Uber-like Software Is Transforming the Facilities Management Industry [Podcast]

How is Uber-like software impacting the facilities management sector?  By bringing the latest technology to the inefficient facilities manager – commercial contractor relationship in similar ways that new apps are bridging the gap between those needing rides and those offering rides.

In a recent interview on the The CEO Show podcast, ServiceChannel’s CEO and facilities industry leader Tom Buiocchi discussed how he sees this new paradigm changing the facilities management industry and the business world in general over the next few years, and how facilities managers and others leaders from retail to restaurants can transform their own businesses.

As to what he’s seeing across the retail industry, Tom focused on the importance of brand uptime and a store’s customer experience.  “Folks with the best brand experience (what we call ‘brand uptime’) and brand vision are doing the best.  Brand consistency and being able to deliver on the brand promise seems to be the most compelling thing they have.”

In addition, an important question ServiceChannel clients are asking is what’s the purpose of their stores? What’s the experience they’re trying to provide?  “Many of our clients are not fighting the online trend but trying to embrace it.  They simply want their customers to experience the product or brand the best way possible.”

Tom highlighted how ServiceChannel is transforming the facilities management world with transparency and data through new technologies.  “We provide the data…we facilitate a much more transparent and modern interaction, and collaboration between the contractor and our customer.  With modern facilities software, our clients get to decide how they want to do business…and we give them the data to improve all the time.”

“Analytics and automation are two of the most important tools. Even in our industry, people look at proposals from contractors and approve or reject them based on the price or different parameters.

“If you’ve done 75 million transactions and recorded them, like we have at ServiceChannel, you should be able to use that data to predict whether you should accept that proposal or not and give you a recommendation with a probability that it will be successful, as opposed to you having to scan every word of that document,” Tom Buiocchi.  “Predictive analytics will be helping you make decisions that you do dozens of time a day, saving tremendous amounts of time.”

The ServiceChannel platform provides a very clear precise picture of what transactions have happened— in the past it was vague, remote, and unmeasurable. It allows you to save a tremendous amount of time by facilitating a much more transparent interaction between the customer and contractor.

ServiceChannel’s FM software allows you to:

• Find the right contractor at that location
• Make sure you can track their arrival at the store, activities at the store, and departure from the store
• Determine if the work was performed correctly the first time
• Understand the sales and delivery service
• Initiate a service work order instantly

As we’ve discussed previously, software is indeed “eating the world.”  Tom referenced that and added that “if you’re frustrated by your industry’s inefficiencies, there’s probably technology available to help you overcome those efficiencies, because the internet, the cloud and tons of relevant software are so accessible now.”

“ServiceChannel is like the Uber for the facilities management business, where it’s coming in and aggregating an entire industry.” Robert Reiss

To hear the full conversation on how ServiceChannel continues to deliver workplace innovation to the facilities management community, listen here.

About The CEO Show and Its Host

The CEO Show is a nationally syndicated weekly radio featuring 19-minute interviews with CEOs of major brands— especially those with exceptional customer and innovation models. Over the past 8 years Robert Reiss has conducted almost 500 in-depth interviews with CEOs on The CEO Show with Robert Reiss. The CEO Show is expanded in Reiss’s monthly column at Forbes.com. Reiss’s work with CEOs was featured on Squawk Box and in the Harvard Business Review, in which Reiss was cited as an “expert in executive communications.”