Service is hard: new book delivers insights

With over 20 years’ experience, ClickSoftware knows about service delivery and how hard it can be for businesses to excel. Drawing on that expertise, the company has released a new book, Service is Hard: Turning Common Field Service Challenges into Customer Engagement Opportunities, which contains insights, best practices and recommendations from experts, thought leaders and analysts.

Recognising that it can be difficult to implement change aimed at service delivery improvement while simultaneously enhancing the customer experience, the book is broken down into eight easily digestible chapters — each of which addresses a specific business challenge:

1. Holding the customer’s hand — why customers expect superior service
2. Aligning conflicting stakeholder interests
3. Metrics for measuring field service management
4. Integrating field service management and legacy systems
5. Managing in-day schedule disruptions
6. Integrating parts into field service management
7. Achieving mobile application adoption
8. Turning the Internet of Things vision into value

Each chapter draws on collective insights from experts and practitioners to provide recommendations that will help the reader overcome issues.

The customer service imperative

Management attitudes towards field service teams are changing. No longer viewed as operational cost centres to be optimised and contained, field service teams are increasingly recognised as the driving force for effective customer engagement and as brand ambassadors. Companies that recognise this — from the smallest service contractor to the largest global enterprise — see superior service as a primary competitive differentiator and growth engine.

This shift in thinking acknowledges truths about business today:

• Customers want (and can get) what they want, when they want it; and,
• Companies now compete with one another at a higher level — it is no longer based only on the product or service being provided, it is about every experience and interaction.

A business and technology perspective

The nature of assets, equipment, tools and knowledge used by service-led businesses addressing different vertical markets is unique. Regulators, competitors, geography, customers and the supply of qualified service professionals are some of the varied characters of these service operations’ external influences, while internal influences include available capital, corporate history, reporting structure and executive strategy.

Regardless of type of business or industry, spreadsheets and legacy tools historically used for field service management (FSM) have facilitated only tactical and reactive approaches to the field service challenge.

While these tools allowed individual managers or dispatchers supporting a small part of a business or service to make decisions that suited a granular part of the business, achieving total operational awareness was not possible, much less efficiency and effectiveness. Today’s FSM solutions need to support an approach that can consistently deliver against the defined strategy, meet regulatory requirements and deliver the highest levels of customer satisfaction while addressing the variability of each business and industry of operation.

The book covers a range of topics to address these issues, such as integration with legacy systems, the path to mobility and how to harness the IoT.

Service is Hard is available in both print and digital formats and you can order a copy using these links — click here for print or here for digital.

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