3 Service Industry Challenges That are More Common Than you Think

COVID-19 has accelerated the speed of transformation by several years. Some organizations are ahead of the curve, but the majority are struggling to keep up. Not to mention, we’re living in a world with a number of economic barriers and challenges: customer expectations have heightened, labor shortages continue to rise, and a recession is on the horizon. 

Service organizations are struggling to keep their businesses afloat, let alone achieve their KPIs. And unfortunately, so many of these issues have trickled down into the customer experience. 

But with the help of a few new tools, some organizations are finding success. Read on to learn how leading service professionals are solving some of today’s top industry challenges. 

1. Keeping up With Customer Demands

After experiencing customer escalations, organizations often wonder, “Is there a way that we could have prevented something like this? Could we have proactively looked at different things to help us address these types of problems?”

In one word: yes. But for many companies, NPS scores and customer surveys have been key to uncovering how customers respond to products and services. But there’s a lot they leave out. The biggest problem: they are reactionary and can’t help you avert problems before they happen. 

To counteract this issue, one of the best ways to keep up with customer demands is to establish a data-driven culture. This means creating structured and actionable plans from all the data that you’ve got. This allows you to take data, build measurements and metrics, and pinpoint trends and insights that reflect on customers, parts, and products. 

“We’ve seen the need to continue to improve how we enable remote service and support, especially considering COVID’s impact. You have to support customers the way they want to be supported – you can’t assume a one-size-fits-all perspective. We have to integrate all of our different data sets to produce actionable insights, and answer the question: how do we turn information into actionable data points? That’s how we’ll deliver value to our customers and serve them the way they want to be served.”

– Linda Tucci, Senior Global Director of the Technical Solutions Center, Ortho Clinical Diagnostics

2. Leveraging Data in a Meaningful Way

There is currently an overall lack of resources across the service industry. And with the threat of a possible recession looming overhead, cost is one of the major factors on the minds of service leaders. 

The best way to combat these concerns is to use your existing data to set organizational priorities. When data is leveraged to its fullest capacity, it pinpoints areas of opportunity you should be focusing on – whether that’s retention, training, customer experience, or more. 

“Production requires customer uptime – which means we have to rethink how we train our technicians, how we run our processes, and how we deliver the service to the customer to maximize uptime. Service Insights uncovers a wide range of data, including information on parts, the amount of time it takes to get a job done, technicians and their skills, and customers and their needs. It then synthesizes that data and helps our managers understand what priorities the team needs to focus on. Instead of having our managers trying to dig through all sorts of data, they come to actionable insights. And they can start improving the way we service our customers.”

– Mark Hessinger, Senior Vice President of Global Customer Success, 3D Systems

3. Hiring, Training, and Retaining Top Talent

Today’s service workforce is undergoing a dramatic generational shift. As Baby Boomers move into retirement and take their hard-earned expertise with them, a wave of younger workers are entering the service industry with a sizable learning curve. The disruption presents ongoing challenges for service organizations of all sizes. “A lot of organizations don’t give enough credit or have enough confidence that they can train people with the right raw talent and aptitude,” observed Roy Dockery, Vice President of Field Operations at Flock Safety, during an Aquant 2022 Service Leaders Spring Break session. 

How can orgs attract, retain, and quickly bring younger workers up to speed before seasoned pros retire? 

“You have to look at the makeup of your team. There’s no one-size-fits-all methodology to embrace. You have to consider all the different demographics and nuances: different age, demographics, how they learn, how they communicate, how they collaborate.

The employee’s experience is paramount. To do more horizontal or parallel career pivots or transformation, you have to create opportunities within the service organization. To create this high-achieving team with a long tenure, you need to understand business and customer needs. It’s a lot easier to retain people than hire new ones.”

– Paul McDermott, Director of Service & Support, T2 Biosystems

Want help in solving common service challenges? Get a demo of Service Insights to see how leading organizations are predicting service and customer needs, creating data-driven plans, and more.