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 boost your business with our doctor database 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: