I recently read Daniel Pink’s book, 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
What is a simple question that delivers exceptional service and generates profitable revenue? It’s the one question that every field service technician should ask. So, why isn’t every field service technician asking it?
In our workshops, we discuss the value that field service professionals provide by bringing opportunities to our customers’ attention that can help them operate their facilities/processes more effectively. One way to uncover these opportunities is to ask this question, “Is there anything else that I can help you with today?”
I was engaged in a conversation recently about why communication plays such an important role in the world of service. It was an interesting discussion and allowed me the opportunity to share my definition of effective communication for the service business.
The quality of our communication is relied on to assess our competence
The quality of our communication is a major source of information that our customers rely on to evaluate our competence and the value of our work. As an intangible service, it is almost impossible for a customer to accurately evaluate actual work quality or competence directly. For example, if it takes us one hour to troubleshoot a problem, how does the customer know that the hour spent was amazing and that it would have taken anyone else a day or more to figure out the problem? The answer is that they don’t really know, so they look to their perception of the quality of our communication as an important input that they use to assess our competence.
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.
In his book, Coaching for Improved Work Performance[1], Ferdinand Fournies notes that, although there are 16 reasons why employees do not do what they are supposed to do, 99% of the time it is because of only two – they…
