Check out these quick tips for strategies to retain your best workers and avoid losing them to the competition.
Your team of service technicians is the face of your organization. Beyond being service techs, they’re salespeople, customer service professionals and marketers for your business. And the great ones can be REALLY difficult to find. The pool of candidates is small, and training costs are high; avoid having to start from scratch by rewarding and retaining the very best. Learn how in the latest episode of Field Force Friday.
Service Technician Careers: 4 Part Series
For your reference, here’s a transcription of the video:
Hi everybody, Happy Friday. Welcome to another edition of Field Force Friday. I’m Adam Bartos and we’re going to speed things up today with a Quick Tips session of our Field Force Friday. We’re just going to give you some quick tips so you can go and act on what we’re telling you today.
It’s a topic that applies to everybody in the field service space, and that’s retaining your technicians. Technicians are really tough to find, so you want to keep the good ones. So we’re going to talk about ways you can do that.
1. Develop a Technician of the Year Program (TOYA)
This gives you an opportunity on an annual basis to reward your best technicians and make sure they’re recognized for hard work. A really great way to recognize good talent, make sure they feel valued, and keep them within your organization.
2. Let Your Technicians Grow
Your technicians probably know they’re really good and they have a lot of good experience, so they’re going to be looking for the next challenge. Give them an opportunity to take on addition training, additional certifications, maybe even additional job responsibilities to make sure they’re getting challenged within your company and NOT looking to be challenged somewhere else.
3. Give Your Technicians a Voice
By giving your techs a voice… they’re the ones in the field who see the day to day of your service department. They know the customer’s feedback, they know what the pros are and they know what the cons are. Maybe they identify a need for new tools, maybe they identified a way the process could be fixed. If you listen to them and let them mold the future of their department, then they will feel like they have skin in the game, have value, and will want to contribute more in the future.
4. Equip Your Technicians With the Right Tools
So, if you’re a carpenter and you’re going to a woodworking shop with dull saws, that’s not really a great retention strategy. Make sure your techs have the right tools, whether it be physical tools on the job site, software tools to help scheduling and taking inspections, whatever is in the field, make sure they are equipped to do their job the best way possible. That will make them want to stay with your company because they’re really working for a best in class service organization.
So these are four really quick tips that can help you retain those technicians. They’re hard to find, they’re hard to keep, and training costs are expensive, so you want to make sure that the good ones stay with you.
Hopefully these four tips help you mold that service organization, so hopefully you can take those and institute them in your business.
Thanks for attending another edition of Field Force Friday, and see you next week.
