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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

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Are you thinking of providing “sales” training for your technicians on how to promote your services? Before making a decision, consider what you want the training to achieve. Below are 4 questions that are key when evaluating training programs that can help you ensure you get a higher ROI.

Those of you who have read my book and subscribe to this blog know that I feel that the technician is in a unique position to identify opportunities that the customer can act on to help them operate their facilities and/or processes more effectively. In fact, I believe that technicians have an obligation to reach out to the customer to discuss these opportunities to help and to assist them in making informed decisions. To me, this really isn’t selling at all, but rather an important part of the service.  And, this approach has a significant benefit. My experience indicates that service firms that engage their technicians in this way will create a sustainable competitive advantage and be rewarded with more business, higher customer satisfaction and unprecedented levels of retention.

Many of you may be considering training your technicians on “selling” to support them in their efforts to add more value to their service relationships.  If this is the case for you, I encourage you to consider the critical components that will drive the success of the training program in attaining the results you are looking for and provide you with a higher return on your investment.

This is important because not all training programs are the same. Some training programs for technicians are sales programs originally designed for salespeople and “modified” for the field service tech. They often cover a full range of sales topics that were originally designed for people who sell for a living.  As a result, programs in this category may include sales techniques and approaches that are foreign to the technician and of limited value.

These “sales programs for technicians” also may have limited impact because they have a solitary focus.  They only address one aspect of success – one that is of limited value without the support of the other key success factors. Success of a workshop for technicians will be dependent upon:

• The connection the technician sees between what he/she is being asked to do and their perceived role (i.e. is this part of my job?)
• Their ability to conduct themselves when promoting services in a manner that continues to build the trust and confidence of the customer
• The fit of what is being taught with your company’s culture
• The technicians’ comfort level in applying the skills taught in the field (are the skills consistent with the technician’s “culture” and the service “environment”?)

This brings me to the 4 questions that are key to helping you evaluate a training program to enthusiastically engage your technicians in business development.

1. Does the training position the role of engaging the technician in business development activities as an integral part of the service that they provide?
   2. Is the approach presented consistent with your business culture and strategy and the role you have defined for the technicians?
   3. Does the training help technicians recognize and develop commitments to enhance their credibility with the customer?
   4. Does the training provide situation relevant skills in communicating ideas to others in order to help technicians comfortably articulate their ideas and confidently deal with resistance when it occurs?

By evaluating training options by asking these questions, we ensure that the training we select will encourage our technicians to be “business partners” who bring their unique knowledge to help the customer solve problems and capitalize on opportunities – problems or opportunities that the customer may not even know they have. Your technicians will be more comfortable in engaging the customer as a “problem solver” in partnership with the customer and therefore more likely to adopt the skills that will contribute to their success. Your customers will appreciate this approach as well and be more receptive to the new ideas presented to them.

Next time I will look at the relative importance of the “selling” skills themselves in terms of the effectiveness of “sales” training for technicians.  You may be surprised to find that these may not be as important as one might first surmise.

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

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”

– Pablo Picasso

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Whether we like it or not, what is written on the work order to describe the service that has been performed, is an important indicator to the customer of the quality of the work completed. This is because, under most circumstances, the customer cannot actually know the quality of the work itself. For example, how do they know if the hour it took the technician to troubleshoot the problem displayed brilliant detective work that would have taken any other person several hours to figure out, or if the hour demonstrated a poor grasp of the technology that another technician could have completed in only 5 minutes? The fact is the customer doesn’t know. They therefore look for evidence of the quality of the service and one of the most important factors that they rely on is how the work performed is described in the work order description.

Therefore, providing a clear and accurate account of the work completed is very important. There is also another and very practical reason for having a clear and accurate work order resolution description – productivity. Imagine the technician completes a complicated repair and describes the work completed simply as “Fixed unit” in the work order description. The invoice for the work is $1,000. The customer on site is delighted to have the problem fixed and gladly signs the work order.

Roughly 60 days later the customer on site gets a call from her Accounts Payable department. They are reviewing the invoices for payment and they want to know what the service company did to justify the $1,000 invoice. Confronted with the need to provide this information, what does the customer do? She goes to her copy of the work order to collect the needed clarification. Of course, the “fixed unit” description is not at all useful so she is forced to call the technician directly. The call unnecessarily interrupts the technician in his work and he struggles to remember exactly what he actually did on that day over two months ago. All this costs time and, of course, money and all because the work order resolution description was poorly written.

So, how does a busy service manager encourage and ensure that his/her team communicates the value of the actual work through the work order resolution description? They could coach their team to use CARE on every work order.

CARE is an easy to remember acronym that can be used as a reminder for the technician to include the critical information that best describes the repair or service in a professional manager and that reassures the customer of the value of the action taken.

C is for Condition: Record the condition on site prior to taking action.
A is for Action: Summarize the actions taken to resolve the issue.
R is for Results: Record the resulting condition on site after the action has been taken.
E is for Expected Next Steps: Identify expected next steps, if any, that need to be taken, including any recommended repairs.

In addition to describing the work performed using the CARE approach you may also wish to include other information such as identifying the equipment and its location, recording all the materials and consumables used in the repair and, of course, identifying other observations or recommendations that will help the customer. All of this can be reviewed with the customer at the completion of the call.

All of this information and much more can be found in our Pocketbook of Proactive Service®. I would be happy to provide you with a free copy of the Pocketbook. If you would like your complimentary copy, simply send me an email with “Pocketbook” in the subject line along with your company name and address and I will get one out to you right away.

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

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

Isaac Asimov

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