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

The post Technology’s Revolutionary Impact on the Relative Importance of Soft Skills appeared first on jimbaston.com.

Here is a simple test for you.  Count the number of “F”s in the sentence below.

Don’t read any further until you have decided your number.

If you said six “F”s, then congratulations!  If you said anything else, don’t feel bad.  Most people see three.  Look at the sentence again.  Did you miss the “F”s in “OF”?  Now that you see the “F”s, it’s pretty obvious right?  It makes us wonder why we missed it in the first place.

Now, think of your service business.  Opportunities to help your customers should be obvious too.  Or are they as obvious as we might think?  Is your service team missing opportunities to help your customers?

Even with a Process in Place, Is Your Customer Seeing All the “F’s”?

Perhaps you have encouraged your field team to look for ways that you could help your customers achieve their business goals.  You’ve set up processes and systems to capture any opportunities identified.  You may have even told your customers your intentions and why your field team’s actions are not only unique but of great value for the them.  Even with all of this in place, how confident are you that they are seeing all of the “F”s – that is, how confident are you that they are not missing any opportunities to help the customer to be better off.

Four Actions to Ensure Your Field Service Team Does Not Miss Important Opportunities

Here are four actions that you can take to help ensure that your field service team does not miss opportunities that are important.

1. Establish a customer visit routine

Whenever your field service professional calls on a customer, ensure that each one of them follows a specific process which may include steps like:

• • Stopping by the customer’s office to explain the nature of the visit upon arrival and asking if anything has changed since their last visit.
  • Stopping by the customer’s office after the work is completed to go over what was done and asking if there is anything else they would like them to address while they are there.

2. Have your field team follow up on previous recommendations

Your customers are busy and, even with the best of intentions, some of your recommendations will get forgotten.  It’s a valuable service that you provide when your follow up reminds the customer to address something that had completely slipped their minds.  This is particularly important if the recommendation would prevent something that could seriously and negatively impact the customer if it is not addressed.

3. If appropriate, have your field team ask the customer to take them on a tour of their facilities

While on the tour, the field professional can point out ideas where you may be able to help and even some issues that may not be related to your business at all but will help the customer see that there are improvements that can be made.

4. Share best practices between team members

Whenever a field service member makes a recommendation that benefits a customer in a significant way, share it with the rest of the team.  What was the issue at hand?  How did the recommendation help the customer?  How many other customers might benefit from a similar recommendation?  What do these customers look like?  What questions might the field professional ask to uncover whether they could benefit from a similar recommendation?

Every time we make a proactive recommendation to a customer, we have an opportunity to help them toward achieving their business goals.  But, recognizing opportunities is not always as easy as we may first assume.  Andmissed opportunities might result in a problem for the customer.  Help your field team establish a process that will minimize lost opportunities and further enhance the value that you offer to your customers.

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

“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one”

– Mark Twain

The post Is Your Field Service Team Missing Opportunities to Help Your Customers? appeared first on jimbaston.com.

If you have encouraged your technicians to promote your services, you may be considering ways to recognize their efforts.  Perhaps one of the most obvious approaches is to pay them a commission based on the number of opportunities identified or on the value of the resulting order.  If you are thinking of paying your technicians a commission for new business consider these 5 key points.

Like all initiatives, there are pros and cons to paying technicians a commission.  On the positive side, commission programs can be relatively easy to set up and awarding payments based on sales certainly demonstrates that we value their efforts and provides a “thank you” for their initiative.  However, my experience in speaking with managers, technicians and their customers, has led me to the conclusion that directly paying technicians a commission for new business generated on a percentage of sales or on a pay per opportunity basis has many more negatives than positives.  Here are five reasons why you might consider a different form of recognition.

1. Commission programs are difficult to maintain. Although easy to set up, commission programs can be difficult to manage and maintain.  It is important that commission programs be:

• Clear in terms of which activities generate which rewards.
• Consistently applied.
• Perceived as being transparent.

All of this takes time and focus on the part of service management and, since service management frequently have other demands on their time, these programs usually do not get the attention they require.  Poorly managed systems rarely live up to these basic requirements and often have the opposite impact than the one they were designed to achieve.  I have spoken with many technicians who are frustrated with the program that is in place because management has not taken the time to properly administer it.  Some are so frustrated that they simply don’t bother to participate.

2. Commission programs might not be perceived as fair. Under a program where a technician is rewarded a commission directly for new business development, there is a possibility that some techs can and will benefit disproportionately compared to others.  For example, those technicians who maintain full coverage or comprehensive contracts may have less of an opportunity to benefit from new business development than those technicians who are mainly engaged in inspection-only contracts or who respond to emergency service calls.

3. Commission programs can confuse the message of business development as a sale rather than a service. This is a big one for me.  As a reader of my blogs you know that I see the business development efforts of technicians as an added service to the customer.  Any time the technician can advise the customer on actions that they can take that will improve their business in some way is a service and not a sale.  If we have encouraged our technicians to embrace this concept of business development as a service, then why are we compensating the activity as if it were a sale?  The more skeptical techs on our team may be put off by this apparent contradiction.

4. Commission programs can drive the wrong type of behaviour. This is related to the last point.  As a service, business development by our technicians by definition must be selective.  We simply want our technicians to keep their eyes and ears open for opportunities to help the customer.  Only when they see that a customer can benefit from a particular product or service do we want them to speak to the customer about it.  We want to discourage our technicians from “pushing” every product and service that we have in the hopes of making a sale because, when technicians act in this way, they look like salespeople to the customer and they lose the customer’s trust and confidence.  However, by rewarding all business development efforts, we may be encouraging exactly this type of indiscriminate business promotion that we want to avoid.

5. Commission programs may cause concern for your customer. How do you think your customers would feel if they knew that the technician who made the recommendation to replace the existing equipment was getting a commission for that recommendation over and above his/her normal compensation?  If you are not sure of your answer, ask yourself how you would feel if the auto mechanic where you get your car serviced is paid a commission for extra parts sold?   I suspect that you would feel a bit uncomfortable about the situation and may even be wondering if the latest repair was necessary.

You might conclude from this blog that I am against paying any form of compensation as recognition for the effort of technicians to promote products or services.  I am not.  I am simply saying that one of the more common means of compensation – paying sales commissions – can have a negative impact on your efforts and you may wish to consider other forms of compensation and recognition.  I will look at introducing some other forms of recognition in a future blog.  If you still plan to go the commission route, ensure that you consider and address the concerns I have identified above.

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 people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you.”

– Zig Ziglar     

The post 5 Things to Consider When Paying Technicians Commission appeared first on jimbaston.com.

For me, the end of December is a time for review of the year past and planning for the year ahead. The welcome change of pace I typically experience during the holidays naturally leads to this type of reflection. If it is the same for you, here are 7 indicators to help you take the pulse of the extent to which the Proactive Service® approach is embedded as part of your culture within your service team.

The Miriam-Webster On-Line Dictionary defines culture as, “a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization.”¹ It is the mindset of why we act the way we do. Instilling a Proactive Service culture has proven successful for service companies for this very reason. The culture underlying Proactive Service is based on using our proximity, knowledge and expertise to identify and recommend products and services that will ultimately help the customer to be better off. Although this approach results in more sales and other great benefits such as higher levels of customer trust, satisfaction and retention, the why we do it is because it allows us to enhance the level and quality of service that we provide.

So, how are you progressing at embedding a Proactive Service® culture within your team? Although financial results are an important indicator of success, here we want to consider how we act that contributes that success.

1. The Talk Around the Water Cooler. The words that your managers and technicians use about proactive business development are a big indicator of how people look upon the initiative. Does their language sound more like sales talk rather than service talk? Are solutions described in how they benefit the customer or how they benefit your company?

2. Observable Coaching and Support. Do your service/safety meetings include a coaching and development segment? Does management appear genuinely engaged in helping their team be better at some of the “softer” interpersonal skills and do they allow time for practice? Do their actions reinforce their words?

3. Ongoing Product and Service Knowledge. Does your field service team take pride in the overall extent of the services your company can provide? Do they recognize that their knowledge and understanding of your services and capabilities which are outside their areas of expertise allows them to add greater value to their relationships because they will be in a better position to recognize ways in which you can help? Does your management team update the technicians on new products and services and refresh them on existing ones? Do your technicians take the initiative to expand their product and service knowledge on their own?

4. Ownership of Processes and Systems. Do your processes and systems accurately capture and track opportunities from the field. Does your team take “ownership” of the process? If a “crack” in the process is discovered, does your team get concerned and are steps immediately taken to address and correct the problem?

5. Sales vs. Service. Is there a positive and respectful relationship between your sales and service teams? Do they speak positively of one another? Do both groups support the other when things don’t go as planned? Do they share common goals?

6. Proactive Service Promotion. Do you promote your Proactive Service® approach to your customers? Does your sales team use your approach to differentiate your company to win more service contracts?

7. Customer feedback. Do your customers share your enthusiasm for the benefits of the Proactive Service approach? Do they recognize they are better off? Are they telling others about the great work that you do for them?

All of these are indicators that point to the extent to which the Proactive Service® approach is becoming embedded in your service culture. We have also created a self-evaluation checklist that will allow you to evaluate your progress against Proactive Service® best practices. Please take a few moments to complete this form.

By taking the time during the holidays to reflect on these areas, you can identify opportunities for improvement and begin to plan the steps necessary to further encourage and enhance the enthusiasm of your team. By the first week of January you can be well on your way to making 2016 the best year yet.

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

“Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”

– Peter Drucker

¹http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture

The post Time to Reflect on your Proactive Service® Culture appeared first on jimbaston.com.

click to enlarge

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.

If you want to clearly differentiate your business and earn your increased revenues and customer loyalty, give your customers your heads as well as your hands. Help your technicians realize the service that they provide when they bring to the customers’ attention those things that your firm can do to help that customer be better off.

The last several blogs have been dedicated to discussing the role of the service technician when they take the initiative to identify and discuss actions that they believe the customer could or should take to improve their operations in some way. When the technician brings to the attention of their customers, those actions they can offer that will measurably help the customer be better at what they do, they provide a valuable service. It is a service that is every bit as important as the technician’s ability to repair or maintain things.

Unfortunately, most firms perceive and describe these proactive discussions with customers as selling and not serving. As I explained in previous blogs, this viewpoint limits their opportunity for growth and their ability to differentiate their service from their competitors. In my last blog, I looked at how by changing our perception of these proactive discussions from one of a selling role to one of serving, a service organization can experience a dramatic improvement in all aspects of the service provided. This time, I will look at how a service business can use this approach to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

It is interesting to note that service firms that see the role of recommending products and services by technicians as selling, don’t tell their customers about what they are doing. I suspect that the reason for this is that it is difficult to communicate the value of their technician’s actions if the reason they are “selling” is to simply increase revenues for the service company. Imagine how impactful the following statement would be to an existing or would-be customer. “Dear Mrs. Customer. I want you to know that we have trained our technicians to be better at selling and more observant about what we can do for you so that we can increase the amount of money we make from your organization.” Not very compelling! Now I am being a bit dramatic here, but the point I am making is that it is hard to put a positive spin on an action by the technicians, which by design, is intended to grow more revenues for the service provider. As a result, the service company likely doesn’t broadcast what they are doing and ends up engaging in a form of “stealth selling” by their technicians. And to me, that is an opportunity lost.

When the role of identifying actions that the service company can take to help the customer operate more effectively is regarded and treated as a service, then it opens up an opportunity to differentiate the overall service provided – including how it is communicated to the customer. The focus changes from how the customer can help us achieve our goals to how we can better help the customer achieve their goals. We should be taking every opportunity to broadcast what our technicians are doing to our customers and prospects alike. It should be a point of differentiation for us. For example, imagine your salesperson promoting the services of your company in a competitive situation. Rather than simply saying what every one of their competitors will say, they can communicate the unique value they bring through the actions of their technicians. The conversation might go something like this: “At ABC Service, we give you our heads as well and our hands. Our technicians are expert in their field and they are in a unique position to observe how your business is working. We want them to get to know your goals and objectives and we want them to keep these in mind as they are conducting their duties. If they see something that will make a measurable improvement to your business, we ask them to bring these to your attention. That way, you can make informed decisions that will impact factors such as your profitability, efficiency, quality, etc. If you would allow me, I would like to show you the impact this approach has provided to our existing customers and what our current customers have to say about it.”

If you are encouraging your technicians to look for ways you can provide a higher level of service to your customers, don’t keep it to yourself. Shout out what you are doing from the rooftops and differentiate your service from all of your competitors.

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

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

– Nelson Mandela

The post Give Your Customers Your Heads as Well as Your Hands 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

The post Want your Technicians More Proactive in Promoting your Services? Your Perspective May be Getting in the Way appeared first on jimbaston.com.