Drones probably won’t impact your field service company, but Amazon’s other accomplishments in online customer engagement most definitely will. Have you noticed that it is impossible to purchase anything from Amazon without first seeing a picture of what you are buying? On every page that references your items, there are pictures of those items. Here are some other questions about the Amazon experience to consider:
How often do you buy something from Amazon without reading the customer reviews first? And how often do you focus on the bad reviews to see what kind of trouble you might expect from the product? And how often do you ignore the good reviews that seem flowery or mushy with compliments but short on detail?
How many email updates do you get from Amazon regarding the status of your purchase? How often does Amazon call you with updates? How often do you call Amazon to request information?
Have you ever depended upon a paper invoice from Amazon as your record of what you purchased and how to pay?
All of the answers to these questions are simple and obvious, so I left them off. Yet most service contracting companies have not embraced the obvious lessons from Amazon. The whole world is being conditioned to expect online information about the things that they buy, and services will be no different. Look no further than Uber, the car transportation service, to see how service businesses will be operated in the near future. Skilled trades in service contracting will not be an exception. So what are you doing to prepare for the future?
If you manage or own a service contracting business, here are a few things to embrace before the Amazon of services embraces your customers and takes them from you:
Online Notifications – give your customers online status updates regarding service delivery. They do not want you to call, and they certainly do not want to call you.
Pictures – show customers what they purchased, or what you are recommending, via photos. Whether “before and after”, or “was dirty, now clean,” or “was broke, now fixed,” or “golly, this looks bad, we better fix it,” pictures are worth thousands of words.
Reviews – always ask for a review. It empowers the customer. It encourages good behavior from the technicians. It gives you content for your website that is valuable to the search engines.
Online Accounts – give your customers access to their service history and account settings from your website. It is convenient to them, and it lowers your costs.
Stop being nutty about invoices – give your customers a rich record of what they purchased, including details of arrival, items used, photos, signed acknowledgement by the manager, etc., and the invoice becomes a simple formality. When it is clear that value was delivered, the invoice can be a clean and simple statement of amount owed.
If these sound like upgrades you would like for your service business, we have good news. None of these changes to follow Amazon’s successful model are difficult or expensive. Don’t believe it? Ask some of our customers. There’s nothing really special about ServiceTrade other than the fact that we are copying modern capability from other industries and bringing it to you. You just have to acknowledge that you want to do business with your customers in the manner of Amazon.
A few months back, I wrote a blog post about the Tesla lesson for service contractors. Tesla has a direct-to-customer model for sales and service, and they support this model with a high tech connection to the car that allows them to deliver certain over-the-air updates while also monitoring the vehicle for proper performance. Every manufacturer in the world today envies Tesla’s sky high stock value, and they are all seeking ways to mimic their success and business model. This means that they are trying to use data and Internet connections to become more valuable to customers.
Last week, I was visiting with a ServiceTrade customer in the fire protection service trade. They informed me that they had found a good solution for collecting alarm inspection data to create the annual compliance inspection report for the fire marshal. I asked them who provided the solution, and they responded that it was offered to them by a manufacturer of alarm equipment for which they are a distributor. I asked further if they had checked into the ownership of the inspection data they collect with that equipment because it has been my experience that manufacturers are trying to displace the distribution channel wherever possible to get closer to the customer.
Sure enough, when my customer dug into the terms and conditions of the license that he signed for the inspection technology, he discovered that the manufacturer licensed the data collected to the owner of the alarm equipment, not the service company collecting the data. The license terms further stated that the alarm manufacturer also had a license to the data to assist the equipment owner in migrating the inspection and service work to a different service contractor than the one that had licensed the system in the first place.
WOW! As a service contractor, you have to be very diligent in protecting your direct connection to your customer. Your relationship in the future is going to be defined by data, Internet connections, and technology enabled services. You need to find applications that allow you to collect and own data that you put to work for the benefit of the customer and your business. Beware the rise of the machines. It can be a blessing, or it can be judgement day.
Happy new year! Two thoughts keep coming back to me this week: First, I sure miss sleeping in over the holidays (I’ve never been a morning person). Second, 2016 is going be the year of the digital wrap for service companies.
The Year of the Digital Wrap
Here’s a task for you: Take a look at your service delivery process and write down every point where you engage your customers. Include everything: appointment-setting phone calls, quotes, invoices, and service appointments.
Where do you see opportunities to make changes and engage your customers online? For the service businesses that want to survive and thrive, those processes will change and improve over the next 52 weeks. The best and easiest way to do that is through the elements of a digital wrap.
We’re pretty excited about the year ahead. Billy Marshall has been writing a book for service companies about how to get that digital wrap in place that will be published in the first half of the year.
Expanding Digital Wraps
If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that Uber is our favorite example of a company that uses the digital wrap to disrupt a service industry and to simplify the delivery of exceptional customer service.
In response to a painful loss of business to Uber, New York City taxi system soft launched an application in Fall 2015 to try to lure their customers back. Like Uber, customers use the application to contact a driver, track the car en route, and make the payment. Reviews of the new system cite a few glitches that will likely be worked out in time if they’re committed to their digital wrap. Kudos to the taxi system for upgrading their services – even if they had to be dragged into it!
The taxi system is not in an enviable position. They’ve lost business to Uber that they have to try to earn back. By being first, Uber set the standard and expectations for the user experience, requiring its competition to find new ways to remain relevant, fight for their customers, and offer customers more options.
The best news of all for consumers is that service matters most. The online reviewers of the NYC taxi application talk about ease of use, cost, service, responsiveness as they do for every service provider. Uber raised the bar for service across the board.
Decide to be the Leader
Taxis are now playing the game by Uber’s rules. how about if you become the leader in your market so your competition is forced to play by your rules in 2016? The digital wrap is the way, and we look forward to going through the details of how to get there with you over the next 52 weeks.
Don’t Let the Back-Office Tail Wag the Company Dog
All too often, as field service companies are considering new software, they base decisions on their historical software usage patterns and let the tail wag the dog. Since accounting software is the primary, and often only, business application in use, companies search for ways to extend back-office capabilities to the front office and beyond. This line of thinking is understandable, but flawed because it ignores the needs of the majority the organization including the:
Front Office – Your schedulers/dispatchers, service managers, etc.
Service Delivery – Your employees in the field who interact directly with your customers.
Customers & Prospects – I hope you know who they are…
Click the “Start Prezi” button below for a quick visual representation of the current mode of thinking about software I am referencing. Click the right arrow button to continue the Prezi.
If this Prezi does not load for you, click here to view the summary.
Notice that little to no consideration is made for customers and prospects; the source of revenue. In addition, less functionality is desired for the considerably larger divisions of the organization that drive this revenue. I propose a slightly different, proportional perspective on technology selection wherein a stronger consideration is made for the needs of customers and prospects while the needs of the back office are met through loosely coupled integrations with existing systems to reduce double data entry.
If this Prezi does not load for you, click here to view the summary.
From this customer-centric perspective of a service contracting organization, software purchases have the potential to bring more than efficiency to the table. Unlocked from the constraints imposed by the back office, applications can be used to generate inbound leads via brand evangelism, increase customer retention, and reduce customer price sensitivity. This software approach is what we call the Digital Wrap.
Much like your physical truck wraps, the Digital Wrap is a low-cost marketing approach that requires no extra work on behalf of your company other than normal daily service activities. By thoughtfully engaging your customers on the internet in educational and informative ways, you can gain the benefits mentioned above. For example, you can:
Create brand evangelism by delighting customers and soliciting online reviews that will drive traffic to your website.
Increase customer retention through trust built upon rich information such as pictures and videos of services performed.
Reduce price sensitivity through differentiation in quality of customer engagement and education of customer service needs with rich media.
Simply put, a digital wrap will lead to more inbound leads to the front office, and an overall increase in customer lifetime value through customer retention and the amount of work performed for each customer annually. See here:
If this Prezi does not load for you, click here to view the summary.
When considering technology for your field service company, think about the needs throughout your organization, including those of your customers and prospects. Ultimately, applications that benefit your customers will help your company grow. Check out our book The Digital Wrap: Get out of the truck and go online to own your customers to learn more about the Digital Wrap.
Looking for Great Customer Service? Try the Cable Company?
Everyone either cringes or laughs when they consider the track record of the cable companies in delivering customer service. Comedians have named their movies or even their whole persona (Larry the Cable Guy) in salute to the ridiculous nature of cable company customer service. But a funny thing happened to me this past weekend. The cable company did an amazing job delivering customer service to my family, and it was because they enjoy a unique advantage that they are finally beginning to exploit.
Everyone in my house was grumpy this weekend because the Internet service was miserably slow. I was dreading calling Time Warner Cable because I was certain there was going to be some lengthy and unsatisfying engagement that would ultimately result in some poor schnook being dispatched to my house and someone from my household having to deal with an inevitable amount of ineptitude. After their automated system discerned that I was indeed a customer and the nature of my problem was Internet service, I was connected with a pleasant woman in some foreign land.
Within one minute she had confirmed that there was indeed a problem with my modem that would be creating a slow experience on the Internet. She asked me if I had access to my Netgear wireless router that was connected to my Motorola modem. Now, they installed the modem, so it was not a huge surprise that they knew the manufacturer, but I had installed the Netgear router, and their knowledge of it surprised me a bit. She asked me to remove power from the router because she was going to reconfigure the modem to eliminate the problem, and then I should restore power to the router.
Within four minutes of placing my phone call, the person on the other end of the line had solved my problem because she could “see” into my equipment to diagnose and resolve an issue. I probed for what the root cause of the problem was, but the language barrier thwarted my curiosity as she was unable to explain it to me satisfactorily. I was, however, happy that my household was up and running at top speed again. The cable company enjoys a unique advantage in the form of their connection to the customer over their network. Given the ubiquity of the Internet, however, the uniqueness of this situation is going to be replaced by an absolute expectation that the service contractor have this type of visibility into the customer’s situation and a similar ability to resolve many issues without ever dispatching a technician.
The Internet can transform even the hapless cable company into a customer service monster. Any service company that embraces technology to deliver an amazing customer experience will find themselves leading the competition in the not so distant future.
Is going completely paperless the best customer experience?
Many of our prospective and current customers tell us that they want to go completely paperless. On this surface this sounds desirable, but does it really make sense, and is going completely paperless the best customer experience?
I relate this to my experiences when going to a restaurant. I had the perfect mix of a traditional and digital experience last weekend at a place called The Modern Life (“The Mod”) in Pittsboro, NC. I give credit to Shelley for the recommendation. The Mod has great wait staff and food in a modern restaurant that now has my email address.
Mixing Traditional and Digital Experiences
As we all know, you can now dine in some restaurants, <insert chain name here>, and have a completely paperless experience: No menu, no waiter/waitress explaining the special and no receipt at the end. Maybe that works for some, but not for me. For me, some paper still provides the best experience. For example, I still want a printed menu that I can put in my hands. It allows me to think about options and see potential wine and food pairings (thanks our friends at Kistler O’Brien my want for a fine bottle of Caymus wine now is only throttled by my rational budget I must stay within). I don’t want to endlessly scroll on a tablet to see my options, or hope to understand the UI that is specific to that restaurant chain.
Once I have paired the wine or beer with the printed menu entree options I want to hear the specials. If my experience is touching a computer screen to see this, it’s not likely that the experience or passion from the waiter explaining in detail will be the same. How many times have you changed your mind once they explain in great detail the wonderful specials?
The Mod got this right by giving me a printed menu and a traditional service experience, then converting to a digital experience when I placed my order.
Mutually Beneficial Digital Experience
After this fabulous experience, having the waiter or waitress bring a tablet to the table and review the bill while swiping my card in front of me is a perfect ending. It also makes me feel better about the security of my credit card. Do you ever wonder if someone writes down your card number when they take it to the back? The Mod handled the end of my dinner perfectly by simplifying the process, and completing the transaction right at the table.
The email receipt that is sent to my inbox was just want I want. This way, I don’t have to keep up with that little paper receipt and remember to balance my account before I lose it. Now it’s emailed to me and I can review my receipt whenever I need to. The Mod now has my email address to keep me posted on events like wine tasting Wednesday. They gave us the perfect dining experience and appropriate amount of paperless engagement.
Understand Your Customers’ Pains
I will admit this desire to have some interaction and not have the experience be completely digital may be due to my age — but it’s not likely. Yes, it’s true I grew up in a time when the only way to read a book was paperback….Kindle was not even a glimmer in Amazon’s eyes yet (neither was Amazon, for that matter). My kids often ask me how I survive not being able to go to the Internet for answers?
I carry a smartphone have a tablet and consider myself to be tech savvy. As I mentioned, it’s that piece of paper I have to take home can get lost or left in my pants to be washed never to be seen again that is a pain that going digital solves.
What The Mod did right was thinking about the customer dining experience and injecting technology where appropriate. For the restaurant, going digital gives them a way to promote special events like their Craft Beer Society right to my inbox.
The Mod’s Lesson: Moderation
My suggestion to prospective and current customers is be digital when it make sense, but don’t lose site of the customer experience just for a desire to be paperless.
Highway to Success: The Power of Customer Satisfaction
Your service contracting or field service company is a car casually driving down the highway to success, but the online giants are changing the rules and the road at a breakneck pace. For example, our blog post Google Home Services and its Impact on Small and Medium Businesses summarizes one of Google’s latest changes that will impact service contractors. Effectively, this update replaces the top search engine results with “pay to play” advertising results. Google is not alone in their frequent updates. Yelp, Angie’s List, Amazon, and other online giants that interface with the customer are frequently adjusting to a constantly-advancing technology landscape where standards for customer experience are set by up-and-coming tech companies like Uber.
Though it may seem impossible to adapt to this ever-changing, digital road, there is good news. Through every change the online giants undergo, there is one constant: customer satisfaction. On the highway to success, customer satisfaction takes many forms and leads to great outcomes.
Online Review Supercar
The online giants want your money and he who pays the toll will have access to the customer. If you won’t pay the toll, your competitors’ money will suffice. This will not change. The only way you will profit in this environment and beat your competitors is to make customers so happy that they sing your praises via online reviews. You will still have to pay the toll, but your customers’ reviews will put you in the front seat of a Ferrari that will make your brand shine to new prospects.
While your competitors are driving Camrys and Accords (the most common cars in the US), your prospects will drool over the opportunity to hop in your supercar. If you are hesitant about the possibility of bad reviews or doubtful about their efficacy, here are a couple facts that you may find interesting:
In this Harvard Business School study, businesses on Yelp that increase their average review rating by one star receive roughly a 9% increase in revenue. (Depending on your city and industry, Google or Angie’s List may generate better results.)
Paying the toll for digital impression won’t change, but a high quantity of positive reviews will convert those impressions into substantial business.
Word-of-Mouth Bypass
Every service contractor or field service company is familiar with the power of word-of-mouth marketing. For many service companies, word-of-mouth is their only marketing strategy. As a marketing professional I would NEVER recommend relying solely on this strategy, but there are clear benefits to diversifying marketing efforts to include some word-of-mouth efforts.
Subvert the Giants – Word-of-mouth marketing enables companies to subvert the toll enforced by the online giants. While the giants evolve, friends and colleagues will continue to talk about their favorite local businesses as they always have – enabling your company to create its own road to success.
Trust = Easy Sale – When prospects discover companies through friends and colleagues that they trust, the sales cycle is simplified for those businesses. This trust enables the businesses to command a premium price because the prospect is already committed to the recommendation.
Social Media Megaphone – In the past, personal conversations were the only opportunity for word-of-mouth marketing. Social media provides your customers with a megaphone to instantly tell their network about the incredible (or not so incredible) customer experience they had.
The word-of-mouth bypass can help you get to where you are going, but it can be slow. Always keep your bypass open to pick up new customers, but don’t spend too much time and energy building new roads when there is a four lane available (even if there is a toll).
The Customer Satisfaction Engine
Satisfied customers will be the engine for your new supercar. With the proper channels, your happiest customers will propel you to success. Here are a couple key principals to follow:
Customer Experience > Customer Service – Since we’ve already covered this topic in depth in a recent blog post, Customer Experience is More Important to your Service Business than Customer Service, I’ll provide a quick summary. The term “customer service” connotes reactive phone calls with disgruntled customers. On the other hand, a great customer experience is a designed process that results in longer, more rewarding customer relationships.
Provide the Outlet – Enable your customers to tell the world about your company. Don’t be afraid to solicit reviews from your customers on Google, Yelp, or Angie’s List. If you’ve built a strong relationship with your customer (see #1), they will be more than happy to promote your company. Similarly, providing them with an easy way to tell their friends and colleagues about your good work will jumpstart your word-of-mouth marketing. Whether you leave cards behind, offer discounts for referrals (here is an interesting post about Airbnb’s findings on the matter), or engage them on social media, be sure to take capitalize on the relationship you’ve built with your customers in a way that attracts new prospects.
No matter how the online giants change the rules or charge their tolls, customer satisfaction will always lead to success. A well-designed customer experience has the power to turn your customers into a high-octane marketing engine.
Customer Experience is More Important to your Service Business than Customer Service
Let’s play a word association game. When I say “customer service” what comes to mind?
For me, it’s a toll-free phone call, entering a bunch of information on the telephone keypad, then retelling it all to a human, once you get through to one.
Customer service is often limited to service delivery, or where you go when you need help to solve a problem. In our interactions with too many companies, customer service has become a 4-letter word.
Let’s carry on with the game. What comes to mind when I say “customer experience?” Is it less clear?
Customer experience spans the lifetime relationship between you and your customer. This assumes that a) you have a relationship; and b) that it’s an enduring one. Your customers’ overall perception of you is an aggregate of each interaction before, after, and between the service delivery.
Shaping a Great Customer Experience
Showing that you understand your customers, and that you’re listening to them, are key components of a good customer experience that keep them coming back to you again and again. Rich, online communications that add more touch points throughout the relationship give you the opportunity to:
Exceed customer expectations
Give customers information and control over their equipment and facility
Listen and respond to customers, especially when they have negative feedback
Plan the Customer Experience
You have a set of defined processes around the service delivery, but do you have the same form around your day-to-day customer relationships?
Set a schedule of pre-appointment communications. They’re a great opportunity to find out what concerns the customer has and what additional services you can provide.
During the service call, show your skill and know-how. Use photos to show the customer what you’ve found onsite that increases their risk or is out of compliance. Even better, show them the after photos of it fixed.
Follow up immediately after the sales call with a rich job record of exactly what was done, not just an invoice. Also schedule a second or third follow-up to check on customer satisfaction and possible other service follow-ups.
Work reviews and references into your follow-up communications. Ask your customers for reviews on 3rd party sites like Google, Yahoo, Yelp, and your social networks on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.
Continue to stay in touch with customers between service calls with seasonal tips, compliance reminders and other advice from your experts that remind them that you’re the best service contractor for their business.
The Payoff
Once you have a strategy, and a process you can follow, adopt a customer-focused culture and make every member of your staff follow it for every customer, every day. The payoff to your business is increased customer satisfaction, longer relationships, and higher lifetime value of each customer.
Don’t bring an operations knife to a customer service gunfight: Customer engagement must be the first priority in a connected world
“Why yes, I regularly purchase products from mail order catalogs” said no one in the last 20 years. Yet 20 years ago, most catalog retailers were thinking to themselves “If only we could improve our operations and reduce our cost of delivery, print, and call centers, we will outprice the competition and really rake it in!”
This line of thinking is obviously absurd in the face of Amazon’s success and the Internet commerce imperative every surviving retailer has now embraced. However, this “internal operations is all that matters” mindset is still rampant in commercial service contracting companies today. Like the retailers of the 90s, commercial service contractors are focusing their systems upgrades on internal operating efficiency and accounting when instead they should be girding themselves for the internet shootout that is going to occur in the war over customer engagement.
Efficiency ≠ Growth
So why did catalog companies believe that operational efficiency and outpricing the competition would provide them with the edge? Much like commercial service contractors today, they focused on tactical, cost saving goals that were easy to understand. For example, it’s not difficult to calculate that reduced windshield time for technicians will result in fuel and vehicle maintenance savings, increased availability for billable calls, and decreased price for the end customer. The math seems pretty simple right? Reduced costs = Increased profits and growth
This equation is WRONG.
What the equation is missing, and what catalog retailers failed to recognize, is the eroding demand that occurs when customers inevitably switch to a competitor that provides a better customer service experience. Amazon, eBay, and the hundreds of other online retailers provided shoppers with a simple, online experience that resulted in the downfall of the old-guard catalog retailers. Commercial service contractors are at risk of the same demise if they don’t provide their customers with an engaging and enduring online customer service experience.
Step One: Demand, Step Two: Efficiency
This is not all to say that commercial service contractors should neglect operational efficiency. For example, Amazon has one of the largest, most efficient distribution models in the world. However, the distribution model was developed well after their ecommerce platform released to the public. Amazon understood that an efficient distribution model didn’t matter if they could not engage and retain customers. By first building the ecommerce platform that shoppers enjoyed, Amazon drove demand that later supported the construction of their distribution model.
How to Avoid the Catalog Trap
How can modern commercial service contracting companies avoid the catalog retail trap? Stop obsessing on operational efficiency and cost reductions. These are important, but hardly matter to your customer when another company provides much better customer service. When you lose all your customers to an internet savvy competitor, no amount of operational efficiency will lead to profits on zero revenue.
Take a page from Amazon’s book. Focus on generating demand by engaging customers online and providing them with an amazing customer service experience that keeps them coming back for more. Strong customer engagement and a reputation for amazing customer service will yield robust revenue that offers the possibility of perpetual profit. You will have the privilege of focusing on improving operational efficiency for many years to come if you survive the internet gunfight that you will inevitably face in the next few years.
The Rocky Road to Crazy Customer Loyalty – Practical Tips to Brand Freedom
No one can serve two masters, and sometimes the road to serving only one can be rocky and painful. This difficult transition was illustrated to me in colorful detail recently by a shrewd and successful service contractor in the kitchen equipment service industry. During the course of an entertaining conversation, I proclaimed that the role of the service contractor is to be the ultimate advocate and technical expert for the customer. This means the service contractor is the source of all truth and data regarding equipment and equipment performance, thereby enabling the customer to make the best operational decisions regarding what equipment best suits their applications and how to maintain it.
He replied (and I paraphrase here because the language was much too colorful to publish on this blog), “Well, that’s a fine theory, but it is not practical. If I tell the customer the truth about each piece of equipment based upon our experience and our service records, the manufacturer will cut off my supply of parts (and other parts of my anatomy as well). So we attempt to remain neutral and leave the customer to navigate the decision process on equipment purchases the best way they can.” I will elaborate further that he was not at all happy with this state of affairs, but a large percentage of his revenue is part sales, and the best margins are when they are purchased direct from the manufacturer (in some cases that is the only “legitimate” way to get the parts).
Practical or not, the transition to “customer” as the sole master of the service contractor is underway, and it is being driven by the Internet and tech titans like Google and Amazon. Very soon, the manufacturer is going to be forced to reckon with widely available information regarding part replacement pricing and sourcing that is going to push margins down to the minimum viable volume distribution margin (15 – 25% instead of 100 – 200%). Manufacturers will be forced to extend warranties and enter into the service business in order to preserve control over the equipment lifecycle and to build margin through service delivery. The service contractor that does not build a service brand that is valuable to their customer INDEPENDENT of a manufacturer’s endorsement will be relegated to low margin warranty and service repairs at the request of some other entity that owns the relationship with the customer.
So what should the service contractor do in the face of this reality? Clearly access to parts is critical, so building up a few relationships with large volume distributors that operate across manufacturer lines is important. Second, establishing programs that qualify technicians across multiple brands is necessary if the goal is to offer the broadest possible value proposition to the customer. In some cases, cooperative alliances with specialty service providers will be required where it is not practical to “own” that expertise within the service area. Third, the service contractor must have an independent sales capability to represent to prospective customers their “expert” value proposition – do not rely on leads from the manufacturer. Most importantly, it is absolutely imperative to establish customer service capability that collects and shares information with the customer so that the service contractor becomes indispensable in the decision making process regarding any equipment purchasing or maintenance decision.
Expertise, communication, and trust enable service contractors to build customer relationships that last forever and command a premium margin. When allegiance to a manufacturer erodes that formula for perpetual service, the customer relationship becomes tenuous and margins shrink. Smart service contractors will establish alternative access to parts along with business practices that expand relevance to the customer in order to replace the parts revenue and margins that will ultimately be worn away by the Internet anyway. Do it quickly before the manufacturers realize that they too must be in the service business in order to preserve their relationship and margins at the customer.
