Welcome to Service Business Review.

As we begin 2008, many service organizations are reflecting on the past months and making necessary adjustments for the coming New Year. We decided to ask our readers what resolutions they were planning to make in 2008. The responses we received were excellent, and we have highlighted an essential (and common) response below. With the opportunity to start fresh in 2008, we hope you will find this issue beneficial in suggesting some ideas for improving service in your organization in the New Year.

Also in this issue:

• Our expert shares New Year’s resolutions that will assist in gaining more visibility into your business in 2008!
• Read Aberdeen's LBS White Paper:
• Can your service organization “weather any storm”?

Got an interesting story or topic you would like to see discussed? As always, your feedback is welcome.

Enjoy!

Simon Morris
Editor, Service Business Review

Feature Story

New Year’s Resolutions for Service Businesses

‘Tis the season! This is the time of year when most organizations are reflecting on the past months, evaluating their business processes and best practices, and planning for 2008. Recently, Service Business Review asked our readers to let us know what resolutions they were planning to make for 2008. You’ve shared a variety of ideas – what your business is doing, will be doing, or should be doing – to make improvements for the coming year. We found that a common theme amongst your responses was the desire to improve upon metrics and more closely analyze critical business data.

Read more about this popular New Year Resolution!

For SageQuest’s Vice President, Bruno F. Del Vecchio, the most important resolution for a service manager is: Measure, measure, measure. After all, you cannot manage what you can not measure, so it is important to find the metrics that are critical to operate your business.

However, determining which metrics are critical can be the most challenging part. To simplify, ask yourself what information/metrics you would most want from a full-time analyst --if you had one on hand. Once these metrics have been determined, imagine that you are this full time business analyst, who’s only job function is to gather and provide these accurate business metrics. Now that you have your metrics list, you can set and assign your improvement goals against the metrics!
So, what metrics would you have examined and reported to you?

“I have worked with hundreds of companies who schedule hundreds of service people to hundreds of calls everyday,” says Del Vecchio “but it is rare that they know the metrics that dramatically affect their business everyday. For example, what is the average drive time to your appointments; what is the average number of miles to a service call; what is the average length of the service call by service type; how do service people statistically compare against each other, against each region; are they getting better, etc?”

Without knowing some very basic service metrics, how can you most successfully schedule your calls? How can you be certain that your on site service rates are correct? How could you possibly perform an employee performance review? And how would you know if you are making progress without know from where you started? The answer is clear. In 2008, resolve to: Measure, measure, measure!

Ask the Expert

By Israel Beniaminy Resolve to get more visibility into your business Resolving to get more visibility into your business in 2008? In the spirit of Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, get some advice from the “ghost of service past”, “ghost of service present” and “ghost of service future” and gain expert tips for gaining more visibility into your business this coming year!

Service Past:
I resolve to know more about the Key Performance Indicators for my business! My goal is to know not just the number of miles traveled and the percentages of calls performed on time, but to also know which types of tasks, which regions, and which time periods are far from the average for those KPIs. This way, if I find any ‘out of the norm’ situations, I can find out why. For example, if a certain region achieves high performance on a particular KPI, I want to understand how this is done, and if possible, do the same in other areas. If we have low performance on Mondays for a different KPI (maybe specifically for repair tasks or for gold-level customers), I want to find out the root cause and take corrective actions.
In this way, resolving to know more about my past will help to improve my future!

Service Present:
I resolve to know more about what’s happening right now, across my service business! If all the details are immediately accessible, I can then set up new and innovative processes for fast and intelligent responses. Then these processes can be automated to handle new data and keep the business on an even keel. And whatever cannot be done by automation should be flagged as an exception, for example, a gold-level customer that is unsatisfied or a region where the day seems to be heading towards a major crunch.
Being aware of what’s happening right now will surely benefit my business in 2008!

Service Future:
I resolve to do as much as possible towards understanding what my needs will be tomorrow, next week, and next quarter. In doing this, I can plan appropriately and efficiently, without careening from one high priority incident to another. To do so, however, I first need to understand past trends and the impact of new events (i.e. new regulations or unusual weather coming up), and I also need to share this data with other groups such as sales, marketing, call center, logistics.
By resolving now to gain more visibility into my business, I am committing to a better Service Future!

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