Remote Service Applications for Professional Services: Better Margins at a Fraction of the Cost

When you are offering professional services to a variety of clients that includes both large companies and small with a mix of needs, the greatest challenge is balancing cost with availability. Clients expect that the relationship they have with their service consultants will be quick and responsive. They also expect that the consultant will be proactive, reaching out with useful information that applies to their product implementation and use. While this is a good way to nurture the relationship, it does impose a cost burden on the consulting manager, who has to balance relationship-building with allocating resources and maintaining profit margins.
The travel and lodging costs involved in sending service engineers on-site is borne by both the client and, often the service provider. Almost as critical as the cost of going to the client site is the billable utilization of service personnel who could be engaged in alternative customer service delivery, sharing more knowledge, and gaining more skills instead of physically traveling.
Managers of professional services teams are in a particularly tight spot. He or she has to weigh the resources available in the context of growing the business overall – taking on new clients means accepting a higher potential costs for the life of that relationship. Unless there is a way to provide effective service at an efficient cost, the need to be available to all clients imposes what is effectively a growth barrier. Remote service solutions fill this gap by giving the services manager the flexibility to handle more (and more complex) service requests via secure Internet.

HOW REMOTE APPLICATIONS BENEFIT SERVICE PROVIDERS
Dispatching individual service professionals to a client site is intimate and customerfriendly, but it is also expensive, and therefore doesn’t scale well to larger client bases. Remote service options are the best way to extend the abilities of service teams without incurring unnecessary costs or diminishing the quality of service.
Some of the key benefits professional services managers will accrue from adding remote services as a client option include:
- Faster and more profitable service delivery, which generates more revenue.
- Better staff performance in the form of outcome metrics (billable utilization and consulting/managed services revenue).
- Cost control improvements by restricting travel time and cost to client requests that truly need the presence of a qualified consultant onsite.
- Greater perceived value of service as a solution recognized by the customer – because it comes faster, more effectively, and without a loss of the “high touch” connection that customer’s value.
- The ability for a service providers to grow according to their own plans, including over a much wider geographic footprint (i.e., globally), without adding overhead or unwieldy cost structures.
There is no doubt that the remote services environment is growing quickly. Frost & Sullivan’s research indicates that the total global revenue from web conferencing service in 2005 was $552.8 million, with an expected compound annual growth rate of 25.3 percent from 2005 to 2011. Web conferencing is just one example of the dramatic development of collaborative tools that include advanced remote services applications.

MORE, FASTER & BETTER
The key to better performance in a services deployment and implementation environment is understanding where and how the remote application will deliver its ROI. Remote solutions don’t replace the expertise of live onsite service experts – but they do extend the reach that those trained professionals have to provide most of the benefits of onsite service from a distance. In most cases, first payback comes in the form of rapid application deployment and a very minimal ramp up period during which Professional Services personnel are trained on the remote system.
Further payback gets locked in through reduced travel and lodging costs, as well as through the accelerated timeframe in which clients can be nurtured.
This creates a virtuous feedback loop in which service personnel are both improving their own billable utilization and the client experience. This further primes the client for the potential of adding more services to their contracts as they get comfortable with the idea that trading speed for intimacy is not a compromise.