Leading ROW Field Operations at the Height of EV Infrastructure Growth

Ryan (Host): Thank you for joining us today, Claire [Ford]. It’s great to have you on the podcast where we’ll be talking about all things, field service operations. We like to start these chats just by understanding your professional journey, almost like an origin story. So you’ve led, you know, field operations, service teams, and after sales functions all across Europe.

Claire Ford: No worries. Okay.

Ryan: Companies right at the center of the EV and e-mobility movement. Now, what were your first steps getting into the field service operations? Like, where did this journey first begin for you?

Claire Ford: Yes. Yes. I actually joined the sales team in the UK for EVBox after some work that I’d done from a sustainability perspective in a world where Bunnings was in the UK. They’re no longer with us. And I moved over actually into EVBox under Jonathan Goose and the sales team there and primarily in operations for that point. Because it was at the start of the EV journey, I guess, in the UK, there was a small team, very much startup environment and so with that came not only sales operations but finance and support and everything else that goes along with that and pretty much moved through the company up through to the point where I was like director of sales operations for a minute. By default kind of thing as opposed to a career trajectory and then moved over into service and support and that’s very much where I became more involved in the after sales slash field service operations and then after a six year stint I think it was at EVBox we moved over to Neo. Bought in for NIO UK, Field Service. NIO haven’t launched yet in the UK, I’m sure they will at some stage, but in the meantime I was seconded to the European Maintenance Team and was lucky enough then to spend a lot of time trouncing around most of the Nordics actually, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, privileged enough to be working with the Field Service teams there to be a supporting function to make sure the maintenance was correct, that the SOPs were good and that they had everything that they needed to carry out that field work. When then I ultimately ended up at ABB where I’ve been happily managing the service teams for the UK and Germany ever late for the last year or so.

Ryan: Amazing. And was there a particular moment when it confirmed like, this is the right field for me, you know, I’m in the right place.

Claire Ford: Yeah, think, but definitely when I moved over to the dark side in EVBox, where of support, right? So I, very much an ability to fix problems. And I was doing that in sales operations. Any kind of operational work is always around fixing and solving issues and problem solving. And definitely when I moved over into support, you kind of, you’re like, these are my people.

Ryan: You.

Claire Ford: These are people that are very much in the mindset that it’s about getting it right and fixing it and understanding what the problem was and learning from it. That was definitely my hurrah moment, moving from sales into support.

Ryan: Amazing. And you mentioned you’re now field service manager for UK and Germany at AVB e-mobility. What does your day-to-day roles look like in that role?

Claire Ford: Mm-hmm. It’s really understanding and managing the needs of the team. So I have service coordinators, dispatchers, and then I have field service engineers. And that’s just managing and making sure that we’re using the resources properly, giving everybody the support that they need to be able to do their roles properly so that I then don’t have any issues with customers because everything’s running smoothly. I would feel the escalations and I very much am that point of contact for the other functions within the company. So from a finance perspective, if there’s any issues, invoicing, billing, kind of thing. And then also with the operations team when they’re producing purchase orders, things like that, I deal with that side of things. Then support. Supporting sales, understanding what their needs are, what the customer needs are and whether or not that’s deliverable. And that’s always a good relationship to have with the sales team is they have a very good understanding of what it is that they should be doing and what we should be doing and how we can help and support them with that. Because despite what everybody in the service and support believe, we wouldn’t actually be here without sales either. So it’s important that we collaborate with them as opposed to work against them.

Ryan: And that’s the dream, it? Having a smooth operations with no upset customers either.

Claire Ford: Yes, absolutely. I mean, there’s no such thing, right? There’s always going to be a problem. And that’s why there is field service and support. It’s just doing a good job of it. And I think very often times you’ll find that people will jump to that, had the worst time. And even down to if your mum has a bad experience in a shopping and a shop, she’ll tell everybody that she had that bad experience. But on the flip side of that, if you can then turn it around and give them a good experience, despite the fact they’ve had an issue, they will tell everybody that that you know yeah absolutely this didn’t work but it was fixed and it was done and I had all of these things resolved for me so very quickly and you know they were so helpful and polite and you know and I think that is the same across any kind of industry, EV or even you know your local Tesco shop. If you do a good job of it and you make people understand that you know their situation or their problem is valid and you want to help them fix it, that’s where you build relationships.

Ryan: And that positive review, that nice word of mouth, it’s so powerful.

Claire Ford: Yeah, absolutely. Especially in an industry like the EV industry, right? It’s still a small one. Everybody knows everybody here, so…

Ryan: So you mentioned UK and Germany there, you’re operations on both sides. Is there a challenge you being in a different country to managing operations? So in terms of communication or team building.

Claire Ford: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, well, I’m English, so as much as I’d like to speak other languages, we don’t. So there’s obviously always that concern that there is difficulties in terms of communication and things. But thankfully, everybody else in the world decided English was a language that they should all learn. So thankfully, I don’t really have any communication issues with the German team. They’re actually really great. And I remember to slow down when I’m talking to them because I can talk very quickly. Yes, no, absolutely.

Ryan: In an unpatronising way, I presume.

Claire Ford: I don’t use the, do you understand me voice? I just remember that I can speak very quickly. So try and curb that slightly. I think it’s all about building that relationship and those weekly calls, daily calls. And just open communication, being available and being open and quickly as well. And that’s the great thing about the world today is that even if someone’s working in Germany, doesn’t matter, I can speak to them and look at them in the face and have that conversation. And that I think that definitely has brought us on leaps and bounds in terms of being able to build bridges across those countries. I would suggest that I have very good friendships all over Europe with people that in some instances I’ve never met but would happily recommend and work with them on a daily basis if I could.

Ryan: Amazing. If we could just go back slightly. So you worked at EVBox, you’ve mentioned there, and that was during a period of growth for EVs and EV infrastructure. What did that period of growth look like for you and your team? Like, how did you go about managing that surge in installations, maintenance, customer requests?

Claire Ford: Yeah. Well, I mean exponential growth isn’t it and it’s that startup where you go from, I think I’ve said, I was employee 198 and by the time I left I think they were looking on 2,000 employees. So there was a lot of people and a lot of growth in the industry and which wasn’t necessarily easy to deal with and you know, you have a lot of 80% there and we’ll fix it to any the rest of the 20% and mistakes are made.

But I think that the great thing about the industry, especially at the beginning, is that there were very, it was very understanding. So in the beginning, there was a lot of understanding that this is new technology, and these are things that we’re learning and we’re growing. The general customer at that point was very much collaborative. They were happy to help us. You know, you be on the phone with a customer that was stuck outside or wherever else and you’d be like, okay, can you please try this? And they were very happy to help us and grow.

That has changed over the years. That’s definitely not something that you see anymore. We now live in an Amazon world where everything is delivered the next day. And if you don’t have it and everything must be now. Thankfully, I would suggest that most of the companies within this industry now have managed to catch up and we’ve got there and we’ve learnt very quickly from our mistakes and use them as a way to move forward and understand the customer needs. So, it’s not so bad now.

Ryan: Yeah, and all this was during COVID, you know, I mean, this was five years ago, I don’t want to hang too much on COVID.

Claire Ford: Yes. No, but a very difficult period, right? You had to build teams, had to build relationships with customers, you had to navigate all of the different PCR tests to be able to send someone over to another country so that they could fix these chargers. The team during that time, it was very difficult for a lot of people.

And I think we spent a lot of time engaging with everyone, making sure that they were not in that remote world. Because as much as we are all quite used to working remotely now and we’re all used to finding that balance. In the beginning, lots of people were very isolated. Rather than being in an office every day, some people were not seeing anyone at all. So it was very important for us during that period to have those daily touch points with people in the team.

And then just growing the team as well during that time. I think I moved from just a UK role to a European one. I had teams in Norway and in France and in the Netherlands and I’m actually really lucky and happy to say that those relationships built up so well that I’ve now got friends that visited the UK recently that I don’t work with anymore and we still connect.

So it’s not easy to build relationships during that time and there was a lot of trial and error. And there’s nothing worse than being asked to a 9 o’clock in the morning call when you’re working from home and you haven’t done your hair and your coffee and everything is everywhere. But we got very used to it very quickly and managed to really build those bonds by not forcing people into it, by encouraging people I think. Especially with engineers, to force them onto a call when they’re trying to be on site doesn’t work.

I think you’ve got to encourage them and actually rather than saying you must attend these meetings, it’s more about saying we have this touch point for you. You don’t have to join if you don’t want to, but it’s here if you need it. And actually when they need it, they’ll use it, right? But having a meeting for a meeting’s sake doesn’t work, in my opinion.

Ryan: Yeah, so I mean, you’re building teams remotely now as well. There’s a vast difference between when you were doing it during COVID and now. Would you say that experience you took from remote team building in COVID has led to how you go about team culture now?

Claire Ford: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s all the instant messaging now, it’s a lot easier. You don’t have to have a Zoom call every time you want to speak to someone. You can have that quick Teams chat. The team now, I would say, they can be very accessible. It’s not just a blank screen or a phone now. It’s very much that connection.

One of the things that I know I’m quite—I annoy people with it sometimes—but I kind of passively aggressively get people to turn their cameras on. And, you know, I’m happy to turn up in a call in the morning, no makeup, hair not done, but I’m turning on my camera so that you can see me. I think there’s a bit of a culture at the moment where people don’t, and you just have these initials. I discourage that.

I also make them do a quiz once a week which everybody just loves.

Ryan: Of course they all love it.

Claire Ford: It works, right? It’s a good thing to have a meeting with everyone and it not be, “this isn’t working, we need to get this done.” It’s a, “Hey everyone, it’s Friday, we’re going to do a quiz now and talk about what you’re up to at the weekend.” And actually it’s brought the team closer together as well.

They may all be in the same country, but oftentimes on other ends of it and they don’t see each other either. Then you have that connection and you understand, this is my teammate. You know, they said today that at the weekend they were doing this, or actually their mother’s not well, so they’re going to visit her. You then have an understanding of the people that you’re working with and that they’re actually people and not this annoying ‘deling deling deling’ Teams noise that is telling you to do something.

There’s a person behind it and I think that’s where you get the best out of people when everybody really understands everyone and you kind of go the extra mile for the person that you care about, because we’re human. It’s human nature to make that effort for people that you care about rather than someone that just keeps nagging at you. So I should learn that with my teenage sons.

Ryan: And it’s important. Obviously we’re talking a lot about remote team members. It’s also important to keep in touch with your onsite members, your back-office staff as well. Are you doing the same thing—checking in, doing team events weekly as you mentioned there?

Claire Ford: Yeah, yeah, no, actually. So the UK team have coordinators and we meet in the office at least once a week. Whenever our field service engineers are within a reasonable amount of travelling distance, I’ll take them with me to go and visit the team on site as well.

As part of my role, I have to do certain checks and SOTs and that kind of stuff. But it’s nice if I bring along the other people that are sending them on the jobs and sending them spare parts and do those kind of things. If they’re there with them on site and they get to see each other, not only do they see each other in general but they also see, “Okay, you know, they’re people and these are the drawbacks or the pitfalls of how this was delivered or how we’re doing this.”

That communication makes a difference and it always helps if I bring along some homemade baked goods because then everybody’s happy, we’ve all had a treat, and I’ve made that extra effort to be there for them. It takes 20 minutes to make a batch of cookies but the actual gesture means a lot, I think.

Ryan: Who doesn’t like homemade cookies either? Incredible.

Claire Ford: I mean, you know, to be fair, I’d prefer cheese, but that’s just me.

Ryan: Okay. We had a little chat yesterday. In that chat, you mentioned the real heroes in field operations are spare parts, logistics, and back office, which I just really like. How do you make sure those unsung heroes feel recognised?

Claire Ford: I think it’s… You mention it, right? You make sure that whenever someone has gone the extra mile for you or the anecdotal, “Oh, it’s always this problem or that problem,” you say, “Well, no, actually, everything was on site as it needed to be and there wasn’t an issue at all with that.”

I think we very much got into the mindset that a lot of these things were not working or didn’t work. And actually, more and more often now it’s not the case. So I like to try and have that conversation or bring that to the forefront whenever something good happens.

Let me be clear, the field service engineers are also the unsung heroes—please don’t quote me otherwise! But there are people that work in the back office and without them, we can’t perform any good service work. Without that part being delivered on site with the help of the courier, or that person that made that phone call and made it happen, or that person that wandered down to the warehouse and helped us out and picked something we didn’t think we had—these all make the difference.

You also have people working in the background to make sure stock levels are correct, parts are there, and that they’re pre-ordering and planning ahead. I think that often goes forgotten and that’s a shame, because they work super hard. There’s been a lot of change, and you have to be agile, especially in parts and logistics—you can’t predict everything, so they have to plan for worst-case scenarios without overloading warehouses and people.

Ryan: Yeah, yeah, of course. So I just wanted to take it back again. So after EVBox, you became operations leads at NIO UK, which you’ve mentioned. I found fascinating there, you’re working on a battery swap out system. So that shift from charging infrastructure to rapid battery exchange, that must have been quite a big shift for you in terms of operations.

Claire Ford: Yes. Yes. I—You think but no, not really. I mean, you’re either charging a battery or charging a car. And the field service teams are very much, it’s a bigger structure. I got to geek out a lot of the technology of how the batteries are viewed and, you know, whenever a car swap happened, it was always quite very—it was very novel, especially in the beginning, because, you know, you’re seeing this car being lifted up and a battery being removed from underneath the car and pushed back in again.

And then you get actually to see how the cells work in the battery and you know, is everything working very well? And the type of software that they have actually to monitor those batteries is way more evolved than I ever really thought it would be. So pleasantly surprised to see that. And then the cars are fantastic.

But you know, the operating model in terms of the maintenance is very much the same kind of concept as it would be for any other engineering type work. It’s the, here is the machine, here is how it works, these are the things that you need to do and it’s just the same with a charger as it is with a swap station.

You know, have these things that you must do as a part of your preventative maintenance and then you have things that you have to do because you know it’s failed or it’s not working. The parts are a bit bigger for a swap station, but for us slightly more difficult because where’s the experience—especially in Europe—the first swap stations were not that long ago built in Norway to start off with. So there’s lots of learning to be done and training to be done.

Whereas actually in EV, it’s slightly more established so there’s more people with more experience with it. But from a mechanical perspective there was definitely more moving parts in the swap stations but essentially it’s, make sure you’ve got your service parts, make sure that you understand what the PPMs are for that and just business as usual really with those. Absolutely.

Ryan: Fundamentals was already there. Yeah. So you’ve touched on this—service managers wear multiple hats, particularly the positions you’ve taken up. Without the right, I’d say, digital tools, I’m guessing that can become quite overwhelming at times. You know, a lot of things to keep on top of, a lot of things to manage. What tools or systems have you found to be most effective for managing things like work?

Claire Ford: Yes.

Ryan: You know, allocating engineers, tracking spare parts, scheduling maintenance.

Claire Ford: Yeah. I’ve, and actually across most of the companies that I’ve worked with, we’ve done the usual integration. So moving from Excel into Salesforce or all the other different CRMs that we’ve used in the past. I think they’re integral to being able to really deliver, to be able to pull those reports to understand how fast we’re moving in terms of meeting our SLAs and hitting work kind of thing.

Salesforce, Lightning App, all of those things—it has changed the game, I guess. Rather than sending a text message to an engineer or, you know, having a phone call or an email thread, you’ve got everything within one system. You can really then understand where your guys are and how well you’re utilising not only your engineers, but also partners.

Not everyone can do everything internally and you have to be able to then manage, engage how your partners are working. And I think these systems make a massive difference and what a difference it is to sharing a spreadsheet on Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to being able to then really see it within the system.

It has made a massive difference. It really has helped us understand what parts we’re using, helped us understand how long it takes for us to even—how long interventions take for one particular type of part, how long does it take us to change that part? All of these integrations within these systems have helped us understand that more and it just keeps actually improving.

I’m not a massively techie person, but actually the systems that we’re using, especially in my current role, are making a massive difference to being able to make us more agile and really understand the customer needs but also parts, logistics and partners.

Ryan: And system integrations can be quite hit and miss sometimes, just from the conversations I’ve had with customers. So looking back at your past integrations, once you’ve been a part of, is there any big learning points that you can take for them? Or is there anything you could do differently, any advice you would give on that?

Claire Ford: Mm-hmm. I’ve been involved in a couple of integrations. I think the one that I’ve learned the most from was when I was at EVBox and we integrated from Xact into SAP and then from SAP to the connection between Salesforce.

Never underestimate the amount of work that that creates. I think it’s really, really important that data is clean, that the information that you’re integrating into the new system is actually relevant. Don’t pressure the people that are already working hard to then take on that project. It’s really important, I think, to have a dedicated team that works towards that integration.

You often think, you know, you’re just going to transfer from one to the other. It’s not that at all. And you really do need to make sure that you have the resource there and the support for that resource as well. A really good ticketing system helps. And just really understanding what it is that you need.

I would say don’t—what’s a good word of reference—Frankenstein it out. So use it for what it was designed for, don’t use it for anything else. I think it’s been designed by people that know better than us, so use it for what it was designed for. And if it’s not right then have those conversations with those software partners and say these are the things that we need and this is how we would really like it to work, and then they can guide you with that.

So that would be my overall advice on those things. And I’m not—we’ve done a lot of those integrations.

Ryan: I might take that saying “Frankenstein it out.” Yeah, I quite like that. Very good. So obviously, yeah, it’s on our minds. It’s on our minds. Obviously, it’s so important in EV infrastructure, the dependency on uptime, preventive and predictive maintenance. I feel like we can’t talk about tools without mentioning artificial intelligence, AI tools that are coming on board.

During our conversations with customers, we don’t really see a massive uptake at the minute in AI adoptions, particularly for operational tasks. Is that similar to you guys at ABB? Do you currently use any AI tools? Is there any you’re thinking about using?

Claire Ford: Well, to be honest with you, I’m not that well into what it is that we’re using at the moment in terms of AI. I don’t use it particularly in my role at the moment. I’m sure that if it is something, ABB will jump on it. But at the moment, it’s not something that I’m very aware of within what we’re using.

But these add-ons very quickly become integrated and all of a sudden, you know, ChatGPT two years ago was something that people—it was just a thing, right? That people were mentioning and everyone was like, “What is this chat, du?” Like nobody really understood what it was and no one knew ChatGPT, whereas now it’s part of our everyday language.

I think you’ll find that within the next coming months, it will be something like, “Oh yeah, no, we use that for everything all of the time.” But right now I’m not overly aware of it at the moment—it could be that that’s because it’s doing its job very well and I’m not aware of it being used, right? So these are usually the good ones—they’re seamless and you’re not aware of it. So, in my opinion.

Ryan: Yeah, that change does happen quickly, you know, and within two months it’s a huge part of the system and how it runs. Definitely.

Claire Ford: Yeah. I grew up without the internet, so I’ve definitely learned very quickly that these things change. The size of a mobile phone and what a mobile phone can do is very different. My phone keeps lighting up every now and then and it tells me that it’s got AI and ChatGPT already working for me and I was even unaware of that.

Ryan: There you go. So we like to finish these podcasts with two questions. The first being, how do you keep the job fun for you and your team?

Claire Ford: I should usually be very mildly inappropriate, swearing at the wrong time and trying to not make too many dad jokes. I think how to keep it fun, like I’ve said before, we do a quiz on a Friday and we all kind of have those group chats on Teams where you can throw something in there and joke and laugh.

I think the most important thing is keep it light. The sky isn’t falling, right? Yes, there are problems. Yes, there’s always going to be something that needs to be fixed or resolved. And that’s just the nature of the industry that we’ve chosen to be in. But that’s more so because we’re people pleasers, right? We want to fix things. We want to help people.

So it’s just remembering to keep it light and that if you make a mistake, it’s not the end of the world. As long as you learn from it, it’s not a problem. And I think that I take that approach with my team all of the time. I’ve always encouraged an environment where if you’ve made a mistake, that’s fine. It’s not a problem. As long as we talk about it, as long as we learn from it, as long as we don’t hide from it, it’s easy to fix.

Keep it light. Don’t dwell on it. If you make a mistake, you learn from it. You’re not going to do it again, so it’s not the end of the world.

Ryan: I think that’s really important to remember, you know, it’s not the end of Earth, you make a mistake, there was no malice, there’s no bad intentions behind that mistake, you know, you hope anyway.

Claire Ford: I don’t know. I’m quite sure no one in my team would ever do anything with malice. Also because I can also be scary, right? So no, obviously not. But this is a bad dad joke. But yeah, keep it light.

Ryan: Excellent. And last question, Claire, what advice would you give to new field service leaders, especially those stepping into high growth, high pressure environments like e-mobility?

Claire Ford: Work out who your stakeholders are. So understand who your supporting functions are and remember that they’re there to support you, but they’re also there doing a job as well. So build those relationships. It’s really quite important to understand who it is that is there to help you.

Remember that you’re not more important than anyone else in your team. These people are there to do a job. They will make you look good. Don’t forget to remind them that it is them that’s doing the work. And don’t forget that. Build those relationships. It’s all about building relationships, I think.

And never feel scared to hold your hand up and say, I’m stuck. I don’t know. I need help. The worst thing you can do is bury your head and hope that everything’s gonna go away. It doesn’t go away. So just put your hand up and say, “Need some help. Show me what I need to do.”

And actually what you’ll find is that most people, especially in field service and that kind of thing, are more than happy to help. Always happy that someone can say, “I don’t know what I’m doing,” because we all like to be able to teach someone something too, right? We all like to be able to say, “You know, this is how you do it,” and because we’re all geeking out over all of how these things work.

So just hold your hand up, understand the supporting functions, build relationships. Don’t get so big-headed that you think you’re better than anyone else because you’re really not. Yeah, just ask for help if you need it. We’re always happy to help.

Ryan: That’s amazing. Thank you so much, Claire. Thank you for joining us today, sharing your experience. It’s just been great hearing about your insights on leadership and operations in general. Yeah, thank you so much. We’ll be back very soon with more guests like Claire. Bye for now.

Claire Ford: No worries. More than happy. You’re welcome. Goodbye.