Are your Customers Better off Having Known you?

“Are your customers better off having known you?”  This is a question we ask in our Proactive Service^® workshops – a workshop for technicians to help them understand and develop the skills and approaches to engage their customers in business development activities.   Our point to the technicians is that, if they want to add real value to their customer relationships, they must do more than simply do a good job at maintenance and service, while reactively addressing any problems that arise.  Any tech can do that and most do.  The real value comes from getting to know the needs of the customer and using their accumulated knowledge and expertise to make recommendations about what they can do to help the customer achieve them.  The measure of their success is whether the customer can say they are better off.

As managers, we have an important role to play here.  Our technicians must understand that this is an integral part of their role.   They must recognize that these proactive conversations that they have with their customers represent a valuable and important service – as important as fixing and maintaining the customer’s equipment.  We must ensure that the processes, systems and expectations of all customer-facing personnel support the technicians’ efforts.  We must be prepared to provide training on the necessary skills for our technicians to be successful and coach on and support those skills regularly.  And, we must maintain focus on this initiative consistently, month after month and take every opportunity to do so through toolbox, safety and other service related meetings.

If we take these steps both our technicians and ourselves will be able to answer “Yes” to the question, “Are our customers better off for having known us?”.  And, most importantly, our customers will appreciate and reward our efforts with their business and their referrals to others.

I’d love your feedback on this. 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

“Improvement begins with I.”

– Arnold H. Glasow