Skip to main content

service an art or a science?


Now that is a question that people have been attempting to answer forever. I have spent the majority of my career trying to move service more towards science than the art. The answer to that statement is, it all depends on the type of service being delivered. For instance, a preventative maintenance is much closer to science as it is clearly defined regarding what actions need to be taken for a desired result. When you look at unscheduled activity, or service calls, levels of troubleshooting are heavily weighted towards being an art.  Service calls take finesse, intuition, experience, knowledge, and attitude all blended together to come up with sometimes magical solutions.



When I think about a really good service person, regardless of industry, they are people who have a series of traits that are very consistent. From my experience these traits include curiosity, a deep hunger for understanding, the ability to experiment and have the confidence to make mistakes, solid domain understanding, and as importantly; an understanding of what delivering service really means. Some of these traits certainly can be taught but many are instinctual. When you meet an authentic service person they will do anything to find a solution.  So, in this day and age of evaporating skilled and qualified labor, when you find your authentic service person with a blend of both art and science, hold on tightly.



-----

Next post:  right amount of info

-----
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Speaking AI (artifical intelligence)

You're talking but I can't hear you.   Everyone can certainly understand this condition; the "Peanuts" parents who sounded exactly like your own, your significant other while you watch your favorite game on TV, or most importantly a work colleague or partner which you are attempting to communicate a thought or vision.   All of these, and many other examples, have plagued our organizations long past the childhood game of telephone (passing your words to another, and on to another, etc.).   So what?   What has changed?   Besides the velocity of products hitting the market, the requirements that we have for our business now needs to be interpreted by data scientists, yet another abstraction layer from the field conditions.   Think about this example; TODAY :   we often think in binary terms, if "x" happens do "y" …   take a sales person seeking potential leads by searching a system for the last time we made contact TOMMOR...
Post a Comment
Read more

Are "mistakes" good or bad?

One of the attributes that make a great technician is the fact that they have made a lot of mistakes. Our biggest challenge is recalling those mistakes ourselves and as importantly sharing them with others on our team. Every single day we go out and fix things, many of them are routine and may not require any form of documentation or sharing; however, there are those instances where we have discovered gold. The trick is to make sure that we can learn from our mistakes in a systematic manner and have the ability to spread the information throughout our organization in a useful and relevant way. Corrective action, an integral part of a quality system, is the absolute best vehicle to put in place for your organization. Some of you may have been turned off by the words "quality system", don't worry you can still deploy a corrective culture without having to understand completely how corrective action and quality management systems work. The process is very straightf...
Post a Comment
Read more

months to aquire, moments to lose

It is just hard to imagine that one of the most common reasons maintenance contracts are lost is because people don't show up and don't pay attention to the details.   In many cases maintenance is an investment to keep the life of your asset running for a protracted period of time. However the length on many maintenance contracts is not even close to the life expectancy of that equipment, so if you don't really have any idea what maintenance is being performed then how do you really know if it's being done to your specification? Thus, it really boils down to business elements, assuming that you are actually performing the work, our focus needs to be on how you are differentiated. Let's take a look at a couple of the most common business-related reasons why people lose maintenance contracts. Not showing up ; managing contracts can be complicated between the sites, number of assets, and the frequencies at which items need to be maintained, can a...
Post a Comment
Read more