If not, then you should be.
Organizations are increasingly having to look at ways to improve operational efficiency, especially during these times. How can you get the most out of your team while optimizing your investment in staff and overhead? How can you control costs and also deliver optimal service and results to your customers?
Data is everywhere. Modern devices in the field deliver tons of it every day back to the enterprise. Your infrastructure generates data. Your employees also generate their own data. Your customers generate data.
Data isn’t the problem. Figuring out how to best consume it and then apply it so that your organization and customers learn from it and benefit from it – that’s the challenge.
There is a lot that’s been written about this topic over the last 15-20 years. What I’d like you to consider is how you could apply this concept more specifically to your service and support teams. There is also a way to do this with customers, but we’ll leave that for the next post…
You have a field service team that is scattered geographically with widely differing levels of expertise and know-how. Before these crazy times, they probably shared information and expertise amongst themselves in the field through collaborative tools like WhatsApp, or text, or by other means. It helps them solve problems, but the team doesn’t learn from it or benefit from it. There is no organizational learning taking place. Today, things have changed in that service organizations are mostly using remote support tools so they can avoid having to go onsite. They can use these tools to see what the customer sees, and they can often resolve problems and avoid some site visits that way.
And they still text each other. But there is little to no organizational learning happening here.
AI can facilitate the creation of a Learning Organization in ways you have not thought of. Keep an open mind and consider the following.
AI can be a tool that crowdsources input from your service team experts and then makes it available to your entire team. Rather than texting each other, imagine a tool in everyone’s hands that gets smarter every time someone uses it. A tech in Singapore fixes a problem using the tool, and instantly every service tech on the planet knows how they did it. Imagine if this were taking place every day, amongst all of your service team members. The whole service organization’s knowledge level would grow. Call center agents would benefit as well. Every day.
Consider that there could be other natural benefits of this organizational learning:
- Better productivity out of your fixed overhead due to quicker problem resolution
- Better management of global parts inventory due to informed dispatch
- Better quality of service for your customers
The core team at RevTwo has a collective 80 years of experience working with service and support organizations. We’d love to talk with you about how to create a learning organization and how to make that part of your strategy for providing service and support for the future. Contact us at info@revtwo.com.