5 Questions to Help you Evaluate How Proactive your Service Team Is

If you are actively engaging your technicians in promoting your services, here are 5 questions to help you evaluate how proactive your service team is. These questions are part of our ‘How Proactive is Your Service Team’ Checklist.

Do you:

1. Position business development as an important service activity to be performed by your service technicians? When technicians recognize the valuable service they perform when making recommendations that will help the customer, they will be more likely to engage them in conversation rather than thinking that it is the salesperson’s job.

2. Have a fail-safe mechanism for handling leads from the field? When our office team does not follow up opportunities, we are in effect telling the technicians that we were “only kidding” when we asked them to explore ways to help the customer.

3. Encourage your technicians to regularly follow up on recommendations they have made in the past? Our customers are busy and sometimes they forget. Our technicians provide a valuable service when they remind them.

4. Formally or informally meet with your key customers to review past performance (including recommendations) and help them use that information to plan/budget for the future? This is a great opportunity to enlighten your customers of the value of the service your techs are providing and engage them fully in the process.

5. Set aside time in your regular service meetings to discuss and practice customer service and business development skills? We wouldn’t dream of letting our customer’s equipment run without any maintenance. We should take the same approach to skills adoption. Regular maintenance will help maintain an exceptional level of customer service.

In our experience in working with service firms, many have found it helpful to use our ‘How Proactive is Your Service Team Checklist‘ to regularly analyze their performance against key measures. It helps them focus on what matters most in an industry that is easily distracted by the demands of the day-to-day realities of the business. The complete Checklist consists of 15 key questions.

We will look at some of these questions in more detail in subsequent blog posts.

In the meantime, I would like to offer all readers of this blog a complimentary copy of our ‘How Proactive is Your Service Team Checklist‘. If you are currently a subscriber to Baston’s Blog, you do not need to do a thing. I will send you a separate link to you to enable you to download a copy of the Checklist. Look for that shortly in your in-box. If you are not currently a subscriber to Baston’s Blog and would like a copy of the Checklist, simply click here to subscribe and upon verifying your subscription, you will receive a link to your complimentary copy. It is our stated goal to provide a regular blog that offers value to its readers. It is my hope that you will find Baston’s Blog helpful and worthwhile, but if you do not, please remember you can unsubscribe at any time.

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

“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”

Stephen R. Covey