As the North America Field Service Director for a $24B American provisioner of scientific instrumentation, I was responsible for a $25MM P&L and an organization of 150 associates. Upon entering the organization, there was a strong desire from other functions in the business to increase our reliance on Independent Service Organizations (ISO) and potentially eliminate our usage of the internal team. I took several actions to convince the organization to maintain a strong internal service organization. I first reviewed data with my team to determine the number of ISOs used, their performance, the number of calls being sent to them, and the nature of those calls.
Through our analysis, we determined that 68% of the calls from our largest product line were simple repairs. Our strategy would be to target this product line by cross-training Field Service Engineers servicing other product families in first responder training. Secondly, we would rationalize the number of ISOs we were using and remove them from our database so calls wouldn’t be sent to them. Third, I spent time meeting with key internal stakeholders across the organization to lay out our plan to gain buy-in. Through those actions, we were able to reduce the number of calls we sent to ISOs by 22% and deliver $795K in savings to the organization. We also improved our customer allegiance score as a result of eliminating poor performing ISOs and delivering a more consistent service.
