Executive Summary
The role of B2B service is rapidly changing. Post-COVID-19, customers are looking for equipment service providers to minimize risks by deploying a touchless or low-touch field service system. Fortunately, a change like this can be quickly implemented, and if you price and market them properly, you will likely enjoy higher revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction.
Introduction
I just finished participating in an IFS webinar titled “How COVID-19 Has Permanently Changed the Future of Field Service,” featuring Tom Paquin. Here is one of Tom’s early slides.
I believe this slide is spot on and correctly describes how the role of B2B service is changing. These pre-and post-COVID challenges that Service Executives are and will be facing for years to come and significant and will shape Service for many years.
In this article, we will look at the following:
- The high-level role of the service organization
- The customer’s new challenge
- Touchless support – how service delivery will change
- How service marketing should respond to these changes
- The impact of the new model on service revenue
The high-level role of B2B service is challenging for an organization
Think about why people buy a product or service. It’s not because the product or service is cheap, looks cool, or they know someone who has one and loves it. No, they buy a product or service because they want the benefits they will get from using it. These are their desired business outcomes and what the customer value creation experts call “value from use.
Now, why do they buy from you instead of from someone else? Easy. They buy from you because you deliver the most outstanding value compared to other alternatives. And value is defined in two ways:
- The difference between what they get and what they pay is measured in money ($, €. £, or ¥).
- Their internal quantifying intangible benefits like excellent service, peace of mind, and ego-boosting.
What is the role of the customer or field service in this discussion? The service’s role is to allow the buyer to continue to generate desired business outcomes plus the intangible benefits after paying for the product and using it during the complete product lifecycle. When service does this well, the customer will not change suppliers, repurchase when they again have a need and buy add-ons that create additional incremental value.
No matter how your service delivers on these outcomes, the results must meet the customer’s expectations at the time of purchase.
The customer’s new challenge
In March 2020, OEM’s services businesses started hearing many new pushbacks.
- The end-user customers heard, “My XXX is down, and I need to fix it, but we cannot bring any outsiders into our facility.”
- From Purchasing, they heard, “WTF – Your travel costs are over the top, plus you can’t get here for three days.”
- From your company’s best salesperson, they heard, “Our key customer needs to find a way to service our products remotely, and you have not come up with anything useful….”
- And from their service technicians, they heard, “I can’t go to that customer. I hear they had 20 COVID-19 infections just this week, and I have a sick grandparent that lives in my house.”
Yes, customers are demanding a new way to service their equipment, and this will probably be the new normal when we come out of this current pandemic.
Touchless support – how service delivery will change
Almost all end users look for what the media calls “touchless support.” This means no outsider must come into their facility to diagnose and repair any of their products. And that is not such a strange concept considering the risk of bringing an outsider into what the customers believe is a controlled environment. Also, these days everyone is risk-averse and is looking for ways to mitigate all future risks, no matter how unlikely they are. However, the end-users are fully aware that this kind of support has a price and are prepared to pay a fair price if the delivered value exceeds their costs.
This means that customers want a form of enhanced self-service for break/fix service and possibly external help for scheduled events like preventative maintenance and upgrades. Here is a quote from an August 2020 McKinsey and Company article From defense to offense: Digital B2B services in the next normal:
“To stay competitive in the next normal, companies have expanded and accelerated their use of digital solutions. Indeed, in just the first few months of the pandemic, 96 percent of B2B organizations shifted their operating model to emphasize digitally enabled self-serve, remote, and contactless operations.”
Self-serve, remote, and contactless operations should include the following:
- Internal employees who are trained and certified to do almost everything on their equipment
- FAQs and how-to videos, lots of videos
- Support them when they are stuck
- The ready availability of spare parts
- Available experienced and certified OEM technicians who can respond quickly and solve all problems (with support if necessary)
Today, several tools and solutions will let an OEM achieve touchless support. Here they are listed in order of increasing complexity:
- Simple knowledge base (FAQs)
- Merged reality virtual assistance
- Remote computer support
- Robust and growing multi-media knowledge base
- Embedded diagnostics
- Remote diagnostics
- Internet of things (IoT)
This graphic from Deloitte shows how these tools and technologies, and others that are even more advanced, fit into a pattern:
Now let’s briefly look at each of the tools and technologies listed above.
Simple knowledge base (FAQs)
Every product-focused website should have at least three separate FAQs for current customers.
- How do I work with the OEM? – This list covers subjects like reaching scheduling an installation, technical support, getting an RMA number, finding out the latest software and firmware versions, upgrading software and firmware, finding the location of service centers, buying consumables and spare parts (with a link to your eCommerce site), and warranty terms.
- For each product, answer the essential and medium complexity how do I…questions. In addition to answering questions, this section should contain links to manuals, training videos, checklists, and other documents that can be downloaded, and parts lists and drawings.
- For each product or application, answer questions about available service contracts with a chat feature or a link to service sales.
These simple knowledge bases have been around for many years, yet many businesses do not even have the most basic type of FAQs – how do I work with the OEM? Page.
Merged reality virtual assistance
Merged reality is the most straightforward digital application imaginable. I know of one supplier that helped an OEM purchase and deploys a merged reality application for over 1000 field engineers in six days with no capital expenditure other than ensuring these engineers have either a smartphone or a tablet.
In its simplest form, the field engineer and the tech support person use their smartphone or tablet to stream a video image to the app. The app merges them and sends them back to both parties. The field engineer’s video stream shows a view of the product being worked on, and the support person shows either a finger, a tool, a meter, or something like that. The support person points his finger at something he wants the field engineer to work on, which they both see. And they also talk to each other while this is going on. For example, the field engineer can transmit a control panel picture, and the support can point to an adjustment knob and say, “turn this knob about ¼ turn clockwise. There is no ambiguity about which knob to turn.
Another notable feature is that the whole session can be recorded and linked to the appropriate work order. This is important since the videos can be uploaded to a YouTube channel or a robust, searchable knowledge base. Other technicians or customer maintenance technicians can easily visualize the troubleshooting and repair process.
Of course, these applications have many other equally simple features. To learn more, I recommend looking at either Help Lightning or SightCall. They have both made a significant impact on field service delivery.
Remote computer support
Remote computer support has also been around for ages, and once set up; it is as easy to use as merged reality virtual assistance. Using something like LogMeIn Rescue, the support engineer can control the client’s computer, run diagnostics, direct the computer operator to perform specific keystrokes, and see what happens. This makes troubleshooting desktop problems easy to handle remotely.
Other solutions come bundled into the computer itself. For example, Google Chrome and Windows have remote control included, while Apple technical support people can access Apple computers with the user only granting access during a support call.
Robust and growing multi-media knowledge base
It would be tough for most products to store and list all troubleshooting and repair videos. Just think about how difficult it would be to describe a problem the way a customer would. That is why suitable knowledge bases are built with an artificial intelligence (AI) engine to instantly search a multimedia database indexed with tabs, which works like Google search. Yet that is needed when a qualified end-user technician is trying to repair a system with an intermittent fault she has never seen before.
I said the stored videos from a merged reality virtual assistance session could be helpful. While these videos should be edited to eliminate standby time, repetitions, and side conversations, it is beneficial to go through all the trial and error troubleshooting since the same symptoms may have different causes, and the more thorough the video, the more likely it will be that the system gets repair quickly.
AnswerAnywhere is a database designed to be used by field technicians and appears to offer many of the capabilities I described above. It is worth looking into as you build your robust service knowledge base.
Embedded diagnostics, Remote diagnostics, and the Internet of things (IoT)
These are three variations of the primary data collection and transmission scenario.
Embedded diagnostics is used when the product has an onboard processor, sensors, and data transmission capabilities. The embedded diagnostics look at the information available inside the product and determine if it works properly or has a fault. We are all familiar with this from our cars. When the air pressure inside our tire goes below a preset limit, the vehicle displays an icon of a tire and a message. We get a “change oil “message when we travel more than a set limit without changing our engine oil (assuming we drive a car with an internal combustion engine), and we get a “change oil” message.
In the mid-1980s, I was the VP of Service for a data communications company. Our product was nearly wholly redundant, and our internal computer monitored the status of each module. When any module sent an error message to the internal computer, it compared both like modules, and if they differed by more than a set amount, it compared each module to the expected output. When it determined which part had faulted, it took that module offline and notified the user.
Remote diagnostics is like embedded diagnostics, only in reverse. A remote computer interrogates sensors, onboard memory, and the control of a device system to determine if the system is working correctly. The advantage of remote diagnostics is that the computer is generally more powerful than the machine’s computer. This means there is a good chance it can accurately track sensor outputs and detect any subtle changes. The computer can also have AI software and perform machine learning (ML) to identify when an actual failure is likely to occur. It also may be able to determine the possible fix and schedule a repair at an off-shift time when there is no substantial cost of downtime.
The diagnostics I just described are not easy to create and program and, therefore, expensive. But in the right circumstances, they can be unbelievably valuable. Consider the case of the jet engines that power an Airbus A350 or a Boeing 787. On a transatlantic flight, each machine can produce about 1Terabyte of data. The data can be transmitted in real-time to a central location when the software looks for anomalies. When it finds one, it can notify the repair people at the destination so the repair can be made (sometimes) in the turnaround period. Not having a mid-flight engine failure can be priceless!
The Internet of Things is like the remote diagnostics I just described, except that the IoT computer can easily import data from any other device or website to make a more robust calculation than just looking at one product. In the jet engine example, an IoT system can also import weather data, flight parameters, airplane weight, balance data, and data from all the engines on the same route with all their related data and develop a strong recommendation about what to do to fix and when.
Today’s technology for identifying equipment problems and solutions is getting incredibly powerful and seriously expensive. But, for the right product and use case, these software systems can save lives, lots of money, and jobs.
How service marketing should respond to these changes
Each of the technologies has a unique cost/benefits equation. Each implementation has a unique value proposition and should have a tremendous cost. And when you combine multiple solutions, customer value can increase dramatically. This is where service marketing comes into play. They should be charged with answering the following questions:
- How should our latest offers be structured?
- What should we charge for each request?
- What happens went we replace a free offer (e.g., telephone support) with a higher-value offer (telephone support + virtual assistant)? Do we remove the free telephone support or charge for all non-warranty calls?
- How do we sell the offers?
- How do we get product sales onboard?
- How do we train all-out International channel partners? Do we charge them for supporting the customers?
- What metrics do we want to use to evaluate our decisions?
This is when you will be glad you have a service marketing professional to help solve all these non-technical challenges.
The impact of the new model on service revenue
Of course, we all want to know how these tools and technologies will impact our revenue and profit. The simple answer is, “It all depends.” It depends on the following:
- What services do you currently sell, and which do you do at no charge?
- What benefits are your customers willing to pay for, and you do you not now offer?
- How much business you are losing or how much money you are earning because your field engineers must travel from a great and expensive distance.
- How much growth will the product side of your business enjoy because you could best satisfy prospects’ needs?
- How many contract truck rolls can you avoid while fixing a problem in a shorter time than when you dispatch a service technician?
Overall, suppose you implement only the first three items on the list (simple knowledge base, merged virtual reality assistance, and remote computer support) and price and market them creatively. You will generate higher revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction in that case. Not a bad set of outcomes from investing in satisfying your customer’s desires for a touchless, or low touch, field service system.
This article appeared in Field Service News on October 16, 2020.
To read more about Customer Value Creation, please click here.
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