Transforming Your Customer’s Service Experience

Welcome to my new Baston’s Blog – Transforming the Service Experience!   Baston’s blog is a regular resource of ideas, tools and strategies to help you transform the service experience you are providing to your customers and reap the resulting rewards – rewards that include higher revenues and profitability and increased customer satisfaction and retention.

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Beyond GREAT SERVICE – The Technician’s Role in Proactive Business Growth

 “The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.”

– Jack Welch

I wrote a book this year called Beyond GREAT SERVICE.  It is written as a fictional account about Charlie, a service manager, as he discovers the secret of successfully engaging technicians in conversations with their customers – a conversation that transforms the service experience and results in increased revenues and customer satisfaction.  Many people have asked me why I have written the book and, to answer that, I will need to take a small step back.

Technicians are arguably the most important assets you have employed in your service business.  They do the physical work necessary to keep your customers’ facilities and processes running smoothly and efficiently.  They do the intellectual work of finding and/or heading off serious problems that could bring your customers’ businesses to a halt.  They do the marketing work associated with representing you and your company.  In many cases, they are the key relationship your customer has with your firm.

Many firms have attempted to leverage those relationships as a source of new business.  The logic goes that “If only we can get our technicians to better promote our services, we could increase revenues and profitability without adding to overheads.”  The challenge is putting this strategy into action.

I have had the remarkable pleasure of spending my career closely aligned to the service business.  I have worked in the business selling and managing technical service businesses.  For the past 11 years or so, I have worked with thousands of technicians and their management as a consultant.  I have seen many companies that have tried to leverage their technician relationships to build more business and some have been successful, but many more have not – at least not as successful as was possible or as they would have like to have been.

Through this work, it became apparent that there are some fundamental issues that impede the success of most firms.  Unless these issues are addressed, management will always be disappointed with their efforts, regardless of the amount of time and other resources used, or the positive intentions of management.  I felt that the book would be a good way to highlight those issues and to provide some specific strategies on how to deal with them. 

I hope that you find Beyond GREAT SERVICE a useful resource as you engage your technicians more proactively in business development.  I personally think that it is a win/win/win situation.  Your company will be more profitable, your customers will be better served and your technicians will have a more rewarding and exciting place to work.

If you have any questions, please feel free to connect with me right here on my website, or contact me directly.

Jim Baston