Why Customer Relationships are hard to establish for Field Service and Support Engineers

Nearly every Field Service or Customer Support Executive I talk to tells me the same thing – “We struggle to develop strong customer relationships at the FSE/CSE level with our customers, because all they seem to care about is getting the equipment up and running again as quickly as possible”.

Of course, that is their short term objective, but when we dig deeper we find that most “engineers” (and I am one myself by background) are pathological problem solvers, and typically lack the interpersonal tools and skills to establish and build mutually beneficial Customer Relationships. On top of this is the ever-increasing demand on higher personal productivity, so FSEs never seem to have the time to really talk to their customers about their business goals and challenges,  due to the pressure to get to the next problem and fix it. What we have found, having worked with more than 2,500 Field Service and Customer Support Engineers globally, is that these excellent and talented technical people not only have the capability to learn how to develop these relationships, but also have a strong interest in doing that, so they can add more value than just fixing a problem and getting the equipment up and running again.

 This is clearly observed when an FSE fixes the hardware problem he was called in for, but the customer is still not pleased with this result. And it usually turns out that the underlying “real issue” is something else entirely, like the President pushing the Factory Manager for additional, incremental output to meet a critical order. Once an FSE understands this real issue, he can deal with it by showing empathy and possibly making other equipment related suggestions to boost output. Remember, the FSE is the equipment expert with a high degree of equipment capability knowledge, whereas the Factory Manager only understands the basics of the equipment and the number of widgets he has to produce.

Over the last 10 years, I have worked with hundreds of Field Service and Customer Support Engineers, and have listened to their varied success stories about how they used what we taught them and were able to save their companies, and their customers both time and money – big money, and hundreds of hours of downtime in many cases. Imagine what that increased uptime generates in incremental Revenue.

My conclusion about this is simple: it takes the vision and the willingness to invest in specific Relationship Building programs, to achieve a truly “value adding FSE/CSE organization”. And the ROI is so compelling that many senior level executives make the investment and reap the rewards. Several world class organizations that we work with have made this effort, and are receiving huge rewards. One $8B technology company we work with reported a savings of more than $5M in 1 year by reducing  escalations by 66%; their ROI was off the charts.