Inside Technology Services

At TSIA, we are dedicated to helping services organizations both large and small grow and advance in the technology industry. We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome our newest members, as well as acknowledge companies already a part of the TSIA community who have recently expanded their membership to include additional service disciplines TSIA has to offer. Here’s a little bit about each company, in their own words.

Providing customer outcomes should be a top priority for today’s support organizations. It’s no longer enough to keep a technical asset up and running, but there is now the added expectation to help customers solve their business challenges and deliver measurable ROI. To meet changing customer demands, it is our responsibility as support services organizations to make sure our personnel fully understand their new role in today’s world and equip them with the tools and training they’ll need to maintain and increase customer loyalty and revenue.

Ten years ago when you asked a professional services (PS) executive what tool they used to manage PS resources, projects, and billables, the answer was almost always the same: spreadsheets. Professional services automation, or PSA, was just being introduced a decade ago, and while it took a few years for PS organizations to realize the benefits of automation, today questions about selecting PSA platforms have become my most frequent inquiry topic from TSIA members. In this blog post, I will share the information I provide to members in these inquiries, and hopefully give you a head start on your next PSA implementation!

'Tis the season of giving, and today our gift to you is the tenth day of our annual 12 Days of Insights blog series. Enjoy!

At TSIA, we talk a great deal about data. We have frameworks, case studies, and lots of conversations with our members about how to leverage big data assets. During these conversations, I walk our members through a succession of questions, starting with their goals, current plans, and progressing through to their data assets and analytic capabilities. In many conversations, members inform me that they have limited, or no, access to rich customer data. In particular, they have no line of sight into how their customers are leveraging their products and/or services. 

'Tis the season of giving, and today our gift to you is the ninth day of our annual 12 Days of Insights blog series. Enjoy!

If there was any doubt that the technology industry is undergoing a major transformation, this year has produced even more compelling evidence that we are nearing the end of the first great era of tech. There are no tea leaves involved here; the story is playing out in the publicly reported financial data from traditional technology companies. Collectively, tech company revenues have declined steeply in 2015, with tens of billions of dollars coming off the table quarter after quarter.

'Tis the season of giving, and today our gift to you is the eighth day of our annual 12 Days of Insights blog series. Enjoy!

It’s commonly thought that professional services for X-as-a-Service (XaaS) is different from professional services (PS) inside of traditional companies. But just how true is that statement? In this year’s “State of Professional Services” white paper, we concluded that 2014 had been a banner year for technology professional services organizations, with the prospects for 2015 being generally very good for the following reasons:

• Generally improving professional services fundamentals
• Better utilization, revenue per consultant, growth rates, and profitability
• Better fundamentals regardless of peer group
• Strong performance in the XaaS peer group

The last point is especially significant, considering all of the conventional wisdom about services business models for XaaS and SaaS that suggests SaaS professional services is “not supposed to make money.” Not to mention the fact that settling on the right services operating and financial models for XaaS isn’t exactly easy. However, the accumulating evidence to the contrary is pretty clear and stands in stark contrast to these assumptions, In fact, more and more professional services leaders are figuring out how to grow revenues and make money alongside a shifting product consumption model. 

'Tis the season of giving, and today our gift to you is the seventh day of our annual 12 Days of Insights blog series. Enjoy!

Manufacturers of industrial equipment, components, and instruments have, on average, a service revenue share of 30%, which has been stable over the last two years. This has been shown by the results of TSIA's Industrial 30 index, which analyzes the quarterly reports of 30 industrial manufacturers reporting their service revenues. 

We’ve found that the service revenue share was stable during five quarters of revenue growth, and it is still stable after two quarters of shrinking revenues of 7%, as compared to last year. This shows that a huge part of services in industrial equipment are product-attached. Fewer product sales mean fewer implementations, lower product utilization by customers means fewer repairs, and customers under pressure even reduces support levels. Some services, like calibration or mission-critical support, are stable.

Editor's Note 4/11/2018: For the most current information on bridging the gap between Sales and Services, read the blog post, "Touchpoint Calculus: Why Sales Can't Do it for Themselves," by TSIA's vice president of expand selling research, Steve Frost.

I was recently on a call with a TSIA member executive regarding possible membership in our rapidly growing Expand Selling (ExS) discipline. We were discussing the need for many functions, most notably sales and services, to all be at the table to make expand selling initiatives a success. TSIA refers to this as building a “customer growth team” that spans all customer-touching functions, as well as services engineering/R&D and finance.

This executive, who was accountable for field operations and direct sales, among other responsibilities, commented that he is working on expand selling efforts, but cannot get his services counterpart to engage with him on some of the initiatives we discussed. When I asked why the lack of engagement, he commented, “Because he is too busy trying to hit his services revenue numbers that he is currently missing.”

The long-running, oft-worshipped, and rarely questioned organizational business structure of Sales and Post-Sales is sick and overdue for some tough medicine. For years, there have been ample talks and thousands of articles written about the dysfunction of Sales and Marketing, but an even bigger argument can be made that the graver threat to a company is what isn’t working between the two major organizations, Sales and Post-Sales, that (sadly) often meet only at that line in the contract where the customer signs.

When it comes to getting customers to renew their subscription with your XaaS offer, does your current renewal engagement model consist of managed handoffs between your internal teams, or is it total chaos? (Tweet this!) In the recent TSIA SRG Cloud Benchmark Study, we aimed to find out how top companies in the technology services industry are structuring their subscription renewal process, as well as get a detailed look at which metrics they’re using to track their success. 

'Tis the season of giving, and today our gift to you is the third day of our annual 12 Days of Insights blog series. Enjoy!

At TSIA, we work with hundreds of tech companies of all sizes and market segments to help them stay on top of emerging industry trends. According to a 2014 poll of our members, over 70% of them have either launched or are developing a managed services business. However, as these tech leaders start to embrace managed services, they learn very quickly how daunting and different these business models are from hardware, software, and traditional services such as professional, support, and field services.

The world of managed services is rapidly evolving. Though many of the value propositions remain, such as total cost of ownership (TCO) reduction, risk aversion, acceleration of the adoption of next gen tech, etc., there has been a tremendous amount of focus on standardization of the offer, specialization of sales, scalability and automation of delivery, and optimization of client governance.

So how do you know where to start when building your own managed services business? In this post, I’ll discuss a seven-step approach you need to consider as you begin the journey. 

One of the inquiries that TSIA is getting more and more frequently from its Education Services (ES) membership is, “How can education services help drive adoption?” (Tweet this!) To answer this question, let’s start with a definition of adoption. Adoption, in its simplest form, is getting a customer to use the product more, whether it’s a technology product, education product, or both. 

Employee attrition is a key field service metric with growing importance. This is due to a number of factors, such as talent wars starting to heat up as field service engineers near retirement age, significant commitment to training, and positive hiring trends due to both growth and replacements.

When it comes to attrition, companies typically lose employees that are performing well and that they can ill afford to lose. That’s why a view of voluntary attrition is critical.

At TSIA, we are dedicated to helping services organizations both large and small grow and advance in the technology industry. We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome our newest members from November, as well as acknowledge companies already a part of the TSIA community who have recently expanded their membership to include additional service disciplines TSIA has to offer. Here’s a little bit about each company, in their own words.

Over the last decade, social support has gone from bleeding edge, to pacesetter practice, to what is almost standard operation procedure. TSIA defines social support as online customer communities or discussion forums, as well as interacting with customers using social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. To gather information on how companies are managing and staffing these programs, TSIA’s 5^th annual Social Support survey asks about channels offered, interaction volumes, service level agreements, and more.

I receive more questions about customer portals, i.e., the web self-service site, than just about anything else. It is a topic that continues to be top of mind with members, and at our recent TSW conference in Las Vegas, I had quite a few discussions with attendees about their customer portal journey, including some amazing results, and unfortunately, some political, technical and financial challenges. To gather some of these thoughts together and answer some common questions surrounding how your organization can go about creating the ultimate customer portal, I’ll be discussing some key tips and tricks in this three-part blog series.