Recently, the Service Council™ hosted a webinar with ServiceNow and Xerox titled “Service Experts: Moving to Best-in-Class Field Service KPIs and Metrics.” John Perry, VP of Global Delivery Transformation and Technology at Xerox, and Bulent Cinarkaya, GM of Field Service Management at ServiceNow, joined the Service Council to offer insight into how ServiceNow helped Xerox enable best-in-class results.
A Shift in Focus for Service Leaders
Each year, the Service Council conducts the Service Leader’s Agenda benchmark survey. The aim of the survey is to understand the priorities, strategies and investments being deployed by service executives. Over the years, the top initiatives have typically rotated between cost cutting, revenue generating and customer initiatives.
This year presented a shift in focus among service leaders. The customer took the top spot, with over 40% of respondents saying that customer management and customer experience (CX) initiatives were their number one focus in 2022. This isn’t surprising given how the pandemic has dramatically altered customer behavior. What was surprising was that cost cutting initiatives were displaced as one of service executives’ top 3 initiatives this year by performance measurement. This was consistent with the Service Council findings in the KPIs and Metrics benchmark survey conducted earlier this year, where customer metrics also took the top spot, followed by revenue and growth metrics.
These findings signal that organizations are putting a renewed emphasis on the customer and growth, and are revisiting how they use KPIs and metrics to measure both internal and external success. If an organization wishes to achieve best-in-class results, understanding the link between performance measurement and service delivery will be imperative, as will investment in the right tools to help service leaders interpret, navigate and monitor critical KPIs and metrics.
Joining Disjointed Workforces on One Common Workflow
The last few years has presented a new set of challenges for organizations, and Xerox is no exception. Through a series of acquisitions, they found themselves with two different workforces totaling roughly 3,000 technicians providing technical support in the US. To further complicate the situation, the two workforces were served by different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Field Service Management (FSM) applications.
During the webinar, John talked about the overlap this created for Xerox. “We would have situations where we would have different technicians in the same city servicing different customers in the same building and not even know. It was clear that we needed to bring these workforces together on a common workflow if we wanted to take advantage of the density of the organization.”
After carefully reviewing several different solutions, Xerox turned to ServiceNow. According to John, “Like many organizations, we had many different legacy systems that we were using, both systems we created and systems we purchased. We wanted to move to a cloud platform that would go beyond field service and extend into CRM capabilities as well.”
Eliminating Silos for Customer and Employee Gains
One of the key differentiators of ServiceNow is its ability to eliminate silos by providing one single platform across the entire enterprise. As Bulent described it, “The goal is to bring the front, back and middle office all together so everyone is working together on one digital workflow.” By having full visibility across the entire enterprise, Xerox was better able to understand the connection between metrics. This transparency into every service call, supported by real time data, helped them identify factors that might be impacting critical KPIs like first-time fix rate (FTFR) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Earlier this year, the Service Council conducted our annual KPIs and Metrics benchmark survey with over 100 service executives. When asked what their priority metrics by class were, respondents said customer metrics were a leading focus, followed by revenue and cost. Shockingly, employee metrics came in at number four. Employee-related issues like talent shortages, the retirement wave and employee burnout have been a top concern for service executives.
During the webinar, John spoke about the correlation between customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction, saying that much of it came back to uptime. “We want the customer to enjoy the use of our product as much as possible. The more we can do to impact uptime, the better off the customer is, the better off our cost profile is and the better off our employee satisfaction becomes.”
Make the Process More Seamless for Customers and Employees
Digital transformation is still front of mind for service leaders, but they are now turning their attention to eliminating the reactive patchwork created by pandemic-accelerated digitization efforts. Organizations want a more seamless “digital first” journey for customers and employees alike. According to the Service Leader’s Agenda survey, 76% of service executives will be prioritizing investment in new technologies in 2022. The research also found that organizations will be investing first and foremost in information exchange and enablement technologies (business intelligence, artificial intelligence and augemented reality), and consolidation solutions for disparate systems (field service management, knowledge management).
In response to this, Xerox has integrated their augmented reality (AR) solution CareAR with ServiceNow for their onsite technicians. John shared the unique approach Xerox is taking with AR on the path towards more proactive service. “We’ve built dashboards using ServiceNow that allow us to monitor performance, so we can see when a technician has been onsite for longer than the average amount of time. This enables us to reach out to them, see if they need help servicing that product and then use CareAR to help guide them through the issue.”
This proactive approach not only helps improve CX, but it can improve technician experience as well. “The nature of the role means we hire people who want to fix things, have confidence that they can fix things and take pride in being able to do so. It isn’t in their nature to ask for help. Being able to intercept that and say ‘let’s step through this together’ has been very helpful. And of course, it means we can improve service times to get the customer back up and running faster.”
How Xerox Tracks the Efficacy of Its Business
As Xerox proves, a good organization is always striving to improve. Best-in-class organizations realize the job of measuring KPIs and metrics is never done. In the Service Council’s previously mentioned KPIs and Metrics benchmark survey, service leaders cited that they track 18 metrics on average. Leading operational metrics such as first-time fix rate (FTFR), meant-time-to-repair (MTTR) and workforce utilization are evolving as organizations seek to understand the causal factors behind the metrics.
When talking about how Xerox tracks the efficacy of its business, John replied that it all hinges on uptime. “We want to get there quick, fix it fast and fix it well. Being able to measure all the metrics that play a role in that kind of service and link them to what is driving those actions is important.” ServiceNow makes the process less complex by providing Xerox with the tools and processes to identify, track, and improve those critical KPIs and metrics.
Most organizations have some system in place to track the top level KPIs related to cost, revenue and customers. However, under each of these KPIs are more detailed KPIs that can give a more comprehensive view into the business’ overall success. Of course, if a company doesn’t already have visibility into the entire organization, measuring these KPIs is extremely difficult. According to Bulent, “Everything starts with visibility. If a company doesn’t have visibility, then they are not going to be able to move beyond those top level KPIs.” A platform like ServiceNow will connect systems and people across the organization to create that visibility.
Certainly, visibility was key for Xerox, whose primary goal was to eliminate the workforce silos and align their technicians across the US by customer set. This would empower the technician to manage their customers and the set of assets they serviced. Since embarking on their journey with ServiceNow two years ago, Xerox has seen improvements in key areas such as travel time, service time, and response time. The workflow unification has also helped create a seamless customer experience because customers are working with the same technician each time and technicians better understand what their customers’ needs are and how best to support them.
Working Towards Best-in-Class Service Delivery
The results from the Service Leader’s Agenda makes one thing clear: 2022 will be the year of the customer. Customer demands, expectations and channel preferences are rapidly evolving. Customers seek speed, accessibility, agility and personalization. They also expect a seamless experience, something that organizations who were forced to accelerate their digital transformations during the pandemic have missed. This reactive, rather than strategic, approach saw digitization in certain areas instead of across the organization. The result, while functional, is not efficient, and has failed to break down existing information silos (and in many cases, has created entirely new ones).
Now it’s a matter of turning digital patchwork into sustainable digital services, underscored by uncompromising attention to customer experience and seamlessness. As organizations begin prioritizing performance measurement strategies to help navigate this new landscape, it is even more important that they have the systems in place to ensure they can see the whole picture.
