive, and outcome based methodologies are achieving best-in-class performance in metrics such as first-time fix rate, customer satisfaction, and employee retention. It’s no secret that getting there can be a massive undertaking–how do organizations move from reactive to proactive? Linda Tucci, Sr. Director Global Remote Technical Support from QuidelOrtho, Sasha Ilyukhin, Sr. VP of Customer Service Operations from Tetra Pak, Ron Kruse, VP of Service Operations from Volta Charging (a Shell corporation), and Jon Barr Head of IT from KONE shared their journeys in this insightful panel. As Barr noted, this process is an individual journey with every technician, every supervisor, and every customer. It’s also important that the customer understands that while they may see you less, you’re actually performing better service.
It’s also establishing what predictive service means for your business, and chartering towards that goal. For Kruse, it’s solving the customer issue before they know it’s a problem. For Ilyukhin in a mature organization like Tetra Pak, outcome based service includes a sustainability element to reduce costs and truck roll. For Tucci, who runs remote service, remote resolution metrics are a key indicator that their predictive model is running effectively. Tucci noted that technicians also look at the overall health of the customer, not just the health of the singular instrument that needs fixing.
Commercial Journeys: Design, Standardization, and Go-to-Market Execution
What organization couldn’t use intelligent, profitable revenue growth? Tony Adamson, VP of Sales and Marketing from Hobart Service, Kathryn Kelly, Sr. Director of Life Services Marketing from BD, and Mark Horvath, Corporate VP of Global Services from Hologic shared their tricks of the trade in this panel led by David Nour of Avnir.
Adamson shared that, for Hobart, selling service should be a face-to-face discussion to be able to talk about the value. The challenge is getting in front of the customer and bringing the team together to make that happen and sell effectively. Kelly at BD then discussed commercializing services and what it takes to tell the service story to drive revenue. For her teams, it was getting them to understand the value of service by visually mapping it out–especially for those who were not particularly savvy with technology, making service commercialization a bit harder to grasp. Horvath then noted that when you’re thinking about building capital, service cannot be subservient to the other areas of the organization. Service must have a voice and must be focused on optimizing to help scale the company, which may involve the frontline serving in a sales capacity as well.
This panel was packed full of helpful nuggets for service organizations looking to drive next-level growth and profitability.
Intelligence Journeys: Creating Your Information Platform
Closing out Day 2, Deepika DiGiovine, VP of Digital Applications and Connected Factory from Dover Corporation discussed how intelligence is driving their integration of workflows. At Dover, their digital journey starts with how customers (in their case engineers) find their products to drive innovation. Next, those products must be easy to configure, and easy to purchase. From there, it’s simplifying the installation, training, and aftermarket service. When customers call in needing that aftermarket service, it comes down to connecting the data and understanding a 360-view of that customer. The thing is, this is not a step-by-step process, but rather, a full circle journey. In an operation with many brands and complexities like Dover, organizations need to find opportunities for improvement within that process and begin there.
The secret to achieving this process? Start small, and scale big.
Join us next week when we share a recap of our Day 3 keynotes!
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