Maintain Focus

Aug 16, 2021 • Features • management • BBA Consulting • field service management • Jim Baston • service strategies • Leadership and Strategy

In this final feature of his blog series on “supercharging” revenue generation through the field service team, Jim Baston, President of BBA Consulting Group, explains how to create a plan to maintain the focus and enthusiasm of your field team.

This is my last blog on supercharging revenue generation through your field service team.

Imagine opening up a reputable trade magazine and reading an article that states that you should stop maintaining your mechanical and electrical equipment. You read the following:

Engineers have just discovered that maintenance of mechanical and electrical equipment is not needed to keep equipment running at peak performance. You’ll get better performance by ignoring the equipment altogether. The equipment will run better and you’ll save money on not having to pay those service bills! This is great news for building owners and process managers. They can now take a hands-off approach, while getting excellent performance from their equipment.

Sounds a bit silly, doesn’t it? Who could possibly believe that the equipment that we lovingly maintain for our customers could possibly perform better if left un-serviced? In real life, without maintenance, filters will clog, belts will break and electrical connections will overheat. The cost of keeping things running, let alone performing at their peak will go up exponentially. Ultimately, everything will grind to a halt.

And yet, if we don’t take steps to help our techs maintain focus, is it not suggesting that we’ve similarly unrealistic expectations when it comes to their proactive performance? What are we doing for our field team to “maintain” their focus of making recommendations that will help the customer to be better off? We can do little or nothing and leave it to chance, or we can take the initiative to put into place a strategy to maintain focus and continually upgrade skills. The choice is ours.

Maintaining focus requires that we put in place a strategy to constantly “maintain” the service our technicians are providing. This includes:

Talking about the valuable service provided by the field service team at every opportunity
Providing skills reinforcement on a regular basis
Coaching the desired behaviour
Keeping the team current on all of our company’s capabilities
Evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of our tools and processes to ensure they continue to provide the support needed to help the techs do their job
Measuring and reporting on results

A special word about measurement. The proactive efforts of our technicians will generate new revenues so it’s natural to want to measure any revenue growth associated with their efforts. This could include measures such as overall revenue growth, growth of project business compared to the maintenance base, etc. But these types of measures only look at part of the picture. If we’re performing a valuable service, we should also consider other measures of the success of our initiative. These include:

Customer satisfaction scores
Customer retention rates
Emergency vs. planned work (the percentage of emergency work should decrease vs. our planned work which will have an impact on our labour planning)

And don’t forget to ask the customer how they feel about the service itself. For example, we could ask, “How happy are you with the recommendations our technicians are making to help you achieve your business goals?

This is the last blog in our series of supercharging revenue generation through the field service team. I hope you have found it of value. To return to the first blog in this series, click here. If I can be of any assistance, please just let me know. You can reach me at jim@jimbaston.com or call me at (416) 254-2383.

Reflection

Create a plan to maintain the focus and enthusiasm of your field team in each of the following areas:

Focus

Skills reinforcement
Coaching and development
Maintaining currency
- Skills
- Systems and tools

Measurement

Customer satisfaction and retention
Performance measurement
Operational impacts

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In this course created and hosted by Jim Baston, President BBA Consulting Group Inc you will be given the tools to help you develop your own framework to implement a project within your organisation to help generate greater revenue from your field service team by shifting the perception of revenue generation away from being a sales activity to being an extension of service excellence.

This course is available to purchase for just £299.

Alternatively, this course is available as part of the Field Service News Masterclass program included within an annual subscription to FSN Elite our new membership community. Currently, while we are in a beta trial of FSN Elite we are offering a free upgrade for all FSN Premium subscribers.