At the 2012 Google I/O conference, the big “reveal” was Google Glass. A team of Glass-wearing skydivers live streamed their descent toward the roof of the San Francisco Moscone center where the event was underway. It was an awe-inspiring stunt, but Google Glass flopped due to a buggy and ridiculous user experience, and the project was shuttered in 2015. Or was it?
The website for glass proclaimed “Thanks for exploring with us,” but it also offered hope for the future with “The journey doesn’t end here.” Of course, Google can waste money on pie-in-the-sky projects forever because they print so much pie-in-the-sky money with their AdWords platform. But what about the rest of us? When should we expect some breakthrough capability with smartglasses? And what would that look like anyway?
I actually think other technologies that were related to the first glasses experiments are going to dominate our attention, and that is probably a good thing. Smartglasses initially were a symbol for three separate and distinct technology advances:
A heads-up type display that removes the need for a display screen to be positioned in your field of view.
A hands-free user interface to be able to engage with an application to move the experience along without tapping on a screen or pecking a keyboard or zapping a barcode or whatever other input you choose.
A camera application to capture and share the imagery in your field of view.
Let’s start with number 3 first. I decided to do this blog post when I saw that Snap (the company behind Snapchat) just disclosed in an investor update that they are writing off about $40 million on Spectacles inventory they are not able to sell. In case you have not heard, Spectacles are the smartglasses that are integrated with Snapchat to give the user a hands-free camera application to share the imagery in their field of view with the Snapchat application. It flopped. But that is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that the glasses were $129 including the charging case. While not free, that is not bad for a first generation, new form factor camera with LED lighting, a power source, and the electronics for connecting to other devices. I think experiments like Spectacles are going to lead to a simpler form factor for a lightweight, high functioning camera that attaches to your glasses or the bill of your cap. It will simply be able to attach to whatever application you are running via Bluetooth or WiFi, and now you have a hands-free camera to snap images or stream video to applications running on your smartphone or tablet.
Item number 2, the hands-free user interface, is actually here today. It comes in two parts that everyone will quickly recognize. The first is the earpiece/microphone that we have all used or seen others use (Jawbone is a popular brand that has done well in the market). This allows you to give audible input to an application (likely running on your smartphone or tablet) and receive audio back from the application. The second part is Alexa (or Siri, pick your assistant). I think Alexa is actually going to be the game changer because Amazon is so good at productizing computing infrastructure for folks like ServiceTrade to incorporate in our applications. We also have experience with Google and Microsoft – there are good reasons why Amazon is the market leader by a pretty wide margin. I believe Alexa will be another example of their market-leading competence in this area. The applications you use will have an Alexa interface that enables the technician to move the workflow along by saying “Alexa, move the workflow along (as a proxy for whatever application option makes sense.)”
Item 1, the heads-up display, is the hard bit. Not because this is new or novel because pilots, for example, have been using heads-up displays in aircraft since the mid-90s. It is difficult because shrinking it to work in a miniature and mobile environment like a pair of glasses is a difficult piece of physics. The display only works correctly if the user can see the application interface in the same plane of focus as the other items of interest. If I understand what I have researched, it appears the approach being used by Google Glass is a near retina display. The image is projected directly onto the retina, so there is no issue with the depth of focus. The information is just “there” for the retina to absorb without refocusing on a “closer” screen display.
What Google Glass got wrong (in my humble opinion) was trying to introduce all three elements in a single device, while simultaneously assuming that the applications where we might use the technology were readily available. None of the technologies were significantly evolved to enable an “all in one” device to be successful. I am not a fan of “all in one” applications anyway, as I find they typically suck at most of the things they try to achieve for the sake of claiming a longer checklist of “features.”
Instead of the “all in one” that flopped for Google (although the physics breakthroughs they achieved with the display are impressive), I believe you will begin to see small changes sneak up on you. It is easy to imagine someone with a Bluetooth Jawbone and a visor-mounted camera collaborating via Facetime with a remote colleague. There’s nothing extraordinary here because all of the technology is well developed already. I can also imagine a technician setting up their tablet beside a piece of equipment and asking Alexa to play and pause and rewind a recorded video of how to repair a complex piece of equipment – hands-free with an interactive application that we already use every day.
There is a phrase in my industry called the “consumerization of IT.” Basically, this phrase means that the end-user consumer applications for new technology will generally lead the market before the commercial applications become available. Seems counterintuitive until you realize that consumer spending makes up 70% of the US economy. It just makes sense that the titans of technology such as Amazon, Apple, and Google, would focus their research and development dollars to address the biggest available market. If you want to experiment with things that likely will work to improve your commercial application, don’t look for some big breakthrough from a wildly new and different application. Instead, focus on the commercials that you see during the holidays that demonstrate how you can display an eggnog recipe and play holiday music by commanding Alexa to do so. Pay attention to the display of best-selling gadgets at Best Buy from companies like Jawbone that connect to applications on your phone. Then go play around in the context of your work for customers and find innovative ways to put these consumer breakthroughs to work for the benefit of your customers and your company.
Southwest Airlines Figured Out How to Deploy 14,000 Devices So You Don’t Have To
I had not thought about how much our service contracting customers have in common with Southwest Airlines until I read an article about the airline issuing iPad Minis to flight attendants to streamline operations. Ok, so their territory is pretty big. And they have quite a fleet to manage. But they offer recurring services, and their scheduling is pretty important! I’m mostly joking here, but the article is definitely worth reading.
Southwest is deploying 14,000 iPad Minis for customer service and to trim costs. Their first change is going paperless with its 700-page flight attendant manual. They frequently print updated pages and distribute them to every flight attendant to update their manual. The FAA is regulating the process of going paperless, so they haven’t completely abandoned paper yet. This move will decrease their paper costs, ensure that the latest version of the manual is deployed to each device and employee, and save flight attendants from carrying around and replacing pages in a 700-page binder.
Customer service gains will come in the second part of the phased rollout, when they replace their current aging point-of-sale (POS) terminal for in-flight alcohol sales. The POS features aren’t expected until early 2017. Instead of maintaining a fleet of secondary devices for this specific purpose, iPads will become the POS device that’s centrally maintained by the airline.
How do you deploy 14,000 devices to people who are constantly in flight? Very carefully?? The article gives an interesting summary of the process they underwent with their partner Stratix to manage the deployment and ongoing device management.
What can service contractors take away from SWA’s deployment, even if they don’t have Southwest’s resources?
Find your ROI Mobile devices and applications enable a number of operational efficiencies and a great customer experience. If you find that going mobile or paperless solves one problem, look for others that you can tackle at the same time to improve your ROI. Southwest explains how this worked for them in the Field Technologies Online article.
Ensure adoption and sense of ownership Southwest had a modern, progressive, and I think the right attitude about sending 14,000 devices to its employees. They want flight attendants to feel like the device is theirs, and welcomes their personal use. Instead of requiring employees to have separate personal devices, this policy makes their work device a perk that they will appreciate it and care for.
Finally, acknowledge that a big change is a big change and accept that sometimes a rollout is best to happen in stages. I’m sure it’ll be frustrating for flight attendants to deal with carrying the iPad, binder, and a separate POS system for alcohol sales for a while, but it’s a first step that sets up future efficiencies and savings.
Team 360 Services was featured in a case study by the author of the Southwest Airlines article Brian Albright. Read “Dousing Field Service Inefficiency” from the March 2016 issue of Field Technologies Online to learn how Team 360 Services is using ServiceTrade to save time and lower costs across their service organization. A free account is required to read the full article.
Technology Tip: Move Photos from your Devices to Google Photos
How many photos are stored on your smartphone right now? I have 1,438 photos that take up 4.8 GB of storage space — but this is pretty low compared to some of the folks around ServiceTrade.
Carrying around more than 1,400 images is pretty painless — until it isn’t. Have you ever hit the storage wall where your device refuses to take one more photo or download one more app until you free up storage space? When that happens, you’re faced with deleting photos until you have the free space you need.
Google Photos is a great free solution for automatically syncing your photos to the cloud where they can be easily viewed, organized, and shared so you don’t have to keep them all on your smartphone.
Take Lots of Pictures
Service photos are one of your best customer engagement tools. Before and after pictures show that you did what you said you were going to do. Sharing before and after photos help customers see the value that you bring to their business. They also C.Y.A. in case there’s ever a question about that service call.
Also ask techs to take pictures of issues or items that need to be repaired. Online eQuotes that include photos of the issue, that are provided within 24 hours of the service call, and have an online approve button are approved 3-times the rate of emailed PDF quotes. Encourage your techs to take lots of pictures through every step of the job — then use them!
Benefits of Cloud Photo Storage
Google Photos will help you manage all those pictures by storing them in the cloud, and making them available to your office staff in an online interface. The ServiceTrade application will take care of this for you by automatically storing photos on the job record, in the app, in the cloud where your customers and the rest of your company can use them. If you aren’t using ServiceTrade, Google Photos will help.
With centralized photo backup, service companies can:
Securely store photos, and give you a choice to keep or delete the originals from techs’ devices
Automatically share photos across the team, without requiring any extra work after initial Google Photos setup
Easily organize service pictures in the web-based interface
Free up storage space on your devices, but retain control of what is deleted, and what is kept locally
To use Google Photos:
Download the Google Photos mobile app for iOS or Android, and choose either the free storage option for compressed images, or a paid option that allows for higher image quality.
Allow the Google Photos app to begin uploading your images. This could take a while depending on the number of photos you have and your wifi speed. My upload of 1,438 photos took about 4 hours on a slow wifi network.
Login to Google Photos at photos.google.com to see your photos and manage them through the web interface.
Choose who you might want to share photos with, like your family for personal photos or your office admin for work photos. You can set up special albums for sharing and choose who sees what.
Delete photos and videos that you no longer need to store on your device.
Once setup, photos and videos will continue to automatically sync to Google Photos.
Why Google Photos?
They’ve built in some fun and time-saving features. This blog post from Google will give you more detail than I’ll share here. Some of my favorites:
Searchable facial recognition. When I search for photos of mom, there she is!
Automatic albums. Google Photos is smart enough to scan your photos and group those that were taken in the same span of time, or at the same location together in an album. It’s not perfect. It had a hard time telling the difference between dogs and sheep and has them all in one album labeled “dogs,” but at least I know where my farm animal photos are – and that’s an improvement from them being mixed in with everything else.
Photo management is easier when you can view them on a larger screen and make better choices about which images to keep and which blurry photos can be deleted.
Google Photos isn’t the only option. Apple devices will sync to iCloud. All device types can sync to Dropbox. The strength of Google Photos’ features at its free price makes it a winner.
If you are a ServiceTrade customer, photos technicians take in the ServiceTrade mobile application are automatically stored in the ServiceTrade platform as part of the service record. When you create an after-service Service Link to send to the customer, you can click a button next to each photo to decide if it’s shown to the customer or hidden. Those photos are stored permanently, in the cloud, and can be recalled any time you or the customer need them. But even ServiceTrade users need help managing and storing their non-job photos, and Google Photos is good for that.
Who hoards the most images?
I did a quick survey around the office and found that my 1,438 photos is pretty modest by comparison.
Don’t Limit your Techs to Just One Tool – or Just One Mobile Application
If you’ve been reading our blog for a while (thank you, by the way), you’ve heard ServiceTrade advocate a connected IT ecosystem of business operations applications for your customer service, accounting, inventory, CRM, payroll, email marketing and online reviews. There are modern, mobile solutions for all of these needs that work within an integrated system.
A multi-software platform isn’t just for your office users, it applies to your field technicians, too.
Technicians and service managers perform several tasks throughout the day. It’s perfectly reasonable to use different applications to perform smartphone tasks the same way that they use different tools to perform the mechanical tasks of their service jobs.
If all you Have is a Hammer, the Whole World Looks Like a Nail
Each tool – whether a cloud-based application or a hand tool from the truck – is specifically built to do certain jobs. It’s no more realistic to expect a tech to open an access panel with a hammer than for them to update parts inventory in a customer service application. Neither scenario will be particularly successful.
The same is true of using an accounting platform or an ERP system for customer service. Your accounting system hammer will make customer service look like a financial transaction, not a planned customer experience.
Make it Easy for Users
Smartphone users are already used to using different mobile applications to perform different tasks. As Billy said back in August, his smartphone has several pages of applications installed. It’s no more realistic to expect a technician to login to a single application for everything they do in a day than it is to expect you to call your spouse through the calculator app.
A mobile application that serves a specific business function will do those functions well. Dedicated applications are more efficient and give a better user experience for field and office users.
You don’t have one big application button on your phone. You may think that having techs use just one app saves them time, but efficiency gained by clicking just one button to start a large, cumbersome app is lost by the amount of time it takes to navigate and use it. You’re better off to have more agile tasks across multiple apps.
Smartphones Deserve Smart Apps
Whether you’re in the office or in the field, all-in-one solutions aren’t so much solutions as they are a weight on your shoulders that becomes more difficult to manage with the passage of time. Take advantage of the smartphones in your techs’ hands by loading them with a network of smart apps, too.
If you have been looking for an excuse to arm your field techs with smartphones, I am going to give you several in this blog post.
The goal of any business expenditure is to make your business more competitive by lowering costs, improving customer service, or increasing revenue. I believe an investment in smartphones for your technicians can do all three.
Lowering Cost The biggest cost to your business by far is the payroll expense for your technicians. The way to lower these costs with smartphones is to maximize billable hours relative to payroll hours. Simply put – deliver more jobs with less time spent planning, reporting, and traveling. The smartphone features (coupled with the ServiceTrade app) that help deliver more jobs are:
GPS Time Clock – when you know where your technicians are working and their status (en route, onsite, job prep), you don’t have to call them (and waste time) asking for updates. When they know you know, they will also act differently. Everyone performs better with management oversight.
Job Planning and Dispatch – when job details arrive in the palm of their hand, techs don’t have to waste time talking to the office, taking notes, or traveling to a place to print paperwork.
Map Based Planning – when techs can plan their route using a map displaying all of their work, they will travel less and bill more.
Faster Paperwork – when the paperwork is printed with all the customer details pre-filled, and the job report is delivered instantly back to the office using the phone as a mobile scanner, techs don’t waste cycles (or lose paperwork) delivering it back to the office.
Less Paperwork – when job notes can be entered onto the ServiceTrade job record using the camera and the audio recorder on the phone, the techs spend less time writing out notes and talking with the office to explain their cryptic, bad handwriting from a job two weeks ago. The report is fast, detailed, and “in living color” for both the office and the customer.
The smartphone lowers technician costs by improving accountability, streamlining reporting, and optimizing the job plan.
Improving Customer Service Great customer service is all about better and faster information (assuming of course that work quality is a given). Smartphones coupled with ServiceTrade get you and your customers better and faster information through many of the same capabilities that lower cost:
GPS Time Clock – when you and your customers know where the technicians are, it saves effort associated with calling and verifying. Good status information makes everyone more comfortable with the plan.
Better Job Reports – online job records with job photos and audio memos from the smartphone give the impression of thoroughness, and it establishes trust.
Job Planning and Dispatch – when technicians have location service history in the palm of their hand along with job details in the form of customer preferences and logistics, problems are diagnosed faster with fewer foul ups.
Map Based Planning – when you know where every tech is located and their job status at a single glance (based upon the GPS job clock), you can make dispatch decisions while the customer is still on the phone instead of calling them back after you play tech update bingo by calling and interrupting every job.
The smartphone improves customer service capability by giving everyone – the customer, the dispatcher, the tech – faster and better information about the job from start to finish.
Increasing Revenue Higher revenue comes from selling more jobs and delivering more jobs. We already reviewed how to deliver more jobs through tech productivity, so let’s talk about selling more jobs. If we again assume quality of work product is a given, then the selling edge goes to the company that builds more trust with the customer. Here’s how you build trust with the smartphone:
GPS Job Clock – sounds like a broken record, but showing the customer via GPS records when technicians arrive and depart builds trust in your billing.
Better Job Reports – the best sales lead in the world sounds like “I have some photos of broken equipment that were taken yesterday at your site. Take a look at them online, and let me know if the quote I provided to fix it is acceptable.” Quotes with photos (or video) get approved twice as often as those without.
Technician Professionalism – when customers see the technician as informed and armed with technology to provide a better job outcome and report, they trust that he is part of an organization that invests in their people and their customers.
So now you have the excuse and justification you needed to do something you wanted to do anyway – arm your technicians with smartphones. Just by themselves, smartphones would probably be a good investment. But coupled with the ServiceTrade mobile and cloud app, they are definitely a homerun for your business. Have a look at this quick video to see more, or jump right into a ServiceTrade free trial. We will help you get the most from your smartphone investment.
