If you are in the service business, then you know a little bit about change. Just about everything to do with field service has been impacted by technology; and it has changed the way we do business. Technology is also having a revolutionary impact on the relative importance of soft skills.

Technology has allowed us to improve efficiencies. It has enabled us to get a more accurate picture of the effectiveness of our business practices. And it has allowed us to empower our field personnel. Most of these changes have been good for the customer, for us and for our field teams.

Closing the Competency Gap

As the pace of technology increases, we can see the shift it is having on the relative importance of soft skills. And it truly is revolutionary. Emerging technologies in the field service business are reducing the competency gap between top service professionals and less skilled service providers. The result is that it is becoming harder to differentiate on technical skills. With remote diagnostics, artificial intelligence, visual reality and embedded information in the serviced equipment, the field service professionals rely more on their tools to troubleshoot and repair and less on their experience and technical expertise. This opens up the door for less “qualified” individuals who use these same tools to give comparable levels of technical service.

This means that, even though it is highly competitive now, it will become even more so in the future. Customers will have an even more difficult time distinguishing between service providers. Service professionals and service organizations alike will have to rely more on the service experience that they create when interacting with a customer to differentiate them from their competitors. The basis of competition will shift from who is doing the best job of servicing the equipment; to who can create the best service experience while doing the job.

It’s All About The Brand

This is not to say that technical competence will go by the wayside. Obviously, it won’t. Technical competence will remain important. But as technology levels the playing field between service professionals of different capabilities, technical competence of the individual and the organizations that employ them will no longer be a factor of differentiation. The winning service organizations of the future will be the ones that create a service “brand.” They will clearly define the service experience they want to create and invest in the processes and soft skills training of their field service team to achieve it.

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. 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

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

– Buckminster Fuller

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The definition of our brand, when boiled down to its simplest form, is what our customers and prospective customers think and feel about our service and our organizations.  We all have a brand.  The question is, did we choose it, or did we let others choose it for us?

Our Brand Promises a Certain Customer Experience

We communicate our brand through every customer touch point, including through our websites, promotional materials and our written proposals for example. Our brand promises a certain customer experience.  The delivery of our brand promise comes through the interaction between our field service team and our customers.  It is critical that our field team acts and communicates in a way that is consistent with our brand and its promise because those interactions are our customer’s reality.

Here are six steps you can take to ensure that your field service representatives deliver your brand promise.

1. Define – Define your brand

By clearly articulating your brand and your brand promise, you can set the foundation to guide your technicians’ actions so that they are consistent with your brand promise.  Start by answering these three questions:

• How do you want others to think about you?
• How do you want others to feel about you?
• What do you want others to say about you?

For example, a service organization that wishes to build their brand promise around the proactive efforts of their field service team may define their brand as follows:

• How we want others to think about us: “Our service provider does more than simply keeping our equipment/facilities/processes running well, they take steps to help us achieve our business goals.”
• How we want others to feel about us: “We feel assured / We are in good hands”
• What we want other to say about us: “We are better off for having engaged our service provider.”

2. Translate – Translate the brand into actions

Having a brand promise is not enough.  We must translate that promise into action.  What specifically do we expect our field service team to do to?  How do we want our team to conduct themselves in order to communicate and reinforce our brand?

In our example above, one of the actions we would define for our field service technicians are what steps to take to identify and recommend opportunities that will help the customer. One large waste management firm who positions itself as an integral part of the community which they serve, teaches their drivers to be courteous and helpful to their “neighbours” as they go about their routes.  They also train their drivers to look for and report any suspicious activity they see along their routes in an effort to prevent crime.

3. Train – Ensure your team has the skills to execute on the brand

F. Fournes, in his book Coaching for Improving Work Performance noted that the most significant reasons why employees don’t do what they are supposed to do are because they don’t know what to do or they don’t know how to do it. Once we have clearly defined the actions, it is important that we ensure that our team has the knowledge and the skills to execute them.

4. Leverage – Use technology and processes to support your brand

We need to evaluate the technology, tools and processes that we have at our disposal to determine how we can utilize them to support the efforts of our field service team.  For example, how can the hand-held devices be used to help keep the field professional focused on delivering on the brand?  What processes need to be modified to facilitate our field service professionals’ actions.

5. Model – Model the behaviour you would like to see

What we say and how we act are important indicators of how serious we are about the initiative.  We must take care that our words and deeds are consistent with the brand promise.  Our team will pick up on our behaviours and match them accordingly.

6. Measure – Measure

If we don’t measure how well we are delivering on our brand promise, how can we possibly know if we are successful, let alone have the information to allow us to continually improve?  This measurement is more than simply asking if the customer is satisfied or if they would recommend us to others, but delves into how well we have met the promise that we made through our brand.  For example, you might ask, “How well did we … [insert brand promise here]?”

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

“Be the change that you want to see in the world.”

– M. Ghandi

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“Money isn’t everything, … but it’s way ahead of whatever is in second place!”

As a kid growing up in southern Ontario, we used to spend a week each summer at my Uncle’s cottage on a lake a couple of hours north east of our home in Toronto.  My cousin and I would spend the days swimming, fishing, canoeing or just aimlessly lazing around.  Evenings were campfires and mosquitos.

On the shore was a boathouse and above it a living quarters that was used mainly for storage during those days.  It was the perfect place for kids to just hang out.  The walls were dotted with little plaques with witty sayings.  I do not know who originally penned this particular one, but it seems to have stuck with me.

There is a lot of talk these days about the customer experience and how it is critical to creating today’s competitive advantage.  In the service industry, the customer experience is largely created by the interaction of our customer-facing personnel with the customer.  In most cases our “customer-facing personnel” are our technicians and the customer experience comes from the relationships they are able to form.  It is these relationships, built on both personal and professional credibility that are critical for our success.

In the service business there are two components – one is the actual work that was completed (the repair, maintenance, troubleshooting, etc. – why the customer called us in the first place) and how that work was performed and described (the technician’s appearance, how they act and interact with employees, what they write to describe the work, etc.).  This fact is described in more detail in a previous blog “They don’t Pay Me to Look Good in Service Delivery”. It is the second component – the how the work was performed – that customers used to judge the quality of the work and the quality of the relationship.  And it is that relationship that creates the customer experience.  This means that, regardless of how technically skilled our technicians may be and no matter how good the work itself has been performed, the customer will not appreciate this quality nor the value that the technician brings to them unless the technician has a relationship with them that communicates that value.  Without the relationship and the corresponding value they perceive, the customer will look elsewhere to find better value.  Or, would it be better to say that in the service business:   “Relationship isn’t everything, … but it is way ahead of whatever is in second place!”

I’d love your feedback on this. 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

“If you want to feel rich, just count the things you have that money can’t buy.”

– Proverb

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During our Proactive Service® workshops, we ask technicians if they have ever proposed an idea to a customer where the customer has never gotten back to them and where they do not know what the customer has decided to do.  Almost everyone’s hand goes up.  We then ask, “Why do you think that is the case?”  Responses range from, “They decided not to do it” to “They got someone else to do it.”  Occasionally someone will say something like, “Maybe they forgot about it” and if they don’t, then we suggest it.  We then relate the story that I told in my last blog about the technician that passed on a lead from the field that was never followed up by the salesperson.  In that situation, the recommended action was to prevent a failure and a few months later, the failure indeed occurred.  Of course, the customer was angry and the technician was put in an uncomfortable position because of inaction on the part of the salesperson, but the problem would have been avoided altogether if the technician just took a moment to inquire with the customer whether they had given any more thought to the matter.

Usually there are one or two techs in the room who share with the rest of the class that they make it a point to follow up.  When they volunteer this, I ask them “What does the customer say when you remind them of something important that they may have forgotten about?”.  “They thank me” is the usual reply.

If we truly want to deliver a more valuable (and valued) level of service, we must do more than simply bring opportunities to the customer.  We must inquire about them when the customer has not taken action to ensure that the customer does not lose sight of those important recommendations and save them grief and aggravation down the road.

I’d love your feedback! 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

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

– Thomas A. Edison

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