For Evident—formerly a wholly owned subsidiary of Olympus Corporation that was spun off as an independent company in 2022—extreme precision is the name of the game. Whether it’s a scientist viewing cells under a microscope or a QC engineer measuring the tiniest stress cracks in a turbine blade, customers rely on Evident’s diverse portfolio of instruments to achieve consistently accurate performance. Maintaining this accuracy over an instrument’s lifespan means keeping up with—and ideally ahead of—the everyday wear-and-tear that can diminish it with time. That’s the job of Evident’s service and support unit.
Back in late 2019, the Olympus executives planning the spin-off viewed the combination of Evident’s strong imaging pedigree and large base of industrial and life science customers as a natural foundation for success. They also saw the opportunity to further differentiate the soon-to-be independent business based on the quality of service and support it provides to their large global customer base. Taking stock of the situation, they realized Evident had gaps to close in the efficiency of its service operations. At the root of it all was a lack of visibility caused by disjointed data and manual, outdated processes.
Today, Evident is transforming its service infrastructure around the world. One example is in Singapore, where Evident’s Asia Pacific (APAC) operations are housed in a modern new facility. In addition to a Technology Center for developing advanced new solutions and an immersive Omni Theater for customers’ presentations and employee collaboration, the new facility features a state-of-the-art Service and Repair Center that serves as a nerve center for service and support activities. It’s from here that Yong Khoon Choo leads Evident’s Service and Quality Assurance for the APAC region.
Looking back, Choo describes a slow service administration process. “Field service engineers may not know what they’d be working on next, or whether a job was covered by a service contract or under warranty,” he says. “As a result, service engineers had to take a ‘triage’ approach that started with a phone call and followed an ad-hoc path from there.”
Even after the job was done, field service engineers had to jump through considerable hoops to close it out. In many cases, for example, they were required to come all the way from the customer’s site back to the office to do the updates required to close out projects. But the larger set of problems stemmed from the fragmented task flow engineers had to follow. “Rather than a single interface, technicians needed to go to multiple places to fill in different data fields,” Choo says. “This fragmentation made doing reports—such as a project’s status—even more time-consuming.”
Tackling the challenge of creating a unified service infrastructure led to important questions: What does the service queue look like? Which jobs and customers are covered by a service contract? What parts pricing discounts apply to each customer? And, based on each customer’s installed base of assets, which customers represent the best opportunities to upsell to a service contract? “Our ultimate vision was to engage with our customers more proactively, intelligently, and efficiently,” Choo explains.
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The new Salesforce solution increased the productivity of support engineers and team leads by over 15%
Evident increased the number of existing customers under service contract by more than 25%
There wasn’t a lot of mystery about which technology path Evident wanted to follow next. A few years earlier, the new company’s predecessor—Olympus—had implemented the Salesforce® Service Cloud (link resides outside of ibm.com) solution as its CRM platform, and it had performed solidly. “We were very comfortable with Salesforce for CRM, so for us the Salesforce Service Cloud was really the only solution on the table,” Choo relates. “When we met with potential implementation partners, our focus was on the specifics of how they would realize our vision of a convenient and seamless service experience for our customers.”
When a local Singapore team from the Salesforce Practice of IBM Consulting™ was invited to present, they came heavy with details. The core of what they proposed was a unified platform—built on the Field Service (link resides outside of ibm.com) module of the Salesforce Service Cloud (link resides outside of ibm.com) solution—through which the Evident service team could manage all service requests from first contact through to billing. The other key component was Salesforce CPQ (link resides outside of ibm.com), which would provide a faster, simpler, and more accurate way for service reps to configure, price, and quote customers for new service requests.
To provide a deeper view of the intended solution, the IBM user experience design team used a persona-based approach to drill down on how the transformation would affect the experiences of key user groups, from customers to different job positions within the internal service team. For Choo, this ability to go deeper in articulating its plan, timetable, and the value it would deliver underscored the upside of IBM’s experience in deploying Salesforce solutions. “IBM didn’t just accept our transformation vision,” he says. “They mapped out a clear and convincing path for getting it done—and that stood out and made a difference.”
Central to IBM’s proposed delivery strategy was the application of the agile, design-thinking principles embodied by the IBM Garage™ methodology. From the moment the project kicked off, a climate of co-creation and collaboration between the IBM team and Evident’s in-house experts prevailed. Thomas Hawker, Salesforce Practice Leader for IBM Consulting, led the 10-member engagement team: “In the upfront stage, we worked closely with the Evident team to understand their pain points in the process,” he explains. “We also did a lot of design thinking to shape the future-state experience, which included ideating around a set of relevant personas.”
Throughout the project, playbacks were conducted at short, regular intervals to keep the Evident team apprised of progress and, where necessary, to pivot and further refine the minimum viable product (MVP) solution. In the latter stages of the project, as the focus shifted toward configuring and fine-tuning the solution, interaction between the teams lessened somewhat, though playbacks continued apace. After a roughly six-month deployment effort, the solution went live in early 2021.
Today, with the new Salesforce service hub in place, life is very different for just about everyone in Evident’s service and support unit. And the key qualities that characterize the new solution—automation, simplification, and consolidation—are the reasons why. Now new service cases are generated automatically from incoming service request emails, with ad-hoc and manual operation a thing of the past. Once an order enters the system, support team leads can automatically and optimally schedule service orders by considering the unique needs of each customer, as well as the expertise, availability, and locations of support engineers in the field.
Evident’s story shows that when it comes to service operations, scheduling optimization yields hard and meaningful results. It’s seen in the 15% reduction in field service turnaround times and a sharp reduction in the need for repeat visits, which both result in the right people being automatically assigned to jobs.
For jobs that have been assigned, the new Salesforce solution has increased the productivity of support engineers and team leads by over 15%. The reason: “With more accessible information and standardized processes, our people can focus more of their time on tracking, executing, and closing out service requests,” notes Choo. “It also enables us to provide our customers with better visibility into where their service requests stand, which has a huge impact on their satisfaction.”
The improved visibility afforded by the new solution has also enabled Evident to better identify and target customers who are strong candidates for service contracts. Before, when quoting new requests, it was a slow and inaccurate process. As this capability is now integrated into the overall process flow through Salesforce CPQ, Evident service personnel can readily spot opportunities to convert customers to service contracts at the moment of contact. Since the solution was introduced, Evident has increased the number of existing customers under service contract by more than 25%, adding a larger and more predictable revenue stream for the company going forward.
As it was designed to do, the transformation of Evident’s service and support operations has turned a point of vulnerability into a key differentiator. In the coming months, as Evident continues to extend its Salesforce solution to Australia, Korea, and India—and to enhance it—Choo sees service and support as the cornerstone of the company’s long-term growth. “Through our work with IBM, we can now provide all our customers with the seamless, efficient, and personalized support experience they’ve come to expect,” he says. “Combined with our own commitment to innovation, we see that as a strong recipe for success.”
At Evident (link resides outside of ibm.com), we are guided by the scientific spirit—innovation and exploration are at the heart of what we do. Committed to making people’s lives healthier, safer, and more fulfilling, we support our customers with solutions that solve their challenges and advance their work; whether it’s researching medical breakthroughs, inspecting infrastructure, or exposing hidden toxins in consumer products.
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