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I’m often asked how to enthusiastically engage technicians in business promotion to create a service experience like the one I describe in my book, Beyond GREAT SERVICE, The Technician’s Role in Proactive Business Growth. In answer to this question, here is a summary of the 5 Steps to a service experience that is beyond great.

Critical to our success is the recognition by technician and management alike, that business promotion is an important part of the service delivery and not a sale. They must appreciate that when we take proactive steps to make these recommendations that will help our customers to be better off we greatly enhance the service value and the service experience. With the intention of promoting our services to help our customers, this proactive approach will become a significant differentiator in a competitive environment where service providers must fight for every dollar and fight for the right to hold, maintain and develop customer relationships.

With this in mind, here are the 5 steps that you can take to deliver a service experience that is beyond great.

Step 1: Assess your Current Position Against Best Practices. An honest review of your service delivery against the critical success factors behind delivering a “beyond great” service allows you to access your current position, recognize your strengths and take action to capitalize on opportunities for improvement. Here is a link to a handy assessment tool to make this evaluation.

Step 2: Define the Service Experience you want your Customers to Enjoy. A clear vision of the service you will deliver through the proactive promotional efforts of your technicians provides the foundation for good planning and execution of the plan. While Step 1 gives you your current position, Step 2 gives you where you want to go and enables you to create your unique roadmap to success. A clear vision also helps you communicate the value behind the initiative to engage your technicians, company stakeholders and, of course, your customers. To explore how to define the service experience, check out this blog.

Step 3: Train to Win. You would never think of sending your technicians out to work on equipment for which they have had no training. If product or service promotion is part of the service our technicians provide, why would we treat this service any differently? Through training, we have an opportunity to:

• Help our field team recognize their role as a service so that they enthusiastically embrace it
• Clearly define the service experience that will be delivered by our technicians to add value to our service relationships and create a sustainable competitive advantage
• Add to their skills so that they can be more successful in helping customers recognize the value in their recommendations

Here is a link to our Proactive Service® Workshop.

Step 4: Ensure Processes and Systems Support the Proactive Efforts of your Technicians. Like any service, you will want to ensure that you have the processes and systems in place to ensure flawless execution of the strategy. This includes how opportunities will be captured, how they will be followed up, how status will be communicated and how the technicians will contribute to the solution.

Keep in mind that our processes and systems is one of several hurdles that you will need to address to unleash the full power of your team. For more details on typical hurdles to success and how to deal with them, download this article.

Step 5: Maintain Momentum. Once the plan, processes and training are in place, our continued success will hinge on our willingness and ability to maintain momentum. We must consider such factors as:

• How will we maintain the levels of enthusiasm we have been able to generate to date?
• What options can we take to keep the initiative fresh in everyone’s mind?
• What opportunities can we capitalize on to observe and coach our field service teams?
• What plan do we have to review key skills?
• What steps will we take to practice these skills to ensure that we deliver a service that is beyond great?

Delivering a service that is beyond great is not easy. If it were, everyone would be doing it today. The benefits, however, are well worth the effort. If you can successfully engage your field service team in proactive promotion of your services as part of the service that they provide, you can expect:

• Increased revenue and profitability
• Improved customer satisfaction and retention
• More customer referrals
• Increased employee satisfaction and reduced turnover
• Better labour planning
• A more enjoyable and less stressful working environment for all

If you have not yet started on the journey, why not take the first step? I would be delighted to hear from you.

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 journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”

– Lao Tzu

The post 5 Steps to a Service Experience that is Beyond Great 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.