More and more service organizations recognize the value their field service professionals bring when they make recommendations to their customers that will help them to be better off. The challenge is to get the field team to embrace this business development mindset and maintain focus over the long haul.

To achieve this, we would be well served by supporting business development by our field service team like any other service we provide. Here are three things we can do.

1. Support the proactive efforts of the field service team with tools and processes.

Imagine that you have decided to offer a new service for your customers.  Would you simply announce the new service and wish your team luck in delivering on it or would you provide every effort to ensure that the initiative was a success?  I suspect that you would not leave anything to chance and that you would make the necessary investments to ensure that the field team was properly equipped and directed to make the new service a success.

Now think about the field team’s proactive efforts to make recommendations of products and services to your customers.  Here are just a few questions to consider:

• Have you made the same level of effort to ensure their success in recommending your services as you have in ensuring that they can deliver upon them?
• What processes and tools have you employed to ensure that your field team can effectively identify and speak to the customer about your services?
• How have you employed your field automation and/or other tools to support the efforts of your team?
• Have you defined clear steps for your field team to take when making recommendations?
• How will the current status of opportunities identified be communicated and updated?

2. Train the field service team on the details of the service that they are about to deliver and the skills required to do so.

Thinking back to the new service offering:

• What training would you provide on that service and how would you explain why it is of value to the customer?
• What would you want the field professional to know about the benefits of the recommended service and the types of problems the new service addresses or avoids?
• How would you equip your service team to speak intelligently about the new service and explain how it will help each customer?
• What skills will you equip your team with to deliver the service flawlessly?

Now consider the business development expectations you have for your technicians:

• How will you equip your field team so that they can explain the benefit of their proactive efforts to the customer?
• How is this different from simply promoting services?
• What specific benefits can the customer expect from the field team’s recommendations?
• How can the field team present recommendations in a manner that helps the customer see the benefit of taking action?
• What specific steps do you expect the field service team to take when delivering on this service?

A field team that recognizes that their efforts are not solely intended for the purpose of increasing revenues, but rather to improve the level of service provided, will be more engaged and enthusiastic in doing just that.  The fact that revenues will rise as a result of their efforts is a secondary reward for their ability to improve overall service levels.  A clear understanding of expectations will also help to engage the team in this important service activity.

3. Measure performance for continuous improvement

Any new service offering will have to demonstrate a return on investment.  Feedback about actual performance against plan will be analyzed and addressed.  Without feedback you or your team would not have a clear view of the effectiveness of their efforts.

The same is true for engaging field teams in making proactive recommendations.  Feedback on their performance will provide insights into what is working well and what is not.  It will give you a clearer view of the effectiveness of the effort and guide steps to make continuous improvement.

An obvious measure is revenue but that is only the tip of the iceberg.  Other related and critical measures are customer satisfaction and retention scores.  In addition, if we are making recommendations that will help our customer to be better off, we should see a decrease in unplanned maintenance and an improvement in overall labour planning.  These are just a few of the measures we can take to evaluate performance.  There are several more.

We Need Ensure that Our Field Team is Properly Equipped

Engaging our field team to proactively identify and recommend products and services to our customers that will help them to be better off is a valuable service.  When we view our field team’s efforts as a service, we can take a step back and evaluate if we are providing the right level of support to ensure their enthusiastic participation and their sustained success.  Like any service we provide, we need to ensure that our team is equipped with the right tools, skills and processes and measure our performance against plan to focus on continuously improving.

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

“One of the greatest compliments that we can receive is
when our customer tells us that they are better off for having known us”

– Jim Baston

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“Actually John”, I replied, “they pay you for both – fixing things and looking good.”  John was not convinced.

I asked John if he had been to a wedding recently and it turns out he was just the month before.

“What did you wear?” I asked.

“Sports Jacket and dress shirt – no tie.”

“What day of the week was it?”

“Saturday.  Why?”

“Is that what you usually wear on a Saturday?”

“You’re kidding, right?”  John responded.  “It’s usually torn jeans and a stained T-shirt”.  John smiled broadly and looked around the room at his peers.

“Really?” I asked in mock astonishment.  “Why didn’t you wear those to the wedding?”

“Because you just don’t that’s why.  You dress up for a wedding.  It shows respect.”

“But surely John, you weren’t invited to look good, you were invited to share the joy of the bride and groom’s big day.”  I stated, paraphrasing what he had said earlier.

“This is different!  I was talking about work and the need to get something fixed.  My customers wouldn’t care if I came in boxer shorts so long as I fixed the problem before I left!”

“Okay John.  How about this?  Have you seen your doctor in the last 12 months?”

“I just had my check up.  Why?

“What was he wearing?”

“Nice pants and a dress shirt – white I think.  He also had a phone on his belt and a stethoscope around his neck.”

“Any bloodstains on the shirt?”

“What????  No!!!”

“What if there were?  What if your doctor was wearing clothes with bloodstains and that looked like they had been slept in, wore a two-day beard and had unkempt hair?  How would you feel about that?”

I went on to explain to John that the service that our customers’ experience is derived from two distinct yet inseparable components.  One is the actual service performed – the troubleshooting and repair, the maintenance activities, the installation, etc.  This component is the service outcome.  It is the reason that the customer called us in the first place.  It was what John was thinking about when he spoke about the fact that customers don’t pay him to look good.

The second component that makes up our customers’ service experience is how the service is conducted – the smile on the tech’s face, the cleanliness of the work area, the quality of the repair description and even how the technicians chooses to present him or herself.  This is called the service delivery.

Because in most cases the customer can’t truly assess the quality of the actual service outcome, they look to how the service is delivered to determine the quality of the service provided.  In effect, they use the service delivery as the lens through which to view and assess the service outcome.  Both service delivery and service outcome are important and cannot be separated.  Together they add up to the total service experience.

Therefore, since customers are paying for the total service experience, it is fair to say that customers do pay us to look good AND fix things.  It is up to us as managers to ensure that they are getting what they are paying for when purchasing services from us.

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

“Your appearance, attitude, and confidence define you as a person.  A professional, well-dressed golfer, like a businessperson, gives the impression that he thinks that the golf course and/or workplace and the people there are important.”

– Lorii Myers, Targeting Success, Develop the Right Business Attitude to be Successful in the Workplace

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Our field service technicians represent a huge opportunity to generate revenues. They have a special relationship with our customers based on a high level of trust. Through that relationship, they have gained a unique understanding of our customers’ goals. They have a practical understanding of the latest in technology and they know our company’s capabilities. Who better than them to recognize and explore opportunities for your company to add more value through more services?

Despite this truth, we have found that most service firms are not fully capitalizing on the unique relationships that their service people have. This is unfortunate for both the service firm and the customer. When we do not fully leverage the special relationships that our service technicians have, we are missing a tremendous opportunity to grow our business, reduce competition and increase customer satisfaction levels. But there is more to it than that. The customer is being denied the opportunity to run their plant or facility better. The customer is not benefiting fully from the knowledge and expertise of our service technicians.

Many firms have considered teaching their service technicians to become part time salespeople. Unfortunately, those firms that we have worked with who have taken this approach report mixed results and any improvement in business development appeared to be short lived.

One of the main reasons that turning technicians into part time salespeople does not work as well as we might hope is because customers trust the service technician to give them objective advice based on their knowledge and experience.  Unlike salespeople who are compensated for what they sell, service people are compensated for what they know and using that knowledge to do their job well – installing, fixing or maintaining things.  They are viewed as honest brokers – “telling it like it is” with no hidden agendas.  It would seem natural that, if they just put a little more effort in selling to those trusting customers, then they will be instrumental in building more revenues and profits.

Unfortunately, the harder the technician tries to “sell” to the customer, the less effective they will be in building new business.  The reason is that the moment the service technician starts to “sell”, he/she transcends that bond of trust that has been forged with the customer.  The technician’s focus changes from the needs of the customer to the interests of making the sale.  The very reason the customer trusted the service technician in the first place – the fact that they aren’t out to sell them anything – is suddenly no longer the basis of the relationship.   When the customer senses that they are being “sold”, they become confused.  To the customer, the technician has just changed from being a “trusted advisor” to just another “salesperson” and the relationship advantage is lost.

The solution is to provide the field service technician with training that ensures that any new business opportunities that are identified are based on solving the needs of the customer – not on the need to sell the services of our company.  This subtle change in approach directs the field service technicians to change their focus from our firm and our services – i.e. what we have or do that can be sold – to the needs of our customer – i.e. what our customer needs and how we can best address it.

When service technicians approach business development in this way, they offer a higher level of service altogether. They will be using their knowledge, skills and experience to help our customers realize how they can make improvements.  They will be giving our customers their heads as well as their hands.

I’d love your feedback. Feel free to leave a link back to your own blog as well via the commentluv feature here on the site.

Jim Baston

P.S. If you would like to explore the “Five Hurdles to Engaging Technicians in Business Development Activities“, I encourage you to download my article which you will by clicking here.

 “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it.
But if you love what you are doing,
and always put the customer first, success will be yours.”

-Ray Kroc

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