Service Workforce Maturity Model
A Tool for Forward-Looking Service Leaders
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Today’s customers expect service to be completed correctly the first time. Meanwhile, service requirements are constantly growing more complex.
To navigate these changes, your service workforce needs access to tools and solutions that connect them to the people, processes, and products they work with. For your workforce to grow and mature, your technology investment should too.
Transforming workforce productivity requires making incremental changes with technology and the way your workforce uses it. This model is broken into four unique maturity stages: Digitize, Connect, Optimize, and Advance.
Within each stage, you’ll learn how maturity level impacts processes, access to information, collaboration, and customer engagement.
When tracking progress across these stages, service leaders should look at metrics and KPIs that are relevant to their operations, such as first-time fix rate (FTFR), workforce utilization, and overall service quality. Whether your organization is at the Digitize stage or the Advance stage, there’s always room for progress—and identifying where you are today is the first step. Continue reading to learn where your service workforce is now, where they're headed, and identify what they need to get there.
Evolving from the customer service model to the customer success model
Fueling your digital tools with deeper insights and information from connected products
Improving how people, products, and processes work together through connectivity
Switching from traditional and paper-based materials to digital processes and instructions
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Collaboration:
Before the Digitize stage, your service workforce might have been using ad-hoc or unofficial communication tools like WhatsApp or SMS for collaboration. But without a way to document and store takeaways from those conversations, continued collaboration was more difficult. In the Digitize stage, leveraging digital tools makes it easier to capture and share knowledge by creating more detailed, comprehensive work instructions.
Access to Information:
In the Digitize stage, service organizations are moving information from siloed sources to central, digital locations. This can look like creating digital work instructions, enabling data visibility into commercial information such as contracts and entitlements, and digitizing customer information.
Customer Engagement:
Digitization enables service organizations to begin evolving from reactive repairs to a more proactive approach. In this stage, implementing customer self-service tools (such as web portals for appointment requests and service history visibility) creates a more transparent and convenient customer experience.
Process:
Digitizing improves processes by minimizing time spent on manual data entry for invoicing or transcribing work order debriefs, enabling more accurate tracking and accountability, and minimizing the risk of lost paper documents and information. From there, service organizations can more easily standardize this information.
Stage One:
Digitize
At this first stage of workforce maturity, service organizations should focus on digitizing operations, eliminating manual or paper-based processes, and shifting away from a “reactive” service approach. On the right, click to learn how the maturity stage of your workforce impacts key areas of doing business.
Process:
Through secure connectivity, service organizations at this stage are leveraging advanced automated processes and remotely monitoring machine health. Certain service actions or decisions can be made without manual intervention, such as optimizing schedules or planning preventive maintenance. When human intervention is required, systems can provide notifications to the right team members to make the right decisions.
Collaboration:
Silos are breaking down between service, manufacturing, and engineering teams. Computer-aided design (CAD) and product lifecycle management (PLM) data are enhancing work instructions and automatically creating experiences. Technicians have access to live product data, which gives them the ability to view machine function with visual overlays before they go out into the field. Service data is shared with stakeholders in sales, marketing, engineering, finance, and others, providing valuable insights to inform key decisions at every level.
Access to Information:
In the Connect stage, service organizations increase access to information across the enterprise. Live Internet of Things (IoT) data enhances work instructions. Technicians access live asset monitoring and health data, and remote triage helps them potentially solve problems without sending a technician. Software content management capabilities enable over-the-air (OTA) updates.
Customer Engagement:
Customers benefit from the erosion of data silos and increased visibility into live equipment data, too. Self-service can extend beyond basic appointment scheduling functionality and include better context and transparency into real-time equipment health data, user manuals, and detailed contract coverage. Proactive customers can leverage these self-service capabilities to initiate additional service requests, extend and upgrade service coverages, or directly purchase required parts.
Stage two:
Connect
In the Connect stage, service leaders should prioritize increasing asset connectivity, giving technicians the right tools to deliver proactive service, keeping stakeholders informed, and enabling a predictive service approach. FTFR is a particularly important success metric to focus on at this stage.
Access to Information:
At this point, technicians have access to product data from the Connect stage. In the Optimize stage, they also get digital twin and CAD data, parts data, and additional information and context served to them with the work order. With newly created digital work instructions, service organizations in the Optimize stage are scaling those instructions across the enterprise so that all technicians can access the same standards and experiences.
Process:
Following the transition phase from Digital to Connect, service technicians are working with standardized processes, checklists, and workflows when they go on-site. Data verification ensures these are completed to standard at every service visit. Automated workflows guide technicians, dispatchers, and remote service engineers through the right steps and remove time-consuming administrative work.
Collaboration:
Organizations using a SaaS offering can rest assured their instructions are up to date. At this stage, the business might have a central messaging platform in place to account for security concerns and to ensure every conversation is recorded for future reference. This platform isn’t proactively contributing to knowledge management or providing useful data.
Customer Engagement:
At this stage of maturity, service technicians go out into the field with all the right skills, tools, and instructions they need to complete the job correctly the first time. They are empowered to act as trusted advisors with customers, equipped with accurate information such as product recalls or bulletins, future service events, and customer entitlements. Customers can also request self-service across several channels, including web, mobile, chatbots, and more.
Stage three:
Optimize
In stage Three, it's all about optimizing how people, parts, and information work better together to collaborate and meet customer commitments.
Process:
Access to commercial and entitlement information enables the service organization to collaborate closely with service sales and proactively advise customers on upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Improved workforce efficiency gives leadership deeper insights into other areas of the business or products in the field.
Access to Information:
With advanced access to information, customers can access step-by-step work instructions and their own machine data, remote support from experts within their own company or from the service provider, IoT and service history data for predictive maintenance, and AI for deeper data insights.
Collaboration:
At this stage, service technicians are working with more advanced remote assistance to collaborate with experts and complete jobs faster. Machine learning and AI can provide intelligent recommendations for assisted troubleshooting and predictive maintenance, drawing from data sources like knowledge articles, past expert conversations, service and work order history, product manuals, parts lists, and more. Technicians might also have access to virtual assistants powered by GenAI that can perform complex tasks, such as rescheduling appointments, predicting job times, or debriefing work orders.
Customer Engagement:
In this most advanced stage, service organizations are providing customers with in-context augmented reality (AR) service instructions and access to remote experts to proactively solve simple problems and reduce downtime, enabling them to have a larger role in the service process beyond simply booking appointments with technicians. This fosters a sense of customer autonomy and control over their equipment's operation and maintenance, ultimately creating a more streamlined and efficient service experience.
Stage four:
Advance
Stage two:
Connect
Stage three:
Optimize
Stage four:
Advance
In the Advance stage, customers see service organizations as trusted advisors—but there are still opportunities for continued growth. At this stage, service leaders should focus on advancing commercial maturity, extending enterprise collaboration, and enabling prescriptive service.
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Remember, every step of the maturity model builds on the last to bring value to your service organization. As you progress, you’ll see changes to your KPIs and your workforce engagement.
Find the Right Technology Partner to Collaborate on Your Maturity Model
Improving service quality and productivity is made possible by focusing on opportunities that are unique to your service organization and workforce. Once you’ve identified goals based on your maturity level, the right technology partner can help you find transformative technologies that match your unique use cases. Read our buyer's guide to explore solutions for the connected service workforce, key features and capabilities, and more to help you select the right technology partner on your service transformation journey.
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