Moments of Truth
Jan Carlzon, who became the CEO of the problem-ridden Scandinavian Airlines Systems (SAS)1 in 1981 and turned it around in two years’ time, described various encounters with customers as ‘Moments Of Truth’. He underscores, that a moment of truth occurs any time the customer comes in contact with some people or some aspects of the organisation and uses that opportunity to judge the quality of service provided. Carlzon’s turn-around strategy was based on the premise that the passengers get their perceptions about the airlines from many interactions with the customer–facing employees. If these short-lived but critical meetings mete out a positive experience, the customer would like to stay engaged. In a forceful and paradigm-changing administrative action Carlzon set out to educate the employees—particularly those at the supervisory or managerial levels—to understand that the most valuable contribution they can make is to empower all the customer facing employees to enable them to handle each moment of truth successfully—in a manner that exceeds customer’s expectations and leaves them feeling positive about the company.
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Service Engineer, a Vital Link
B2B relationships, particularly in manufacturing sector, span a long period of time depending on the nature of the manufactured product. Multiple customer encounters take place during this period, involving people at different levels of hierarchy. Handled with maturity and empathy, each of these interactions can generate plenty of goodwill. On the other hand, it can undo all the good work done earlier if the customer perceives lack of serious concern on part of the people dealing with his expectations.
Many people may get involved at one time or the other in dealing with customer issues. However,
‘there is one incumbent in the company, who is most in-touch with the customer and the product sold; bears the biggest brunt of the customer’s moods, enjoys the most gratitude and is in a unique position to build long term successful customer relationship. He is the company’s Service Engineer**.’
Functionally placed at the firing line, a service engineer is responsible for converting his company’s contractual and implied promises into value adding performance. For the customers he is the company’s face and the way he conducts himself substantially shapes the customer opinion about the company as a vendor and the strength of their mutual relationship. An emotionally engaged and knowledge-empowered service engineer has the capacity to raise the customer relationship to the level of emotional engagement. He can truly act as a messenger of goodwill for the company.
One Individual, Many Roles
A service engineer is a great and least expensive source of feedback about customer’s expectations, product behaviour and emerging business opportunities with the existing customers. As part of his primary role, however, he delivers value to his customer and earns goodwill for himself and for his company by playing one or more of the following roles:
This is a preamble to the four blogs that follow dealing with each of the above roles.
Gopal K Gureja
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*I have used the title ‘service engineer’ in a generic sense for all those who provide on-site technical support irrespective of the official designation they may have.
** Gureja, Gopal K, (Tata Mcgraw-Hill, 1997), Creating Customer Value, Page 181.