How Does it Matter to Your Field Service Team?

While it is fun to read how different people interpret the objective truth—the glass contains water to the half-way mark—is it possible to make everyone in the room believe in the same interpretation to achieve a common goal?

To be told that one should see the glass from a particular perspective is slightly different from making one believe in that perspective. As these “beliefs” to a large extent drice the attitude, behaviour, and commitment for the further course of actions. 

From this standpoint, cultivating a common set of beliefs in service teams is of utmost importance so that they don’t end up with half of them seeing the glass as half empty and the rest as half full.

This set of  “common beliefs' could help develop a service mindset in the field teams that focuses on creating value for the customer, their satisfaction or delight, and overall customer lifetime value. 

Over many years of working with field service organizations, I have found the following factors crucial for cultivating an effective service mindset: 

Empathy: Understand the concerns of customers and give every aspect of the concern enough importance. A lot of time, customer concerns are dismissed or neglected for them not having enough knowledge. But dismissing the concerns as irrelevant or unimportant might affect their “moment of truth” at any touchpoint. 

“People will try to convince you that you should keep your empathy out of your career. Don’t accept this false premise.” 

Tim Cook, CEO- Apple

Discovery: Who are you talking to? What are their expectations? What will it take to meet their expectations and are you equipped to do that? Answers to these questions help you build the connection with the customer, and in achieving the final goal.  

Communication: Service mindset leads to facilitating transparency at every step of the process and that exudes trust. It could be anything ranging from team capabilities, solutions not being available with your business to missing parts or any error on techs’ part. Explain the reason—the why and why not properly, in a manner that customers can understand and trust.

Accountability: Each member in this chain of collaboration must be aware of the ‘common goal’, and must make themselves accountable for the success and failure of that common goal.  

With extensive digitization, there are only a couple of instances where we, as businesses, get a chance to meet our customers, and service engineers and techs’ service mindset and that common goal can not only help differentiate you from other businesses but also create excellent relationships with customers and overall higher customer satisfaction and lifetime value.