Creating a Proactive Service Culture Throughout Your Service Team

Creating a Proactive Service® culture throughout your service team is one of the most effective ways that a service company can grow their business and create a distinctive competitive advantage.  By Proactive Service®, we mean a technical service team that is engaged not only in maintaining and fixing equipment to the highest levels, but in actively looking for ways that their firms can help their customer meet their own business goals.  It is proactive because the technician takes the initiative to identify opportunities to help and proactively addresses these with the customer.

Almost every service company can point to one or more of their techs who are naturally gifted to promote their services. They are always making recommendations to customers and promoting new services – and their customers love them. In our experience, these technicians are successful because they don’t see their recommendations as selling, but rather as an enhancement of their service.  If you have one or two techs on your team that fit this description, then you know the potential of getting everyone on your team to act in the same way.

In this series of blogs we are going to examine six steps that you implement to create a Proactive Service® focus from all of your service team members.  This will greatly enhance your efforts of developing a distinctive and sustainable competitive advantage and result in higher revenues and delighted customers.  I also contend that it will make your business a more desirable place to work.

The six steps we will explore are:

1. Focus on the service, not the sale
2. Encourage your techs to get to know your customer’s business goals
3. Provide continuous educational opportunities on your products and services
4. Develop a clear opportunity response process with feedback loops to the technician
5. Create a follow up process for quoted work
6. Provide ongoing coaching and support

Next time we will consider how we position our efforts as a service to ensure we get engagement from our techs and our customers.

What kind of service culture does your organization have today? 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

“Do today what others won’t, so tomorrow, you can do what others can’t.”

 – Unknown