I recently read Daniel Pink’s book, Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and found that the conclusions from the book are directly relevant for those managers who are looking for ways to encourage their technicians to proactively promote their products and services.  These conclusions made me question, “Is it time to stop paying technicians for leads?”

Extrinsic vs. Intrinsic Rewards

In Drive, Pink presents compelling evidence that extrinsic rewards for completing certain tasks – for example, external rewards such as commissions, lump sum payments, etc. – do not always work and can even cause harm.  According to Pink, this is particularly true where the task is not routine and when it entails thinking and creativity.

The evidence suggests that creative tasks, such as evaluating and presenting the best solution for addressing a particular need, provide their own rewards in the doing.  These are called intrinsic rewards because the reward comes from performing the task rather than from an external source.  In situations like these, it is the reward of actually completing the task itself that largely motivates the employee to continue.

This last point is consistent with what I have experienced in my work with technicians.  There are many field service professionals who naturally bring ideas to the customer without any prompting or incentives.  They do this because they see it as part of the service they provide.  They get satisfaction and take pride from the fact that they are truly helping the customer.  They don’t need extrinsic rewards to get them to act; their reward comes from the act itself.

The Problem with Extrinsic Rewards

The problem with extrinsic rewards is that they can diminish intrinsic motivation for doing a task and turn that task from an interesting part of the job, into a menial chore.  But that is not all that Pink found to be problematic about extrinsic rewards.  Diminishing intrinsic motivation is just the first of the “Seven Deadly Flaws”[1] as described by the author.  The other six flaws of extrinsic rewards are:

2. They can diminish performance.
3. They can crush creativity.
4. They can crowd out good behaviour.
5. They can encourage cheating, shortcuts and unethical behaviour.
6. They can become addictive.
7. They can foster short-term thinking.

What Can Be Done?

So, what can we do if we want to encourage this proactive behaviour on the part of our technicians?  Here are some ideas:

• Ensure that the baseline compensation is fair and adequate.
• Constantly reinforce the fact that the act of identifying opportunities to help and speaking to the customer about them is an integral part of the service provided. As part of this, showcase examples of where technicians have acted in this way and how it specifically has helped the customer.
• Openly praise and provide feedback to reinforce desired behaviours.
• Offer rewards that are not contingent on the individual act of promoting services, but which recognize group-wide achievement. Pink calls these types of rewards “now that” rewards – as in, “now that you have achieved this, here is a reward to recognize that achievement.”  These are rewards that are not typically communicated in advance.  Pink cautions that this approach can lose its effectiveness if the “now that” rewards become expected (or contingent) rewards.

In the end, I think it all comes down to how we think about the task of making recommendations to customers.  If we see this task as part of the service, then we should treat and support it like we do all other services.  If we don’t provide extrinsic rewards for completing routine repairs for example, does it really make sense to do so for making recommendations?  The evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards may have the opposite effect to what we intend.

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

“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what
you want them to do because they want to do it.”

 – Dwight D. Eisenhower

[1] Daniel H. Pink, Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (New York:  Riverhead Books, 2009), p. 59.

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The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that roughly 30% of all food produced worldwide is lost or wasted, along with all of the resources (water, fuel, fertilizers, etc.) necessary to get that food to consumers.[1]  The statistic brought to mind a compelling advertisement I saw a couple of years ago and got me wondering if we can draw parallels between how we manage food budgets and training investments.

The advertisement was created to make consumers aware of the enormity of the issue.  I can’t recall the exact details but I remember the image of a man at a barbeque with a grill full of food.  He is moving the food to a serving plate.  Every second or third time he bypasses the plate and puts the food directly into a garbage bin.  It is through the absurd nature of the act (who would cook dinner only to throw it directly in the garbage?) that makes the advertisement so effective.  Its point is that, although we would never dream of wasting food by throwing it directly into the bin, we effectively do just that when we throw out the leftovers three days later. This compelling image was intended to help consumers look at the issue in a new light.

Which brings me to training investments.  Like food consumers, no one knowingly makes an expenditure on training their teams with any intent of wasting that investment.  And yet, depending on how well we as managers support the training, we are effectively doing so.

Several years ago, James D. Kirkpatrick, consultant, author and trainer, made a presentation at an event hosted by the Canadian Society for Training and Development.  He presented a chart depicting the relative contribution to training effectiveness between management support and training quality.  He indicated that 25% of a training program’s effectiveness can be attributed to how management positions and introduces the training before the event takes place.  A further 50% of effectiveness will be the result of how management follows up and supports the training after the event.  According to his presentation, only 25% of training effectiveness can be attributed to the quality of the training itself.

This is not to say that the quality of the training itself is not important.  Obviously we want to ensure that the training content and delivery is of the highest quality.  Rather, it is speaking to the important role management has in ensuring that participants get the most that they can from the training event.  Without this support, Kirkpatrick’s research suggests that, like the food commercial outlined above, we are likely throwing training dollars directly into to the garbage bin.

Here are three things that we can do to get the greatest return from our training dollars in terms of skills adoption and behaviour change.

1. Before the Training Takes Place. Introduce the training in context of how it will benefit the participants. What will they learn?  Why will this be beneficial?  What results should they expect by implementing the new skills?  Prepare for the training and provide necessary backup so that attendees can participate fully.  Arrange a venue that is suitable for the training purpose.

2. During the Training. Although it is not always possible or practical to participate in all training that takes place, make a point of participating fully in training events when it makes sense.  Get an advance copy of the training materials and review them carefully.  Make notes in the margin of the workbook about examples from the day-to-day lives of the attendees that can help illustrate key points.  Participate in the training and avoid sitting at the back of the room eyes glued to the computer or cell phone.  Let others speak and avoid dominating the conversation, while making contributions of key points that are not otherwise raised.  Network with participants during breaks to get a sense of how they feel about the workshop and the key points they are learning. Be enthusiastic throughout the workshop.

3. After the Training. Follow up with participants and assess how clearly they see the relevance of the training to their day-to-day activities.  Spend time to see how well they are applying the new skills and constructively provide feedback and coaching where applicable.  Identify key behaviours to review in future meetings and provide opportunities to practice new skills (role plays for example) when practical.

No one wants to throw training resources into the waste bin.  A good way to prevent this from happening is to recognize and act on our role as managers to support, reinforce and coach new skills and behaviours.  We must remember that, in reality, we are not paid for what we do but for what our team does.  Therefore it makes sense to do what we can to help our teams to be the best that they can be.

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

“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”

– Margaret Fuller

[1] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at:  http://www.fao.org/save-food/resources/keyfindings/en/

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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 it comes to engaging technicians in promoting services, many service managers see the role of selling as different from the role of service. They often describe selling and service as distinct and almost unrelated activities. With this view, when someone is selling they are not serving and when someone is serving they are not selling. The chart below illustrates this view of the relationship between selling and service activities.

The Distinct Activities of Selling and Serving

In the chart, we have reduced the activities that a salesperson and/or a technician perform to simply selling or serving. Obviously they do more than those activities in their daily work, but let’s make this assumption to simplify the point being made.

The vertical column of the chart represents a measure of the percent of time spent in an activity (in this case either “service” or “selling”) from 0% to 100%. Since we are only considering these two activities, then the total of the time selling and the time servicing must equal 100%. The horizontal axis represents the percentage of time spent in each activity. As we move across the axis, more time is spent in selling activities from nearly 0% in the “Pure Service” situation to nearly 100% in the “Pure Selling” situation. Note that in the position marked “Pure Service” there is still a small amount of selling taking place. This represents the technician’s time spent with the customer explaining the situation and recommending specific repairs. Likewise, note that at the position of “Pure Selling” there is a small percentage of time allocated to service.

When our perspective is that selling is an activity separate from serving then, if we want our technician to spend more time promoting our services, we must move the technician from “Pure Service” along the horizontal axis towards the position of “Pure Selling”. We would not contemplate moving our technicians all the way to the right – we do not want to turn our technicians into salespeople – but a little more to the right as depicted by the red arrow would be beneficial.

But this view may just be what is limiting performance and results. When we think of service as a distinct activity and look to “move our technicians towards the right” on our chart, we tend to see selling as an activity that is an “add on” to what our technicians are doing now (service) and not part of the service itself. This can result in a “while you’re there” perspective as in, “While you’re there, keep your eyes open for other things that we can sell to the customer.” It is this viewpoint that can limit the potential of our initiative and may even erode the relationship with the customer.

This perspective is limiting because it perceives selling as a tactic to be performed to win more business rather than as a service to deliver a more valuable service outcome and experience. With this perspective, our focus and attention is directed to how the customer can serve our needs rather than how we serve the needs of the customer and this will subsequently obscure much larger opportunities to integrate the promotion of our services into a differentiated service offering that is valued by our customers.

In my next blog, we will look more closely at the reasons why this perspective may be hindering our success and how a change in perspective will result in breakthrough thinking.

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

“There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?”

– Woody Allen

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