Let’s talk about what service intelligence is and how using the right service intelligence platform creates high-quality, highly efficient service experiences.

Key Takeaways

• Data generated from your service interactions hold valuable insights into your workforce performance, asset reliability, and customer experience
• A service intelligence platform helps you capture and make sense of this data in plain language
• These platforms help you generate prescriptive insights, build plans to optimize service delivery, and improve efficiency
• You can use these platforms to identify cost drivers, training needs, and customer issues more effectively

What is service intelligence–and why is it important?

Any service interaction with your customers generates valuable information you can use to understand your business’s performance. These interactions (and the data they generate) are the building blocks of Service Intelligence and include:

• Calls with a customer support team
• On-site visits (and repeat visits) from a field service team
• Reports of asset breakdowns 
• Asset in need of preventative maintenance program 
• Effectiveness of preventive maintenance activities
• Purchase orders for assets and parts
• Maintenance logs
• Technician job notes
• Technician domain knowledge

Service intelligence is about gathering, organizing, and extrapolating this information in order to identify problems and opportunities across the organization. It’s about helping managers objectively see how their team is performing, where specific assets are experiencing challenges, and whether a customer might be close to an escalation based on hard data.

The success of any service organization depends on delivering exceptional customer service in an efficient and cost-effective manner. The performance of your customer-facing talent is put under the magnifying glass when businesses are faced with challenging economic conditions. Managers who have easy access to holistic metrics that go beyond past trends will be able to  make decisions that will improve key areas of their business and the service their teams deliver.

What does a service intelligence platform do?

A service intelligence platform is a set of technologies that organizes and analyzes traditional service data and institutional knowledge from your highest-performing employees. In addition, it provides your management team with clear reports and analysis and gives your support team access to best practices during service visits. 

Service intelligence platforms are a natural evolution of field service management software. That’s because they go beyond traditional dashboards, like BI. Unlike reactive software, service intelligence help leaders see the root cause of issues and give them prescriptive and customized insights on how to address them at scale. These new platforms eliminate the need for data exports and pivot analysis. Instead, service intelligence concisely packages critical information to be delivered directly to decision-makers. 

Service intelligence platforms are made up of these components:

• Workforce reporting that measures how well each of your technicians is performing in the field and provides guidance on what kind of training is needed
• Asset reporting that identifies potential issues or engineering challenges with your products
• Customer success reporting that identifies your performance relative to each customer and predicts escalations before they occur
• Troubleshooting and triage tools that can be used on-site by any technician, providing every employee access to the collective knowledge of your most experienced technicians

How a service intelligence platform will improve operating efficiency 

Here are the major benefits of implementing a Service Intelligence Platform.

Identify training needs

Service intelligence platforms take into account all of the details surrounding a technician’s performance including the customer, asset, number of visits, fixes employed, success rates, and more. Reviewing individual technician performance and performance as a group helps managers identify where specific team members need a hand and where there are needs to improve training programs overall.

Upskill technicians with troubleshooting tools

Knowledge sharing and management are key pieces of an effective service intelligence platform. Service intelligence platforms contain intelligent triage and troubleshooting tools built from historical service data combined with the tribal knowledge of an organization’s most experienced subject matter experts. These tools upskill less senior technicians and bring up the average technician performance across the board when used properly.

Support engineering and product teams 

By analyzing how assets perform by customer and as a whole, product and engineering teams can identify challenges where components are failing or opportunities to make changes that eliminate downtime and improve operating efficiency.

Understand individual customer needs and the customer experience journey

Reviewing the hard data about customer interactions let’s service teams objectively look at customer experience. Predictive reporting based on the number of visits, success rate, time to resolution, and more will help you identify customers at a higher risk of looking for a new supplier or service provider.

Bonus: Make the case for preventative maintenance 

Understanding performance data across team members, assets, and customers to identify true costs. Understanding and presenting these costs backed by data helps service teams build the case for preventative maintenance contracts.

What is the difference between service intelligence (SI) and business intelligence (BI)?

A service intelligence platform is not the same as accessing BI dashboards. Standard dashboards that simply report KPIs like first time fix or cost per success, can’t guide you to look at top priorities or pinpoint the most critical business issue. 

Service intelligence goes beyond BI. It seamlessly combines all your service data with workforce knowledge to create a more comprehensive view of your organization. This means it understands your data and it understands your people. Want to know why your top performers are able to make fixes so quickly at a lower cost? Or why some team members struggle to repair specific equipment. Service intelligence explains this in plain language. BI dashboards can’t do that. 

With all of this information in one place, service leaders have a trusted source for data-driven decision-making. 

Service Intelligence from Aquant is ready for action

When you’re ready to deliver efficient, effective service experiences that turn your customers into your biggest promoters, get started with Aquant.

The Aquant Service Intelligence Platform has everything your service & support managers and technicians need to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and improve customer experience like never before. We lead the service intelligence space with an unmatched ability to mine free-form text from technicians’ notes to create deeper observations and solutions that can be put into action by service leaders.

Request a demo today. Learn how easily your service data can be turned into your greatest asset.