Our latest webinar “Optimizing Service Processes: Enabling Uptime & Efficiency” , we featured Mark Hessinger, a global services business advisor with over 25 years of experience in industries like manufacturing, automotive, and aerospace. He shared insights on how businesses can use AI to drive value and a better customer experience.
Check out our key takeaways below or watch the recording on-demand here.
1. How do we help our teams?
Service teams in manufacturing face daily challenges—managing workloads, finding accurate information quickly, and keeping up with technical advancements. As Hessinger noted, “We put our employees under a lot of pressure to work faster, get more jobs done in a week get more customers visited, and they're also commenting that their work hours are too high.”
To improve customer experience and drive revenue, you need to give your field and support teams the tools they need to work efficiently. Happier and more engaged teams mean happier customers. One way to achieve this is through AI-powered field service tools.
2. Centralizing knowledge for faster, smarter service
Disconnected knowledge sources and complex workflows often slow response times and limit productivity. Manuals might be stored in PDFs, training videos buried in an online archive, and troubleshooting guides scattered across different applications. This fragmentation leaves technicians constantly hunting for information, wasting time that could be spent solving customer issues.
Service AIdvisor offers a solution by connecting these scattered resources, making it easy for technicians to find exactly what they need when they need it. "Using a tool such as AI, you can connect these sources and present the most relevant information to the user at their right point in time." Hessinger shared. By consolidating knowledge like manuals, technical bulletins, product catalogs, and training videos, Service AIdvisor gives your teams the right information at every decision point.
Imagine this: instead of flipping through endless PDFs or hunting for a video tutorial, technicians simply ask Service AIdvisor a question and instantly get the answer they need, along with a link to the specific page or timestamp in a video where the knowledge came from.
Whether it’s a wiring diagram or a two-minute instructional video, Service AIdvisor connects all your resources in one place, cutting down on search time and keeping your team efficient and ready.
Time spent looking for information is time wasted. By having knowledge at their fingertips, your technicians can focus more on solving problems and less on finding answers.
3. Workforce gaps and onboarding
Onboarding new technicians can be time-consuming and costly, especially in field service, where the learning curve can be steep. At the same time, many field service teams face workforce gaps due to high turnover, retirements, or difficulty in finding experienced technicians.
Service AIdvisor simplifies both onboarding and skill development by equipping new team members with on-demand, accurate knowledge that helps them feel confident and effective as they begin helping customers.
Service AIdvisor’s real-time guidance and verified answers mean technicians don’t have to rely on tech support or more senior colleagues for troubleshooting help. Instead, they can get specific error codes, diagrams, and step-by-step checklists through Service AIdvisor. This reduces onboarding time, cuts training costs, and improves overall team readiness.
Experienced technicians can also contribute their expertise to build a living knowledge base, capturing valuable insights for the entire team. This way, each new hire starts strong, backed by the team's collective knowledge.
4. Improving first-time rates and first-call resolution
First-time fix rates (FTFR) and first-call resolutions (FCR) are the gold standards in field service. Resolving issues on the first visit or call reduces costs, improves customer satisfaction, and lightens the workload for your team.
Many organizations are turning to AI to improve these metrics. In fact, the WBR’s AI in Field Service report found that 74% of respondents saw increased FTFRs after implementing AI.
During the webinar, we discussed how Service AIdvisor helps your agents and technicians resolve issues on the first attempt by offering AI-powered diagnostics and guidance tailored to each problem.
With Service AIdvisor, your technicians and agents have instant access to detailed job history, relevant error codes, and troubleshooting guides tailored to the particular issue. This level of preparation increases the likelihood of resolving issues on the first attempt, reducing the need for follow-ups and additional appointments.
By enabling your teams to handle a broader range of challenges independently, Service AIdvisor boosts productivity and helps them deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience.
Fewer repeat visits and faster issue resolution translate into happier customers and a more efficient service operation overall. Service AIdvisor equips your organization to tackle these challenges confidently, building trust and efficiency at every touchpoint.
5. Tools technicians actually want
Field service technicians want to focus on what they’re hired to do—solve problems and help customers. What they don’t want is to spend valuable time searching for information or navigating complicated tools.
"Our field technicians, what they like to do is what they’re employed to do. Solve problems, work with customers. What they like least is spending time looking for things and finding things to do their work.” Hessinger observed.
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According to the Service Council’s Voice of the Field Engineer 2024 Survey, live troubleshooting steps and quick access to videos for repair procedures are at the top of technicians' wish lists.
Service AIdvisor delivers on both these needs with instant AI-powered troubleshooting and video navigation down to specific timestamps, letting technicians jump straight to the content that addresses their issue. No more combing through unnecessary content—just fast, targeted help.
For technicians, Service AIdvisor becomes an AI-powered expert who’s there whenever they need it. Instead of pausing to search for solutions, a technician can ask Service AIdvisor about a specific issue, access prior visit notes, and pull up the exact troubleshooting procedure, even while en route to the next job.
Q/A
Why shouldn’t I just try to build a system like this with my internal development team versus buying or implementing a tool like something that Circuitry.ai offers?
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Mark Hessinger: I'm going to give you the reasons why I think buy is the right answer. I'll first give an example of when I introduced the IoT years ago. I started working with the build concept working with engineering, and the struggle I had was product management had their road map and their priorities, and we were not the high priority, and it just moved very slowly.
We also found that as we needed to do things that were industry norms, it was easier to eventually go with a buy solution because you could demonstrate they had all the right norms and had proven the security and everything. A similar thing applies to an AI solution. One is your return on investment because you don't have to assemble a team, develop the tool, test it, and then deploy it. Buying a tool puts you in a position where you can directly deploy it and start getting your ROI. And in an industry like AI, where things are now changing quite quickly, and the industry has been around longer than I've been around, just recently that there's a lot of supporting capabilities with computer power, it's really moving fast now.
I'd rather have a company that wakes up every morning wanting to make sure that their customers are happy and effective using the tool and that they're looking at how to extend the capabilities of a tool and keep building out what can be used with the technology. So, I think you'll get to your ROI faster, plus the continued development will be much richer in the buy scenario.
Nathan Tarpey: Totally agree, Mark; just to build on that, since we have the expertise in building out AI systems, we know how complex it is to build out these systems, how important it is to stay ahead of the curve in terms of making architectural decisions and really trying to stay on top of the latest and greatest advances in the AI space.
There's a lot of hype around AI, and tons of companies are trying to implement AI systems internally, but there's quite a high failure rate for internal builds, upwards of 80 % failure rates. So, it's very challenging, and just building up the business case and bringing something to market also takes a lot of time. By the time you build something internally and bring it to market, you could be completely obsolete. So that's, there's a lot of challenges with building internally.
How fast and what are the components of getting ROI out of AI systems or Circuitry.ai?
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NT: I would say our system helps you really achieve ROI quickly by, you know, driving time savings, reducing transactional costs, increasing first-time fixed rates, thanks to our AI-powered diagnostics and guidance, which allows technicians to resolve issues on the first visit, reduce repeat visits, improve customer satisfaction.
These improvements mean that you start seeing ROI within the first month. As labor costs decrease and service capacity grows without the need for additional staff. Over the course of the first year that you're using it, you'll really start to see that ROI pile up.
In addition, by automating routine tasks, Service AIdvisor really helps boost technician productivity while lowering the cost of each service interaction. The combination of faster repairs, higher productivity, and reduced costs quickly just makes that ROI number go up through the roof. You'll see improved productivity, reduced expenses, and, at the end of the day, enhanced customer loyalty as well.
MH: I'll just add to those examples that Nate gave and what I talked to earlier, I think it's important always to use those types of metrics, things that you can measure. There are broader things like customer retention, NPS scores, and all those things, but they're impacted by so many things. They will have a positive impact from this, but keep your ROI focused on the ones that you can actually measure and demonstrate so you can show your leadership. “Yes, we made a great decision, and we're making great progress.”
How do you ensure technicians will actually adopt and use this?
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NT: Great question. First of all, we take a lot of pride in our user experience, and we spend a lot of time and energy to craft a modern user experience with all the best practices that you probably have come to expect from using other popular tools online. So, we try to really work hard to make our tools very intuitive. That being said, the best and easiest tool to learn is something where you don't really need to learn much at all, right? You don't want to spend a lot of time learning a new tool; you want it to be as intuitive as possible. We've designed our system to slot in with your existing system, so it fits in right where you work naturally.
We can integrate with your text-based systems, WhatsApp, and Teams channel. We have a mobile app and a Chrome extension that can sit on the side of a web page so that you can work in the browser as normal with the Chrome extension sitting on the side. We can connect with your CRM system or any databases that you have seamlessly.
We're hoping it can become an invaluable tool that new employees use from day one to help get up to speed from a training perspective. You try it out; you grow as an employee with the tool because it's been an invaluable knowledge resource for you since your first day at the company.
And for veterans, a great time saver. They might be tired of calling tech support numbers and waiting on hold. Now, they have access to an advisor available 24 /7 with great answers. So, no more combing through long manuals, searching for multiple people to talk to, and no more lag time to get answers; you get answers right on your mobile phone, in voice mode, hands-free, and with multiple language support. It's a tool anyone can use in all sorts of flexible situations.
On top of that, managers will want to use this tool. Admins will want to use this tool because you can get a lot of insights from the dashboard to see from an analytical perspective who's been using it, look to incentivize your employees to use it more, and see how users are using it so that you can, stay ahead of trends and achieve improved KPIs like better first-time fix rates.
MH: I'll just add to that, so to ensure usage, one is during the selection and setup, involve your field, find a couple of those people in the field that the general field team looks up to, and that if they say this is good, they're going to say, okay, you know, that person says it's good, it's good we can use it because there's advocates out there that can help you move things forward.
Change management, implementing a technology like this is very important. I implemented AI a number of years ago, and the thing I learned was when you start with AI, everybody has a different perception of what you're expecting to get out of it. So, make sure your explanations are clear and you're setting the expectations and educating your organization on what you're going to achieve and what you're expecting to do with the tool. Good change management, and it's easy to deploy, easy to use, and then you'll be successful.
How does this knowledge application fit in with CRM and FSM systems, and where else can I use it?
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NT: In a word, seamlessly. We've set up our system to integrate with any number of external data sources for both input and output. It's something that, you know, when we get to know you, the customer, during the POV, proof of value process, we'll get to know how your employees work, what kind of systems they use on a day-to-day basis, and be able to design our implementation on top of and within those current systems so it's a true augmentative type of system.
That’s why we take pains to involve a wide variety of your team during that POV process. So not only can you get to know our systems, but we can get to know your systems, how people are using your systems and get buy-in from your team up and down the line .
I see the benefits for new and inexperienced engineers from the tool, but only them benefiting from the tool won't bring the 35% savings estimated. So how can experienced field engineers benefit from this tool?
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MH:The last place I worked was 3D Systems and I was told this person, that person, that person, they're the experts. They know everything. They don't need anything. Then, set up chat groups by technology, and you'll see that even your experts are asking questions. Depending on how broad your product portfolio is, there's a lot of things they need to know and be able to do, and not every issue comes up every day. One, getting to information quicker, which we talked about a few times, will benefit everybody in the organization. Yes, it will benefit to a higher level those with less experience, I agree with that. But even experienced people, if they can recall something quicker by using the tool, they'll gain some benefit as well.
NT: A lot of times, those experienced people are taking a lot of time out of their day to do training for new employees. And there's also all sorts of new products that are always coming down the line, so it can be hard for anyone, new or old, to keep up with the pace of change.
So, what's nice about the way we've designed our system is that veterans can stay up to date and they can free up more of their time to do the problem-solving work instead of answering questions from novices. They can even input their own expert answers right into the system and contribute to tribal knowledge that becomes an invaluable part of the knowledge source for posterity, which again is a reinforcing way of helping users new to the system to get trained up.
A lot of times, these veteran workers, too, are on the brink of retirement. So, we've seen lots of companies suffering from what they term as brain drain. And so, you as a company want to try to get ahead of that and not be playing catch up when a mass retirement event happens in your company.
How can I try this out and see if this system will bring value?
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NT: We've alluded to the POV program. It's a program where you can try out the product; we’ll set you up with a white glove experience so that you and your team can dive in and see the value with minimal time spent and minimal risk for your side. It's a highly structured program. Basically, we follow a long checklist. So you and your team can try out every single feature.
It'll be customized to your unique use cases to help you solve real-world business problems. We want you to try it out so that it feels real to you, get your veterans and new users alike to try it, and see the value for one and all. It's a free 30-day program that includes initial data loads, onboarding, and some standard integrations.
We're offering our POV customers 50 % off subscription fees for the first three months after the POV ends and a tiered volume-based subscription pricing model. For our partners, we have preferred pricing, a dedicated CSM, road map prioritization for the features that you are asking for, and premium support. We definitely encourage anyone who's interested to reach out.
Take the next step with Service AIdvisor
The challenges in field service are real, but with the right tools, your team can handle them head-on. Service Advisor reduces the time technicians spend looking for information by using your company’s knowledge and data to provide instant answers to technical questions. Whether troubleshooting an issue or finding the right part, Service AIdvisor helps technicians get answers fast, allowing them to focus on delivering effective service.
We’re sponsoring Field Service Connect 2024. Visit our booth to learn more, see a live demo, and discover how Service AIdvisor can make a difference in your team.
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