Schneider electric

After a large number of acquisitions in the last few years, Schneider Electric has merged more than 27 brands. They need to support and maintain a complex legacy customer base, servicing hundreds of distinct products and millions of assets across of all the companies they have acquired and providing superior service across the board. They want to deliver one, unified customer experience so their client will always receive the same excellent service.

Historically, the business was primarily focused on selling products, without as much tracking of where the products had been sold, and where service revenue was possible. They needed more knowledge about where their install base was.

Schneider Electric operates their business in 100 countries, giving empowerment and autonomy to local leaders to drive the service business. This empowerment is central to their strategy, and they wanted to balance local autonomy with improving consistency across the customer experience.

In the past, services were primarily focused on fixing customer issues, with the main driver being customer satisfaction, but the team also saw services as a fantastic opportunity for growth and profitability. They wanted to move their services team from a reactive, break-fix model into a growth engine.

They chose ServiceMax for its breadth of functionalities, because it fully and completely covers the end-to-end service delivery execution processes. At Schneider Electric, they have branded the ServiceMax platform, Bridgefield Services, a platform to enable growth, efficiency and customer satisfaction for the field service business.

A large part of the project was related to integration with ERP systems. Schneider Electric has created nearly 20 connectors that fully enable the replication of service contracts and work orders across the systems. Their ERPs platforms include a number of SAP systems, as well as an Oracle ERP. All of these are integrated with ServiceMax.

ServiceMax has been deployed in 80+ countries and is being used today by more than 8000 end users. They have 1000 sales specialists fully dedicated to service, more than 4000 field service technicians, 3000 users in customer care centers with access to install base knowledge and more than 8 million assets have been qualified to be monetized.

ServiceMax is the cornerstone platform to support functionalities for their technicians, sales and dispatcher teams. They use ServiceMax to manage their installed base which is the foundation of their field service business. They also manage their service contracts, work order management and leverage flexible mobile functionalities. Technicians have immediate access to the right product information while out in the field. Offline access has been key and multi-device support enables different teams who require compatibility across devices on Windows, Android, or iOS operating systems.

Within their strategy and plans for rolling out IoT solutions, Schneider Electric sees ServiceMax as a key enabler to integrate the world of connected products and connected offers with their field service business.

In the past two years, the Schneider Electric global team has seen impressive movement in their success metrics for the field service teams.

The digitalization of their service processes allowed them to eliminate 70% of paper-based processes.

They also seen the desired improvements in the team’s efficiency. They have seen significant improvement in scheduling times against SLA’s and improved considerably the skills management of their technicians with the ServiceMax Work Order functionality. And their first time fix rate is up by 3 points from their performance two years ago.

In terms of customer satisfaction, they have seen improvements on two different measures. First, they saw the overall customer Net Promoter Score improve by 3 points from their score two years ago. And beyond that, they saw an even bigger improvement for VIP customers, whose scores jumped 7 points in the same time period. They’ve also seen an increase in positive customer comments across their social media platforms.

In terms of growth, they observed an 8% increase in won opportunities year-to-date. This represents a 6% increase in additional business which is equivalent to +€500,000 increased revenue per month. Since their service transformation, they’ve vastly improved their install base knowledge, and are now tracking 8 million serviceable assets, 5 time the assets they were tracking at the start of their journey. In 2016, for instance they saw a huge revenue increase generated through capturing the installed base data and cross selling / upselling from that data and generated €65m additional won business.

The Service data they collect in ServiceMax touches almost every aspect of their business. It gives them valuable insights, not just for the service department, but also for their R&D, operations, sales, finance, and marketing teams, as well as their senior management team. They view this ‘Service Data Gravity’ as a strategic route to growth and advancing their customer service even further.