The Hot Topics Buzzing at Field Service's Fall Conferences? Data, Of Course

Fall is tradeshow season, and in the field service industry two prominent shows took place last week: Aberdeen held its 2012 Chief Service Officer Summit in Boston, under the theme of “The Science of Service,” while the Technology Services Industries Association held its Technology Services World 2012 conference in Las Vegas.

TheSmartVan couldn’t make it to either event, but we did the next-best thing: We followed on Twitter. Here’s what we learned:

Chief Service Officer Summit

At the CSO summit, finding ways to analyze data appeared to be the most pressing topic. Service executives from Cisco, Ingersoll Rand, Southwest Airlines, Enterasys Networks and Pitney Bowes spent two days discussing how service organizations can best capture, analyze and apply data to deliver better service.

One tweet in particular from Sumair Dutta, Aberdeen’s top service management analyst, sums up the “Big Data” discussion:

Dutta cites Linda Tucci, a field service manager for medical device manufacturer Sysmex America, Inc., and a panelist on a presentation called “Data-Driven Decisions: Data’s Role in Maximizing Customer Value During the Service Lifecycle.”

While a lot of the CSO 2012 discussion (on Twitter, at least) was focused on Data (with a Big D), the talk was also grounded in good old-fashioned customer service — why it’s important and how businesses can get better at delivering it. Check out these Tweets from Vala Afshar, chief customer officer and CMO at Enterasys Networks:

Technology Service World

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, the Technology Services Industry Association held Technology Services World 2012. Again, lots of data talk. John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research at the TSIA, spoke at the show and wrote about what was happening on his blog, Eye on Service. Ragsdale recapped one of the top-attended sessions from Day 1 (Oct. 17) about — you guessed it — Data:

“Big Data: Three Inspiring Stories of Service Analytics. I had a suspicion I would have one of the top attended session when they brought in 2 more rows of chairs, and there were still people standing in the back of the room. This session launched my new research report, “Market Overview of Service Analytics. Creating Actionable Insight in Three Categories: Business Analytics, Customer Analytics, and Consumption Analytics,” with some creative and informative presentations from 3 panelists: Jennifer Batley from Walker Information; Tom Duly from YIDATEC; and David Lowy from Moxie Software. Jennifer did an interactive game with live electronic voting–very cool, illustrating the importance of analyzing all customer touch points to assess the strength of the account. Tom presented some very interesting operational dashboards, showing cost and productivity improvements with Asian outsourcing, specifically some data on doing business in China. David talked about how data is “hidden in plain sight,” and gave examples of mining available customer data to impact not only service, but product management, sales and other divisions.”

Head over to Ragsdale’s blog to read more about TSW 2012, which ran Oct. 15-17.

A tweet from Kymberlaine Banks, a social media program manager for Telvista, did a good job crystalizing the role of data and analytics: