Top 10 Best Practices to Recruit and Retain Service Talent
We all know who we are talking about when we speak about the real talent in the service business, the service engineer. Every service manager knows which field service engineer one can send to the really difficult assignments or who in the support organisation can always fix thorny problems that others cannot. The best Service talent has a unique combination of: technical skills, soft skills to deal with customers, the ability to deliver a superior customer experience, be ambassadors of the company’s brand, and ability to manage stressful situations. Many of these competencies can be developed but service managers know that finding the right talent makes all the difference to their business.
Finding and retaining talent will only become more important as service talent increasingly plays an important role in selling services. Engineers now need to act as trusted advisors and give objective advice to customers, helping them to get the best out of complex technology in the context of their business, or advising your customer on business optimisation as they have become process or industry experts.
Trusted advisors know how the processes of their company work, what are the products and services being offered and what should be offered in each customer situation. They are the eyes and ears for the company and often the most important touch point for the customer that through increasing digitalisation have less personal interaction with your company.
As products increasingly become connected to the internet and produce vast streams of data that are analysed and put to use for the benefit of customers, the service talent increasingly needs to have digital skills in order to address challenges with information technology rather than hardware issues.
Real talent in service is also a lot more productive. Noventum benchmarking has shown that service talent can be eight times more productive than average performing service staff.