The changing face of the customer

In the lead-up to next month’s 7th Annual Field Service Management Summit, event organiser IQPC takes a look at why customers are no longer merely recipients of goods and services; they’ve become influencers on and contributors to the way companies do business.

TSC Group Holdings is a holding company for several industrial service businesses, including Trilogy Services and Spectrum Fire & Security in Australia, and Cowley Services in New Zealand. The group became the eventual owner of Hastie Services after the company went into receivership in 2012.

TSC recently went through a wide-ranging, transformational change program called Program Endeavour. Michael Phelan, head of business solutions at TSC, established the business solutions group to drive the key IT transformation part of the project, and he explained that one of the major drivers behind this program was to position TSC as a market leader, with an innovative and integrated technology value proposition to its customers.

“When we established the business solutions group, we came up with a plan for a very different mobility solution, going with Gartner Magic Quadrant leader Click Software. Automated scheduling was a key requirement for both Trilogy and Cowley Services going forward, and Click offered that capability,” he said.

Given the scheduled maintenance nature of the Spectrum Fire & Security business, the existing ERP solution was adequate to meet its business and customer requirements.

Two customer portals were developed and rolled out (one designated as an operations portal to service internal customers), as well as new reporting applications. Through these new solutions, TSC has enhanced visibility of field service operations, even developing a real-time and robust analytics system.

“To date, we have achieved a 40% reduction in the reactive ‘call to cash’ conversion cycle (19% reduction for maintenances) and acquired in excess of $10 million in new business - driven by our new customer portals and referrals from existing customers,” Phelan noted.

TSC has empowered its customers with recent and real-time data to review productivity metrics and more granular information, such as the status of a technician’s progress on particular jobs, as well as where the scheduled job is currently placed.

The customer and operations portals are a completely custom, in-house developed solution that sits atop the main ERP system and operates day and night. Customers will have access to the previous day’s data, with an option to examine real-time information on request.

But according to Phelan, these platforms and other solutions are still new within the internal company structure.

“We only completed the rollout of all these solutions across our Australian and New Zealand branch network before Christmas - everything from the customer and operations portals to mobility, scheduling and reporting. The solutions need time to bed-in at the branches, so for now we are only using drag-and-drop scheduling with the aim of moving to assisted scheduling in the winter.”

Technicians and service managers will have several months to become more familiar with functionality of the new solutions, as well as improve management and operational processes. TSC is constantly auditing the available data at the same time, because it inherited an abundance of legacy information from the now-defunct Hastie Services Group.

The operations portal is technically a decision support system designed as the key enabler for company-wide visibility. Phelan and the team can review:

• all service calls raised within the ERP system for mobile devices;
• full summary and statistics of all timesheets submitted;
• breakdown of the day’s activities, including amount of reactive calls, maintenance calls, quoted calls and overtime for jobs (summarised by service manager, branch manager and then the general manager);
• technician KPI tracker.

“It only takes half an hour or less to review submissions, thanks to the operations portal. Now that we’re capturing such granular data off the mobile, we can synthesise the information to develop productivity metrics and drive campaigns forward. All the documentation associated with service calls can be viewed, as well as further works required,” Phelan said.

The ‘further works required’ (FWR) aspect entails a scenario where, within an existing maintenance contract, technicians identify other areas of work that can be undertaken to save the customer money and bring in more business. It’s a practice encouraging more reactive work, incentivising technicians to widen the contractual opportunity.

The operations portal also equips Phelan and the team with asset management and parts tracking applications. If a technician is on-site and not equipped with an important item to complete the job, or the asset itself is missing specific components, they’re able to contact the supplier directly and order the parts posthaste.

The branch service support team can then track and update the part’s status automatically to the technician’s app.

Plans are currently underway to develop an advanced asset data capture system, so that not only can internal stakeholders access granular information asset by asset, but external customers too.

They will be able to review schematics and diagrams, and examine aggregate datasets of the most critical infrastructure (as well as asset spend of any quarter in any given year). Advanced asset capture can improve first-time fix rates and also enable customers to log calls via their customer portal, reducing administration costs and further improving the customer experience.

TSC’s customer-centric perspective has paved the way for exciting technical and operational developments in field service mobility. And by getting the right piece of information to the right person, at the right time, company influencers can make crucial, informed decisions for successful outcomes.

A video showcasing the Cowley technology solutions discussed above can be viewed here and Dr Michael Phelan will present an in-depth case study on integrating field service and analytics technology based on customer demand at the Field Service Summit. Download the brochure or visit www.fsmaustralia.com for more information.

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