Smartglasses Face a Blurry Future

At the 2012 Google I/O conference, the big “reveal” was Google Glass. A team of Glass-wearing skydivers live streamed their descent toward the roof of the San Francisco Moscone center where the event was underway. It was an awe-inspiring stunt, but Google Glass flopped due to a buggy and ridiculous user experience, and the project was shuttered in 2015. Or was it?

The website for glass proclaimed “Thanks for exploring with us,” but it also offered hope for the future with “The journey doesn’t end here.” Of course, Google can waste money on pie-in-the-sky projects forever because they print so much pie-in-the-sky money with their AdWords platform. But what about the rest of us? When should we expect some breakthrough capability with smartglasses? And what would that look like anyway?

I actually think other technologies that were related to the first glasses experiments are going to dominate our attention, and that is probably a good thing. Smartglasses initially were a symbol for three separate and distinct technology advances:

A heads-up type display that removes the need for a display screen to be positioned in your field of view.
A hands-free user interface to be able to engage with an application to move the experience along without tapping on a screen or pecking a keyboard or zapping a barcode or whatever other input you choose.
A camera application to capture and share the imagery in your field of view.

Let’s start with number 3 first. I decided to do this blog post when I saw that Snap (the company behind Snapchat) just disclosed in an investor update that they are writing off about $40 million on Spectacles inventory they are not able to sell. In case you have not heard, Spectacles are the smartglasses that are integrated with Snapchat to give the user a hands-free camera application to share the imagery in their field of view with the Snapchat application. It flopped. But that is not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that the glasses were $129 including the charging case. While not free, that is not bad for a first generation, new form factor camera with LED lighting, a power source, and the electronics for connecting to other devices. I think experiments like Spectacles are going to lead to a simpler form factor for a lightweight, high functioning camera that attaches to your glasses or the bill of your cap. It will simply be able to attach to whatever application you are running via Bluetooth or WiFi, and now you have a hands-free camera to snap images or stream video to applications running on your smartphone or tablet.

Item number 2, the hands-free user interface, is actually here today. It comes in two parts that everyone will quickly recognize. The first is the earpiece/microphone that we have all used or seen others use (Jawbone is a popular brand that has done well in the market). This allows you to give audible input to an application (likely running on your smartphone or tablet) and receive audio back from the application. The second part is Alexa (or Siri, pick your assistant). I think Alexa is actually going to be the game changer because Amazon is so good at productizing computing infrastructure for folks like ServiceTrade to incorporate in our applications. We also have experience with Google and Microsoft – there are good reasons why Amazon is the market leader by a pretty wide margin. I believe Alexa will be another example of their market-leading competence in this area. The applications you use will have an Alexa interface that enables the technician to move the workflow along by saying “Alexa, move the workflow along (as a proxy for whatever application option makes sense.)”

Item 1, the heads-up display, is the hard bit. Not because this is new or novel because pilots, for example, have been using heads-up displays in aircraft since the mid-90s. It is difficult because shrinking it to work in a miniature and mobile environment like a pair of glasses is a difficult piece of physics. The display only works correctly if the user can see the application interface in the same plane of focus as the other items of interest. If I understand what I have researched, it appears the approach being used by Google Glass is a near retina display. The image is projected directly onto the retina, so there is no issue with the depth of focus. The information is just “there” for the retina to absorb without refocusing on a “closer” screen display.

What Google Glass got wrong (in my humble opinion) was trying to introduce all three elements in a single device, while simultaneously assuming that the applications where we might use the technology were readily available. None of the technologies were significantly evolved to enable an “all in one” device to be successful. I am not a fan of “all in one” applications anyway, as I find they typically suck at most of the things they try to achieve for the sake of claiming a longer checklist of “features.”

Instead of the “all in one” that flopped for Google (although the physics breakthroughs they achieved with the display are impressive), I believe you will begin to see small changes sneak up on you. It is easy to imagine someone with a Bluetooth Jawbone and a visor-mounted camera collaborating via Facetime with a remote colleague. There’s nothing extraordinary here because all of the technology is well developed already. I can also imagine a technician setting up their tablet beside a piece of equipment and asking Alexa to play and pause and rewind a recorded video of how to repair a complex piece of equipment – hands-free with an interactive application that we already use every day.

There is a phrase in my industry called the “consumerization of IT.” Basically, this phrase means that the end-user consumer applications for new technology will generally lead the market before the commercial applications become available. Seems counterintuitive until you realize that consumer spending makes up 70% of the US economy. It just makes sense that the titans of technology such as Amazon, Apple, and Google, would focus their research and development dollars to address the biggest available market. If you want to experiment with things that likely will work to improve your commercial application, don’t look for some big breakthrough from a wildly new and different application. Instead, focus on the commercials that you see during the holidays that demonstrate how you can display an eggnog recipe and play holiday music by commanding Alexa to do so. Pay attention to the display of best-selling gadgets at Best Buy from companies like Jawbone that connect to applications on your phone. Then go play around in the context of your work for customers and find innovative ways to put these consumer breakthroughs to work for the benefit of your customers and your company.

Snakes on the Roof!

Every popular book or movie generally hues to a typical formula. A hero faces a daunting challenge and makes a big effort to overcome trouble. The reason this formula works is because humans are captivated by trouble and drama. Jonathan Gottschall, the keynote speaker for the Digital Wrap Conference, documents in great detail the human attraction to dramatic story in his book The Storytelling Animal.

Here are a couple of the money quotes from the book:

“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.”

“Stories the world over are almost always about people . . . with problems. The people want something badly – to survive, to win the girl or boy, to find a lost child. But big obstacles loom between the protagonists and what they want. Just about any story – comic, tragic, romantic – is about a protagonist’s efforts to secure, usually at some cost, what he or she desires.”

If you want to keep the attention of your customers and get paid a premium for your services, you need to give the customer some trouble. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? “The customer doesn’t want trouble!” you retort indignantly. “Quite the opposite, in fact. The customer really just wants nothing! No breakdowns, no disruptions, no aggravation, no hassles.”

And I couldn’t agree more. But the problem with delivering nothing is that your service is taken for granted, and you will get unplugged from the account by “one truck Chuck” when he promises a lower price. You can almost hear the customer now responding to Chuck’s low price pitch:

“Nothing ever happens around here! Why am I paying these other guys so much? Chuck, thanks for saving me some money! You won the business with your low price!”

Of course, Chuck will screw it all up, and pretty soon the “nothingness” that was taken for granted will become a series of disruptions, breakdowns, hassles, and aggravation. It doesn’t have to be this way.

You can give the customer what they want, which is nothing, as long as you are regularly finding snakes on the roof, snakes in the riser room, snakes in the ductwork, snakes in every nook and cranny of their critical equipment. Of course, these are figurative snakes, not literal snakes. The snakes are the equipment deficiencies that your technicians are recording with photos, audio, and video for the customer to review online via your Service Link. The deficiency snakes are clickbait that constantly reminds the customer how your diligence keeps them from getting bitten by disruptions and breakdowns which inevitably lead to hassles and aggravation.

The customers are only human. They can’t resist clickbait. Clickbait is a good story that shows how you have charmed and corralled the threatening snakes to save them from trouble. When they open your online quotes offering all manner of snake traps and snake killing repairs and upgrades (mind you, no snake oil for the customer!), they are practically gleeful that the hero of the story (that would be you) has again prevailed over the devious equipment snakes that were plotting to harm them. Approved! If you want to keep your customers for the long term, give ‘em some trouble by finding some snakes on the roof!

Keeping Score is Not the Same as Winning

Every major sports venue has a prominent scoreboard so that fans and participants alike can easily review the score with a glance to the outfield or upward at the jumbotron. Knowing the score is a critical element in decision-making. No point in running the ball up the gut in football when you are behind by 3 touchdowns with five minutes left in the game.

Imagine trying to coach the game, however, by looking at the scoreboard instead of watching the action on the field. Ever notice what is happening with the coaches on the sidelines during the game? Doesn’t really matter what sport. The coaches are riveted to the action on the field or on the court, right? They may glance at the scoreboard occasionally, but most of their attention is directed onto the field of play. So that they can make adjustments during the game to accentuate what is working and compensate for what is not.

Why is it, then, that commercial service contractors so often obsess over the accounting systems that measure the score while completely ignoring the customer service systems that provide real-time feedback regarding the action on the field of play? Keeping score is not the same as winning. Winning means that everyone is executing the plays for the business to the best of their ability and in the interest of great customer outcomes. Accounting systems and accountants have almost zero impact on the game, and yet they are often placed at the very center of decisions regarding how to execute a winning game plan. That’s like asking the statistician to draw up the winning play on fourth and long with the game on the line instead of entrusting it to the offensive coordinator. The score at any time in the game matters, but it is a small element in a winning coaching strategy.

To be fair, customer relationship management systems, electronic commerce, and customer service applications (along with marketing automation) are newer applications on the market relative to the older and more established accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. It is worth noting, also, that these newer applications focused on sales and customer service are the fastest growing breed of applications on the market. It makes sense. If you are going to compete in today’s fast-paced and online markets, you have to observe and measure what is happening on the field – play by play – instead of just waiting for the score to be tallied. How are the salespeople performing on their calls and quotes? How are the technicians performing identifying opportunities for repair? How are the customers grading your customer service via online reviews? How often is the service level agreement being met or exceeded? None of these items register in the accounting system, but all of them will have a profound influence on your ability to win the game.

There is nothing wrong with glancing at the scoreboard a few times every quarter to tweak the playbook. Winning consistently, however, means a relentless focus on the play by play action in the field while making constant adjustments. Keeping score is not the same as winning. Remember this maxim when you prioritize how you invest in applications for running your business.

Get Busy Growing

“It comes down to a simple choice, really . . . Get busy living or get busy dying.”

— Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption

Growing your business is a simple choice. And if you are not growing, the business is in decline, whether you realize it or not. Equilibrium is dangerous, and it is also difficult to maintain. The slightest perturbation will knock the system out of balance and cascade it toward its natural inclination. If that natural inclination is growth, growth will continue. If that natural inclination is a decline, the decline will hasten. Growing is the better of the two choices, and it is actually easier and more fun than the alternative – grinding away just to keep what you have already.

Why do I say that growing is easy? It is easy for many reasons, but foremost among them is because talented people gravitate to growth. And the opposite is true as well. If your business is growing, talented people will come aboard and stick around to advance their interests, while using their talent to build your brand. If you are not growing, you will find yourself surrounded by dead weight on the payroll that you must lug around to achieve the results you desire. You will work harder and achieve less, and that is no fun. Less work for more pay is a better alternative.

So, how are you going to grow? So that you can attract better talent, work less, and earn more pay? A good place to start is simply committing the organization to growth. Say it out loud to everyone. “We are going to grow!” Then set targets and build a plan, because it won’t happen just because you say it (although saying it helps). Here is a simple set of ingredients that I find work well in a growth recipe. You can modify and add others, but these make a good start.

Choose Your Customers – It is difficult to grow when customers are a source of aggravation and heartache in the business. Who wants more of that? Choose customers that you actually enjoy serving, and who appreciate what you do for them. Fire the others as quickly as you can, or raise their prices until they are forced to fire you. The simple act of choosing good customers will give you miles and miles of credibility during your organization’s journey to consistent growth.

Keep the Customers You Choose – Great service businesses are built upon long lasting customer relationships. Set up your service programs to maximize the outcomes for your best customers. If you can eliminate customer churn, your growth every year will simply be the additional customers you add through the sales cycle.

Add New Customers – If you know the type of customers you want, and you also know how to serve them well, and you have a sales team that you pay to go sell to them, you should grow every year. Simple logic, right? If you cannot add customers, then you need to determine if your salespeople are ineffective or if your service program somehow is not attractive. If you have already been successful in the first two principles above, you might need to replace your salespeople.

Commit to an Apprenticeship Program – If you know you are going to grow, you will need skilled labor to service the customers. In case you have not noticed, there is a skilled labor shortage. It can be very difficult to hire quality trades people to deliver the service in the manner that keeps the customers you choose. Go ahead and commit the resources to hiring, training, and developing talent to support your endless growth cycle. Always be hiring. The pressure of the growing payroll will add urgency to the sales efforts of the organization.

Offer a Branded Service Program – It is far easier to rally an organization around your branded service program than around platitudes like “integrity, honesty, hard work, motherhood, apple pie.” Be specific in the creation of service programs and features that define your brand. Commit to technology innovations that establish the bedrock of how you deliver service so that the organization can actually enjoy growth instead of being crushed by it. “Work harder and care more” is NOT a sustainable growth strategy.

It may feel risky to you to strap on a bunch of ambition and commit to growing your company year after year after year. It is far riskier, in my opinion, to grind away with mediocre people just to keep what you have already earned. Go ahead and be ambitious. Get busy growing and enjoy the best things in life.

Are your services significant?

Significant objects are worth more than regular objects. At least that is the conclusion arrived upon by the significant objects project and its team of researchers. Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, a writer and a journalist respectively, set out to prove that stories can increase the value of objects. While it is tempting to view the goal of the exercise as justifying the existence of the writing class, the results of the experiment are unequivocal. Humans value stories, and they become invested in the life objects that reinforce the stories they enjoy.

Joshua and Rob purchased one hundred pieces of stuff from garage sales, thrift stores, and related trinket outlets for a grand sum of $129. They then enlisted professional writers to conjure stories related to each piece of stuff to accompany the auction of said stuff on eBay. The auction value of the storied stuff as measured by sales price on eBay was $3,612 – a return of 2,700%. Pretty good margin, huh?

So what is the return on your services? How much are you able to charge above what it costs you to deliver? Somewhere between 30% and 50%? Maybe your services would be more significant, and therefore more valuable if you delivered your services with the story describing what happened. I don’t mean an invoice. The story is what you saw, what you did, why you did it, and what likely trouble the customer avoided because of you. It is also the photo essay of images that reinforce your story. And I am not suggesting you type it all out. Record it as a video or audio memo. It will take all of 2 to 4 minutes extra, and it could be worth a lot over the course of the relationship with the customer.

Humans learn from images, story, rhythm, and rhyme. It is programmed into us since the days of the cavemen and the campfires. Since you are not going to insist the technicians become poets or rappers, you should at least insist that they relay their good work to the customer in the form of images and stories. When you teach the customer something about their facility, it reinforces the good decision they made in contracting with you. Over time, the accumulated review of your work will imprint your brand in a manner that is not easily supplanted by the “one truck Chuck” competitor that is always willing to go lower on the invoice. You will be able to raise prices because your services have become significant through the power of story.

We have seen this phenomenon time and again at ServiceTrade as our customers are surprised and delighted by how easy it is to get customers to approve online quotes when the photos demonstrating the reason for repair are literally viewed inline with the quote. They are likewise surprised at how much customers value the Service Link feature that presents the “story” of the services delivered online with a gallery of photos, video, and audio for review. They shouldn’t be. Humans sharing photos and stories is the basic power behind the growth of Facebook into a company valued at $500 billion in a little over 13 years. Maybe some of that Facebook photo and story magic will work for your brand. Can you think of a better way to make your services more significant?

Amazon Prime Lessons for Service Contractors

Everyone knows Amazon has been on a tear lately. Here is their stock performance over the last 5 years as compared to the broader S&P 500. Wow! A big part of that success has been the Prime subscription program.

Amazon customers who subscribe to Prime to receive the following benefits:

Priority shipping. It varies by area and items from FREE 2-day shipping to FREE 2-hour shipping.
Prime videos, music, and books. Certain titles are available to stream or borrow for FREE.
Photo storage. Amazon will store your photos so you don’t have to worry about losing them on a device.

And there is a long laundry list of other Prime benefits that you can review here. Most folks probably only care about one or two of the benefits, but which parts of the bundle are valuable to which customers probably varies considerably. So Amazon just includes a bunch of stuff to cast the widest net into the market. They are committed to the costs of most of these things anyway, so why not maximize the revenues across their most attractive customers while getting the glow of a great customer service reputation? It also leads folks to spend more time and money with Amazon products.

So, what are you doing in your service contracting business to get more by doing more for your best customers? Do you have a Prime program? Is there a tier of service that includes the basic preventative maintenance program PLUS a bunch of extras that get them to pay upfront?

Here are some suggestions for how to form a program that pays you similarly to how Amazon is paid.

Give it a name. Sales people cannot talk about your program and customers cannot reference it if it doesn’t have a name. Amazon chose “Prime,” whose root is from the Latin word prim or primo, meaning first, as in first in line. This is a good name because it conveys some meaning while also being easy to remember. You should do likewise. Obvious choices are names like “Premium” or “Platinum” or “Gold,” which are unimaginative, but at least connote value easily. Ideally, you can name your program in a way that has both meaning and rhythm and rhyme so it is easy to say and easy to remember.
Charge a subscription fee. You should collect a monthly or quarterly or annual fee in exchange for the program. Angle for annual for the obvious reasons, but offer other options that might appeal to different customers. Try to price it where the average customer would happily pay for the benefits and you would make a decent margin on average. Some customers will be more profitable than others, but maximizing profit is not the angle for the program fees. Locking the customer into your services as the preferred vendor is the goal.
Offer expedited service response. Everyone likes the idea that they will get priority (hence the “Prime” name) service relative to others. If you are committed to great service, go ahead and make the promise to your best customers that you will respond with skilled technicians to any problem within 1 or 2 hours. Maybe there is also a promise to return a call or web inquiry within 15 minutes. You are probably committed to it anyway, so why not get credit for it?
Include basic maintenance services. If there is a PM protocol for the equipment that will be under your care, and you are committed to delivering the work, go ahead and build it into the program. It makes it easier to schedule the maintenance when it is included (you don’t have to ask or wonder if they will pay), and you will get opportunities to upsell based upon the maintenance reviews.
Offer a lower rate on all planned services. It is good for both you and the customer for all services to be planned instead of emergencies due to failures. When you quote repairs and upgrades that can be scheduled instead of emergency, the rates will be cheaper. The more customers you get into proactive mode instead of reactive emergency mode, the more efficient you can be with your scarce technician resources.
Offer an online account. Give your customers a reason to come to your website. Show them online details of their plan, history, equipment, quotes, etc. It lowers your cost and makes your company stickier and more memorable.
Offer a performance guarantee. After you get their equipment into good order AND you have a regular maintenance routine or remote monitoring to expose any risk, offer emergency service response at the subscriber program rates. It shows your confidence in your plan, and it incentivizes the customer to approve your quotes for planned repairs so that the equipment stays in the program. Any equipment exhibiting failure symptoms that are noted and quoted by you comes off the plan if the quote for planned repair is rejected or ignored.

When customers feel that you have been thoughtful in meeting their needs with a premium customer service program, they will happily pay a program fee to claim their membership. You can use the steady cash flow and predictable schedules to hire and grow and expand the program. Then you can put the Amazon python squeeze on all of your competitors and laugh as they wiggle and squirm in the grip of your escalating capability and brand value.

Whole Foods Whole World

I bet the grocers that had a bad day when Walmart got into groceries about fifteen years ago are having a really bad week now that Amazon has announced their intention to buy Whole Foods. The innovations Amazon is going to bring to grocery buying go well beyond low price and internal operational tweaks. Amazon is going to use technology to transform the grocery buying experience, and the old competitors focused on their tired, old, internal metrics will be toast.

Marc Andreesen, a famous internet entrepreneur and venture capitalist, once said: “Software is eating the world.” You can read his editorial in the Wall Street Journal here. It’s true. Customer service innovations driven by software are transforming every industry. Netflix to Blockbuster. Uber to taxis. Amazon to booksellers, hosting companies, and now grocers. When will it be your turn? Which side of the statement will your company be? The eater? or the eaten?

Do you suppose the first innovation Amazon is going focus upon is how Whole Foods does accounting? Is that where they are going to put their innovation muscle? I ask the question because it seems that accounting remains the first priority of service contractors when they think about how to apply technology to their business. But it sounds really silly in the context of the Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods, doesn’t it? As I have said before, your perfect accounting process is perfectly irrelevant to your customer. You should have a good one, but it will not save you from an innovative, customer-focused competitor.

I am not going out on a limb when I say that Amazon understands that accounting is irrelevant, and their focus with Whole Foods will be transforming how customers buy groceries. They will eliminate aggravation and uncertainty for the customer through technology. I bet there will be an awesome mobile app for pricing your groceries in the aisle and eliminating the checkout line. I bet you will use that app to find the groceries you seek without wandering up and down the aisles. I bet you will get interesting recipe ideas based on the ingredients you buy often. I bet your buying preferences will lead to deliveries to your house via drone for the items you buy on a regular basis. I bet the best customers with the most money to spend on groceries will gravitate to Amazon and their innovations. I bet I cannot even imagine the things they will do to make grocery shopping more convenient, and none of it will relate to how they do accounting.

So when will it be your turn? Will you be the eater, or the eaten? Are you considering how to upgrade your customer’s buying experience with your services? Or are you piddling around with how to extend your accounting to wring a small bit of extra margin from your internal processes? Are you building an innovative and growing brand that attracts customers to you? With an experience that they cannot easily trade for the low price guy? Think about it. Who do you want to be in your market? Amazon, Uber, Netflix? Or the other guy?

Real Deal Customer Service Saves the Day After a Flat on I-95

A flat tire on my boat trailer on Interstate 95 ranks high on my list of things that suck most in life. Of course, it has to be on the traffic side of the trailer to really suck. It sucked on Saturday morning at 8:50 when I heard the blowout and looked in the driver’s side mirror and saw rubber spewing out from the wheel well. The rear tire on the left side had blown, and I needed to get onto the shoulder quickly before the other tire on that side also fell victim to the load from my Grady White fishing rig.

I was en route to West Palm Beach in preparation for a run to the Bahamas and a week of fishing and diving. Not going to get there with this flat tire, so might as well suck it up and get out in the South Carolina heat and mosquitos and change the tire and get back underway. Fortunately, I planned for this problem because it has happened before and ruined my day. I pack a ramp in the back of the F250 that allows me to avoid the hassle of a jack. Just pull forward (or back up as the case may be) with the ramp in front of the good tire, and presto, the back tire that just blew outcomes off the ground to be changed out. I also packed a bicycle pump because I did not take the time to get the spare filled to 65 lbs of pressure. After 15 minutes on the changeout (most of which was spent detaching the spare from the trailer) plus a 10-minute workout with the pump, I am ready to roll again – sweaty and greasy but happy with my ingenuity.

Now the problem is that the spare is a different brand tire and it is 9 years old. I still have 550 miles of road to travel, and I do not like the idea of being without a spare. I buy all my tires from Discount Tire, and now I am going to put them to the test. Will I have a good customer service outcome? Fortunately, the story has a happy ending because Discount Tire is the real deal when it comes to great customer service. How do they do it?

Let’s look at the lessons service contractors can learn from my experience.

First, Discount Tire offers a premium program. If you buy tires from them, they will rotate and change all the tires in your household for no extra charge. Why? Because they want to see you in the shop as often as possible so they stay top of mind with you. They also provide air pressure reminders via email – again to stay top of mind. I can never forget who takes care of my tires even if I only buy tires every 3 to 4 years. I know who to go to with tire problems. Do your customers know what brand they rely upon for servicing their critical equipment? Are you constantly in their inbox with valuable information and reminders?

Second, I opened Google Maps on my iPhone and zoomed in on Jacksonville, Florida – the next big city I was going to hit. A search for Discount Tire yielded six hits. Sure enough, one of them was right off the highway. One more tap on the iPhone and I am speaking with Jeff. Can they take care of me today? “Absolutely. We will figure it out. When will you be here?” Are your locations registered with Google? Do you have reviews to push you up the listings? Can they tap to call?

When I pulled into the store, Mike took care of me (not certain where Jeff went, but it didn’t matter). He pulls up my record on their system and stares hard at the screen for about 4 minutes as he reviews my history relative to his capability at this store. “Look, you have a warranty on that tire that blew, but the spare is 10 years old. Also, someone in our shop made a mistake and mixed a 10-ply tire in with 3 other 8-ply tires when you had your last change. We need to make that right. I suggest we warranty replace 2 of your tires, have you buy 2 new ones, and put the best current tire as your spare. It will be $289 and I can have you rolling in 90 minutes.” SOLD! Now I have 4 new matching tires, and I am writing about Discount Tire (and giving them backlinks on this post). Do your people have access to the customer information they need to help the customer buy more from you and become so happy that he/she writes about you online? If not, why not?

You cannot deliver good customer service without great information that is accessible and easy to use by everyone in your organization. You cannot deliver good customer service if the customer cannot find you easily (i.e. online, not in the phone book). You also need a premium program that puts your brand in front of the customer over and over again as part of your service cycle (read The Digital Wrap). Do you have one? Is it branded? Do your customers rave about your service? Do you have a digital wrap?

A blowout on Interstate 95 became a very good thing for Discount Tire. Do your customer’s challenges (or lack thereof) regularly become good things for you and your company?

Learn how a Digital Wrap makes your happy customers evangelists for your brand like Billy is for Discount Tire. Go to digitalwrapbook.com.

Money for Nothing

In 1985, Marc Knopfler, the front man for the band Dire Straits, overheard a guy in an appliance store grudgingly admiring the MTV rockers performing on the store display TVs. Knopfler memorialized the reflections he overheard in the grammy winning, number one hit song “Money for Nothing” later that year. The song opens with the lyrics:

Now look at them yo-yos that’s the way you do it
You play the guitar on the MTV
That ain’t workin’ that’s the way you do it
Money for nothin’ and chicks for free

He goes on to declare “them guys ain’t dumb” and that the rocker “is a millionaire” while lamenting that he has to “install microwave ovens, custom kitchens” and make “deliveries” to get paid his meager wage. Now the truth of the matter is that not every rocker gets paid like a rock star, and those that do are paid handsomely for delivering hits that their fans love. If you are a service contractor, how can you get paid for delivering hits instead of delivering labor? How can you get paid “money for nothing” by becoming a rock star for your customers?

If the only time you get paid is when your customer needs your techs to show up and install, repair, or deliver something, you are destined to get paid like the guy in front of the TV instead of the guy on the TV. The graphs below illustrate the dilemma you face in a business model that requires skilled labor to drive revenue.

Customer demand is always lumpy. If you staff at a level that matches peak demand, you will deliver great customer service, but you will be losing money during the periods when your crews are idle.

If you staff to optimize for profit, you will certainly lose customers (and revenue opportunities) during peak demand when you cannot deliver the repair.

The ideal situation is one where you can shape the customer demand curve in a manner that allows you to staff for great customer service while also maximizing profit.

So how do you do this? How can you shape the demand curve? How do you get customers to pay for “hits” instead of paying for “performances?”

For your customers, your “hits” are actually not “hits” at all, but instead just plain old boring outcomes where nothing ever breaks and all the labor you deliver is for planned maintenance instead of emergencies. Never an emergency. Never a disruption. Never an outage. Money for nothing.

Customers want predictable outcomes for predictable fees, and you can get paid “money for nothing” (i.e. no breakdowns) if you can deliver on a “no drama, just results” program. It is unlikely that you can be perfect in this scenario (i.e. nothing ever breaks), but you can certainly adopt an approach that minimizes the breakage while maximizing the profit and the customer service. Here are the elements to consider:

Offer a preferred customer service plan. Preferred customers “subscribe” to your proactive maintenance plan (for an annual fee) in exchange for lower, preferred rates and guaranteed response on “demand” work. To do this program well, you need to have a very strong understanding of their existing equipment and its condition, a periodic inspection and preventative maintenance routine, and a waiver for any equipment that represents a high risk to the plan. Generate a good, strong contract from the equipment records you collect in the survey of the customer’s facility (with exactly what you service and what is excluded) and collect the annual fee up front as a fair trade for the lower rates.

During your routine inspections and maintenance, any deficiencies you note that represent risks need to be immediately turned around to the customer with a preferred rate quote for remediation. If the customer declines the quote, the equipment is automatically excluded from the preferred rate plan, and higher rates for future remediation now apply.

Develop a monitoring and early warning system for high-risk situations. Certain equipment you maintain may be prone to expensive failure modes. Look for solutions to generate early warnings and preclude expensive and dramatic failures with low drama, scheduled repair and replacement. These solutions do not necessarily need to be extremely high tech. For example, if you know that a sprinkler section may be prone to freeze in very cold weather, just tag that location with a freeze warning that automatically sends the customer an email reminder to engage auxiliary heating. When the pipes burst at your competitor’s locations, you buy Google ad words that night and use the high drama to add your competitor’s customers to your preferred maintenance plan.

Consider offering warranties for important equipment. This further extends the concept of preferred rates with a “pay in advance” mentality for a “guaranteed hit.” In this case, the preferred rate is “zero” in exchange for the “pay up front” warranty fee. Aggressively monitor and maintain the important equipment to be certain you avoid warranty losses. You will not win on all of them, but a data driven approach with strong maintenance discipline will usually result in “money for nothing” for you along with a happy customer.

Being a rock star requires talent and hard work, just not necessarily the hard work of skilled labor installing “microwave ovens, customer kitchens [and] deliveries.” Instead, it is the hard work of selling a program that pays “money for nothing” when you get paid up front to deliver boring outcomes with no drama instead of relying on high-risk demand work where great customer service and high profit present a difficult, if not impossible, balancing act.

Lessons in Customer Service from the Utility Company – NOT

It is fortunate for the utility companies that they are protected by high walls of regulation that prevent new entrants from competing with them. I had to call customer service at Duke Power yesterday because I need to change the service at a location where I am now the personal representative of the owner. I assumed there would be a process to demonstrate to them my power of attorney, so I was not expecting it to be as simple as checking a box on a website. What I did not expect was a flashback to the mid-1980s.

When I reached the supervisor who could actually give me some instructions, she told me that I needed to fax the notarized power of attorney to their legal department. I replied that I did not have a fax so could she please just supply me with an email address. I have a nifty little app on my phone called CamScanner, and I can quickly shoot a scanned copy to legal. She repeated the fax number and said that I could mail it to them via the postal service if I did not have access to a fax. I asked her to hold the line for one moment while I picked up another call.

“It’s the ’80s calling,” I told her. “They want their customer experience back.” She repeated the fax number for me, and we said our goodbyes.

Don’t be like the utility companies. Take every opportunity to streamline the customer experience with your brand so that the customer is endeared to your company and never plots to leave for a competitor. After I hung up with Duke, I told Shawn, our marketing director, that the next house I build will absolutely be off the grid. I cannot wait to write Elon Musk checks for my Powerwall and my solar installation in addition to the check that I am willing to write for a small diesel generator. I want to get rid of Duke at the first opportunity I can because they suck.

Now, you might think this is a crazy response to having to deal with a fax machine. I can assure that the generation that is behind me (I am pushing 50) feels the same way and more so. If you want to keep your customers for the next 10 – 20 years, don’t be like Duke. As often as you can, do away with old, archaic approaches to customer service and replace them with conveniences that make the customer appreciate the thoughtfulness of your brand. Here are a couple of pro tips:

Be Mobile Friendly – everyone wants to engage from their smartphone, so let them.

Maximize Self Service – no one really wants to talk to anyone in your office, so don’t make them.

Take a Long View – expensive, disruptive repairs that might make a good margin for you are not good for the customer. Find ways to charge maintenance subscription fees that smooth your revenue while minimizing customer pain from surprises.

Sell the Program – emphasize to everyone that your brand is all about technology enabled conveniences. They will remember that pitch when they encounter the stupidity of a vendor (like Duke) that doesn’t get it.

Don’t be the utility company. You do not have the regulatory protections and you don’t want a reputation built upon 1980’s customer service.