Learn how to put your customers’ needs first to achieve better preventive maintenance results for your field service and repair business.
Managing successful preventive maintenance (PM) programs is one of the best ways to guarantee recurring revenue and loyal customers, but not all PM programs are created equally. Follow along as we guide you through 3 Do’s and Don’ts to keep your PM programs profitable and customer-centric.
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Video Transcription
Hey everybody! Welcome back to Field Force Friday. I’m Joanna Rotter.
Today we’re going to cover a topic that’s very important to any sort of service or maintenance or repair organization: preventive maintenance.
We all know that PM programs are extremely valuable for regular business and especially for customer retention, but they’re not really all created equally, and, let’s be honest, most of them need a little work.
Today we’re going to go through three Do’s and three Don’ts of running a successful, customer-centric preventive maintenance program.
Our first Do: Say yes to the little jobs. When customers sign a preventive maintenance program with you, you’re signing on to be the trusted guardians of their equipment. You want ot be able to provide the most trusted feedback and be their advisors. But in order to get to that level, you need to say yes to all the jobs that they ask you to do: big and small. So, if someone asks you to change their oil, while that might not be the most lucrative job for you to do, it will build that trust so you’ll be their go to team when they need a bigger, more expensive service job done.
Likewise, to maintain your status as trusted advisors, that leads into our Don’t, which is Don’t underquote PMs. You can think of this like going to the dentist. You go to the dentist, not necessarily because something’s wrong, but because you want to make sure nothing really big happens. So, I go into the dentist, my dentist says I’m a-okay, I leave, and then a month later I need an emergency root canal. I’d be pretty angry at my dentist if that happened. The same thing can happen if you skip steps when you’re doing preventive maintenance visits. If you come in an do your regular visit and then something really bad happens a month later, your customers aren’t going to be very happy with you. So, in order to keep your customers happy and wanting to work with you and establishing that trust, it’s important that you do all of the steps necessary in every PM visit, to really prevent big things from happening, ideally ever.
Moving on to #2, our second Do is hire a service sales team. A lot of service companies don’t think to do this, but especially for preventive maintenance contracts, it’s a great way to keep them moving, keep the program making money. They can do research, find out who you’ve worked with in the past, find out who might be good candidates for a service contract down the line. The sales team is also a great follow-up team to call your existing contracts that are expiring. So you can put your sales team in charge of calling those expiring contracts and offering upsells or at least a renewal.
When you’re making those promise after you’ve made the sales, it’s important, then, that you don’t under promise. This might seem counterintuitive. Some companies will actually under promise, then over deliver. For example,they might say we’ll get a delivery to you in six weeks, but it actually arrives in two weeks. While you might think that that makes you look good, you’re not only under selling yourself by saying initially that it will take six weeks, when it really might only take you two. You’re also inconveniencing your customers. Think of it like if you were ordering a pizza. You call the pizza delivery service, they tell you it’s going to take an hour to get there, then they show up in 15 minutes and you’re in the shower or doing whatever else. You’re not expecting them so it’s a big inconvenience to you. And, you don’t want to put your customers in that position.
The third Do on our list is to track success and ROI rates. Basically, what you’ll need to do is set up a system so that you’re measuring whether your service contracts are profitable, things like equipment and technician performance are big ones to measure. When you’re tracking the success rates, you can figure out what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments so your contracts are as profitable to you as possible. That’s sort of a no brainer and should be a great way to set up successful preventive maintenance contracts.
Then, likewise, you want to make sure that once you have all that data and information, don’t ignore it. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many businesses have tons of information and look at it, but don’t really take action with it. Don’t ignore what the data is telling you. Basically what we mean by this is, don’t go into auto pilot. You can set up stakeholder portals and customize that data for each stakeholder in your organization. What that allows you to do is take that information and take actionable steps for improving your service contracts down the line and really getting at the heart of what customers are looking for.
Alright, so there you have it, our three Do’s and Don’ts of setting up a successful, customer-centric preventive maintenance program. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks again for tuning it and we’ll see you next week for another edition of Field Force Friday.
