ServiceMax continues to innovate and expand the reach and impact of its Core field service and service execution platform. Our innovation is driven with an eye on external trends around emerging technology and business models but is primarily impacted by our customers. They influence us in a variety of ways:
- By using our product and adopting features
- By extending the product with their own innovation
- By providing us feedback via our voice of the customer programs
Better Together
One of the things customers constantly outline is how service delivery models are evolving and changing. In the past, a customer had an issue and they would just ping their local technician directly who would come on over and resolve the problem. While this model was simple in its execution, it lets a lot of valuable information and data fall through the cracks. Often this also created customer headaches when it came down to invoicing or the alignment of other contractual commitments.
The service delivery experience has since changed. The resolution of a customer issue now involves multiple personas especially as the criticality of asset uptime has risen. A customer might do their own self-service or have staff for first-level support. They might rely on a partner to conduct basic service work and maintenance on an asset. In times of need, they might expect a remote technical support session for issue resolution and triage. More so, others might need to be involved in a technical support conversation before it reaches a dispatcher for the start of a more traditional field service process. For field service, a technician needs to communicate with the customer, the dispatcher, and someone in supply chain to ensure that they have the right preparation for the job. If they can’t fix something, they need to conduct a further escalation or bring the asset back into the depot. A simple service experience now has multiple touchpoints by multiple people, all of whom tend to use different tools to get the job done. Therefore, the end experience can often be disjointed, with internal team members seeking each other out for information. What’s more is that the customer is often left out of the loop, creating confusion, distrust, and a negative service experience.
Therefore, we believe that it is vital that ServiceMax provides powerful technology solutions to all these stakeholders involved in the service delivery experience and that these stakeholders and tools are united on a common thread. This common thread can be the asset or the work order that contains all the relevant work and communication on an event taking place on the asset. The value of this isn’t only a unified service experience, but one that can be tracked, audited, and analyzed post completion.
At the crux of it, this is the reason for our innovation roadmap to focus on a ‘Better Together’ experience. Previous releases and product updates have focused on getting the right tools in the hands of the right people. End customers and asset operators use ServiceMax Engage; service delivery partners use Zinc or the ServiceMax Partner Portal; remote support agents use Zinc within ServiceMax, Dispatchers use Service Board, and technicians take advantage of ServiceMax Go and DataGuide. Other internal stakeholders use Zinc. As these individuals are all able to access the power of the ServiceMax platform, they can now be brought together to deliver the best and most effective service experience.
Bringing it to Life
In past releases, we have started to bring solutions together as Zinc is embedded in the ServiceMax Core platform but is also built in to ServiceMax Go and Engage. In this latest release, we are integrating Zinc into the Service Board scheduling platform to allow for dispatchers and technicians to improve their collaboration and communication in the context of the work order that they are currently working on. As a result, organizations can expect:
- Improved Dispatcher and Technician Productivity – Quick and immediate updates and changes to work order schedules via Work Order Chat in ServiceBoard
- A Better Customer Experience – Timely adjustments to schedule and work parameters to meet the customer’s needs
- An Enhanced Technician Experience – An increased amount of time spent on work and less on back-and-forth administrative tasks and communication like the sharing of critical routes or other information
Making Life Easier for Technicians
In June, we released version 1.0 of DataGuide, our new product aimed at delivering an improved form and output document experience on ServiceMax Go. Based on initial feedback from customers, the overall sentiment is that the real power behind DataGuide is its integration within the ServiceMax platform. As a result, one can easily pull ServiceMax data and incorporate it into complex forms and eventually use inputted data to execute critical service actions. This improves the technician’s data gathering experience but also makes the data much more usable. (Learn more about DataGuide).
Right off the heels of the initial release is an update to DataGuide. Included features:
- Forms: New question type – Signature Capture
- Forms: Multi-language support (RTL languages) for improved technician data capture
- Forms: Create records from form submissions to analyze and review data trends….and more
We continue to look for new question types that fit and match our customers’ data capture and regulatory needs. What’s impactful in this release is the enhanced ability for our customers to leverage completed form data to populate and update ServiceMax objects for enhanced analysis and review
Several More Updates
There’s still more. ServiceMax Core 22-R3 comes with the following updates to your favorite products:
- Service Board – Maps: Polygon Filtering from improved search
- Service Board – Proposals: Factoring in Technician Efficiency Factor in schedule proposals for more accurate and personalized schedules
- Go for iOS/Android – Service Flow Action (SFA) Configurations: Geofence-based notifications
For a complete list of enhancements and release features, we encourage you to review our Core 22-R3 landing page and to review the detailed release notes.
Customers looking for additional detail can review recorded material from our Product Managers (Litmos – access required) or reach out to their Account Management team for further details.
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