Technician Service Challenges – How to Keep a Customer

It’s happened to all of us. A preventable failure, a lost customer, and all this could have been avoided for the price of a cup of coffee. I learned this lesson many years ago interviewing customers for a client. I asked a range of questions about performance, suggested ways to improve technician service, keep customers and address some of the challenges they were facing or expected to face in the future. Our aim was to develop a service strategy that better anticipated and served the needs of their customers.

One customer told me it was lucky that he was still a customer at all. He told me of an incident that happened a few years previously that caused him some personal embarrassment and had him literally concerned for his own job. Apparently, after a routine maintenance call, the technician informed the customer that they had a problem with a specific piece of equipment. It was showing signs of failure and that it should be replaced. The technician duly included this in the service order summary which the customer signed.

Several months passed and the equipment issue was not addressed. And then one day the equipment failed. The failure caused several days of business disruption and incurred a costly emergency repair. The customer called the President of the service company to complain only to find out that he had indeed been informed.  The President went on to tell him the exact date that the conversation took place and the fact that the customer had even signed the work order that included the equipment failure warning in the summary. “I felt terrible”, said this customer. “I had obviously forgotten about the recommendation. I sheepishly hung up the phone … and that’s when I really started to get angry”.

What made him angry was the fact that the same technician was back at his office to do routine maintenance at least two or three times between the initial recommendation and the failure. “Not once in all those times did the technician remind me of this looming problem. Had he only mentioned this to me, it all could have been avoided”.

Which brings me to the cup of coffee… Taking the time to grab a cup of coffee with a client might give your technicians an opportunity to review outstanding recommendations and avoid disaster.  It might even mean more business and improve customer satisfaction and retention. This is one of the subjects we address in our Proactive Service® workshop.  Each time, several technicians invariably nod their heads and admit that a similar thing has happened to them (or a colleague).

Has this happened to your technicians? Perhaps it’s time for some coaching. I welcome your feedback. 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

“Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.”

– Earl Wilson