While you’re here. How often do your engineers hear that?

How often do we all ask an expert another question when we’ve got their time?

We all do it. The reality is operatives in the field get asked about extra work all the time and very few companies capitalise on these golden opportunities. Yet this work represents the easiest kind of sale – the customer is asking you, and they’re already happy with your work. If your Engineers rarely update you on extra work, then you also need to think about what this means for your customers. If you don’t get back to customers about the extra work, they spoke to you about, how do you think they will feel? Probably unimportant, dissatisfied, like maybe they should ask another company. That’s the double whammy effect not only could you be failing to do more work for existing customers you could be reducing customer satisfaction and loyalty too.

To capitalise on these opportunities, it’s fundamental to appreciate that Engineers want to help, and Sales want to make money – harsh but true! So, you need to make it easy for an Engineer to help a customer without causing them any hassle – we all take the easy route. Service management systems that have a simple function to capture the ‘extras’ and share this data with Sales teams to estimate and follow-up on, can help you capitalise on these opportunities. Done well this can help businesses achieve seemingly effortless growth and high levels of customer service and retention.

While you’re here you could also consider how you could combine ‘extra’ work with planned work, so you reduce your cost and increase your margin.