For the first time ever, this year’s Service Management Expo was held at Excel in London. It joined a plethora of other events at Excel that week making it one of the largest exhibitions we’ve attended in recent years.
On day one, it would be fair to say that the team were a little nervous. The sheer size of the venue meant it took some time for the visitors to work their way through all the Halls. Eventually they did, and as a result the Zafire team met some great people and enjoyed a fantastic three day event.
Peter Duffield, Head of Sales for Zafire reflects back on the event, ‘there were several key themes evident throughout the majority of the conversations we had. These included the ability to manage the complexities of service management organisation, the need to deliver customer delight without breaking the bank and the increasing importance of ‘field service’ operations as a revenue generating business function.’
Peter concluded by saying, ‘the team worked extremely hard over the duration of the show and we returned back to Banbury with a list of high quality contacts and business opportunities.’
Expanding on the themes identified
1) Generating revenue ‘in the field’.
The first clear critical message that came across, and what appeared an essential requirement for all organisations regardless of size or operation, is providing field service engineers with the information, technology and underlying process to raise orders and generate sales on the ‘fly’ – creating a revenue generating business function.
2) Inherent agility and system flexibility to meet specific business needs.
Being able to adapt quickly to business change and meet the ‘exact needs of an organisation’ was an essential requirement voiced by most people we spoke to. Fed up with rigid fixed systems that can’t accommodate specific requirements and forced to change business processes, people we spoke to want technology to support and compliment the processes they have already identified as essential to their business and don’t want to change to fit the technology.
3) Delighting customers – more than a fluffy marketing phrase.
The idea that ‘delighting customers’ is merely a phrase the marketing department came up with for their latest campaign is a thing of the past. Service Management companies realise there is a real commercial benefit in monitoring and improving customer service across the board. From the face-to-face interaction with the field workforce and the telephone conversation with the ‘Service Desk’ through to quality and timeliness – doing this better – provides a real competitive advantage.
Whatever your core business, Smart 8.3 delivers an end-to-end, flexible, all-in-one integrated solution that works across your entire service organisation keeping you in complete control.
