Xerox embraces innovation to transform service delivery for customers

Exceeding customer expectations
For its business customers, the public face of Xerox is its 6,000-strong worldwide team of Field Support Technicians.

With a long history of innovation, Xerox continuously strives to enhance the service its technicians provide, to maximize availability and performance of customers’ equipment, and the value it delivers to their businesses.

The company wanted to unify its two field support workforces, one serving small and mid-market customers and a second supporting larger enterprise organizations. Xerox was looking for digital solutions to unlock economies at scale so it could achieve consistency and flexibility across its entire field workforce with the aim to lower costs, reduce inefficiencies, increase uptime and shrink its carbon footprint.

Most of all, Xerox wanted to take customer service to another level, using leading-edge technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI), that would speed time to resolution and transform their customers’ experience.

Xerox also wanted to address another challenge. Many of its highly skilled and experienced employees were approaching the later stages of their careers and were due to retire within the next 12 to 36 months. Not only did Xerox need to replace these individuals, but it also needed to retain the knowledge and experience they possessed.

“We had to figure out a way to get early career employees excited about joining Xerox, while also upskilling them to meet our service standards,” explains Steven Bandrowczak, Chief Executive Officer at Xerox. “Many of the technicians leaving had 30 years of experience, so how could we empower a new employee with 30 days on the job to work at the same level?”

“The service industry is the last frontier for creating customer value. Technology has enhanced the customer experience, but service has lagged behind. We realized that if we could bring technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence into the service space, we could revolutionize the experience for our customers.” For customers this would mean greater uptime and faster issue resolution: helping to maintain business continuity.

ServiceNow provides the platform for transformational results
Xerox set its sights on digitizing its mobile workforce, and the foundation for that transformation was ServiceNow. “We felt that the combination of ServiceNow Field Service Management and Customer Service Management would allow us to be much more effective,” explains John Perry, Vice President Xerox Digital Experience for Service Delivery/Customer Service Technology.

The company deployed ServiceNow to overhaul its core processes including performance analytics to optimize field work, and process optimization to remove redundancies.

ServiceNow Field Service Management (FSM) is at the heart of it all. “With ServiceNow I can know right now precisely what’s going on. We can respond to situations as they occur and get better information more rapidly, and that’s had a huge impact on our business.” explains Perry.

“In the last year ServiceNow Field Service Management has helped to open up an extra 53 minutes of repair time in front of customers for each technician per-day. We’ve also reduced travel time by about seven minutes per journey.” Multiply those improvements across 3,000 mobile technicians and the impact is huge, for Xerox and its customers.

Bridging the skills gap
While ServiceNow provides the backbone of Xerox’s new field service management model, CareAR delivers — through augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence (AI) — live visual remote assistance and guidance support, to field technicians on customer sites. Seamlessly integrated within the ServiceNow workflow, CareAR technology enables and extends the ServiceNow remote Desk Agents’ and Experts’ ability — with visual context and instructional guidance — to collaborate and see what the on-site field tech or customer sees. This supports them in more accurately diagnosing issues, deflecting costly dispatches, and driving reductions in time sensitive resolutions, while also bridging the skill gap and accelerating knowledge transfer for new technicians.

“The combination of ServiceNow and CareAR technologies drives results that previously could only be imagined,” comments Sam Waicberg, President at CareAR. “Launched directly from ServiceNow’s FSM or CSM agent desktop, CareAR enables Desk Agents or Experts to easily collaborate and remotely diagnose and problem solve with clients or field techs onsite, via live visual AR from their mobile devices. In many cases, using the same AR collaboration toolset, they can then walk customers through troubleshooting and repair sequences, or send them a link to simple and intuitive self-solve AR instruction sets, ensuring a fast and accurate remote issue diagnosis.”

When the issue requires a new part or in-person technical expertise, a Xerox field technician can go onsite. The ServiceNow platform captures all relevant case and work order history, so the technician can get to work without wasting time on duplicated efforts. Technicians also benefit from AR support, with newer technicians benefiting from more experienced technicians’ guidance, when needed, remotely.

Faster resolutions, fewer miles
AI plays a key-role in accelerating ticket resolution. Drawing on real-time data from more than 3 million deployed devices integrated with FSM and Xerox AI tools, and using CareAR, technicians can take additional measures to proactively address issues that may arise in the future.

“More than half of our customers can now solve their problem at their first touchpoint with us,” explains Tony Kehl, Vice President, Delivery North America West. “We’re reducing the number of trips the technicians are having to take to visit the customer.” By reducing truck rolls, Xerox has cut its carbon emissions by 594 metric tons in just 12 months.

The AR guidance and AI-driven recommendations are proving invaluable in bringing new hires up to speed; even experienced team members are taking advantage of the new capabilities.

“The cost of second visits in any service organization is gigantic,” explains Ricardo Berrio, VP for Service Delivery in Latin America. “Can you imagine eliminating 50% of those! I truly believe that, together, ServiceNow and CareAR is a game changer in how we can improve overall service delivery, uptime, and the customer experience.”

As with any business, digital transformation is an ongoing process. In the near future, Xerox intends to expand its use of ServiceNow across Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, France and Italy: consolidating multiple customer relationship management (CRM) platforms into one and unlocking the same efficiencies across new regions.

Unlocking a new line of business
Although they have since expanded their investment to benefit from ServiceNow IT Service Management and ServiceNow Impact, Xerox initially partnered with the ServiceNow and CareAR ecosystem to address internal challenges. They quickly realized that the FSM and CSM solutions had the potential to disrupt the entire service industry.

As a result, the company decided to launch CareAR as a separate subsidiary along with an equity investment from ServiceNow. Today, the solution is being used to transform the service experience across organizations in manufacturing, telco, transportation, hospitality, healthcare, data centers, the airline industry, and more. Partnership and integration with ServiceNow is a key part of this expansion.

“Right now, somewhere there is a tech working to take care of a customer. We can bring the best expertise remotely, real time, to see and help resolve a problem,” concludes John Perry. “Using ServiceNow and CareAR we’re giving them access to the best information and expertise that we have.”

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