how to maintain excellent customer service Archives - jimbaston.com

Proactive Service® – Giving Customers your Hearts & your Heads

Jim — Tue, 21 Jan 2014 13:46:01 +0000

I received an important reminder about giving customers our hearts as well and our heads. I was having lunch with a good friend and client last week and we got onto the topic of the benefits and pitfalls of engaging technicians in business development activities. In particularly we were talking about how sales people can use the proactive promotion of services by their technicians to differentiate themselves when selling contract services. I mentioned that while most companies give their customers their hands (i.e. do good work), proactive service companies provide customers with their heads as well. By looking out for their customers and making helpful suggestions to allow them to be more effective at operating their facilities, they are providing the highest level of service.

Steve, who is a key part of a large, national service firm suggested, “Actually Jim, I agree with you but I think you need to be more specific. When engaging our service technicians in speaking to customers about the other things we can do to assist them, we need to ensure that they use their hearts as well as their heads.” Steve went on to relate a story that a service manager told him. It seems that they had a technician on staff who took promoting services to a new high. He would promote anything and everything to anybody that would listen. As a result, this service manager was getting complaints from several customers. They didn’t appreciate being “sold” when the technician was really there to service their equipment. Steve went on, “This technician wasn’t really acting on behalf of the customer, he was acting for himself and the benefits that he would get if the customer bought the product or service he was offering. His heart was not in the right place and the customers could spot it a mile away.”

Steve was right. Technicians have to engage the customer in these kinds of discussions for the right reasons. They have to believe that the customer will be better off by taking their recommendations. If they don’t believe that the recommended action is in the interest of the customer, then they should not be suggesting the service at all. That is one of the reasons I don’t think that “commissions” or “bonuses” should be paid for services sold by the technician. It encourages the behaviour but for the wrong reasons.

I encourage you to look closely at your own programs for promoting services through your technicians. Are your technicians empowered to give your customers their hearts as well as their hands? Do your support systems (like bonuses or commissions) reinforce this approach or do they encourage them to leave their hearts in the truck? Have you made it clear that you want them to use good judgement before making recommendations and be certain, in their own minds, that the recommendation is truly in the interests of the customer?

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

“A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.”

– Nelson Mandela

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Transform the Service Experience through Tangibles

Jim — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:43:21 +0000

In my previous blog in this series, we discussed how to transform the service experience through ‘assurance’. In this blog post, we will consider what we can do to transform the service experience through the tangible aspects of the service we provide. Our customers will make judgments about the quality of our work and the competence of our technicians based on tangible clues that they can see.

Recall that the name RATER[1] is an acronym with each letter representing the first letter of one of the five key dimensions of service quality. They are:

R eliability: Our ability to provide what is promised, dependably and accurately

A ssurance: Our knowledge and courtesy, and our ability to convey trust and confidence

T angibles: Our physical facilities and equipment, and our appearance

E mpathy: The degree of caring and individual attention we provide to customers

R esponsiveness: Our willingness to help customers and provide prompt service

The challenge for us when considering tangibles, is to define how we can contribute to the service experience through the tangible clues that our customers see. Everything that the customer observes says something about the quality of our service. Therefore, every tangible aspect of our work must be consistent with the image that we want to portray to the customer about our service. For example, if we promote ourselves as providing a premium level of service, then our technicians must be dressed in a neat and professional manner, their truck must be clean, free of rust and dents and well organized, and the tools they use must be in tiptop condition and of recent vintage. Anything less will cause the customer to question whether they are really getting the quality of service that they have been promised.

Other things to consider include all areas of our business such as:

The quality of our written reports
The content and appearance of our literature and our proposals
The condition of the work area before, during and after service is provided
The appearance of the equipment after it has been serviced
The use of appropriate safety equipment during the performance of the work

The list can be extensive but the effort is worth it. Next time we will consider how we can help the customer experience our empathy – the E in RATER.

What tangible clues are you providing your customers? 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.

Until next time,

Jim

“Costumes are the first impression that you have of the character before they open their mouth
– it really does establish who they are.”

Colleen Atwood

[1] From the work of: Valarie A. Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman, Leonard L. Berry. Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations. New York: The Free Press, 1990

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CMCEF Webinar Series – Part 3 Maintaining the Service Experience

Jim — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 11:36:36 +0000

The next and final webinar in the CMCEF Webinar Series is called Maintaining the Service Experience and will take place on Tuesday, February 26^th, 2013. On February 12^th, 2013, I presented the second webinar in the Transforming the Service Experience series hosted by the Canadian Mechanical Contractors Education Foundation. The Webinar was called Creating the Service Experience. In the webinar, we considered the five key hurdles to successfully engaging our technicians in activities to transform the service experience resulting in more revenues and higher customer satisfaction and retention. The hurdles that can prevent our technicians from doing what we would like them to do are:

Knowledge: We must clearly define our expectations of what we want our technicians to do. Often we assume that our technicians know what is expected and overlook the importance of this step.
Skills: We must ensure that our technicians have the skills to act in the manner we ask of them. Engaging in proactive discussions with customers may be uncomfortable for some of our technicians and they may lack the skills to do so effectively.
Perception: We must ensure that our technicians understand why we ask them to act as we do. Speaking to customers about our services and capabilities may be perceived as a sales task by our technicians. They need to understand that helping our customers operate their facilities more effectively is a service, not a sale.
Tools and processes: We must make certain that the technicians have the tools and are supported by our processes to do what we want them to. When our processes do not support our technician’s efforts, they will perceive that what we are asking is not that important and quickly lose heart.
Motivation: To get our technicians to enthusiastically embrace a proactive service approach, they must want to do it. Otherwise, at best they will simply go through the motions or, at worst, not act in the manner we would like them to at all.

As mentioned above, this next and final webinar called Maintaining the Service Experience (Tuesday, February 26^th, 2013), will focus on our role as managers to motivate and support our technicians to create and maintain momentum for change.

For more information on this last webinar in the Transforming the Service Experience Series, click the link below:

Tuesday, February 26^th: Maintaining the Service Experience

Note: This webinar is open to everyone. Non CMCEF members are welcome to attend. The webinar will commence at 11:00 AM EST and is scheduled to be one hour in length.

Once you’ve attended the webinars, I would 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.

Until next time,

Jim

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