Field Service Manager

Field Service Manager

Jeff Wartgow, TOA Tech: Managing Field Forces in a Changing Industry, from Field Service East 2013

Video transcript:

So, yeah like I said, I’m Jeff Wartgow. I’m VP of Channels and Alliances for TOA Technologies. The first question you might be asking is, this is a thought leadership conference, why did they select the VP of Channels and Alliances to come talk and not somebody from Product Management or Technology Office. I asked them the same thing and the truth is, you know, I get to work with our whole partner ecosystem. All our systems integrators, all our other software companies, all the systems we plug into. So I’m constantly on the forefront of customers and other companies customers coming to us, talking to us saying hey, where’s this going? What should we do here? Can the technology do x, y and z. So they thought I would be an ideal choice to come and talk to you. I hope you think so. You might notice that TOA is a little bit different just from our slides. We’re a kind of a funky cloud software company. Hence the reason I’m dressed in all black when it’s 95 degrees outside. And I do my presentations a little bit more interactive. This is supposed to be about the new paradigm in field services and in order to understand the new paradigm I think you got to understand the old paradigm and where we have come from. So would you guys get mad if we did a little field service history lesson? Is that okay? Come on, you guys can fill up on that many sandwiches. Yes, okay. Good, good, good. Let’s pull it out.

Field service history 101 – There are not a lot of constants in our industry. We actually work in a very dynamic industry but there is one thing that hasn’t changed through the ages and that’s the field service cycle. It’s just this simple. There’s the origin of the request, there is the communication and dispatch of that request, the appropriate guys who is going to fulfil it and then there’s the fulfillment of the request and the academics which say the cycle stops there. But the real aficionados know there’s always step for the feedback loop. The feedback loop is how well you did fulfilling that request and that’s actually the most important as that will determine if the request... if the cycle is repeated and if it is repeated, will it include the same people? So let’s battle test this constant.

All right I don’t want to go medieval on your ass but I’m going to. Medieval times, there is a field service request. I can’t believe I actually have to buy these images because my marketing department I was going to break up some violation. They look like characters from its small world. The field service request is sent by the Lord or Lady through the technology method at the time which might have been a footman or a carrier pigeon if you can find the clipart for it and dispatched by your local technician, the guild worker. Now, that’s steps one, two, and three. What about step four? The feedback loop. Let’s talk about it. Well, if the job was successful, you would receive money, legend would spread throughout the land and everything would be great. If the job was unsuccessful, you just kill him. The beauty is the simplicity. Now this is really... come on, this is the roots of our entire industry. This is your roots people. This is where you came from. Now this very same concept though has been true throughout and I know a lot of field service managers who would like that executioner back.

But let’s fast forward again to the industrial revolution. We are a little bit more civilized now. The previous process was effective. Self correcting but not very scalable. So now, in the new age, we have a field service request where I’ve created with this Dapper Victorian Lady. She gets to use the amazingly latest technology to dispatch her request and then the technician comes to fulfil. Now once again what is step four? The feedback loop. What’s the Victorian era feedback loop look like? Well we stop killing people. So if the job was good, you would receive a thank you letter explaining how satisfied they were. If the job was bad, you would receive a strongly worded letter explaining how much they disliked it. Now when I was designing this presentation I thought I go talk to my office and like would it be cool if I pulled out on my jacket pocket a Victorian era complaint letter? It would be like a Ted Show and like I can read it in front of you about everybody you know like we can see like nothing changes throughout the ages. We looked everywhere, we could not find one which is quite telling in itself that the good letter and the bad letters were probably not taken very seriously and went it right in the waste basket. So when I look at my constant here, everything is pretty much the same process moving at a higher velocity involving more people except we forgot about the step. And it’s amazing how many customers that we work with today who are still operating in this. It’s not that they are getting bad feedback, its worse. It’s that they don’t know what the feedback is. Okay.

Let’s advance to the modern age. Now come on, my presentations are like a ride at EPCOT, you start with the dinosaurs then you move on and then you get to the cool future stuff right before you get off the ride. The Modern Age. Here is where we all live. Field service request comes from anywhere, anybody, anyhow. It is dispatched via any number of technologies. Look at all the different ways even at this particular event people are communicating with their field and it is sent to a gentleman who is highly trained. Has a huge skill set and able to handle very complex tasks but let’s talk about the feedback loop.

What does the modern feedback loop look like? Does anybody have a good idea? Somebody help me. Social media, absolutely 10 points. Now this is the modern feedback loop. This is exciting stuff. What does successfully work look like in social media? There you go. I’ll take it like the stuff. Well you can count it. It’s quantifiable but it’s not real specific. What does bad feedback look like? I’ll tell you what, it gets real specific. You guys want to take a look? Let’s take a look. Okay. Still waiting on our new blank, legal had me redact these. These are real tweets. Fantastic service as promised as per #standard service #bad service #customers. And they say that to 147 followers. How about next? So blank didn’t deliver shopping and the driver lied complete on your way #service to 280 followers. It’s not okay to wait in effing week for installation to 1600 plus followers. Here’s my favourite. At blank, insert company name, support his name, it’s a short name. It could be Bob. They are calling out a guy. They’re hanging his name on it. We will be porting four lines away bad customer service, greedy #slap in the face. They actually get physical with you. Now this is the new paradigm of field services. All right. And my PR girl said she’d kill me if I said this but I’m going to say it anyways just to see what happens. One of these tweets is for a company that’s registered at the show. Look around. Is it you? It’s real and it’s just not consumer industries. It could be anything. It could be the water is still up. It could be I’m still waiting on my container. It could be any... it’s absolutely present. And so the number on thing facing field services that we think is defining all the trends is every little mistake we make, every little cut we make, is going to be exposed and shouted from the rooftops and unlike the customer service letter of the industrial era, it is going to be there forever.

So this is the modern feedback but when I look at everybody, I think you should look at that stage four that we forgot about. The executioners are still there. In fact it’s worse because they’ll drag your whole company through the mud, and it’s really hard to recover in this world of hyper communication. Now, the big question is, Jeff, what are we going to do about it? How do we play in this new world? All these trends of social and of these communication trends, we’re going to use all of these to our advantage.

Now, you are all here, you’re trying to figure out what the next big thing is. That’s why you came to my session I hope and you’re trying to figure out how this is going to impact my plans and what decisions I should... what I should be taking into consideration when I’m making decisions about my technology about my field force. So when you’re looking for future trends, where are some of the places you could look? Anybody have a suggestion? You could check with analysts. They’re doing the same thing. You could do what Jules Verne then. All he did was go to shows like this, see what the latest technology was and take the next logical step or you could use my secret method and it’s 100% accurate and will predict the future every single time. It’s like Tommy Robbins now. Now I’m going to give you the secret. It absolutely works every time. Anybody have any idea what it is? Anybody going to dare speak? Customer. Customer is trying to figure out this too. It’s actually even easier than that. Just look at your kids. Does anybody have one of these at home? Yeah, okay, all right. Finally we’re getting a connection. You’ll hear me. Exactly. So before you go to the alternate of trauma and choosing... and using punishment that you could give a child today, which we all we know is turn off the Wi-Fi. We should look at them and see what lessons they are teaching us because I’ll tell you what, one thing is absolutely certain. This is the future field service force and training.

Okay. So let’s look at our test subjects here. Our crystal ball into the future. We’ll start at the basics. What’s in their hands? The phone, the smartphone in particular. I don’t know too many teens who have a little brick Nokia or have a giant pc anymore. This is what they’re using. This is what they’re being trained to use. This is the technology that they’re going to out of school mastered on. Now let’s look at adoption rates of smartphones real quick. I’ll give you some hard data here. There is the iPad, there is the adoption of the iPhone and look at the crushing adoption of the iPad. Holy cow! Everybody have them. How many iPad’s are in this room? If you have an iPad, please hold it up. I see one here, one here, one... look at this. Guys that’s ridiculous. Every has one. They weren’t even available 2 ½ years ago. Now we’re all working off these things. All right. So now put yourself on my shoes. I’m an executive at TOA Technology, we’re a cloud based software company. This decision directly impacts everybody in this room. We’re planning an R&D budget. Where would we start investing R&D? Anybody going to take a guess? Or you’re all waiting for my next slide? You guys were safe to wait on the next slide. There is the iPhone, there is the Android. Wow. Should I be investing on iPhones or Androids? Should my application be designed to run on the Mac software or should it be running on Google? This is a pretty critical decision we all have to make. Remember this is what kids use. Which one would you choose? Anybody going to dare? He’s going for Google? It’s a good choice. The numbers are backing here right now. Anybody who’s going to bet on Apple? Here’s what... here’s what’s going to happen. I’m not... this is what I think is going to happen. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re not going to choose either or any because sooner or later, in the next few years, something else is going to be wrong with the crushing adoption rate that’s probably going to annihilate this. This brings up to the number one trend and it’s a buzz word but I tell you what, it’s very, very real.

BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. You heard around everywhere people are going for this stuff. People are looking at this the wrong way. Companies who are in serve in... who are just in general corporate entities look at BYOD as a way to save money on hardware. So I need to buy everybody a phone and maybe I can save a little bit on the data plan too. That’s fine. But in field services, I want you guys to look at this in another way. Come on, we know what we spend. The phone is pretty cheap when you look at the overall cost of operations. That’s not going to you know get us a promotion right here if we cut this out but giving something to your field that they’re comfortable in using, trained to use and it’s personalized to them to increase their productivity, that is the holy grail of BYOD. And right now, with technology such as HTML 5, this is becoming very, very real. Thursday we rolled out a customer 400 plus BYOD users. Now you ask all sorts of questions to this guy, he said that’s awesome. 400 years made the decision two years ago to go BYOD. I said how are you planning for your data plans? How are you going to manage these devices and stuff like that? He is like listen, if you work for a bank, you got to wear a suit to work and I don’t buy you the suit. If you’re working for me, I’m not buying you you’re phone. I don’t pay for the gas in your car for you to commute to work, this is standard business and plus every one of these guys I worked with already bought the phone anyways so it’s not like I’m putting them out. Very unique philosophy but I’m seeing a lot more people adopt it. When you’re looking at your road maps, we met like somebody here was a 12-year business plan, that’s awesome. He’s got to take this fact into consideration. All right. And you can fight it but you know what, the truth is guys, it’s happening already.

So my friends who held up the iPads, how many of those had your company buy you the iPad? One, two there’s a lot more iPads in here than that, I’m guessing a lot of you bought the iPads yourself, you’re part of the BYOD phenomenon because you’re sitting here working, using it. 21 million office workers bought their own smartphones, 11 million bought their own laptops, 3 million bought their own tablets, you’re in the 3 million people. Now Forbes did a survey of 10,000 workers, 50% are using more than three devices for work. Are you in that? I am. I got three devices in my pocket right now. I’m trying to move them around. I got two iPhones, I have an iPad in the back and I have an iMac. This is what every... now this is the big punch line of this. People expect to do this and when you’re hiring in the future, they’re going to want to use their own device because they know they’re going to be more successful on it. So you’ll be expected to provide the tools to them to let them do that. So that’s the first big trend, all right. You guys with me? Scaring you yet because I’m going to go back to the couch?

Go check in with our test objects here. Okay. So we decided that they’re all using smartphones and stuff and we tried to pick which one we’re going to pick to roll out to our field workers then we all decided well you know what, really we can’t decide what it’s going to be so we don’t care we’re all going BYOD – good. Now let’s talk about the next thing. How are they using these phones? Somebody over here had two of these. Are they cleaning out their inbox before school? Really. They still want to e-mail? Yeah, I don’t know. Texting. Yes. Now when they want to talk to their friends, do they go in outlook and try to find a time a time when they’re all available? Yup, real time, exactly. You know my biggest complain about my job is right now, I have 362 unanswered e-mails, I know that because I looked it right before I came in the room. My son is never going to have to deal with it because he’s never going to have an e-mail account. Everything right now that’s going on in that screen is texting, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now we talk about this as social. Try not to think of social as an application. Think about it as a style of working. It’s a style. It’s a new technique.

See, somebody is coming in real time right now. Social networking users have surpassed past e-mail users dramatically in ’07. And I didn’t believe this when I saw this. This is like there’s no way people spent more time on social networks than e-mail but then I really checked on my own thing, first of all I have a personal e-mail account. The only thing that goes there is spam and e-bills. Nobody has ever sent me a personal e-mail in like a year. They always get me on Facebook or something like that but when I looked at my Twitter account, how much time I spent on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn all the time now. Check it everyday. On Facebook, I totally agree with this trend. So this trend is going to impact us and how we’re managing our teams but really apart from annoying us all at the dinner table as we’re all checking the Facebook, let’s look at the silver lining here. What can these twins do? First of all, they all know exactly where each other are. If Caitlin is at Ryan’s house and Debbie likes Ryan, and Caitlin is not supposed to be there, she knows instantly. Second, they’re all doing one to many connections. You know we’re not just texting one person back and forth. There’s a whole conversation going on. So Caitlin is at Ryan’s house and Debbie is upset is about it. So Debbie instantly starts a conversation with 17 of her friends to discuss the problem in real time. In real time that’s why they never disengage because this is not somebody sending a message and reading it. This is actually a two-way conversation. Think about what that means for us. We have people who are going to be on our teams who have the skills to instantly find one another. Instantly collaborate with one another on a subject and do it all in real time. Imagine the power of the field force that can do that.

These are going to be technologies we’re going to be introducing the whole concept, all right this is a little dated. I know the show hasn’t been on something like the 90’s but I was keeping it until it’s current. The idea of phone a friend, so you’re out there in the field, you’re unloading your van, you realize due to some mix-up in the warehouse you have the wrong part to fix the job you want to do. What do you do? Oh, you call up dispatch, you say I got the wrong part, I got to go back, I got to pick this up or you do what Caitlin would have done with her boyfriend, instantly press the button, gather everybody who is within the 3 mile radius and see who has an extra part and when you can meet up. Second – You’re popping the lid up the air conditioner, you’re an excellent air conditioner repairman and all of a sudden you see a problem that you haven’t seen before. What do you do? You press the button and instantly the social technology finds everybody whose worked on that same air conditioner or solved a similar problem and instantly connects you with them in a chat session so you can work on it real time. This all exists today. You can have it now if you want for your field force but what I’m saying is, it’s going to become standard and absolutely essential in the next two years, three tops.

Now the other thing too is I was in the session this morning that was really it was really fascinating but we’re talking about somebody asked, how many of you guys expect your field service people to sell? Anybody thinking about how many these field service people sell? Yeah, you’re out there. Yeah, I know. I know it because we get this request all the time. This is huge. When I talk about context or where I talked to you a little bit about context to where and solving a field service problem, let’s talk about context we are in selling.

Now, this is my Facebook page. I took a screen shot of it yesterday. All right. I don’t believe in BSing my audience. What did Facebook do to me? Well, they saw Jeff is loading up a lot of pictures of iPhones in a presentation somewhere so they had assumed I am shopping for a new iPhone and they served me up the ad. Then they say Jeff is pointing out on a whole lot of hard stats about adoption rates and technologies. So they’re giving me hey Jeff did spreadsheets here’s a little tool for you. And somewhere in cyber space it found out I was going out to Palm Springs, so here you go let’s about golf. I guess I assumed I was here to have some fun and not to work. This is context to where advertising. We’re victims of it every single day and I really appreciate the people of Facebook for putting up three things that actually were relevant to this talk and not something weird that was going to creep you all out. So here’s some weird stuff that happens out there. So this same technology that marketing departments are using and everything like that, how is that going to work in the field force? Grab it, pull it directly to your field service technician. I have a customer today who sells furniture. They deliver the furniture in the house, this guy’s job is to unload the truck and place the furniture in the house without damaging the walls and everything. His job has now evolved into, he walks in, he brings his own device carrying an iPad, he delivers the couch and based on the order history, their backend software delivers directly to the field technician, ‘oh, Mrs. Wartgow, you just bought this nice couch. On the iPad. Would you consider the end table to go with this? While I’m standing in your living room, they look lovely right there.’ And of course since I’m not home, she says yes, we love the end table. She signs and buys them. They are on their way on the next truck and the field service guy, the furniture moving man is now getting a commission from doing an up sale in my house.

We see this all the time. Out of the most of the used cases, we’re asked a model going forward. The gap between service and sales is becoming so blurred. We just have to a giant demo with this with M-Docs about selling people upgrades to their telephone service. It can be extending warranties. We had a customer come in the other day that says, hey I sent a lot of guys out to do break-fix work but sometimes they’ll get there to replace a part and they’ll realize that this is a part that customer can easily replace themselves. I want to be able to sell the guy an extra part that he can keep in his closet in case something happens again. They want to take payment directly on the phone and they all wanted to be closed on the spot. Great example is carpet cleaning. It’s great you know you go out, you have somebody come and steam clean your living room because you’ve got little kids like mine who has spilled something on it and then they show up like well while I’m here and all the hoses are out, do you want me to do the den? Do you want me to do the dining room? Do you want me to do the whole house? All that is being delivered through the field service organization now. That’s a huge trend that we got to take forward.

Meanwhile back on the couch, so now our future workers are using their own devices, they’re collaborating via social style software, they are using that social style software to collaborate real time to solve field service problems and to now become sales reps. You guys have a quota of how many jobs you got to fix. You are going to have a quota for how much you’re going to sell. This is going to be really difficult. Now what, what makes all this happen? How is this possible today? Because it’s everything. Now cloud computing, it’s been around a while. It’s been through many different iterations. If you got... if anybody in here remembers you know it was like I remember this stuff back when I was a main frame time share utility computing from IBM, grid computing. This whole concept gets reborn every five years of cloud computing and it’s true. The concept has not changed. What’s different about it this time around is it actually cost effective and affordable and that’s what’s driven the adoption rates so much on cloud computing. So these topics BYOD, does not fundamentally work on premise. It can only work if you’re running a cloud application. Social does not work outside of the cloud. Context to where it won’t work outside the cloud. This is it.

I’m going back to our friends who we have 12-year business plans, I asked them, when are you moving to the cloud? Now, there are a million conferences you can go to, they talk about cloud computing and all the benefits of... there’s one distinction I want to make between cloud today and cloud in the past. It’s a phenomenon we call eSaaS. The E stands for enterprise Software as a Service. Cloud computing has traditionally been left for small business or people who could not afford the original capital investment and hardware to run an enterprise class app. So they migrated to cloud. It was an easier way to get into the door. Enterprise gives you all the savings from hardware and management sure but the concept of enterprise cloud computing is it’s bringing you a technology that could be even be cost prohibited for the largest companies on earth to run on their own data centre. For us that’s super computing style route generation. You know, all this stuff becomes very, very affordable. The big thing about this too is, I showed you a bunch of trends social out pacing e-mail, adoptions of iPhones, adoptions of Androids. These are cloud computing system gives you something that you don’t have in an on premise solution and that is flexibility and scalability. It’s easy to change. It’s easy to upgrade. It’s easy to integrate with other clouds. Allows you a little bit more security as things are just going to keep on changing in a more rapid pace.

But the other really most important thing about the rise of eSaaS and I mean I could also talk to you about you know like oh, well, you know it’s statistically proven. It’s more secure than IT data centres and it’s got more update and stuff blah, blah, blah. All that IBM tells you that stuff. This is a lesson in fundamental economics. So I was recently at a conference for investment banking in San Francisco. 400 companies there, all pining for investment from Wall Street. How many of those do you think were cloud computing companies? Anybody got a guess? All of them. Every single one. Now Wall Street can be fickle and they like to jump on fads and I don’t like to direct people like you towards fads. So let’s look at people who have a much longer view rather than the quarterly pro... this quarters profits. Let’s look at our industry main stays, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, have you looked at their acquisition strategy? Biggest when they’re spending on their money. SAP buys Success Factors for billions. Oracle buys Right Now for billions even Microsoft is gobbling up companies like Yammer. They’re investing in this technology. So if you are banking your future, on the on premise solutions and the on going continued road map of that, you’re doing yourselves a disservice because the person who sold you that equipment, is not. Finally the last one now. Remember I said the secret to predicting any trends, forget Wall Street and forget what other big software companies are buying. What do you do? You look at your kids. So I recently attended a career fare for Carnegie Mellon University. Amazing computer science program. Do you know what these kids are learning? I’ll tell you what, it’s not Microsoft. Ruby, XML, SOAP, all the cloud languages. These kids will never ever touch a server. It’s all just going to be somewhere. They’re going to plug into the wall and their whole business is going to be built that way. So am I scaring anybody yet? Oh, good. You all... I keep this conversation at another at a... I think it was oil and gas and you know they got a little nervous because they’ve got billions and billions tied up in on-premise systems but this is the economic, macroeconomic trends that are going to drive the entire industry.

So it’s one constant that hasn’t changed. And now the biggest thing was they’re going to try to overlay where social fits in this cycle, where it fits in fulfilment, where it fits in the final most critical customer feedback. Truth is, every one of the topics I brought up is going to affect every single stage of the field service cycle. Okay. So that’s my talk. That’s a little bit from TOA Technologies. Does anybody have any questions? Anybody? Come on there’s got to be one. You guys are really, really easy. I was expecting...

Field Service Manager

Jeff Wartgow, TOA Tech: Managing Field Forces in a Changing Industry, from Field Service East 2013

Video transcript:

So, yeah like I said, I’m Jeff Wartgow. I’m VP of Channels and Alliances for TOA Technologies. The first question you might be asking is, this is a thought leadership conference, why did they select the VP of Channels and Alliances to come talk and not somebody from Product Management or Technology Office. I asked them the same thing and the truth is, you know, I get to work with our whole partner ecosystem. All our systems integrators, all our other software companies, all the systems we plug into. So I’m constantly on the forefront of customers and other companies customers coming to us, talking to us saying hey, where’s this going? What should we do here? Can the technology do x, y and z. So they thought I would be an ideal choice to come and talk to you. I hope you think so. You might notice that TOA is a little bit different just from our slides. We’re a kind of a funky cloud software company. Hence the reason I’m dressed in all black when it’s 95 degrees outside. And I do my presentations a little bit more interactive. This is supposed to be about the new paradigm in field services and in order to understand the new paradigm I think you got to understand the old paradigm and where we have come from. So would you guys get mad if we did a little field service history lesson? Is that okay? Come on, you guys can fill up on that many sandwiches. Yes, okay. Good, good, good. Let’s pull it out.

Field service history 101 – There are not a lot of constants in our industry. We actually work in a very dynamic industry but there is one thing that hasn’t changed through the ages and that’s the field service cycle. It’s just this simple. There’s the origin of the request, there is the communication and dispatch of that request, the appropriate guys who is going to fulfil it and then there’s the fulfillment of the request and the academics which say the cycle stops there. But the real aficionados know there’s always step for the feedback loop. The feedback loop is how well you did fulfilling that request and that’s actually the most important as that will determine if the request... if the cycle is repeated and if it is repeated, will it include the same people? So let’s battle test this constant.

All right I don’t want to go medieval on your ass but I’m going to. Medieval times, there is a field service request. I can’t believe I actually have to buy these images because my marketing department I was going to break up some violation. They look like characters from its small world. The field service request is sent by the Lord or Lady through the technology method at the time which might have been a footman or a carrier pigeon if you can find the clipart for it and dispatched by your local technician, the guild worker. Now, that’s steps one, two, and three. What about step four? The feedback loop. Let’s talk about it. Well, if the job was successful, you would receive money, legend would spread throughout the land and everything would be great. If the job was unsuccessful, you just kill him. The beauty is the simplicity. Now this is really... come on, this is the roots of our entire industry. This is your roots people. This is where you came from. Now this very same concept though has been true throughout and I know a lot of field service managers who would like that executioner back.

But let’s fast forward again to the industrial revolution. We are a little bit more civilized now. The previous process was effective. Self correcting but not very scalable. So now, in the new age, we have a field service request where I’ve created with this Dapper Victorian Lady. She gets to use the amazingly latest technology to dispatch her request and then the technician comes to fulfil. Now once again what is step four? The feedback loop. What’s the Victorian era feedback loop look like? Well we stop killing people. So if the job was good, you would receive a thank you letter explaining how satisfied they were. If the job was bad, you would receive a strongly worded letter explaining how much they disliked it. Now when I was designing this presentation I thought I go talk to my office and like would it be cool if I pulled out on my jacket pocket a Victorian era complaint letter? It would be like a Ted Show and like I can read it in front of you about everybody you know like we can see like nothing changes throughout the ages. We looked everywhere, we could not find one which is quite telling in itself that the good letter and the bad letters were probably not taken very seriously and went it right in the waste basket. So when I look at my constant here, everything is pretty much the same process moving at a higher velocity involving more people except we forgot about the step. And it’s amazing how many customers that we work with today who are still operating in this. It’s not that they are getting bad feedback, its worse. It’s that they don’t know what the feedback is. Okay.

Let’s advance to the modern age. Now come on, my presentations are like a ride at EPCOT, you start with the dinosaurs then you move on and then you get to the cool future stuff right before you get off the ride. The Modern Age. Here is where we all live. Field service request comes from anywhere, anybody, anyhow. It is dispatched via any number of technologies. Look at all the different ways even at this particular event people are communicating with their field and it is sent to a gentleman who is highly trained. Has a huge skill set and able to handle very complex tasks but let’s talk about the feedback loop.

What does the modern feedback loop look like? Does anybody have a good idea? Somebody help me. Social media, absolutely 10 points. Now this is the modern feedback loop. This is exciting stuff. What does successfully work look like in social media? There you go. I’ll take it like the stuff. Well you can count it. It’s quantifiable but it’s not real specific. What does bad feedback look like? I’ll tell you what, it gets real specific. You guys want to take a look? Let’s take a look. Okay. Still waiting on our new blank, legal had me redact these. These are real tweets. Fantastic service as promised as per #standard service #bad service #customers. And they say that to 147 followers. How about next? So blank didn’t deliver shopping and the driver lied complete on your way #service to 280 followers. It’s not okay to wait in effing week for installation to 1600 plus followers. Here’s my favourite. At blank, insert company name, support his name, it’s a short name. It could be Bob. They are calling out a guy. They’re hanging his name on it. We will be porting four lines away bad customer service, greedy #slap in the face. They actually get physical with you. Now this is the new paradigm of field services. All right. And my PR girl said she’d kill me if I said this but I’m going to say it anyways just to see what happens. One of these tweets is for a company that’s registered at the show. Look around. Is it you? It’s real and it’s just not consumer industries. It could be anything. It could be the water is still up. It could be I’m still waiting on my container. It could be any... it’s absolutely present. And so the number on thing facing field services that we think is defining all the trends is every little mistake we make, every little cut we make, is going to be exposed and shouted from the rooftops and unlike the customer service letter of the industrial era, it is going to be there forever.

So this is the modern feedback but when I look at everybody, I think you should look at that stage four that we forgot about. The executioners are still there. In fact it’s worse because they’ll drag your whole company through the mud, and it’s really hard to recover in this world of hyper communication. Now, the big question is, Jeff, what are we going to do about it? How do we play in this new world? All these trends of social and of these communication trends, we’re going to use all of these to our advantage.

Now, you are all here, you’re trying to figure out what the next big thing is. That’s why you came to my session I hope and you’re trying to figure out how this is going to impact my plans and what decisions I should... what I should be taking into consideration when I’m making decisions about my technology about my field force. So when you’re looking for future trends, where are some of the places you could look? Anybody have a suggestion? You could check with analysts. They’re doing the same thing. You could do what Jules Verne then. All he did was go to shows like this, see what the latest technology was and take the next logical step or you could use my secret method and it’s 100% accurate and will predict the future every single time. It’s like Tommy Robbins now. Now I’m going to give you the secret. It absolutely works every time. Anybody have any idea what it is? Anybody going to dare speak? Customer. Customer is trying to figure out this too. It’s actually even easier than that. Just look at your kids. Does anybody have one of these at home? Yeah, okay, all right. Finally we’re getting a connection. You’ll hear me. Exactly. So before you go to the alternate of trauma and choosing... and using punishment that you could give a child today, which we all we know is turn off the Wi-Fi. We should look at them and see what lessons they are teaching us because I’ll tell you what, one thing is absolutely certain. This is the future field service force and training.

Okay. So let’s look at our test subjects here. Our crystal ball into the future. We’ll start at the basics. What’s in their hands? The phone, the smartphone in particular. I don’t know too many teens who have a little brick Nokia or have a giant pc anymore. This is what they’re using. This is what they’re being trained to use. This is the technology that they’re going to out of school mastered on. Now let’s look at adoption rates of smartphones real quick. I’ll give you some hard data here. There is the iPad, there is the adoption of the iPhone and look at the crushing adoption of the iPad. Holy cow! Everybody have them. How many iPad’s are in this room? If you have an iPad, please hold it up. I see one here, one here, one... look at this. Guys that’s ridiculous. Every has one. They weren’t even available 2 ½ years ago. Now we’re all working off these things. All right. So now put yourself on my shoes. I’m an executive at TOA Technology, we’re a cloud based software company. This decision directly impacts everybody in this room. We’re planning an R&D budget. Where would we start investing R&D? Anybody going to take a guess? Or you’re all waiting for my next slide? You guys were safe to wait on the next slide. There is the iPhone, there is the Android. Wow. Should I be investing on iPhones or Androids? Should my application be designed to run on the Mac software or should it be running on Google? This is a pretty critical decision we all have to make. Remember this is what kids use. Which one would you choose? Anybody going to dare? He’s going for Google? It’s a good choice. The numbers are backing here right now. Anybody who’s going to bet on Apple? Here’s what... here’s what’s going to happen. I’m not... this is what I think is going to happen. Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re not going to choose either or any because sooner or later, in the next few years, something else is going to be wrong with the crushing adoption rate that’s probably going to annihilate this. This brings up to the number one trend and it’s a buzz word but I tell you what, it’s very, very real.

BYOD – Bring Your Own Device. You heard around everywhere people are going for this stuff. People are looking at this the wrong way. Companies who are in serve in... who are just in general corporate entities look at BYOD as a way to save money on hardware. So I need to buy everybody a phone and maybe I can save a little bit on the data plan too. That’s fine. But in field services, I want you guys to look at this in another way. Come on, we know what we spend. The phone is pretty cheap when you look at the overall cost of operations. That’s not going to you know get us a promotion right here if we cut this out but giving something to your field that they’re comfortable in using, trained to use and it’s personalized to them to increase their productivity, that is the holy grail of BYOD. And right now, with technology such as HTML 5, this is becoming very, very real. Thursday we rolled out a customer 400 plus BYOD users. Now you ask all sorts of questions to this guy, he said that’s awesome. 400 years made the decision two years ago to go BYOD. I said how are you planning for your data plans? How are you going to manage these devices and stuff like that? He is like listen, if you work for a bank, you got to wear a suit to work and I don’t buy you the suit. If you’re working for me, I’m not buying you you’re phone. I don’t pay for the gas in your car for you to commute to work, this is standard business and plus every one of these guys I worked with already bought the phone anyways so it’s not like I’m putting them out. Very unique philosophy but I’m seeing a lot more people adopt it. When you’re looking at your road maps, we met like somebody here was a 12-year business plan, that’s awesome. He’s got to take this fact into consideration. All right. And you can fight it but you know what, the truth is guys, it’s happening already.

So my friends who held up the iPads, how many of those had your company buy you the iPad? One, two there’s a lot more iPads in here than that, I’m guessing a lot of you bought the iPads yourself, you’re part of the BYOD phenomenon because you’re sitting here working, using it. 21 million office workers bought their own smartphones, 11 million bought their own laptops, 3 million bought their own tablets, you’re in the 3 million people. Now Forbes did a survey of 10,000 workers, 50% are using more than three devices for work. Are you in that? I am. I got three devices in my pocket right now. I’m trying to move them around. I got two iPhones, I have an iPad in the back and I have an iMac. This is what every... now this is the big punch line of this. People expect to do this and when you’re hiring in the future, they’re going to want to use their own device because they know they’re going to be more successful on it. So you’ll be expected to provide the tools to them to let them do that. So that’s the first big trend, all right. You guys with me? Scaring you yet because I’m going to go back to the couch?

Go check in with our test objects here. Okay. So we decided that they’re all using smartphones and stuff and we tried to pick which one we’re going to pick to roll out to our field workers then we all decided well you know what, really we can’t decide what it’s going to be so we don’t care we’re all going BYOD – good. Now let’s talk about the next thing. How are they using these phones? Somebody over here had two of these. Are they cleaning out their inbox before school? Really. They still want to e-mail? Yeah, I don’t know. Texting. Yes. Now when they want to talk to their friends, do they go in outlook and try to find a time a time when they’re all available? Yup, real time, exactly. You know my biggest complain about my job is right now, I have 362 unanswered e-mails, I know that because I looked it right before I came in the room. My son is never going to have to deal with it because he’s never going to have an e-mail account. Everything right now that’s going on in that screen is texting, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and now we talk about this as social. Try not to think of social as an application. Think about it as a style of working. It’s a style. It’s a new technique.

See, somebody is coming in real time right now. Social networking users have surpassed past e-mail users dramatically in ’07. And I didn’t believe this when I saw this. This is like there’s no way people spent more time on social networks than e-mail but then I really checked on my own thing, first of all I have a personal e-mail account. The only thing that goes there is spam and e-bills. Nobody has ever sent me a personal e-mail in like a year. They always get me on Facebook or something like that but when I looked at my Twitter account, how much time I spent on LinkedIn, I’m on LinkedIn all the time now. Check it everyday. On Facebook, I totally agree with this trend. So this trend is going to impact us and how we’re managing our teams but really apart from annoying us all at the dinner table as we’re all checking the Facebook, let’s look at the silver lining here. What can these twins do? First of all, they all know exactly where each other are. If Caitlin is at Ryan’s house and Debbie likes Ryan, and Caitlin is not supposed to be there, she knows instantly. Second, they’re all doing one to many connections. You know we’re not just texting one person back and forth. There’s a whole conversation going on. So Caitlin is at Ryan’s house and Debbie is upset is about it. So Debbie instantly starts a conversation with 17 of her friends to discuss the problem in real time. In real time that’s why they never disengage because this is not somebody sending a message and reading it. This is actually a two-way conversation. Think about what that means for us. We have people who are going to be on our teams who have the skills to instantly find one another. Instantly collaborate with one another on a subject and do it all in real time. Imagine the power of the field force that can do that.

These are going to be technologies we’re going to be introducing the whole concept, all right this is a little dated. I know the show hasn’t been on something like the 90’s but I was keeping it until it’s current. The idea of phone a friend, so you’re out there in the field, you’re unloading your van, you realize due to some mix-up in the warehouse you have the wrong part to fix the job you want to do. What do you do? Oh, you call up dispatch, you say I got the wrong part, I got to go back, I got to pick this up or you do what Caitlin would have done with her boyfriend, instantly press the button, gather everybody who is within the 3 mile radius and see who has an extra part and when you can meet up. Second – You’re popping the lid up the air conditioner, you’re an excellent air conditioner repairman and all of a sudden you see a problem that you haven’t seen before. What do you do? You press the button and instantly the social technology finds everybody whose worked on that same air conditioner or solved a similar problem and instantly connects you with them in a chat session so you can work on it real time. This all exists today. You can have it now if you want for your field force but what I’m saying is, it’s going to become standard and absolutely essential in the next two years, three tops.

Now the other thing too is I was in the session this morning that was really it was really fascinating but we’re talking about somebody asked, how many of you guys expect your field service people to sell? Anybody thinking about how many these field service people sell? Yeah, you’re out there. Yeah, I know. I know it because we get this request all the time. This is huge. When I talk about context or where I talked to you a little bit about context to where and solving a field service problem, let’s talk about context we are in selling.

Now, this is my Facebook page. I took a screen shot of it yesterday. All right. I don’t believe in BSing my audience. What did Facebook do to me? Well, they saw Jeff is loading up a lot of pictures of iPhones in a presentation somewhere so they had assumed I am shopping for a new iPhone and they served me up the ad. Then they say Jeff is pointing out on a whole lot of hard stats about adoption rates and technologies. So they’re giving me hey Jeff did spreadsheets here’s a little tool for you. And somewhere in cyber space it found out I was going out to Palm Springs, so here you go let’s about golf. I guess I assumed I was here to have some fun and not to work. This is context to where advertising. We’re victims of it every single day and I really appreciate the people of Facebook for putting up three things that actually were relevant to this talk and not something weird that was going to creep you all out. So here’s some weird stuff that happens out there. So this same technology that marketing departments are using and everything like that, how is that going to work in the field force? Grab it, pull it directly to your field service technician. I have a customer today who sells furniture. They deliver the furniture in the house, this guy’s job is to unload the truck and place the furniture in the house without damaging the walls and everything. His job has now evolved into, he walks in, he brings his own device carrying an iPad, he delivers the couch and based on the order history, their backend software delivers directly to the field technician, ‘oh, Mrs. Wartgow, you just bought this nice couch. On the iPad. Would you consider the end table to go with this? While I’m standing in your living room, they look lovely right there.’ And of course since I’m not home, she says yes, we love the end table. She signs and buys them. They are on their way on the next truck and the field service guy, the furniture moving man is now getting a commission from doing an up sale in my house.

We see this all the time. Out of the most of the used cases, we’re asked a model going forward. The gap between service and sales is becoming so blurred. We just have to a giant demo with this with M-Docs about selling people upgrades to their telephone service. It can be extending warranties. We had a customer come in the other day that says, hey I sent a lot of guys out to do break-fix work but sometimes they’ll get there to replace a part and they’ll realize that this is a part that customer can easily replace themselves. I want to be able to sell the guy an extra part that he can keep in his closet in case something happens again. They want to take payment directly on the phone and they all wanted to be closed on the spot. Great example is carpet cleaning. It’s great you know you go out, you have somebody come and steam clean your living room because you’ve got little kids like mine who has spilled something on it and then they show up like well while I’m here and all the hoses are out, do you want me to do the den? Do you want me to do the dining room? Do you want me to do the whole house? All that is being delivered through the field service organization now. That’s a huge trend that we got to take forward.

Meanwhile back on the couch, so now our future workers are using their own devices, they’re collaborating via social style software, they are using that social style software to collaborate real time to solve field service problems and to now become sales reps. You guys have a quota of how many jobs you got to fix. You are going to have a quota for how much you’re going to sell. This is going to be really difficult. Now what, what makes all this happen? How is this possible today? Because it’s everything. Now cloud computing, it’s been around a while. It’s been through many different iterations. If you got... if anybody in here remembers you know it was like I remember this stuff back when I was a main frame time share utility computing from IBM, grid computing. This whole concept gets reborn every five years of cloud computing and it’s true. The concept has not changed. What’s different about it this time around is it actually cost effective and affordable and that’s what’s driven the adoption rates so much on cloud computing. So these topics BYOD, does not fundamentally work on premise. It can only work if you’re running a cloud application. Social does not work outside of the cloud. Context to where it won’t work outside the cloud. This is it.

I’m going back to our friends who we have 12-year business plans, I asked them, when are you moving to the cloud? Now, there are a million conferences you can go to, they talk about cloud computing and all the benefits of... there’s one distinction I want to make between cloud today and cloud in the past. It’s a phenomenon we call eSaaS. The E stands for enterprise Software as a Service. Cloud computing has traditionally been left for small business or people who could not afford the original capital investment and hardware to run an enterprise class app. So they migrated to cloud. It was an easier way to get into the door. Enterprise gives you all the savings from hardware and management sure but the concept of enterprise cloud computing is it’s bringing you a technology that could be even be cost prohibited for the largest companies on earth to run on their own data centre. For us that’s super computing style route generation. You know, all this stuff becomes very, very affordable. The big thing about this too is, I showed you a bunch of trends social out pacing e-mail, adoptions of iPhones, adoptions of Androids. These are cloud computing system gives you something that you don’t have in an on premise solution and that is flexibility and scalability. It’s easy to change. It’s easy to upgrade. It’s easy to integrate with other clouds. Allows you a little bit more security as things are just going to keep on changing in a more rapid pace.

But the other really most important thing about the rise of eSaaS and I mean I could also talk to you about you know like oh, well, you know it’s statistically proven. It’s more secure than IT data centres and it’s got more update and stuff blah, blah, blah. All that IBM tells you that stuff. This is a lesson in fundamental economics. So I was recently at a conference for investment banking in San Francisco. 400 companies there, all pining for investment from Wall Street. How many of those do you think were cloud computing companies? Anybody got a guess? All of them. Every single one. Now Wall Street can be fickle and they like to jump on fads and I don’t like to direct people like you towards fads. So let’s look at people who have a much longer view rather than the quarterly pro... this quarters profits. Let’s look at our industry main stays, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, have you looked at their acquisition strategy? Biggest when they’re spending on their money. SAP buys Success Factors for billions. Oracle buys Right Now for billions even Microsoft is gobbling up companies like Yammer. They’re investing in this technology. So if you are banking your future, on the on premise solutions and the on going continued road map of that, you’re doing yourselves a disservice because the person who sold you that equipment, is not. Finally the last one now. Remember I said the secret to predicting any trends, forget Wall Street and forget what other big software companies are buying. What do you do? You look at your kids. So I recently attended a career fare for Carnegie Mellon University. Amazing computer science program. Do you know what these kids are learning? I’ll tell you what, it’s not Microsoft. Ruby, XML, SOAP, all the cloud languages. These kids will never ever touch a server. It’s all just going to be somewhere. They’re going to plug into the wall and their whole business is going to be built that way. So am I scaring anybody yet? Oh, good. You all... I keep this conversation at another at a... I think it was oil and gas and you know they got a little nervous because they’ve got billions and billions tied up in on-premise systems but this is the economic, macroeconomic trends that are going to drive the entire industry.

So it’s one constant that hasn’t changed. And now the biggest thing was they’re going to try to overlay where social fits in this cycle, where it fits in fulfilment, where it fits in the final most critical customer feedback. Truth is, every one of the topics I brought up is going to affect every single stage of the field service cycle. Okay. So that’s my talk. That’s a little bit from TOA Technologies. Does anybody have any questions? Anybody? Come on there’s got to be one. You guys are really, really easy. I was expecting...