The available population with the potential to become service engineers is growing fewer, for a number of reasons. The engineer has to be able to balance customer needs with business pressures, particularly as customers become ever-more demanding of high levels of customer service and the cost of delivering service continues to increase. In addition equipment is becoming more complex with sophisticated interfacing and networking. Integrating field and support engineers into a broader customer interface role is also hindered by engineers not wanting to accept an in-house role, contrarily many support staff fulfilling in-house roles reject the Nomadic lifestyle of a field engineer.
Providing service excellence to customers requires development of good staff and ensuring the best are retained. Recent research has shown that, for the first time, businesses are investing equivalent amounts of their budgets in training and in technology (21%), but the majority are spending most of their training budgets on increasing technical skills. Breaking down the budget reveals that most companies invest no more than 10% of their training budget in non-technical aspects, so only about 2% of the total budget is spent on developing customer handling and relationship building skills; skills that are becoming essential to modern customer-interface support staff, as the need is to fix the customer, not just the equipment.
The change in requirements has not happened overnight; the shift from fixing equipment to fixing the customer has been a subtle and gradual evolution, slow enough for many engineers to adapt, and adopt ways of working to accommodate change, yet very few companies have noticed the difference. Anecdotal comments have identified specific customers as becoming more demanding, not recognising the symptoms as a sea change, simply because they have no effective mechanism to detect a change, for example:
- They haven’t asked the engineers (or don’t believe them)
- They haven’t asked the customer (the average customer satisfaction survey will not detect the change)
- Because the change has been so gradual, some customers have been unaware of changes to their requirements ( the frog in gradually warming water meets an untimely end, the frog plunged into hot water jumps clear)
- he measures are efficiency measures not effectiveness measures
- The majority of service systems are designed to pick up productivity information only ( many still using visits per day as a KPI).
It is rare to find a business that has established systematic collection of on-going information about the customer and their changing needs, but such a business can demonstrate the value of this information by the sound relationships and rapport achieved at their customer interface, resulting in significant growth in revenue and additional sales, as their satisfied and loyal customers buy again and recommend the company to their contacts. It is necessary to identify whether the customers have Mercenary, Hostage, Promoter or Detractor characteristics; the following definitions, although brief, illustrate what is happening, often before our very eyes.
It is rare to find a business that has established systematic collection of on-going information about the customer and their changing needs, but such a business can demonstrate the value of this information by the sound relationships and rapport achieved at their customer interface, resulting in significant growth in revenue and additional sales, as their satisfied and loyal customers buy again and recommend the company to their contacts. It is necessary to identify whether the customers have Mercenary, Hostage, Promoter or Detractor characteristics; the following definitions, although brief, illustrate what is happening, often before our very eyes.
- Mercenaries: Customers just looking for cheaper deals, and highly likely to switch if presented with a better offer. What could engender loyalty?
- Hostages: Do not want to stay, but tied to the company by contract, technology or other barriers. What will satisfy them and/or how to retain them?
- Promoters: Customers essential to your long term success. They are the best promotion and distribution channel for any company. How to retain them in a profitable way?
- Detractors: Dissatisfied and not loyal. They are actively disruptive via negative word of mouth. Only attempt to retain if significant profit potential.
Figure 1 represents how these different types of customer fit onto the loyalty and satisfaction grid.
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