Use your engineers to generate value for money - summary

Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group

Rather than gagging your field staff, why not allow them to engage with the client and feed back what the customer really wants?  In this article Steve Downton examines how developing engineers to be trusted customer advisors would offer increased service value

Engineers may still jeopardise a sale by word or deed, but in my experience this happens only when the engineer/technician or agent has not been appropriately trained. They need to be trained in “soft skills”, which, in most cases in the past were aimed at helping the engineer to recover a difficult situation. But customers will only pay if they see value; the engineer/support agent acting as a trusted advisor has to give the message of the value to the customer.  Many businesses are convinced that their service personnel are liabilities and cannot see how the bottom line can be improved by providing value-added services to customers, because in their mind the engineer/support agent as a trusted advisor does not exist.