Aberdeen: The Customer-Driven Field Service Team

The (Not So) Hidden Value of the Tech on the Customer Experience

Can a technician drive customer satisfaction or retention? Or is the tech valuable in that they can turn more wrenches in a given day? Does field service truly have an impact on happy customers?

Field techs are an important customer touch point.

The service technician and the field service organization play a role in all of the above. However, the impact that the tech can have on the customer experience must be looked at more fervently in this new age of business. Customers no longer have to wait on service and now have the technology to evaluate the service organization (and almost as importantly the competition). This additional empowerment should not be viewed as a threat but an opportunity for the service organization to use touch points such as a field service visit to bring value to the customer relationship.

Aberdeen’s recent report on Secrets to Optimize Field Service for Better Customer Experiences (September 2013) highlighted how top performing organizations have begun to look to field service to improve customer satisfaction as opposed to solely focusing on operational goals such as reduced travel time or worker productivity. These operational metrics definitely have an impact on the customer relationship, but they can often times be misleading. For example, if technicians are completing more jobs in a day, that may seem great as more customers have fixed assets. But, what if the asset or piece of equipment fails again tomorrow because the tech didn’t take the appropriate time to identify the true nature of the problem. Or, what if travel time is reduced so the technician is able to get to a customer site more quickly, but the customer isn’t there to let the tech fix the problem. These improvements from the service organization’s perspective may not actually have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and can actually lead to a negative experience.

If you would like to learn even more about the topic of service and its impact on the customer experience, Aberdeen welcomes you to listen to a recap of its upcoming 8^th Annual Chief Service Officer Summit which can be found here. This event is an executive forum which brought together service leaders from around the globe to discuss topics in regard to –

• The New Mobility of Service – a look at the next level of mobility in field service, beyond the device to the intelligence that enhances the customer relationship and resolution.
• Service Knowledge – identify the best practices in not only capturing quality customer and service data but also what this insight enables (i.e., new services, tailored offerings, new products, more efficient service execution)
• Integrating Network Partners into your Business Strategy – the complex nature of service delivery makes it necessary that organizations incorporate a myriad of partners (i.e., technology solution providers, third parties, suppliers, etc.) to resolve customer issues and without aligned goals the end customer experience can be compromised
• And many more sessions highlighting even more best practices…

Please visit Aberdeen’s event website to learn more about this exchange of best practices in service delivery. Service doesn’t end when a failure is fixed, the service experience extends beyond one single touch point and the customer relationship must be the focus of a Best-in-Class service organization.

written by:

Aly Pinder, Senior Research Associate at Aberdeen Group

As a senior associate in the customer experience and service management practice, Aly Pinder Jr. researches and explores how service and manufacturing executives utilize technology and implement best practices to improve post-sales service and support processes. Through practitioner benchmarking and analysis of Aberdeen’s research database, he examines how Best-in-Class service organizations are reengineering their service chains for improved performance and increased profitability.

Aly’s coverage areas within the service space primarily cover the following topics on which he has written or co-authored over 40 research reports and bench marked more than 4,000 service executives in his four plus years with Aberdeen:

• Field Service and Mobility
• Service Parts Logistics
• Warranty and Service Contract Management
• Reverse Logistics

Follow Aly at: @Aberdeen_cesm, @Pinderjr

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