FIELDSERVICENEWS

THINK TANKS ES S I O N S

Briefing Report: Disruption, Development and Diversity in field service sponsored by:

Our Panel of Experts:

Steve Smith, CTO, Astro Communications• Industry: IT Solutions• Number of FSEs: 24

Darren Thomas, Head of Service Northern Europe, Waters Corporation

Keith Wilkinson, VP Sales EMEA, ClickSoftware

Vasu Guruswamy, Former VP Global Services, Schlumberger

Robin Bryant, Service Director, Scott JCB

Wilhelm Nehring, CEO UK and Eire, thyssenkrupp Elevator

Kris Oldland, Editor-in-Chief, Field Service News

• Industry: Medical Technology• Number of FSEs: 100

• Industry: Field Service Software• Number of FSEs: N/A

• Industry: Oil and Gas• Number of FSEs: 4,000

• Industry: Heavy Machinary• Number of FSEs: 90

• Industry: Urban Mobility• Number of FSEs: 300+

• Industry: Field Service • Number of FSEs: N/A

About the report:

One of the most interesting things about the field service sector is

that whilst as a discipline it sits across a huge variety of wide and

highly disparate industries, there remains overwhelmingly the same

fundamental challenges, pain points and goals for every organisation

operating a field service division.

Whether you operate in the print/copy market or heavy

manufacturing, whether your engineers and technicians fix vending

machines or jumbo jet engines, you will invariably find more common

ground with other service leaders working in different sectors, than

you will find differences.

In many ways the same is true whether you have 10 engineers in your

territory or 10,000.

Yes, some of the challenges of running a larger field service operation

are more complicated, as are some of the tools you may use to do

so - but the fundamental elements of what is great service and its

growing role within industry remains in organisations of all sizes.

It was this train of thought that led Field Service News to partner

with ClickSoftware to host the inaugural Field Service News Think

Tank Session. The idea being to bring together a small, select group

of senior service professionals from different sectors and different

size organisations, to try and help us keep a firm grasp of the key

issues and trends within field service that are translatable across all

industries - and that are applicable for companies of all sizes.

The conversation was wide ranging and each member of our industry

panel brought their own unique insight to the table, giving us a

diverse range of opinions that really got to the heart of the pervasive

challenges field service organisations face in today’s rapidly evolving

environment.

Across the next few pages we have centred in on some of the key

areas of discussion and debate amongst this panel of industry leaders

that were held across the day.

In each section we’ve left their points in transcript form, so what

you are about to read comes direct from these service leaders

themselves, giving you a true feel for the universal trends and

insights that we are saw emerge across the day.

It makes for fascinating reading and should be of value for any field

service professional, regardless of industry, location or company size.

Kris Oldland: Given the focus of companies across all industries on Digital

Transformation, has the importance of a field service call become even more

important in terms of Customer Satisfaction and Customer Experience - as

increasingly, the field service visit is now the sole (or at least most frequent)

face-to-face interaction between an organisation and their customer base?

Steve Smith: For us the importance of great service and the field engineer’s

role in delivering a good customer experience, is something that has always

just been part and parcel of the job.

I’m not sure it’s more important, I think it is has always been important.

If you’re in a customer service business, the only thing you really have to

compete against anybody else is your standard of customer service.

I think on that front it’s all about the diversity of people we employ which

has been an important factor. We’ve often taken people from a hospitality

background and then taught them the technical side of our business,

putting them through training or apprenticeships. We have also taken

on ex-military people as we find they have the right mind-set, although

again not necessarily a technical background per se, but we find they have

the personal organisational skills and the self-management skills that are

important for a technician.

Ultimately, it really does stand out when you have good customer service.

The MD of one of our own clients, TGI Fridays, always says that ‘when you

get great customer service, you feel it’ and that sums up our ethos as well.

I think for us, that approach has always been important, but perhaps with

increasing competition more of a spotlight is being placed on service as a

differentiator today.

Darren Thomas: In an sense, we see the growing levels of automation and

remote maintenance being driven by what are the fundamental economics

of field service - which means that the importance of the field service

engineer has indeed increased dramatically.

It’s costs a lot to send an engineer to repair a broken system so we are

investing heavily in what we are calling our ‘Expert Centre’ where we

endeavor to solve / diagnose customer problems by phone or be remotely

logging into the system

The one negative bit of feedback we get on this from our customers is

that when they contact the knowledge centre, we ask them to carry out a

lot of tests before we can dispatch an engineer and of course that can be

frustrating when we are asking an experienced person have you done x,y and

z?”

However, the point is that for our organisation, ultimately it is the primary

interaction that is important. So if a customer calls the Expert Centre then

we can affect a good diagnostic or even a remote fix - so we are investing

in tools to do that where possible. We are currently implementing a global

initiative which we are calling ‘Knowledge Centre Support’, where we are

pooling all of the first-time-fix reports - whether it be via an engineer in

China , Europe or the USA.

Essentially, if one of our engineers comes across an issue that they haven’t

faced before, they are then tasked with writing up the resolution to that

problem - which is then made available to all of our engineers and the Expert

Centre, further helping us identify issues quickly.

We really are dedicating ourselves to that first-time-fix via remote support.

At the end of the day once the engineer is sent out to our clients he or

she then becomes the ambassador for our company. They become really

important in terms of ensuring the customer is fully satisfied. I think their

role is absolutely evolving in that sense.

#DigitalDisruption - In a digital world is the face-to-face role of the engineer now a critical part of the customer experience?

Keith Wilkinson: We are all consumers of services whether it be from your

bank, utilities providers , telco or media provider – we are all seeing this rise

in automation and self-service, so you could look at it and ask – ultimately is

that human touch point still important?

But what inevitably happens is that automation, that self-service aspect will

ultimately go wrong at some point and when it does go wrong we then we

have that one brief moment of truth where the engineer is sent out into the

home or work place to not only just solve a problem, but also to make an

impression on the customer.

The customer will likely have tried some levels of self-service or even to self-

fix the device because they just want to get it back operational again so they

can get on with their own job – so now the engineer has all their trust and

faith in your company riding on their shoulders.

So that engineer, from a digitisation perspective, needs to have all the

tools, all the knowledge and information possible at his disposal so he can

be empowered - so he can become that brand ambassador. I think those

scenarios it can make a huge impact on whether or not, when the time comes

to renew that specific contract you actually do so - or whether you think ‘I had

an important issue that wasn’t really resolved effectively’ in which case your

advocacy of renewing that service may be less assured.

Darren Thomas: Also I’d add to that, that it is important to think about the

whole service cycle - For example, what about the follow up as well?

Are you constantly informing them [the customer] about the progress that is

being made? For me, it is very much about how you bring that customer with

you through the resolution journey - how you outline to the customer how

you will solve their problem – and that can come down to communicating

across the management chain as well just the field engineer.

Kris Oldland: It’s an information train isn’t it – and that is dependent upon

transparency and honesty

Personally, I think more companies need to perhaps embrace that notion.

More companies need to say to their clients ‘this is the process we are

going down to resolve your issue, we can’t get this fixed right away but we

are moving heaven and earth to get it fixed and here is what is being done.’

Because there is nothing more powerful when it comes to engendering brand

loyalty than facing a real customer service challenge and bringing the client

with you through that issue and into resolution.

Turning around a bad experience and transforming it into a good experience

is something that can make that customer become a customer for life –

mainly because it is making them feel valued and understood.

Vasu Guruswamy: I think we need to remember the old maxim about quality

over quantity. Whether it’s people or automation, each one brings its own

power.

Definitely the bar on automation is rising; and there is no getting away

from the fact that knowledge systems are critical. But we had the problem

before we went worldwide [with their own knowledge bank] that everybody

believed in reinventing the wheel because that was the value that they

sought for themselves - and so the idea of putting knowledge in a system was

an anathema for most people and it took us a long time to turn this culture

around.

In fact, I had to take a slightly provocative approach.

We had people that were facing challenges asking ‘what do I have to do in this

condition?’ And some guru in the world would answer their problem - which

was great because the first time around as it adds enormous value, but then

there was a slightly negative impact on the business because there was little

checking to see if what was being added was repetition, had it already been

covered before?

Once everyone in the organisation began to realise that they just had to go

to the system to get answers, then our ‘experts’ who were used to answering

bulletin board questions had to be challenged with ‘you are an expert

because you can solve new problems not just because you keep parroting the

same solution’ to change their mind-set.

#Automation - Does the advance of technology in fact add even more importance to role of the field service engineer?

Kris Oldland: Is it a fair assumption to say that for most companies, when an

engineer is ultimately sent out, when that truck rolls, that this is the end result

in a chain of events that have led to diagnostics and remote or self-repair

having failed?

Therefore, is the engineer is now expected to have an additional level of

knowledge and experience to provide the expert resolution that couldn’t be

delivered via any other means?

Robin Bryant: For us we are looking at automation to get better efficiency for

the engineers that we’ve got.

In our industry we are dealing with companies that may have one machine

or they may have ten machines and when they have an issue they may be

questioning if they buy any more. So when the engineer comes out and makes

a good impression, turns it around, fixes it and is positive about the product,

that can have a huge impact on whether that next purchase is our equipment

or a competitor’s.

We’ve always had some guys around the depot that are really good at that

stuff and they are great guys, but then there are those that aren’t so good

in that part of the role. So we are looking at how we get training out to the

team to bring everyone up to that upper level. Ultimately, the engineer can

have a hugely positive impact with the customer but they can also potentially

have an equally negative impact as well. So for us automation is as much as

about bringing service standards to a consistently high level as it is about the

efficiency gains we see from it.

We have a very prominent parent brand in JCB and they set high standards in

service delivery expectations that are a reflection of the importance of their

brand. They set us targets in terms of where they want us to be in terms of

service level, the quality of our engineers and the amount of training that we

have to do, but they are also incredibly supportive at the same time.

Wilhelm Nehring: Of course, one of the nice things about this group is that

we are all from different industries and from companies of different sizes, but

one thing for us in our industry is that we cannot allow our clients to maintain

or repair a lift – it is simply a matter of health and safety.

So we have constant contact with our clients through our engineers,

and I very much like the phrase Darren [Thomas] used earlier of ‘brand

ambassadors’. This is exactly what our engineers are for us.

To a certain degree I think the role of the service engineer has become more

important, I would also agree with Steve’s [Smith] point that it has always

been an important role, but the competitive market out there has made

the role of the service engineer more visible and so things like training and

teaching your staff to be that brand ambassador have become vital.

It’s a different thing to do, to engage with the client. You need to be able to

have the technical skills to actually fix the lift - but you also need to interact

with the client. What else does the client want? What else does the client

need?

For us at thyssenkrupp, our engineers are the most important asset that

we have – so when we get feedback from clients about how brilliant or

impressive our engineers are, this is our lifeblood. This is what we do – so it is

incredibly important to us.

Coming back to how we enable that, we invested heavily in what we call

‘International Technical Service Centres’ because we also undertake third

party maintenance on other companies assets. We have 1.2 million units

under maintenance – and about a third of them are other makes and brands

so we need to enable our people to maintain these other units as well.

We do this through technical services, with reverse engineering etc and this

is why we are the first in our industry to take this approach and we have

by the far the best technical services because we invest so heavily in these

centres. We have them all across the world as a support for the engineers and

technicians – and that is what gives them the platform for them to do their job

#BrandAmbassadors - What role can field service engineers have on an organisation’s relationship with their customers?

Keith Wilkinson - What’s processing through my mind is that there is this huge

amount of investment in technology whether it’s IoT, Augmented Reality or

anything else that is helping field service engineers get things right first time. So

now we are moving to this predictive stage where we are fixing things before

they fail and I just wonder how much customers actually even put a value to

that?

It’s big investment by companies and Wilhelm has referenced that they are

doing this to differentiate their products and services, but I wonder in a way if

we are taking these technology changes as consumers for granted? Therefore,

there is big, big pressure on companies to think about how we communicate

these innovations out to brand? How do we market them?

How do we let customers know these things are really in our capability and

make sure that they see the full value of them?

Vasu Guruswamy - The point is that whilst it’s right to be proud of our

innovations, the playing ground is being levelled every few months. What you

thought was a great achievement twelve months before is the minimum that is

expected today. Customers are constantly changing their expectations.

For example, if you don’t reach the standard of iPhone X all of sudden you

are no longer current. It is not even out in the market, yet already people’s

expectations have moved. Already, fingerprint technology has become standard

so now facial recognition is the latest innovation. People’s expectations are

constantly being reset and only in one direction - upwards. If you don’t meet

them you can begin to slip out of their zone of respect. You stop giving that

impression of ‘this is a great company I want to do business with.’ Whether

it is B2B or B2C it is the same for everyone. That is an external force that one

individual or one company cannot fight.

Darren Thomas - I think one of the biggest challenges in our industry, is that

with the instruments we are bringing to the market and the service deliverables

we can bring to the customers, the customers themselves are actually twenty

years behind.

Because they are so fixed in their ways - they don’t bring what they know from

home. For example, everything deploys to your phone these days, all your apps

can get updated automatically, your Pay TV provider can make fixes remotely

- even utilities companies can offer some remote services now. Yet in our

industry there are still a lot of people are struggling to make that step change.

They are unable to bring these concepts we are used to in our personal lives

into their working lives.

Kris Oldland - So are you finding that you are having to bring the customers

with you on the journey? There are always two directions in this type of

innovative environment aren’t there - the customer pull and the client push...

Darren Thomas - Yes. Generally, Data Security is their biggest concern and we

can work around that but it is a case of pushing everything up hill. We need

them to influence their IT department and the more senior people in order to

introduce something beyond the Status Quo. I think that often it is crucially

a case that we need to have conversations at a higher level than we would

traditionally do when discussing more standard service contracts etc.

Vasu Guruswamy - That’s a good point, in Oil and Gas, for many reasons, Data

Security and also safety are massively important pieces of the conversation.

The truth is that often when people put these forward as reasons against

introducing new service delivery concepts - we identify two things.

One is perceived problems, their lack of understanding of what is actually

happening in the wider industry. For example, we often have to try to explain

why Data Security in the Cloud is far, far greater than their own private Data

Security. The chance of a Microsoft or a AWS getting hacked is a million times

less than one specific companies data centre getting hacked.

The second thing is generational change, this is a key aspect of this

conversation.

We are seeing youngsters coming up, who don’t have the decision making

powers just yet, but they are completely in this game. It is the people who

have spent twenty, thirty years in the old ways of working, with the old ways

of thinking, but are still holding decision making positions push these things as

objections more forcefully. You can see how a particular customer is going to

react by studying their organisation and how they are building their culture.

Ultimately, it is a two way street - I think there is a lot of education that still

needs to happen but some of it is also just a matter of time. In another five

years maybe even ten we will find we’ve been pushing at an open door.

#FieldService2.0 - Are we doing enough to communicate the benefits of proactive service?

Kris Oldland - We’ve hit on a very interesting point here when we talk about

the difference between generations.

We’ve talked on the shifting importance of the field service engineer,

positioning them as a brand ambassador, the other issue that we’ve seen quite

a lot of is the ageing workforce crisis - we are seeing a lot of people out in the

field approaching retirement age in many organisations across the world.

We are also seeing a huge difference in culture between the baby boomers

and the millennials - is that something that is weighing on your minds - are you

ready for this wave of millennials to enter your workforce?

Also what about the skills that you are looking for in new field service engineers

are technical skills more important still or are they something you can train

whilst people skills are more of a natural trait?

Steve Smith - I think you can train people skills if you begin working with

people at a young enough age. This is why I think apprenticeships schemes are

to bolster up these.

Degree routes are a great route for some, but they don’t cover everything,

I think apprenticeships cover a lot of areas that you wouldn’t otherwise get

through a university degree.

We find with apprentices it actually goes two ways. It’s not just about us

passing all of our knowledge across to the apprentices, it is actually a two way

thing because they actually bring a huge amount of value into the business.

I’m amazed at how quickly they accelerate, certainly a lot faster than when I

was an apprentice.

I’m actually a judge of the apprentice of the year award in our industry, on

average we used to get about eight to ten entrants, this year there were twenty

seven this year, and thirteen of those were female.

If you look at the applications and the references from their management and

you think that they are only eighteen - you think wow that’s an incredible force

to have in a business in quite a cross section of industries - so I think that is a

really valuable route.

#TheMillenialWorkforce - Do we understand them and are we ready to harness what they bring to the table?

Steve Smith - I mentioned before about diversity in businesses and in our

industry in particular it’s pretty slow. About thirteen percent are female and

that’s grown - and apprenticeships have certainly had a big impact here. In our

organisation about half of our front-line staff are now female and they certainly

have a different approach and it just brings a better mix for our customers.

Darren Thomas - It [gender parity] is a big challenge for us. I look after our

service operation across Northern Europe and we have a team of about 70 field

people and we have just a handful of female engineers. We advertise the roles

fairly and have an open policy of course - but our challenge is how do we attract

females to even apply to the role. There are other jobs in our organisation that

are weighted the other way but to get ladies to come into engineering is a big

challenge.

We had a Norwegian female engineer who joined us about 6 months ago. Her

story was fascinating. She tried two university courses in chemistry and bio

chemistry and then got into the more hands on, practical course and found that

was a perfect fit for her and her story is really inspiring. We need to be taking

her story and looking for others like her around the world, but it is then trying

to find the right mechanism to take those stories out to the masses.

Steve Smith - I think the problem starts earlier on and there is a lot of work to

be done at the school level- even at primary school level. It also needs to be

done not just with the students but with the parents as well.

A lot of parents influence their child’s career choices and a lot of parents would

say that for their daughters engineering is not really a woman’s career. I’m

involved in this to a degree myself and it is a huge job. I was at a careers day

and I saw forty young women that were transitioning from school into a career

and only two of them were doing anything to do with STEM. There is just so

much work to be done.

Vasu Guruswamy - There is also much underlying subconscious bias to be

overcome. My background is from India but I have worked in 15 different

countries and I’m quite surprised, contrary to what I thought, about the

amount of bias that still exists in the UK.

I have had my friends daughters telling me that their teachers have talked girls

away from STEM when they are aged 12, 13 or 14 when they are first getting

exposed to Science and Technology. And they are doing this without even

realising. They are not being explicit, but if you taped that teacher and played it

back to them they would likely be shocked at how their subconscious bias play

out - but still it happens again and again and again.

Gender parity is a massive challenge in our industry because we all start in the

field and in Oil and Gas - that means you are out on the rigs or in tough terrain

such as desert when on land , but still we get twenty five to thirty percent

of women at the recruitment stage worldwide - however, in Europe and in

particular the UK, we have one of the worst ratios of male to female engineers .

The US is a little bit better, and also it is a little bit better in Eastern Europe, but

most women in our business come from Asia, South America and Africa. I think

it may be because in these regions getting a job is more about survival.

However, getting women into the organisation is one thing - there is then also

the question of how they progress within the organisation as well. If you take

the middle management level it is only twelve percent of our workforce. Part of

this is due to things like marriage, children and the types of decisions women

are making between the ages of 27 and 33 but numbers just nose dive at this

point.

We’re recruiting 30% - so how come we only have 12% are in middle

management, when we get to senior management it becomes only 5%. So

there is a lot of work to go for us - but also the whole society has an impact on

this. It is a problem of such a giant size and so many people don’t even realise

the enormity of the problem.

Keith Wilkinson - You make a really valid point there Vasu, people are doing

this through their subconscious actions but it is really happening in leadership

conversations within businesses as well and people don’t realise that the advice

that they give to ladies in business in how to manage their career, their growth,

expectations of business results and what to focus on - I’ve seen it in so many

personal situations being in senior leadership teams that the leaders don’t

actually realise how they are communicating and whilst again it’s not explicit,

but it impacts on how women see their career and the senior positions they get

and yes, it is a big , big problem.

#WorkforceDiversity - How big a challenge is the imbalance between male and female engineers and how can we overcome it?

Kris Oldland: Let’s talk about career paths. Is it something that is clearly

defined in your organisation? Do you just look for the best of the best and

they just naturally rise to the top or do you have a path for every new trainee

engineer to follow?

Wilhelm Nehring: For us it’s quite straightforward - if we can, we always prefer

to teach our own people. So if we get someone on-board we try to put the

thyssenkrupp brand in their heart, so they become totally committed and stay

with us for forty years.

We have a lot of examples of staff who go from doing their apprenticeship

with us through to retiring with us. However, it does also depend on the

culture within different countries, for example in Germany it’s more common

for someone to stay with a company for life, but I’ve also experienced similar

things in Spain, and even in the UK we have some engineers who have spent

over forty years within the company.

It’s great because they can pass on their experience but there is also an

emotional attachment to the company as well for them.

Of course, the beauty of being a technology conglomerate is that you can

offer opportunities outside of your current career paths. Whilst we can offer

a straight path of becoming an engineer, then becoming a supervisor onto a

branch manager - but if you want to move into a different part of the business,

or a different location that is fine you can do that with us - and this is what

we try to offer - people the option to move across the world, across different

industries but within the same company - because then we have people who

stay with us for life.

We try to encourage thinking beyond the traditional career ladder because the

new generation is much more interested to see what is out there. They want

to do more and this is what we have to offer. It’s not for everyone and that

is fine, but having the ability to offer different routes of progression makes a

tremendous difference.

Kris Oldland: It’s an interesting point and going back to the discussion of

Millennials, there are some interesting statistics about them being the first

generation ever that values their work life balance and embrace a set of

broader challenges more than they do financial remuneration.

Robin Bryant: We have perhaps the same approach from an opposite

perspective. Because we are not a big corporation we can be flexible. If

someone wants to move to a different part of the business then we can do that.

If someone needs to be off long-term sick we can decide if to look after them

based on a perhaps slightly more personal approach, which can help in those

types of decisions. So there are benefits to working for a smaller company also

and a lot of our people see that and we also have staff that have been with us

for forty years or more.

We are putting things in place to try to keep engineers as engineers but we are

giving them standards and having different levels because quite often the best

engineers are not the best suited people to be the best supervisors. Often they

are absolute perfectionists and all of a sudden they are looking after 20 people

they are not able to cope with that - they have to overcome a different type of

challenge of not being able just go out and fix everything themselves - having to

manage others, having to supervise and delegate is a very different skill-set.

Kris Oldland: It’s a very valid point - not all engineers make great managers do

they?

Vasu Guruswamy: It really does just depend on the individual. Engineers as

generally are very technical people, so no, many will not necessarily have the

right attributes...

Keith Wilkinson: I think that is true, not all engineers will make great managers

- I which is also true across any industry and any profession. You have to put

frameworks, investments and mentoring in place because actually it is an

emotional change that an individual goes through.

To echo Robin’s point, the reward system that they work in as an engineer is

that they get great value and self-satisfaction from fixing things and seeing it

is them that brings all the expertise and value to the customer. Moving to a

leadership role you’ve got to almost distance yourself from that and it is about

how you empower your team to be successful.

That is very much an emotional shift in perspective and people need coaching

through that journey and this is perhaps an area of investment that a lot of

companies neglect to identify.

#CareerPaths - How important are strategic plans to offer engineers clear and well defined career progression?

Keith Wilkinson: When you have these engineers who have taken six months

as a minimum to on-board them how do you go about keeping them trained

and also keeping attrition rates low?

Obviously ,there is the flip side of things which is that you’ve got to keep them

utilised and productive, so this would strike me as an interesting challenge?

Vasu Guruswamy: In our industry engineers are highly skilled, probably with

a masters degree, but at least a bachelors degree in subjects like Geology,

Engineering, Science subjects etc.

We have a two-tier program. Firstly, it takes three years for us to have an

engineer become fully independent in that we will send them alone in front of

the customer - and that is a very strict program. They attend training schools

that can go from eight to ten weeks. Then they will be working in the office and

have tasks to complete.

They will be mentored and tutored and there will be testing that all needs to be

signed off and there are a lot of certifications that they need to attain.

This lasts between three and four years, and if they haven’t made the grade

by this point then they will typically be let go. It is a lot of investment but it is

better to cut the losses at this point rather than have them struggle later. Up

to this point everything is very regulated, the individual has no say in how they

proceed. However, once they reach that point we reverse the message.

We say to them ‘you decide what you want to do.’ We give them that freedom

and part of that is because retention is a major challenge for us.

Also, whilst we are in the top 25% of employers in terms of remuneration, we

will never be able to compete with the likes of Shell or BP because we are a

services company whilst they are filling barrels.

But the pride and the adventure are things that we can offer. So it is only a

certain type of people that will stay with us for a long time. If money is the only

thing that matters to the individual I can guarantee that in four, five, six years in

they will leave because they can get better money elsewhere.

Even during the recruitment process we factor this in. In fact, for us retention

starts in recruiting the right profile of candidates.

Wilhelm Nehring: I’d go as far as saying that even if you are a large company

you really don’t want people to stay for money - because if the only reason they

work for you is because of the salary then something is wrong.

If you talk about that commitment, that pride, that joy for working with you - to

achieve that you have to offer more than just the best salary.

I think, whether we talk about large conglomerates or smaller companies both

of which we have represented in this room, the thing is whatever your company

size you need to be able to adopt an attitude that reflects both ends of the

spectrum. We have over 155,000 employees globally but we still talk about

individual human beings and if you break that down to countries your talking

about a group of smaller companies, with smaller workforces. .

You can run a big company as you would run a family business in terms of spirit.

In how you want people to be committed, how much you want people to be

engaged. This is very much how we approach things at thyssenkrupp. We want

people to be thyssenkrupp, not just people working for a big company.

I think that this is something that I believe young people expect much more

these days, they expect you to be much more on top of what’s going on in their

world.

It’s so important because that is what keeps people in your organisation.

If it’s just money then when a competitor comes in and offers them just a little

bit more you’ve lost them.

#EngineerRetention - How do we make sure our engineers don’t just leave our company once they become fully qualified?

About ClickSoftware:

Choose the Right Partner for Field Service Excellence - we are a company in the service of service.Field service and workforce management are facing a transformation. In an

increasingly connected, mobile, and customer-centric world, every service

provider competes not just within their industry, but with every positive service

interaction their customers have ever had. From Amazon to Zappos to Uber,

customers expect seamless, transparent, responsive service—and to be helped

in real-time.

The days of service being a necessary evil and a cost center are in the past.

Service operations are now a critical business function with potential for

supercharging revenue growth and strengthening customer loyalty. With

industry-leading technology, unparalleled field service expertise, a truly global

presence, and the largest market share, ClickSoftware is the ultimate partner in

customer-focused service organisations that have real work to do.

Technology That Outpaces the CompetitionIntelligent automation (our most powerful, unique differentiator) is deeply

embedded in everything we do; allowing for optimized decisions and execution

that will master every moment of the service chain With ClickSoftware, a new

order emerges as service moments are brilliantly organized into a cohesive

picture. Our solutions are available in the cloud or on premises, and our service

technology experts can help you bridge software and process in a way that

makes your people more empowered and efficient.

Effortlessly Deliver Exceptional Customer ExperiencesEvery service experience is made up of a series of moments. From the call

initiating service to measuring performance after the work is completed, every

decision has an impact on the perceived quality of service that your customer

receives.

ClickSoftware’s goal is to exceed expectations by eliminating friction and

frustration for both your techs and customers, from the moment a customer is

told exactly when their tech will show up, to the moment the job is successfully

completed and their tech pulls away. Each decision in the service chain that

leads to a positive outcome needs to be mastered; balancing customer service

with cost and convenience to the business.

With ClickSoftware you control every moment of the service delivery process,

superbly orchestrated into a winning experience for your customers.

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