More and more service organizations recognize the value their field service professionals bring when they make recommendations to their customers that will help them to be better off. The challenge is to get the field team to embrace this business development mindset and maintain focus over the long haul.

To achieve this, we would be well served by supporting business development by our field service team like any other service we provide. Here are three things we can do.

1. Support the proactive efforts of the field service team with tools and processes.

Imagine that you have decided to offer a new service for your customers.  Would you simply announce the new service and wish your team luck in delivering on it or would you provide every effort to ensure that the initiative was a success?  I suspect that you would not leave anything to chance and that you would make the necessary investments to ensure that the field team was properly equipped and directed to make the new service a success.

Now think about the field team’s proactive efforts to make recommendations of products and services to your customers.  Here are just a few questions to consider:

• Have you made the same level of effort to ensure their success in recommending your services as you have in ensuring that they can deliver upon them?
• What processes and tools have you employed to ensure that your field team can effectively identify and speak to the customer about your services?
• How have you employed your field automation and/or other tools to support the efforts of your team?
• Have you defined clear steps for your field team to take when making recommendations?
• How will the current status of opportunities identified be communicated and updated?

2. Train the field service team on the details of the service that they are about to deliver and the skills required to do so.

Thinking back to the new service offering:

• What training would you provide on that service and how would you explain why it is of value to the customer?
• What would you want the field professional to know about the benefits of the recommended service and the types of problems the new service addresses or avoids?
• How would you equip your service team to speak intelligently about the new service and explain how it will help each customer?
• What skills will you equip your team with to deliver the service flawlessly?

Now consider the business development expectations you have for your technicians:

• How will you equip your field team so that they can explain the benefit of their proactive efforts to the customer?
• How is this different from simply promoting services?
• What specific benefits can the customer expect from the field team’s recommendations?
• How can the field team present recommendations in a manner that helps the customer see the benefit of taking action?
• What specific steps do you expect the field service team to take when delivering on this service?

A field team that recognizes that their efforts are not solely intended for the purpose of increasing revenues, but rather to improve the level of service provided, will be more engaged and enthusiastic in doing just that.  The fact that revenues will rise as a result of their efforts is a secondary reward for their ability to improve overall service levels.  A clear understanding of expectations will also help to engage the team in this important service activity.

3. Measure performance for continuous improvement

Any new service offering will have to demonstrate a return on investment.  Feedback about actual performance against plan will be analyzed and addressed.  Without feedback you or your team would not have a clear view of the effectiveness of their efforts.

The same is true for engaging field teams in making proactive recommendations.  Feedback on their performance will provide insights into what is working well and what is not.  It will give you a clearer view of the effectiveness of the effort and guide steps to make continuous improvement.

An obvious measure is revenue but that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Other related and critical measures are customer satisfaction and retention scores.  In addition, if we are making recommendations that will help our customer to be better off, we should see a decrease in unplanned maintenance and an improvement in overall labour planning.  These are just a few of the measures we can take to evaluate performance.  There are several more.

We Need Ensure that Our Field Team is Properly Equipped

Engaging our field team to proactively identify and recommend products and services to our customers that will help them to be better off is a valuable service.  When we view our field team’s efforts as a service, we can take a step back and evaluate if we are providing the right level of support to ensure their enthusiastic participation and their sustained success.  Like any service we provide, we need to ensure that our team is equipped with the right tools, skills and processes and measure our performance against plan to focus on continuously improving.

As always, I welcome your comments and questions. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“One of the greatest compliments that we can receive is
when our customer tells us that they are better off for having known us”

– Jim Baston

The post 3 Ways to Support Business Development by Your Field Service Team appeared first on jimbaston.com.

During our workshops, we discuss the importance of the quality of the written word and how it helps the customer recognize the value that we provide in the work performed. This easy acronym – I-CARE –highlights the 5 steps to create work orders that shout “value”.

When I have the opportunity to speak with service managers, one of the discussion points that inevitably comes up is about the quality of the work order summaries written by their service technicians. It seems that in many organizations, the quality of the written summaries of work is all over the map – from very poor to excellent. When I ask if they have clear and simple guidelines to help their busy technicians to consistently write well, they often admit that those guidelines are still on the “to do” list.

The quality of the written work order summary is important for a number of reasons. One reason is that the customer relies on the summary to give them a sense of the quality of the work that was performed. Because of the nature of our work, it is unlikely that our customers will be able to objectively assess the quality themselves. A clear, concise and comprehensive summary will communicate more value than a simple “fixed unit” on the report. Another reason for complete and concise reports is that the report may become an important document if there is ever a dispute about what work was actually performed. Yet another reason is that a complete and concise report will save time in the long run. Think of your own organization. How many times has the technician had to be interrupted in the field to answer a question about the work performed that could have been prevented if the work order summary description was more complete?

To help you address this problem, I suggest that you introduce the I-CARE approach with your team. It is a simple, easy to remember acronym that will help your technicians write work order summaries that will communicate the value of their work.

Add your own example to provide context. You may also wish to remind your technicians to:

• Remember that everything they write on the work order goes to the customer so spelling and grammar are important
• Include all materials and relevant consumables
• Omit obvious facts (e.g. “drove to the work site”)
• Refrain from language that may create doubt in the customers mind (e.g. “seems to be working”)

Perhaps the most important question of all is to ask your team to imagine that they are the customer who will receive the invoice that will follow. Based on the quality of the work order summary, how comfortable do they feel about paying the bill?

I hope you find this helpful. If you want to see other suggestions to improve the customer experience for your customers, send me a quick note and I will be happy to send you a copy of our Pocketbook of Proactive Service®, which includes I-CARE and several other ideas for improving the service experience for your customers.

As always I welcome your questions and your feedback. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim Baston

“The difference between the right word and the almost
right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

– Mark Twain

The post I-CARE – 5 Steps to Work Orders that Shout “Value” appeared first on jimbaston.com.

When service firms think of business development as a tactic they to tend focus on short-term activities that may achieve immediate gain at the expense of long-term growth. A tactical approach focuses on the question: “How can I get my service technicians to be more assertive in promoting our products and services to our customers?” The downside of the tactical focus is that short term tactical thinking can sometimes lead us to think of how the customer can serve our needs rather than how we can serve the needs of our customer. We may look at the opportunity in terms of “… let’s leverage our customer relationships to win more business.” In addition, a short term, tactical approach may obscure much larger opportunities to truly build a differentiated service offering.

Firms that look at business development by technicians as a differentiating business strategy, look at their relationships with their customers differently. They tend to focus their efforts in ways that better serve the customers’ needs rather than their own. Their thinking changes to “… how can we capitalize on our knowledge and experience to help our customers be better off for having known us? How can we use this approach to serve our customers so well and so uniquely that they would never think of going anywhere else?” This builds more credibility with the customer and leads the service firm to look for strategies that formalize the day-to-day opportunity identification efforts of the technician into an integral component of their service rather than an add-on to it.

This difference in perspective can mean a subtle difference in approach – and a big difference to long-term results. Which perspective guides your firm? Here are four questions you can ask yourself to find out.

1. Is opportunity identification part of our service deliverable?

Let’s go back to the question, “How can we help our customers be better off for having worked with us?” When we take this perspective, we view the act of finding new opportunities not as an “add-on” activity for techs to do “while they are there”, but an integral part of the technician’s expected service deliverable. Their ability to recognize and recommend actions that their customers can take becomes as important as their ability to keep the equipment running in tip-top condition. With this focus on business development as a strategy rather than a tactic, we can start to implement specific tools and processes that formalize this “opportunity identification” role.

2. Do your technicians recognize the valuable service they provide by making recommendations to help their customers be more successful?

Many of the technicians that I have met do not see their role as a salesperson. They tend to leave sales activities to the people with the expense accounts and fancy cars. What these technicians fail to see is that we are not asking them to sell at all. We are asking them to serve. By identifying and speaking with the customer about the actions that the customer can take that will help them improve operational performance, reduce costs, improve tenant satisfaction, etc. is a valuable part of the service.

3. Do your processes support your business development strategy?

There are implications from this approach on the processes used to support business development activities by technicians in the field. Because lead handling becomes just as important as lead generation, the successful firm will have to ensure that they have a failsafe process for handling leads from the field and following up on them in a timely manner.

4. Do you and your technicians have the skills to deliver on the strategy?

Skills development is also an integral part of the strategy. Service technicians will have to become as good at interpersonal skills as they are with their technical ones. Service management will need to be skilled at coaching and in opportunity management. Training on these interpersonal and communication skills will be seen as critical to performance, which in itself will drive improved learning and skills adoption.

These questions and many others are answered in our technician training program called The Proactive Service® Workshop. It has proven to be of great value to organizations of all sizes. Please click here for more information about this program. Let us help you transform your customer’s service experience.

When business development becomes part of the strategy rather than a tactic, our approach focuses on the needs of the customer and how we can profitably satisfy them. And that is what service is all about.

I welcome your feedback. You can connect with me via telephone or email or leave a comment right here on the site. And as always, please feel free to leave a link back to your own blog if you have one via the commentluv feature here on the site. If you are reading this blog post via email, you will need to locate this post on my website by clicking here. Scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find the comment section.

Jim

“All … can see these tactics whereby I conquer,
but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.”

– Sun Tzu

The post 4 Questions about Business Development by your Service Technicians appeared first on jimbaston.com.