I am just back from the 5^th Annual IQPC Remote Device Monitoring and Management Summit which took place in Nashville this week. What a great event it was!  I moderated the Best Practice Go-To-Market Strategies for Smart Services panel discussion and had a chance to speak with many of the attendees - all who were in different phases of their remote service initiatives.  

There were definitely some reoccurring themes, as well as some new topics, among the group. The reoccurring themes illustrated the challenges and opportunities of remote service - as well as the winning strategies of some of the early adopters. I have outlined some of the highlights here:

Challenges

• How to package and sell remote services
• How to train a product focused sales force to sell services
• Regulatory constraints across all industries and markets
• Nonexistent connectivity to some assets
• Customer adoption and acceptance continues to be difficult

Opportunities

• Integrating data collected via remote monitoring into the product design cycle for continual improvement.
• Integration of remote service into CRM backend for issue record generation, automated dispatching for field services, and customer entitlement checks.
• Leveraging remote services to a greater degree for perishable items - driving sales opportunities for consumable sales teams
• Increasing interest from their end users looking for assistance in asset auditing and management

Winning Strategies

• Stay away from developing your remote strategies in a silo, get executive buy in, as well as involvement from your internal Services, IT, and Product teams as early as possible.
• Get your end user's IT group involved as early as possible, as it will make customer acceptance easier.
• More companies illustrating their success utilizing Net Promoter Score (NPS) and how this is their key corporate measurement.  Critical success factor is listening more closely to the voice of the customer (VOC), and driving improvement based on their feedback.

Going Green!
Green initiatives were a hot topic as companies continue to focus on shrinking their carbon footprint. The most impactful quote came from Richard Walker of Siemens Building Technologies who stated "corporations need to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations".  Remote services support green initiatives in the form of:

• Remote preventative maintenance
• Additional predictive maintenance
• Energy management
• Avoidance of hyperinflation in the service economy due to surging fuel prices

It's clear in the Green evolution that the climate change argument is over (first step of knowing you have a problem is admitting you have a problem). It seems that companies that adopt a green "remote services" strategy will flourish, and the slow adopters will fall at the wayside.

There was another very compelling topic that came out of the conference, which I define as the Remote Services vs. the Human Touch Paradigm. I will Blog on that next week.  Until then!