The shortage of skilled workers is also a problem in service. This makes it all the more important for companies to retain good staff in their after-sales department. But how can fluctuation in this area be reduced?
A successful Service Manager cannot be limited to continually optimizing customer service processes. As important as this task is, you are dependent on your team to deliver good work in the long term. To ensure a pleasant working environment for your technicians, you can use these points as a guide:
1. start with the recruitment process!
We often use the term customer touchpoint to describe the interfaces between companies and customers. In service, such customer touchpoints sometimes feel more like a front line. As a result, this term often seems like a shameless euphemism. Even in service, most interactions with customers are very friendly and polite. Nevertheless, your employees in the After-Sales compared to other areas of the company.
You need to find staff who can deal with difficult situations and conversations and also cope with the often high time pressure. Finding the right solutions to problems and mastering the technical aspects are only half the battle in service. Empathy and good communication skills are just as important. This should be taken into account during the recruitment process.
2. build a strong corporate culture!
The corporate culture has a major impact on how your employees interact with each other and with customers. You therefore need to think about what guidelines you want to represent in service and how you want to communicate these to your employees. Companies with a strong corporate culture have a much lower employee turnover rate.
Of course, you are not the only one in the service department who deals with questions of corporate culture. Use the guidelines defined at company level as a guide. These are typically defined with the support of the marketing, communications or strategy departments. They can help you with your project. Nevertheless, you should also think about how these values can be transferred to the service.
3. invest in your new employees!
New employees should be fully trained so that they can perform their tasks satisfactorily. This is not only important for the company and customer satisfaction, but also gives your technicians a sense of security. In this way, onboarding is much smoother and your new recruits will find their way around much more quickly.
The onboarding phase should not be reduced exclusively to technical know-how. You should also provide your technicians with useful guidelines and manuals on how they can improve your brand image and communicate your corporate culture to the outside world. In larger companies, it can also make sense to organize seminars for new employees in which the values of the new employer are communicated to them.
4. communicate the positive effects of excellent customer service!
You need to give your employees the feeling that their work is valued. Service has an enormous influence on the overall success of a company - especially in mechanical engineering. There is therefore no reason to make yourself artificially smaller than you are. Emphasize the importance of your employees' work to your team and also to other parts of the company.
Everyone has had good and bad experiences with a service department. The potential here is enormous to do a good job and create memories that customers will remember for a long time to come. So always emphasize the great influence your department has on the Customer loyalty.
5. recognize your team's successes!
If one of your employees goes the extra mile or turns a particularly challenging situation around in favor of the department, you should definitely acknowledge this. Even small gestures can make a difference here. Starting with an appreciative email to the department or mentioning the performance in a meeting.
The area of financial cooperation also plays an important role in after-sales. Research shows that before especially bonus payments increase the satisfaction of employees who have contact with difficult customers.
6. set times for appraisal interviews!
Have regular discussions with your employees about the problems they encounter in their daily work and how you can help to improve working conditions. This will help you to discover points of frustration and annoyance among your technicians much more quickly. You may be able to take countermeasures before a resignation lands on your desk.
If everything is running smoothly in the service team, it can of course be assumed that no help is needed. It could therefore be the case that employees are not seeking to talk to you about this. However, there may be problems that go under the radar for you. That's why it makes sense to actively seek out discussions outside of the annual appraisal meeting and to make a conscious effort to do so.
7. promotion of a healthy work-life balance
Customer service is a stressful and demanding area of work at times. Service managers know this all too well. Technicians are no different. High time pressure and dissatisfied customers can often make everyday working life difficult. A good work-life balance is an increasingly decisive factor for many employees when choosing a job.
As a manager, you need to understand this need. Design the processes in such a way that there is enough free time available and your team can relax. This also means that employees can actually enjoy their free time while on vacation and not have to respond quickly to this or that email or phone call. With increasing home office hours and the spread of remote service, this is becoming more and more important.
8. enable opportunities for advancement in your organization!
If employees do not see any opportunities to improve their own professional situation, the desire to change employer increases. Therefore, think about how members of your department can develop within the company. Even if an employee is satisfied with their own position, they usually still want to feel that they can progress within the company.
To ensure this, you need to create a successful Skill management to be able to monitor the development of each individual. This will allow you to quickly identify who is lagging behind in developing their professional potential and you can clarify in a discussion whether this may be due to your organization. You may be able to assign them an exciting area of responsibility alongside their core tasks.
9. ensure open communication within the service department!
Spaces should be created for employees in customer service to get in touch with colleagues and exchange ideas. Dissatisfied customers and trouble with malfunctioning machines should not be the only points of contact with their workplace.
This is all the more important for employees in the field and working from home. Provide sufficient channels and events through which your team can get in touch with each other and also talk about topics other than work. Team-building measures are irreplaceable in terms of employee retention. Although there are a disproportionate number of characters in the service sector who can be described as lone wolves and who appreciate this high degree of independence, it is still easier to hunt in a pack in some situations. This point should also be actively managed.
