Skip to main content

It's the little details


As overwhelmed Oscar sits in his office, surrounded by piles of overdue work order tickets to review and material orders to procure, his heart yearns to give the customer anything they want, yet the tools at his disposal make it difficult. On this relatively ordinary day Oscar receives a phone call from a marquee customer. This new customer has multiple locations and has asked for just three pieces of information every time a person visits their sites to perform service or maintenance. Oscar gathers his thoughts as he prepares to discuss this seemingly small challenge with reluctant Ruth, the dispatcher who has been with the organization for decades, Ruth can be a bit of a curmudgeon. Oscar does appreciate the inconvenience of gathering unexpected information both for the field worker as well as the back office.  A seemingly great example of ending up between a rock and a hard place.



In a world of perfect harmony where all customers, work orders, and requests are exactly the same the aforementioned scenario would never occur. For many of us the reality is simple; we are obsequious hoop jumpers and will do anything for our clients. Certainly balancing one request for three pieces of information from a single client is not a big deal. The challenge happens when we have multiple requests across multiple time frames and multiple individuals handling the data. This screams for an agile and flexible toolset based in the cloud which can gather information quickly and get this data into a format that can be leveraged by existing transactional environments. Just a handful of weeks ago we discovered such a tool included with our Office 365 base subscription, $5 per person per month. The tool is known as office forms and it allows you to gather field information and export it to excel so it can be imported into a transactional system. Gathering field data does not have to be a constraint to your business, instead an opportunity to differentiate yourself.



-----

Next post:  perceiving the service professional

Questions?  feel free to leave replies or direct message

See all of the "last mile worker" posts here:  http://lastmileworker.com

-----
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