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Let's make a lasting impression on the industry together. Hey everyone, welcome to the Domino podcast. Today we're looking inside Domino's service organization and how our approach supports faster fixes and better uptime for production lines.
Instead of focusing on how many technicians live near a plant, we look at how remote expertise, smart scheduling, and well-trained field technicians work together to keep equipment up and running. To help unpack this, we have two leaders from our Domino North American service team. First, we have Fred Brown.
Fred manages our technical support services team at the North American headquarters for Domino, where he oversees the help desk scheduling and repair centers. Fred's group is often the first point of contact when a customer has an issue on their line and they solve many problems remotely before a technician even needs to travel. Fred joined Domino in 2017 and brings leadership experience from both Siemens and AT&T.
We are also joined by Ryan Parks, the regional service director for North America. Ryan leads the field service and installation teams who go on-site for repairs, upgrades, and project work. Ryan started with Domino in 2006 and has grown through the roles in field service, project management, and service leadership.
Today, he oversees the east coast service region from Quebec to Florida and west to Arkansas. Ryan focuses on technical development, consistent service quality, and he sees every day how good preparation for technical support speeds up on-site work. Fred, Ryan, thanks for being here today.
Let's start the conversation by giving listeners a clearer picture of how Domino's service organization works from behind the scenes. So Fred, when you talk to new customers, how do you describe the structure of Domino's service organization and the role that your team plays in it? That's an excellent question. So basically, what we do when we interface with customers is we want to make sure that they are familiar with our service structure.
And typically, the technical help desk team is a first point of contact. So the team members will introduce themselves, of course, and kind of talk through the flow of them. They'll talk through, you know, the overall flow of how Domino works from a service point of view.
So basically, they'll start with the troubleshooting over the phone opportunities. And then, if required, they'll walk them through how we would get our work order created if we need to send someone to site. And then, the schedulers would then contact the customer and let them know when somebody would be on site.
And then, Ryan's team would jump in and take over. So, great lead-in. Ryan, from your side, how is the field service organization set up, and how does it connect with the work Fred's team does, you know, when there's an issue for a customer? Yeah.
So, I mean, what Fred's team does is really vital to the success of what the engineer is going to get, how successful the engineer can be once he arrives on site. I mean, the more information that Fred's able to gather, the more troubleshooting and triaging and stuff that his team's able to do just sets up that engineer to be more successful. So, for instance, if they're able to identify any needed parts, or if they're able to identify, you know, a special software as something that's needed, you know, that engineer is able to prepare for it, go into site with just that much more, you know, they're able to save some time, arrive on site with what they need to complete the job and be successful.
That's awesome. So, they're not showing up there with just a no idea what's going on. You've got a good lead-in to what's actually happening on the machine, and they come prepared.
Right, or showing up and not having what they need. You know, if they show up and realize, oh, well, I've needed these two parts, and I don't have them, you know, now we've extended things out. So, rather than Fred's team being able to identify those parts and get them on site to where they meet the engineer, now the engineer is identifying it a day or two days later, and now it's extending things out, you know, because now we have to have those shipped to site.
So, certainly. So, Fred, when a customer calls a help desk, what actually happens? Like, talk me through step-by-step how you guys triage an issue for a customer. Sure, absolutely.
So, again, the agent will obviously introduce themselves and, again, talk them through, if they haven't spoken to Domino before, the technical help desk process. And basically, what they're going to do is we're going to gather the serial number of the piece of equipment that they're calling in about, so we can pull that up in our system and identify the customer and the equipment. Then they will start asking, you know, questions like, you know, what do you experience? Are you getting errors? What's going on with the equipment? If need be, then we will introduce our Domino AR, which is our augmented reality app that allows us to remote into their phone and utilize their phone to see what they're looking at.
We can take pictures, snapshots, annotate on the pictures what we want them to do or what we want to see closer and take it from there. And to Ryan's point, if we can't resolve it, then we're trying to identify which parts would be required to resolve it on site once we deploy a field engineer. So, yeah.
That's amazing. So, it's almost like FaceTiming. We can get in there and actually use their phone to look at what's going on in real time.
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, we've had this tool for probably about three years, four years possibly. And it amazes us today that the number of customers that already have the apps loaded on their phone.
So, when we ask them, you know, hey, do you want to use Domino augmented reality? And of course, it's at no cost. They say, oh, yeah, I already have the app. So, the agent just then sends them a link that they click on and it connects them.
And it's a viable tool. It really helps mostly. And it's kind of strange when you think about it.
But a lot of the opportunities we run into in the field with our equipment is possibly software related. So, it could be a setting or something in the software. An IP address isn't what it needs to be or something like that.
And when you're interfacing with customers over the phone, and they're reading these, you know, lengthy numbers back to you, sometimes that, you know, it's not, you know, communicated properly, or they're looking in the wrong location on the software. And what the augmented reality allows us to do is just look at that screen ourselves through their phone and see all the different settings that they have. So, we don't have to go through and ask them every setting that they have in the software.
And we can zoom right into what we want them to adjust or change. It's really fantastic. Sounds amazing.
Can you tell me a little bit about the people that are answering the calls? Are they offshore? Or, you know, what kind of, you know, how much training do they have on your product and service? Sure. No. So, the team had six members on the technical help desk team.
We have about 85 years between the six members of field experience on the team. So, they are all product technical specialists, which means that they are masters, if you will, of at least one technology, if not all of our technologies. So, we have a skill set across the entire team for all of our technologies.
So, we have a lot of experience. And Ryan will appreciate this because whenever we have a fantastic field engineer that, you know, decides that they may not want to do that anymore, we grab them for the help desk if we can. So, I'm sure he appreciates that.
So, these guys aren't just reading through a script and a checklist. They're actually really understand the product and know how to diagnose it. Absolutely.
Yes, they do. And they are all remote in North America. They have equipment at their homes that they can utilize when they're troubleshooting as well to walk customers through different settings and things like that.
So, and of course, we have emulators as well on the laptops that they can emulate the software as well. But no, a lot of really hands-on experience across all the technologies. And there are no scripts.
I can tell you that. There is our e-service, which is our knowledge-based facility. And what we do is if a customer needs to see a video or a document, what we like to do is get them signed up for our e-service so they have access to the database where all the information resides.
And instead of sending them the document, we show them how to get to the document. So, in the future, if they have needs, they can log in there and kind of navigate themselves. That sounds amazing.
I'm sure you have a pretty high success rate of getting people back online quickly with that kind of quality. We do. We do.
Yeah, currently, well, actually, for the last probably three years, we've averaged a 91% phone fix within 15 minutes and a 98% phone answer rate within 20 seconds. So, it's not like people are going to call in and be on hold. It's not like you're calling your cable 800 number.
I know people, you know, tend to, you know, sometimes get a little hesitant when they hear an 800 number. But no, you're calling the people that actually the field engineers, Ryan can, you know, attest to that the field engineers call if they need help as well. So, a really talented team.
So, Ryan, when an issue arises that Fred's team can't fix and it gets escalated to you, what does that handoff look like and what information is most valuable to your technician before they travel out to the site? Yeah, once it gets handed off to us and just to, I guess, to promote or even talk up Fred's team a little bit more. I mean, Fred's team is absolutely amazing. Most of them are former service engineers, several of them I hired myself and when life changes or when desire changes and they just don't want to be traveling around and scraping their car off and being out in the snow, you know, Fred talks them into joining the team and living the good life and, you know, being able to make their own coffee and sit at their own desk and stuff and help out.
So, most of them have been in the same position that the service engineers are in. Many of them have been to the same plants of the people who are calling in. So, the information that they can gather is just outstanding.
Once it gets transferred to my team, though, then we have what we call our on-site protocols that take over. And those are not just protocols that the engineer lives by when they're on site and in front of the customer, but also it starts before the call and then it even continues on after the call. So, the first thing that they're going to do when they receive that notification that they've got a work order, they're going to review the notes from the help desk.
They're going to be able to go back in and review past work order information. They're going to be able to see what other techs have been to site, if it wasn't themselves, so they can reach out to those other techs. They've also got contacts, so they can see who we've worked with in the past on site.
They can see who opened up this service call. They can reach out to them with additional questions. Many of our team have the same augmented reality apps and stuff to where they can work with as Fred's team.
So, if they do have additional questions, they can reach out to their contacts. They're on site and gather additional information if they think they need it, just to make sure that they're prepared for the visit. So, it's sort of a second check after Fred's team goes through it.
The expectation is that our service engineers are going to go through and do their due diligence and make sure that they're prepared. And if not, then they start to look at other resources and see what they can do to prepare themselves or to put somebody else in a position where they'll be prepared. And then, continue on with the call.
So, they reach out, set up an expectation for arrival times and what's needed, and we go from there. It's amazing. It's hard to imagine how mission critical some of this stuff is when a line's just sitting there that you guys can get them back online with a phone call sometimes.
Talk a little bit, Ryan, about response time. If the support team can't get them online, what's your typical support response time and how big of a territory you guys cover? How many people are out there fixing stuff? Yeah, I mean, across all of North America, I think it's in the neighborhood of 80 service engineers, and they're strategically spread out across the high points and stuff. So, the goal for us is whenever there's a mission critical, a line down situation is to be there within 24 hours.
So, Fred's team gets the call and our goal is to be there the next day to where we can get there with the part and get them up and going. Wow, that's cool. So, Fred, can you talk us through, you told me once about a Samuel Adams brewing story and how your team guided the onsite technician through the repair.
Can you tell me a little bit about that? Just give us kind of a real-world example. I think, yeah, I think you're referring to a laser that was down, and again, it was a situation where we implemented the augmented reality, domino augmented reality tool, and we were able to go through and look at the settings that had been changed within the unit itself and get them back up online and running. And, you know, that's a fantastic thing when you think about it because when their line is down, they're not making any products.
So, anytime that we can have the opportunity to get them back up and running via the phone is obviously, without a doubt, our best opportunity to, you know, have the best customer experience that we can. And again, the team is, it's more of a day-to-day, you know, the example of that customer is just one of many that happens every day throughout the day. We average about somewhere around probably 80 calls a day.
So, yeah, there's a lot of that that goes on. Yeah, I would say, Fred, your team, you know, I would say more times than not, the case is that you were able to get them up and going in some form or fashion, even when a call is scheduled. So, whether it's your team's helping them get a spare piece of equipment online or making some adjustments and stuff to where you can get the line running again, but they still want the site to optimize everything.
But often, I think you're able to get them up, you know, at least limping along for, you know, my team to come in and, you know, maybe get it a little bit to the next level. No, that's right. I mean, one of the things that, you know, sometimes is critical is just getting the customer back running.
It may not be the speeds they want to run. It may not be, you know, necessarily the optimal code, if you will, but we're able to get them up and running. And then Ryan's team would engage and go in and put the final touches on it to get them back to 100%.
So, it's a good point. Ryan, I got a question for you. Like a lot of times, you know, customers will compare vendors based on how many technicians live near their plant.
You know, is that a misconception? You know, do you guys feel like you're situated to handle, you know, regardless of where their plant is or, you know, talk me through kind of that question. You get people to that question quite often. Yeah, absolutely.
I think, you know, my favorite response to that is, you know, why would you need six technicians that are available right outside your door? You know, hopefully the equipment's a little bit more reliable than that. But yeah, I mean, whether you've got six technicians within an hour or you've got one technician within the hour, the chances of them not being assigned or the chances of them sitting around, you know, twiddling their thumbs and just waiting for somebody to call is just slim to none. You know, so if they're already on a site and they're already tore into another piece of equipment, you know, they're not just going to leave that site to come over here.
So, I think what we look at is from the engineering standpoint, from the account manager that sells the equipment to the project manager that helps to put the plan together to install it. We look to try to make the customer as self-sufficient as possible so that, yes, we'll be there when they need us, but the basics and the day-to-day stuff, we're going to be looking to try to make sure that that equipment's redundant, that they have the spares that they need, that they have the training that they need, so that they're able to get the equipment up and going, where they're able to change over to a spare when needed, and then we come in and do the heavy lifting or the heavy repairs when needed. Brett, I've got another question for you.
Like, is there anything a customer can do in preparation for the call that makes your job more, you know, easier to diagnose or, you know, solve quicker? Is there, you know, should they have that preloaded? Yeah, absolutely. First off, you know, if they can gather any failure codes, any type of information, anything that's occurred, changed, you know, that may have had an impact on the results they're seeing currently, whether it be, maybe they had a power glitch, maybe they had, you know, any type of interference to the normal operation of the equipment can impact the result of the equipment. So, if they have that information along with, of course, the serial number when they call us, then we're pretty much set up for success, and the team is good at walking them through the questions that need to be asked to get to the final resolution from that point.
Ryan, I'd ask the same question for you. Like, if we do have to dispatch, you know, a field tech, is there something that they can do to prepare, you know, so the technician is more successful and able to get that thing back up and running quicker? Yeah, I mean, I think that, like Fred said, any information that led up to it, you know, it's often, I think it's everybody's, I think, tendencies to not want to admit that, well, yeah, we were in here and we were making adjustments or that type of stuff. So, you know, any adjustments that were made, any attempts that they've already done to try to fix it, you know, anything that they can share is always going to be good information.
You know, you go into something and if you're pointed in the right direction and stuff, usually it helps out. So, yeah, I think just good notes, good, clear, concise, you know, details on what occurred, what fault happened, any videos or pictures of the code type of thing, that's stuff that always helps out as well. If you can get a picture of what the code looks like, that's something that helps Fred's team as well as my team when they get to site.
So, maybe a question for both of you guys. You guys come out with new products and equipment all the time. How do you keep these guys up to date on the latest products and, you know, things going on in the industry and, you know, people development? How do you keep these guys sharp? Basically, and I think we're going to be pretty much aligned here, but basically, we have an announced training facility in Gurney, Illinois, in our headquarters, and there are regular training classes that happen.
So, when a new product's released, then we slowly rotate our team, my team anyway, through the training of the new equipment one at a time, and then from Ryan's perspective, I think a lot of it has to do with what equipment is in the engineer's region of service, but I'll leave that to him. Yeah, I think we've got, you know, our in-house training facility on top of that for every single different piece of technology. We have technical product managers who, you know, if there's just small incremental updates, then they work to get that information out to the field, whether it be through online learning or Domino Academy.
They'll set up different teams meetings and virtual meetings to go over some of the incremental changes or incremental stuff that comes up, and we also have a team of field technical specialists and product technical specialists who attend regular meetings on specific pieces of equipment, and then they're tasked with passing that information on to the other teams or to the rest of the team. So, when we have our regular team meetings and stuff, just that normal stuff or the normal day-to-day advancements or changes in equipment, they're passing that along and they're bringing those to our regular team meetings. So, on top of the regular trainings that occur, there's also that incremental stuff that happens throughout the year for everyone.
I think it's vital that, you know, everyone understand that we have an escalation process as well, that, you know, we have different teams set up for the technologies within teams, and the technical product managers, my team, the FTSs are all part of those escalations, and if someone has something that they haven't seen before that they've run into, they can throw something in that chat and then they're going to get five or six answers back, you know, immediately to the system. So, that's kind of nice as well. Certainly, and that information is passed along throughout the groups as well.
So, often some large escalation happens or some difficult fix occurs, and then that ends up being a lesson learned that gets shared throughout the team, and, you know, hopefully that fix happens a little quicker the next time around. Certainly makes you feel good about buying Domino products that you guys have the support infrastructure in place. How do you think Domino's support compares to, like, some of the competitors in the market out there? Do they have the same, you know, technical service desk and, you know, at the level that you guys are doing this? Of course not.
No, I think we're probably the standard of best in class when it comes to the technical help desk and our field engineers. I think, from my perspective, a lot of our competitors throw engineers at things in the field. So, they tend to want to, if you will, have a lot more field engineers on hand than we do, just so they can throw people at the customer.
But we don't do that at Domino. One, our equipment's a lot more reliable, and our remote support is outstanding, and our equipment is designed for it. I mean, we have our Domino cloud interface where our computers are constantly sending data to a cloud that, you know, if there is a fault, then my team gets an email saying, hey, this printer is in fault, and we can take a look at the printer in the cloud to see if it's back up and running.
If it's not, we can reach out to the customer and say, hey, we see you got this printer down, can we assist you? I think Domino has a wide variety of tools that probably are beyond our competitors, from my perspective. I'm not sure, Ryan, what do you think? Yeah, I think that, you know, each company's going to have different tools and different processes and stuff to try to handle these things. I think that ours are world class and absolutely, you know, top of the pile.
But in addition to that, I think it's the people at Domino. I think that you've got a passionate group that really, really cares about what they do and works well together. So, I would put that up against anybody else for sure.
That's great. And I think, Ryan, as a further point, I mean, that goes beyond the service team. You know, we should recognize the support we get from all the other departments as well, which is critical.
And, you know, our department's being successful with their customer interfaces. So, Domino as a whole, I think, operates extremely well from my experience. Absolutely.
Yep, absolutely. The account managers want to make sure that the right equipment's spec'd out. The project managers want to make sure that it's a smooth transition and everything gets installed correctly and the plan goes to, you know, gets completed.
And the service engineers and stuff and the people who are there doing the day-to-day work and stuff, they go back and give feedback to the others and work together. I think it's a big team for sure. It certainly starts with the right product and for the right use, I'm sure, and then translates all the way down to service.
Kind of to wrap this up, guys, one more question I have for maybe both of you. If you could change like one perception about technical support in the industry, what would it be? Like, is there some like disinformation out there, some perceptions about support that you'd like to see changed or let people know about? I think our biggest struggle is always going back to the 800 number. You know, human nature is to want to work with someone that you've met face-to-face.
So, when a field engineer is on-site servicing a customer, the customer tends to build a relationship with that engineer, which is fantastic. It's exactly what we want. That's exactly the culture that Ryan's driving.
I don't want to speak for him, but I did. But in reality, we would prefer that they reach out to the technical help desk team and work with my team because, you know, those engineers are out servicing another customer. They're not necessarily sitting around waiting to take a phone call from a customer to support them.
So, the biggest thing I'd like to see change is the overall, you know, impression of dialing an 800 number. And when you're calling Domino's 800 number for support, you're getting the best of the best. So, it's just, it's hard sometimes to get that, you know, that word out there, but we're working hard at it.
That's awesome. Brian, anything to add to that? Yeah, I think when you look at the members on Fred's team, you know, he talked about the, what is it, 92 percent success rate for taking care of calls over the phone. And that group of individuals, they're not just sitting there looking at, you know, a template and running through a list of questions and going for it.
They are, I mean, these are service engineer nerds. You know, they want to fix that. They take pride in fixing it and getting those fixes taken care of.
And you see them, you know, get passionate about it and dive right into it. I see the chats and stuff that occur. Sometimes they're reaching out to the techs that have been to site, trying to get extra information so that they can even be more accessible when taking it on.
So, like I said, this is a group of, when you get ahold of them and you start talking with them, they are fully invested in trying to get you up and going. You're not just a number where they're trying to pass this thing along and assign the call. They are, they are certainly, they take pride in the fix, just like the on-site engineer that comes to site and sees you face to face.
Thanks again to Fred Brown and Ryan Parks for the insights today. The takeaway here is simple. Great service is not about how close a technician lives.
It's about getting the right expertise involved fast, whether that happens remotely or on-site with the right preparation. Thanks for listening to Domino Podcast. Subscribe for more conversations on uptime, reliability, and smarter equipment support.
Have a great day. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Leave Your Mark, the coding and marking podcast sponsored by Domino. We hope you enjoyed our insightful discussion and gained valuable knowledge to enhance your operations.
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