From Technician Blame to System Accountability: Rethinking Field Service Performance

This view is actively damaging. The real constraint on field service performance is rarely the individual technician; it is the slowest, weakest part of the service system, be that parts logistics, data quality, planning, processes, or customer readiness.

At Field Service Forum 2026 – Power of 50, Didier Martin, Director of Services at Nilfisk, explored how companies can achieve predictable, high-quality service outcomes by treating service as an end-to-end system whose performance is experienced entirely through the eyes of the customer.

From Product-Centric to Solution-Driven – Without Breaking the Culture

Nilfisk, a 120-year-old cleaning equipment manufacturer recently acquired by Germany’s Freudenberg Group, illustrates a shift many industrial companies are navigating: moving from a product-centric organisation to a solutions business driven by service.

The ambition is straightforward: move beyond selling vacuum cleaners, floor cleaners, and high-pressure washers, and instead provide cleaning uptime and outcomes across diverse environments, from retail to hospitals where cleaning is mission-critical.

The challenge is less straightforward. A century-old product organisation is built on engineering, manufacturing, and sales structures designed for units shipped, not availability delivered. Pushing service to the centre without understanding the company’s DNA risks internal resistance and operational disruption.

A key lesson emerging from practice is that large, abrupt changes in service models often create more rupture than results. Leaders who succeed in repositioning service tend to:

• Start by understanding the company’s existing DNA: how decisions are made, what is valued, what front-line autonomy looks like today.
• Make changes in small, visible steps rather than sweeping restructures; each step builds credibility and reduces organisational friction.
• Avoid importing best practices wholesale from previous employers; what worked in one service organisation rarely maps 1:1 onto another.

This disciplined, context-sensitive approach may feel slower than a radical redesign, but it is more likely to sustain the transition from product to solution orientation without triggering internal backlash that ultimately harms service quality.

Service Performance Is a Multiplication, Not an Addition

One of the most useful mental shifts for service leaders is to stop thinking of performance as the sum of individual contributions and instead treat it as a multiplication of interdependent factors.

Field service outcomes depend on at least four core elements:

• Technician capability and autonomy;  
• Spare parts availability;  
• Information quality (diagnostics, technical data, history);  
• Customer reality (access, availability, actual usage).

These are not additive. If any one element fails, the overall outcome collapses. A skilled technician cannot compensate indefinitely for missing parts, wrong data, or a customer who cannot grant access to the equipment. The best planning and stock strategy cannot recover from a technician without the right skills or authority to act on site.

Thinking in terms of multiplication reframes performance:

• First-time fix is not an individual KPI. It becomes a measure of system health – planning, parts, information, and customer coordination – not a scorecard for the technician.
• Hero behaviour becomes a warning sign. Technicians who constantly save the day by improvising around systemic failures are masking issues in logistics, processes, or data that will eventually scale into bigger problems.
• Investment decisions shift. Instead of asking to make technicians faster, leaders ask which element in the chain is currently the bottleneck.

The slowest, weakest department, not the highest performer, sets the pace of the entire service process.

Technicians Are the Face of the Company, Not the Problem

Across many industrial organisations, the technician is the person customers see most often. In some contracts, a technician might visit two or three times per year, while sales appears once every few years, if at all. For the customer, the technician is the brand.

Yet internally, technicians are frequently treated as the last link in the chain rather than a primary design constraint for how the service system should work. Three blind spots are common:

1. Misplaced accountability  

When response times or uptime targets are missed, companies default to criticising technicians instead of examining planning rules, parts strategies, or process complexity. Simplifying or redesigning those processes often creates more improvement than any form of individual performance management.

2. Insufficient autonomy and support  

Service organisations vary widely in how much autonomy they give technicians – from centralised planning and strict authorisation to technician-led scheduling and field decision-making. The problem is not one model versus the other; it is the mismatch between the autonomy technicians are expected to exercise and the tools, information, and support they actually receive.

3. Underused insight at the edge

Technicians see the reality of usage, conditions, and workarounds in a way that back-office staff never will. But they are often missing from system design, tool selection, or process redesign discussions. Many service transformations stall because they are built in meeting rooms with managers rather than in the field with the people who use the systems daily.

One emerging practice is for service leaders to spend regular full days in the field with technicians, not to audit them, but to observe workflow, friction, and customer interaction. The result is a more realistic understanding of what actually helps or hinders performance and a much more grounded basis for system changes.

Data Discipline: When Excel Becomes a Symptom

Most industrial manufacturers have invested heavily in ERP, CRM, and field service management platforms. Yet many still run critical parts of their service operation from Excel files.

The problem is not the spreadsheet itself; it is what it signals. When front-line teams revert to Excel, it often means:

• Core systems contain small but significant errors or gaps.  
• Data structures do not reflect how work is actually done.  
• The effort required to correct data in central systems feels higher than the perceived benefit.

This creates a dangerous loop. Poor data leads to poor decisions on planning, stocking, and resource allocation, which in turn reinforce the belief that systems cannot be trusted. Service then becomes dependent on individual workarounds instead of reliable, repeatable processes.

Breaking this cycle requires more than a data-cleansing exercise. It demands simplification: reducing the number of tools, harmonising key data points, and designing processes that minimise manual re-entry or parallel tracking. Without clean, usable data, any attempt to optimise service is guesswork.

Customer Experience as the Only Visible Outcome

Internally, companies focus on organisation charts, reporting lines, and system diagrams. Customers see only three things: how long it takes to restore operation, how often issues repeat, and how frustrating the experience feels.

Even sophisticated internal structures are invisible if they do not translate into:

• Shorter downtime and reliable appointment times;  
• Transparent explanations and training at the machine;  
• Consistent pricing and logistics performance.

Some manufacturers use Net Promoter Score (NPS) or similar measures to track this reality. Interestingly, customer comments often praise technicians while criticising price, logistics, or time-to-appointment. This indicates that technicians are doing their part, but structural elements around them are failing.

Another often-overlooked factor is customer readiness. If the customer is not available when the technician arrives, cannot grant quick access to the machine, or has frequent staff turnover among operators, even the best service organisation will struggle to hit its targets.

When companies manage to align technician capability, parts availability, data quality, and customer coordination, service shifts from something that feels random to something that feels predictable. That predictability is what customers buy, whether or not contracts explicitly name it.

Conclusion

When the system works, technicians stop fighting the organisation and start creating value.

Instead of chasing missing parts, fixing scheduling errors, or compensating for bad data, they can:

• Generate leads and commercial opportunities based on real usage;  
• Provide feedback on product robustness and design improvements; 
• Train users and reduce misuse that drives avoidable failures;  
• Act as a reliable, trusted face of the brand at the customer site.

For senior decision-makers, the priority is to stop treating technicians as the problem to be optimised and start treating them as the clearest indicator of system health. The bottleneck is almost always elsewhere – in process design, data, parts strategy, culture, or leadership attention.

Service excellence is less about heroics in the field and more about disciplined, often unglamorous work on the underlying system, guided not by internal charts, but by what the customer actually experiences.