Last year, I launched a video series titled Acrobatics during the Crisis. I saw all kinds of heroics scaling up healthcare, ecommerce, last-mile delivery, millions of emergency PPP loans and many other services. This year, while the pandemic continues, I have seen a noticeable decline in service quality - supply chain disruptions and labor shortages explain much of that but I also see quite of bit of that is what I call COVID and BREXIT "copouts."
The stage is set for companies to step up with service heroics and gain sustainable advantage over their competitors. In the enterprise, industrial world, there is a clear acceleration in the trend of servitization - where product companies are selling them on "as a service" and outcome based models and service companies are moving from transactional, break-fix type services to more strategic relationships. Again, a huge opportunity to differentiate.
With this background, I invited Sarah Nicastro, Vice President of Customer Advocacy at IFS and creator of industry resource Future of Field Service to this 52nd episode of Burning Platform.
Sarah is a keen observer of trends in customer service with her regular podcasts on the Future of Field Service which features leaders from global brands across industries such as AT&T, Peloton, Southwest Airlines, Tetra Pak and Unilever.
We cover wide ground especially around the people/work aspects of the service economy. We also discuss that IFS has become very service savvy. People still view it as an ERP player but as Sarah points out it is also a 6 time leader in the Gartner Field Service Management MQ. IFS has also gone through a major rebranding exercise with a focus on what it calls "Moments of Service" and we will be hearing a lot more about their service capabilities.
