How Third-Party Providers Support OEM Staffing Challenges
Across the board, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) struggle to find reliable, well-trained staff to meet their service needs in order to differentiate their brand and meet necessary service obligations to their customers.
With hiring freezes due to economic uncertainty alongside a challenging talent market, hiring for specialized field and technical service positions can seem impossible. Moreover, employees have begun “Quiet Quitting” movements. Quiet Quitting is when an employee remains in one’s workplace while not actively going above and beyond and thus not performing to employer expectations according to a recent CNBC article, how quiet quitting became the next phase of the great resignation.
So, how can OEMs solve these hiring issues? By partnering with a third-party service provider or a White Glove Service Partner—like Quest—who understands your service needs and is trained on your products.
Let’s continue to discuss how both third-party service providers and white glove service partners can support OEM staffing challenges.
OEM Staffing Challenges
Original equipment manufacturers often face many challenges when it comes to staffing. So why is it difficult to find and retain reliable staff?
There can be several reasons why it is difficult to hire reliable staff. First, the specific skills and experience needed are hard to find especially in a tight labor market, and when this search gets narrowed down to specific geographies that have limited talent pools. Even if individuals have the necessary skills and experience, the onboarding time to get them fully trained on all service aspects of OEM products can be lengthy and time-consuming depending on product complexity. Additionally, extensive travel that may be a job requirement for these roles can spread newly hired resources thin and burn them out quickly leading to turnover issues and additional costs with re-hiring. These are just a few of the issues that can make it difficult for OEM’s to hire and retain resources required to meet service delivery expectations and ensuring OEM brands are protected.
Moreover, various industries are facing staffing challenges today. In the Healthcare and Industrial markets particularly, the onboarding of new hires is a challenge, and time and time again, staff is hired but then may not perform or turn over due to demanding job requirements or better pay.
So, what’s the solution? There are a few different options that can be considered such as engaging a staffing company, hiring a third-party service provider or better yet a White Glove Service Partner such as Quest.
What is a Staffing Agency?
A staffing agency or contract hire firm is an organization that provides resources for hire on a temporary or contract basis. The scope is limited to supplying potential candidates in geographies that may meet certain hiring criteria. These services will then place these prospective resources on a contract basis; however it will be the responsibility of the OEM to fully manage this new resource as if they were an internal employee, this can include:
While staffing agencies can fill positions relatively quickly there are still a lot of hidden costs and management with this approach, leading to a bigger strain on service management personnel.
What is a Third-Party Service Provider and White Glove Service Partner?
A third-party service provider is an organization that provides support services to businesses. These services can include semi-managed resources that are tasked to handle incremental service activities or overflow by hybridized with existing OEM service personnel. Third Party Service providers may generally provide resources that can perform the following activities:
Third-party service providers often specialize in supporting businesses in specific industries, such as servicing devices in the Healthcare and Industrial markets. This includes lending their resources to OEM’s to aid in the services outlined above. Most Third Party Service providers provide semi-managed resources, meaning the resources are employed by the Third Party Service provider however the OEM may still be involved in the following activities:
White Glove Service partners, like Quest offer a more fully program managed and integrated solution that incorporates the following:
Both Third Party Service Providers and White Glove Service Partners are able to sufficiently meet basic OEM service requirements, the decision OEM’s ultimately need to make is if more hands on management is preferred or more of an autonomous managed solution is required.
How Do Third-Party Service Providers and White Glove Service Partners Help OEMs?
Both third-party service provider and White Glove Service partners can support OEM staffing needs in several ways.
First, they both can help identify the specific skills, geographies and experience that OEMs need to be successful. Second, there can be much better cost structures and utilization rates given the fractional ability to use resources from a Third Party provider or White Glove service partner. Lastly, there are added benefits to engaging White Glove Service partners as they will generally offer more turnkey solutions for OEM ensuring faster onboarding times, scalability and less reliance on the OEM during the tenure of the relationship, allowing OEM’s to focus on more core and critical aspects of their business.
Either way, partnering with either a third-party service provider or White Glove Service partner, OEMs can be confident that their end users will have sufficient trained resources to support their systems will be able to provide the high level of service that clients expect, and issues with gaps in service coverage or long turn times to have devices repaired will ultimately be minimized or reduced.
Interested in learning more? Reach out to Quest to discuss how you can augment your staff by using our White Glove Service teams. Then, read on for the benefits of oursourcing OEM services
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