Leadent featured in Utilities Week - 07.09.2006
This article originally appeared in Utility Week on 7th September 2006
"Culture Shock "
Some organisations shy away from implementing field force enablement because they are nervous about the resulting impact on business culture. Those that do decide to make the change are often under pressure to implement the solution quickly to speed up the delivery of benefits and relieve the pressure on customer service.
It is here that implementation can fail and concerns about business culture can appear to be justified. Projects can quickly become technology focused and the impact on business culture forgotten. What was once a barrier to change can be pushed to the background with disastrous consequences. Utilities are right to be concerned about the impact field force enablement will have on business culture, but managed correctly, mobile technologies can have a positive impact on all concerned. The two key groups affected – utility customers and utility staff – are best considered in turn.
As far as customers are concerned, the best way to know whether an implementation has been successful is if they are not aware that a change has occurred. The average consumer in Britain expects to turn on the tap and have water or flick a switch and have light. They do not think about the process. However, the day they turn on the tap and nothing comes out, they suddenly start noticing the process and how the fault is dealt with. With field force enablement, the technology enables routine maintenance to be carried out more quickly and efficiently, ultimately eliminating a lot of problems before they have occurred.
Of course, some problems are never going to be prevented altogether. There will still be emergencies for field forces to handle. Traditionally this has led to customers calling the call centre and seeking advice from a customer service team, who do not operate in the field and are typically relaying second-hand information.
An effectively installed system using field force techniques can get around this common problem by feeding detailed real-time information to staff at the call centre, allowing them to provide customers with much more educated answers. So, for example, if a repair team is on site within half an hour of the first call, the next customer to phone – say an hour later – can be told that a team is already there and that the work is expected to take another 30 minutes.
Field force transformation techniques can be made even more proactive by updating website information on a real-time basis. This way customers can keep up to date with the progress of the work as it is happening. This is a far cry from traditional means of communication, which have come in for a huge amount of criticism over the years.
All of this can be of huge benefit to a company. By being more proactive when it comes to customer management it would be possible to reduce the volume of calls and, with the technology available, to close any incoming calls on the first contact.
When evaluating any shift in employee culture, the first place to look is as the management. This is because senior staff influence the rest of the organisation. This is particularly true of utilities, where organisations are driven by regulation and performance targets for which management is directly responsible.
Field force enablement can provide the ability to link together all of the different mobile assets in an organisation, making the business more transparent. This helps create a process-driven organisation that will start to dismantle operational silos. Weaker members of management can find this unpalatable, while a strong management team will find that employees have the opportunity to appreciate and understand the decisions they take and their benefit to the business. Additionally, for the transformation to be effective there needs to be a shift in which behaviours a company values. Heroes in the past were rewarded on how they dealt with emergencies; today’s hero is less “macho” and is rewarded on how the emergency was prevented.
It is vital to understand that field force enablement will mean a shift from management making decisions on job priorities to technology making the decisions, based on the business rules. Jobs will no longer be shared out in the depot on a daily basis. For this to work effectively, employee acceptance must be obtained across the board. This can be a particular problem with established employees who are accustomed to influencing their manager’s decisions in order to get the jobs they like doing, in the locations they like working in. Due to this, educating employees about the ways the technology will help to improve the business can be a pivotal part of the acceptance process.
There are also other cultural impacts on staff that may not be immediately obvious. One good example of this is pay. A good field force structure should mean that most employees do not work regular overtime because of the added efficiencies of the new system. This has its benefits and drawbacks for staff. On one hand, those who are keen to leave on time will get reduced hours, but on the other hand those using overtime as a means of supplementing pay will see a reduced pay cheque. This change in culture may mean that it would be beneficial to establish a new rewards structure to replace overtime pay.
The most critical element of cultural acceptance throughout the organisation is complete preparation for the changes that will occur when the new system is implemented. At Leadent, we always draw up plans for how the shift in culture is expected to occur. These plans are as important as the detailed project plans, but are too often forgotten. A common mistake that many companies make is to implement a system and wait to see what happens. With advanced planning, the culture shift can be effectively managed, as long as there is built-in flexibility to allow the method of implementation to be changed if necessary, once the results start to be seen.
Given the benefits to customers, staff and the bottom line, utilities will start to seriously see field force transformation as an enabler. Sure, there will be cultural resistance, but as long as organisations recognise this and plan and manage it, the programme will be successful.
Alastair Clifford-Jones is chief executive at consultancy Leadent