In a mid-pandemic field service environment, plenty of solutions have arisen on the fly. From hybrid operations to revamped safety protocols, it seems like things are in flux.

Field service has permanently changed—perhaps more dynamically than any other business function. The pandemic has reinforced the importance of customer service by understanding customers across every service and digital touchpoint to maximize loyalty and consumer value. This has become more complicated due to COVID; nevertheless, innovations in field service management can enhance customer loyalty amid increased expectations.

Oracle’s list of top field service trends spotlights what’s new and what’s next.

1. An evolving field service workforce

As in many other industries, field service is feeling a crisis in staffing and in a transition to a more hybrid, digitally connected world. This is also exacerbated by an increasing gap in experience and expertise as older workers retire or leave the field. Service organizations are embracing the gig economy and third-party service providers to supplement their in-house workforces.

This trend is creating a new challenge (and opportunity) for service leaders to capture knowledge and integrate it into the digital tools new or contract field service engineers rely on to be successful. Giving your digitally-savvy new team members on-demand support speeds their ability to contribute while offering senior engineers the ability to shift into less demanding remote support roles.

2. Meeting new customer expectations

Much like our collective transition to virtual meetings and contactless delivery of goods throughout 2020, customers across the board are becoming accustomed to new models for service delivery. Field service solutions have been enhanced to ensure service visits meet local safety standards and customer preferences, while companies must seamlessly blend virtual and physical experiences.

Moreover, as customers’ buying preferences shift toward outcomes over products, service is becoming a critical piece in the revenue model for businesses. Field service teams are being given tools and incentives to monetize service events, such as for-service contract renewals or cross-selling equipment or consumables.

3. Making every customer interaction matter

If there were a broad theme to 2021 for field service management, it’s this. More than ever, the industry is counting on developing myriad touch points to increase engagement with customers.

With offerings including self-service portals, knowledgebase articles and media, AI-guided digital assistants, and remote service events, field service leaders are providing customers more immediate and touchless ways to resolve issues. This variety of customer touch points enable service team members to focus on the most critical customer issues.

4. Integrating connected assets and equipment into service

Perhaps the most significant trend impacting field service is the proliferation of connected equipment and assets that can mitigate the need for in-person repair or maintenance.

IoT monitoring enables remote diagnostics and self-healing routines. And when integrated with your field service management solution, it can automatically trigger work orders and schedule service activities for major faults. When your field service engineer arrives, they can use this information to fix issues more quickly and accurately.

5. Avoiding disruption while managing change

Amidst all this change is the critical task of moving forward without slowing down. All the tech tools in the world don’t drive and sustain change; change management is just as important as new tech rollouts. Organizations must make this culture of optimization and change something that sticks from the culture on down.

One of the biggest advancements is the connection between IoT and artificial intelligence (AI). Service businesses are now able to trigger services via AI without needing a human task to be that trigger. Leading-edge technology can help navigate change as conditions continue to fluctuate.

Utilizing AI learning tools for routing and scheduling allows for changing conditions to overcome issues of manual discrepancies that happen without automation.

Successful companies can deliver on the set of new customer expectations by removing the friction from all digital and in-person touch points to provide seamless, informed interactions to customers. The transactional economy has become less hands-on and is likely to change while the pandemic continues to hold influence. Smart field service organizations can meet the change positively by making every engagement count—no matter how brief.

Oracle Field Service offers intuitive, AI-powered tools for routing, scheduling, and managing field service technicians. Learn more about how this solution makes it possible to deliver efficient and on-time service experiences every time with the quick self-guided product tour below.

For more information about field service and field service management software, send us a message!

Article written by: Rick Shimko, Oracle Senior Product Marketing Manager

 

 

At APEX IT, we’re proud to be a part of our customers’ success stories each and every day—and we’re honored that this year’s Markie Awards have recognized so many of these shared achievements.

Among them, our client Keurig Dr Pepper (KDP) just took home the Nexus Award for the Best CX Ecosystem, a testament to the brand’s innovative CRM solution that unifies Oracle Sales and B2B Service, Oracle Customer Data Management, and Oracle Eloqua Marketing Automation, all in one best-in-class solution. 

Keurig Dr Pepper is a leading North American beverage company with over 26,000 employees and annual revenue exceeding $11 billion. In addition to its leadership position in the soft drink category, KDP also markets the #1 single-serve coffee brewing system in the U.S. and Canada, thanks to its Keurig acquisition that pushed its portfolio to over 125 owned, licensed and partner brands today, including Keurig®, Dr Pepper®, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters®, Snapple®, Bai®, and more. But with its vast foothold, KDP needed a way to unify its various platforms and system architectures into one cohesive and user-friendly customer environment. And we’re proud to say that’s where we were able to jump in.

In 2018, as KDP was consolidating its many business units, we leveraged the company’s real-world integration to develop a consolidated CRM platform that could accelerate the realization of both its customer and business goals. We expanded our use of Oracle CX from what began as one legacy Keurig group, to an enterprise standard across B2B groups. And we integrated customer care into CX across a variety of Oracle applications, including SaaS, PaaS and DaaS, ultimately creating a modern beverage CRM platform that is poised to digitally transform the customer, B2B and internal employee experiences at KDP. 

We’re thrilled to celebrate the success of Keurig Dr Pepper at this year’s Markie Awards, along with all of our customers who are working tirelessly to drive the evolution of customer experience in tandem with operational efficiency and long-term profitability.

Congratulations to all of this year’s Markie Award winners, and here’s to many more!

Who owns the customer experience? Do you define your customer’s engagement with your organization as ‘customer experience’? Do you have a customer experience strategy?

Typically, marketing has focused on the first two steps of the customer journey — Awareness and Consideration, and Expansion. Sales is involved. Service is definitely involved. The C-Suite creates the directive to provide great customer experience. In most industries, the majority of CMOs feel that marketing owns the customer experience. How about in the transportation and logistics industry?

At Apex IT, we believe Marketing, Sales, and Service own the customer experience, but that a centralized group needs to own the consistency of the message and the experience the customer has throughout their journey of interacting with you. The marketing organization is enabled to provide centralized support when defining and mapping out the customer journey.

When defining your brand, there are three steps that you can take to define your customer’s experience.

Understand what your customers look like, how they make decisions, where they are along the routes you service. Segment them into different target audiences and personas. These personas may change how your market to them and even fine-tune your message, the channel you use, maximizing the experience of your prospect or customer.

Once your experience strategy has been created based on your target audience, collecting data and defining attribution about your customers helps determine your channel strategy. The data you collect may help with up-selling or cross-selling, website or e-commerce approach and design, and help customers interact and resolve more online.

Guidelines may consist of color schemes, fonts, and logo usage. But brands must look to develop a new playbook…by defining their brand experiences. Personas and behavior profiling can be used to create guidelines for customer interactions throughout the customer journey, resulting in building loyalty, increasing sales, and providing better customer service.

If you are interested in learning more or having a conversation, please contact us.

Apex IT is a leading CX/CRM consulting firm helping transportation and logistics organizations improve their customer’s journey. To learn more about Apex IT, please visit our website.

Oracle is a Gartner and Forrester leader, providing solutions in CX/CRM, BI, and Data. To learn more about Oracle CX, please visit their website.

Buyers and decision makers are rapidly changing and doing more and more research prior to making decisions. Traditional selling efforts and Sales Force Automation (SFA) technologies are now a foundational must-have. In your sales readiness strategies, where are you on the sales process and technology maturity scale?

To move into a Best Practice state for your sales processes and strategies, here are the trends in Sales Customer Experience (CX) for 2018.

Members of the Generation Y (sometimes referred to as Millennials) have been in the job market for a while now….and are being promoted into more senior decision making positions. These buyers know how to use technology, they value work-life balance, and are enthusiastic and creative. Your processes, techniques, and SFA technologies must adapt. Also, many millennials are also your sales reps, and also are expecting more advanced tools to help them do their job rather than just set up appointments and have lunches.

Members of the Generation Y (sometimes referred to as Millennials) have been in the job market for a while now….and are being promoted into more senior decision making positions. These buyers know how to use technology, they value work-life balance, and are enthusiastic and creative. Your processes, techniques, and SFA technologies must adapt. Also, many millennials are also your sales reps, and also are expecting more advanced tools to help them do their job rather than just set up appointments and have lunches.

Members of the Generation Y (sometimes referred to as Millennials) have been in the job market for a while now….and are being promoted into more senior decision making positions. These buyers know how to use technology, they value work-life balance, and are enthusiastic and creative. Your processes, techniques, and SFA technologies must adapt. Also, many millennials are also your sales reps, and also are expecting more advanced tools to help them do their job rather than just set up appointments and have lunches.

Good sales people know when to use the right collateral at the right time. What if technology can suggest the right content in the right context at the right time? Advanced SFA technology can help sales teams with the WHAT and WHEN based on the WHO. These are the automated things, called ‘Bots’ that can help automate engagement with your sales teams and your customers.

Even though many organizations are still figuring out their predictive lead scoring models, modern selling teams are developing prescriptive models. Sales people just want to know what their next move should be to move their funnel forward. Technologies can provide more insights….and these can be used to calculate ‘next best actions’ leading to better outcomes. Machine Learning models analyzing all of this data and collecting feedback will help adjust these prescriptive suggestions.

If you are interested in learning more or having a conversation, please contact us.

Apex IT is a leading CX/CRM consulting firm helping transportation and logistics organizations improve their customer’s journey.

Oracle is a Gartner and Forrester leader, providing solutions in CX/CRM, BI, and Data. To learn more about Oracle CX, please visit their website.