Determining Technician Success in the Home

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Podcast (unfiltered): Play in new window | Download

Your technicians are crucial to your company’s customer experience – they’re your front line in the home! But too often, those same technicians are the least prepared to execute on your customer service strategy. That is, until you’ve given them the correct training. . . .

In this week’s episode of Cracking the Code, Contractor University faculty members Weldon Long and Russ Horrocks explain how to train your technicians to go above and beyond for customer service, and how you can reward them for doing so. The result? Happier customers and a more successful business.

Audio Transcription

As a technician, what determines your success in the home? Well, you’ll learn all about it on today’s show.

Now, today we have some great content from yours truly and the amazing Russ Horrocks. We’ll talk about rewarding the behavior that you want, exceeding customer expectations, and how to be, not just what to do. Take it away, Russ. You’ve got to reward the behavior that you want. And so you have to recognize your people in your, in your office and your, uh, you know, among your team for doing those kinds of things.

I’ve let them know that’s celebrated, and we appreciate the extra work that someone did to get this incredible review or feedback from a customer to say that they helped them carry groceries in, or they helped them, you know, I’ve, I’ve been in homes countless times where I’ve painted door jams and I’ve, you know, hung, I’m, I’m six foot three, I’m pretty high reach, so I’ve, I’ve, uh, fixed people’s blinds before.

I mean, any little simple thing I can do to give them an experience that is above and beyond what they expected. And I think that’s really what we want to ask a technician to do. To go into a home, give a customer an amazing experience that exceeds their expectations. And if we do that, we trust that the outcomes will be what they should be.

That’s like Steph Curry, if you’re a fan, he goes to practice because he wants to be the best. In a game, he wants to get the best outcome, and so he produces the best effort. He executes at the highest level that he can, and he trusts it will produce the best outcome. And that’s kind of how I look at what we do.

I’ve done my training, it’s time to knock on the door, now it’s time to execute. I’m going to focus in the moment, I’m going to be present, do what I do the best I possibly can, and trust it will produce the best outcome. I use a little acronym, it’s BPO and it’s BPE. The best possible outcome requires the best possible effort.

And I trust if I do it right, I’ll get the right results. So for me, that’s how we kind of reconcile all of this, what we’ve talked about so far. How do we be a technician? I think so much training focuses on what to do, where I like to focus on how to be. Because that’s where all the top performers win.

They win when they learn how to be a technician, how to be a salesperson. Uh, not just simply what to do. And so how do you exist in this role? How do you reconcile these pressures you might feel? How do you go into the home to make sure they’re never translated to the customer? And how do you get the best results?

You have to figure out this world and navigate it mentally. And once you get there, it’s an incredible place to work from. Where you can have fun, you can have passion, you can be good at what you can do. People love you for what you do. They refer friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. And you start to see some personal Success that you never thought was possible.

And then now you start to create a different life for you and your family. So, you wanted to add to that real quick? Well, no, I just, I think it goes to your central point. Uh, that the, the customer experience drives everything. You know, and I think when we talk about this customer experience stuff, It’s not just kind of a soft, you know, You know, skill that you can’t measure.

Like, there’s a direct correlation between how happy your customers are and how much income you make, right? I mean, as I often say, we get compensated in this industry based on the number of problems that we solve for homeowners. But homeowners are only going to allow you to solve those problems if they have the great experience with you, they have the trust, all those things.

So, while it may not be a hard number, Right? That customer experience has a direct relationship between that, your income, and overall the customer, the, the, the company’s performance. There’s a direct relationship between those experiences, those positive experiences, and your income, and the company’s overall performance.

Yeah, and then it starts to become kind of a cycle. You start to realize training produces better results, better results produces more better outcomes, they change my quality of life, and then you start to love the training. You know, you hear the top performers like Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan.

They’re always, it’s always associated with, they were obsessed with training. Every top performer, that’s what you hear. They were obsessed with the training, with the details. And that’s really why we’re here today. We’re talking about the details, the training, the skill, the technique. Every word I say in the home, I can tell you why I’m saying it, what it’s accomplishing, what it’s allowing me to do, the objectives I’m achieving, and how it’s progressing the call.

How well do you know your craft? That’s the important thing to ask yourself. So the key here though to exceed the customer’s expectations is the word customers. It’s not going to work this well if I did this. Let’s say Weldon’s my homeowner and I knock on the door, I meet and greet Weldon and I say, Weldon, look, I’ve got a process to take you through today.

It’s pretty rigid. Oh, shh, shh, listen. It’s pretty rigid and I’ve got to accomplish it. It’s what I’m going to do to you because I want the best. Hey, just, I need you to be quiet now, okay? So, I need to get through my process to get what I want from you today. So, if you could just kind of shut up and stay out of my way.

What, what? Nope, nope. I just need you to stay out of my way. I’ve got a process. Okay. And if you follow my process, we’re going to get on just fine. Sound good? I’m afraid to speak now. How well is that going to work for us? Well, it’s not going to be exactly the customer experience. It’s an experience, all right, but probably not a good one for the homeowner.

Absolutely not. So the key to that statement is not just the expectations, but the customer’s expectations. Each customer has a unique idea of what they want the experience to look and feel like, because they’re different people. You have to be tethered to a process, but not chained to it. I use that terminology very specifically because I have to have the freedom to be creative in meeting someone and say, wow, this is a different human being.

I better act different and behave different if I want to get the same, you know, dynamic outcome. And so we want to make sure that we have a process that allows for creativity. Uh, any LinkedIn said in 2020, the number one recruited trait was creativity. Harvard’s produced a study after study that says the number one trait among top performers is creativity because we deal with other humans.

And that creativity means that I can read a room and realize this situation’s a little bit different. I’m not going to sit down and ask Weldon a ton of questions. He’s too busy. He won’t appreciate it. It’s not the experience he wants and he’s going to hate me for it. And i’ll never be an effective communicator and the outcome is going to be too much at risk.

I have to know how to change my behavior to accommodate the uniqueness of the person i’m speaking to. That’s where you start to get into the high performance. You know, those guys that can do a million dollars with a hundred leads, they know how to do that. They know how to do it with any type of personality, any type of situation, any type of buyer customer value system and buying process.

They know how to execute their process with that level of dynamic, um, you know, I guess, um, expression. And, and that to me is the fun of this. That to me is the, is the beauty. That’s why I haven’t got bored in 22 years of teaching this because every day I get to learn it better and learn more about it.

And every night I get to study more and go, you know what? That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know that. And that to me makes this, uh, keeps it fun and exciting. So, all right, so exceed. Why do you want to exceed? Well, you can’t just meet the expectations. It’s not going to work. They expect you to know what you’re gonna do.

You don’t, you don’t go to the doctor and he gives you a diagnosis and say, Wow, you actually diagnosed me. I’m, I’m shocked. We expect them to know how to diagnose this. I’ll tell a funny story. I won’t mention the guy’s name. I’m in Texas and I rode with the salesperson years ago. And he gets out of the truck and he’s smoking in the truck.

He gets out in the customer’s driveway. He looks at me with a very serious look and says, You know what? I won’t do rest. I said, what’s that? He goes, I’ll never throw my butts in the customer’s property. I mean, did you want an applaud for that? I’m like, I blew my mind that he. looked at that as a positive trait that he doesn’t litter in his customer’s property.

I mean, they would expect that you wouldn’t litter in their property when you come to visit them. So when you’re a technician, they expect you to be a technician. You’re not gaining any loyalty or growth because you’re a competent technician. That’s not going to cut it in today’s world. You have to blow away their expectations.

Be everything they hoped that you’d be, and be nothing that they were afraid that you’d be. And that’s that, that dynamic, uh, expression that we have to have. So when I knock on the door, I don’t care if it’s a maintenance call, I don’t care if it’s a service call, I don’t care if it’s a sales call. My mentality is, when I leave these people, they are going to be blown away by the experience I provide them.

And that’s the mentality I take into every single home. And I don’t care what capacity I’m there. I was at a call a couple weeks ago, a few weeks ago in Florida. We show up to a home on a maintenance call. Two year old train, very, uh, 20V system. They had a UV light at the evaporative coil. They had a UV light downstream.

I think it was an iWave or something like that. Brand new equipment, everything had been done, and the tech turns to me and says, there’s no opportunity here. I says, what are you talking about? There’s a customer here, let’s go have a conversation, let’s find out. I have no idea if there’s opportunity, but I’m not going to assume it based on what we see.

The customer came out, started talking to the customer, made a connection. He had a, a new Corvette in his driveway, uh, those are like unicorns now, they’re hard to find and get, and he had one, and we talked about it, he did a, a, a cold start for me, and we, we made a strong connection, and it was just innocent and honest, I enjoy people, I love to meet people, and the strength of that connection built into, by the time we were done with the maintenance tune up, I walked in and said, hey, let’s take a look at your filters, and the guy, he said, they’re in the return grid, about four of them, four returns throughout the home, we opened up one return grill, and it was one of those, um, Uh, cut out, uh, fabric filters, um, and it was kind of sucked into the return.

And I just looked at the guy and said, Look, a lot of people like to filter at the source back of the unit. You eliminate this from happening. You don’t have to wash them and worry about biological growth. Is that something you want to look into? That’s all I said. Didn’t sell anything. I just introduced an idea and a concept based on the strength of a relationship.

And the guy said, yeah, that makes a lot more sense. And I said, great, we’ll go see if it can be done. Came back and said, sir, good news, we can, we have space to put a, a centralized filter up at the source. We can eliminate all these here. You’re not going to see this, you don’t have to wash it. It’s going to be changed once or twice a year based on our service, and we can do it for you.

You can have the filters here, we can bring them, it’s entirely up to you. And I said, it’s going to cost 800, and the guy goes, he just goes, he didn’t want to hear the price. He just goes, he made a signing gesture. He said, just do it. And so we left, the technician looked at me and said, I can’t believe you just did that.

I go, did what? I just had a conversation, you know, you guys assume there’s no opportunity when you walk into a home. I never assume anything, just execute the process to the best of your ability and trust that the outcome is what it should be. And how much opportunity is being wasted out there because we predetermine the scope of opportunity when we, when we knock on the door.

How much is being wasted an opportunity for your company, for you as an individual, because you’re not having these conversations. Because you’re predetermining what the possibilities would look like, could look like, and what they are. And I encourage you not to do that. I don’t care what the lead sheet says.

I don’t care the age of the system. I don’t care the lead source. I don’t care. It’s another human being, and I get to go and have a conversation. And in that conversation, I’ll do the right things, where I’m going to find and discover opportunity. So, I bring that up because we didn’t meet that guy’s expectations that day.

We blew him out of the water. He had no idea he was going to engage in an interesting conversation with people and learn something and have people that are so competent in his home. And then pressure him and just cared to inform him and be there to help him should he want to be helped. And he happily engaged in that and then spent 900 to add a filter.

You know, there’s opportunity in everything that we do if we just do things right. So I bring that up because we don’t want to just have the mindset of, you know, getting a paycheck, not getting fired, doing the bare minimum. Like Weldon said, have the mindset of being the best at what I do. If you want to be the best, the top producer on your team, then become that.

It’s a choice. No one naturally got there, and the natural part of it may make it easy for somebody, but anyone that wants it bad enough and puts the time and work in can achieve the top performance level if they simply want to. It’s a behavior you can learn. It’s skills that you can develop and you can work on.

So, I bring this up because these are the foundational components to being the best at what you do. Without them, everything we talk about tomorrow will be worthless. You won’t be able to execute it correctly because you’re not going to be built on the foundation and the mental foundation of how to do this right.

Well, do you want to add something to that? Yeah, I was just thinking of a story. You probably heard me tell it before. I write about it in my book, Consistency Selling. It’s about a guy that his business was called Joe the Concrete Guy. And years ago, I lived up west of the town here up in the mountains, and I’d see his truck around town all the time.

And I needed some some concrete steps poured at the end of my driveway. So I called him up. Joe, the concrete guy comes out to my house. He gets out of his truck. There’s not a pretentious, pushy bone in his body. He’s a hippie, long bushy hair, big beard, cut offs, t shirt, flip flops. There’s nothing pushy or obnoxious or salesy about Joe the Concrete Guy.

Not a silver tongued devil, right? Not at all. Simple guy. And I’m showing him where I want these steps poured, and as we’re talking about these steps at one point, He looks over at a trailer that I had parked next to my driveway in the dirt and the rocks. And he says, um, why is your trailer parked in the dirt and the rocks there?

I said, well, Joe, as you can plainly see, the driveway isn’t wide enough for the trailer. And he said, well, you know, when I’m here pouring your steps, I could widen your driveway. And my budget went from a thousand bucks to ten thousand bucks just like that because I ended up widening the driveway all the way to the street.

But when he wrote all the paperwork up, I asked him, I said, Joe, where’d you learn to do that? He said, well, he said, um, I’ve been doing this a long time. And all I do is concrete. I don’t do HVAC. I don’t do plumbing, roofing, siding, yard work. All I do is concrete. And I learned a long time ago that if I’m going to pay my bills and feed my family, I got a very simple job.

And that is every time I walk onto a piece of property, I look for every problem that concrete can solve. And I tell people. And really, that’s our job. It’s what Rustin on that call, he was talking about in Florida. Uh, or Texas, where, where it was with, with, with the, with the, with the, uh, the filter. Right.

He, he wasn’t being pushy, wasn’t being slick. He’s just looking for every problem that heating and air conditioning and filtration, indoor air, quality, airflow can solve and letting people know about it. I mean, if the guy had said no, he would’ve been fine with that. That knows a perfectly acceptable answer.

Yeah. But I think sometimes we start thinking that if we do that, we’re somehow being. Uh, pushy or, or slick or whatever. Your job is to walk into a house, build a relationship, and look for every problem that heating and air conditioning, ventilation, IQ, can solve and tell people about it, and then let them make the decision.

They’ll make the final decision that’s best for them. So I just, uh, I couldn’t help but think about that story because that’s exactly what you were doing in that situation and I think Joe the concrete guy is a pretty good model for all of us. Yeah, I, I love that story. I, I call that seeing these techniques in the wild.

No one was, he wasn’t taught that and I’ve met a mechanic like that but they realized their survival was based upon being good at what they did and they learned that technique because they had to. Yeah, I was having this conversation with, uh, Gary Alex a couple nights ago. And, uh, you may know Gary. He’s one of the, the faculty members, founding faculty members here.

And we, we’re talking about to a large degree, uh, uh, that we’re spoiled in our industry. Listen, I, I’ve written sales books and I, I speak in every conceivable industry you can, you can think of from insurance to banking to transportation, everything. And in most of those industries, like you’re out there pounding the pavement, doing your own lead generation, right?

You’re prospecting every single day. It’s a big part of your job. In our industry, as service technicians or comfort advisors or selling technicians, the reality is you get set appointments probably every single day, right? And you don’t have to prospect, you don’t have to pound the pavement. We are spoon fed leads and service calls in this industry.

And I think sometimes because we have this abundance of calls that we, that we do get a little bit. I don’t know, uh, a little lackadaisical. We take it for granted, right? Maybe if we had fewer opportunities, we might be hungrier and look for these opportunities to, to, to fix something. But I think we kind of get a little bit spoiled.

I’m speaking for myself, too. I was a comfort advisor for a long time. And so I think we just have to be aware of, of that, that reality, that we can take things for granted. We can fail to be maybe as hungry as we should be because we’re getting so many leads and service calls every single day. But if you take that abundance of leads And you apply the mindset that Russ is talking about.

The combination of those two things is pretty dang powerful. Yeah, I love that. It’s that’s a tough message, isn’t it? Well, it is. We don’t want to say that we’re marginalizing your struggle, but to his point, I mean, your struggle is you have too many calls today. You have too many opportunities that doesn’t happen in most industries.

They’re sitting around going, I can’t pay my bills or feed my family. And I have no opportunity. To even have success. Yeah, so it’s not that we’re marginalizing your struggle. We know that what you do is hard We know that what you do is demanding But what an advantage we have that we can go out there as salesmen or technicians and have opportunity given to us So make the most of it.

Absolutely. So mindset to support the brand objective. We have to have a service mindset That’s why I love working with service technicians awesome content right there from russ as always now If you like this episode, please share it on your facebook And if you want to unlock more premium training content to take your business to the next level, click the link in the Facebook post for a free 30 day trial.

That’s it for now, folks. We’ll see you next time. Until then. Bye bye for now.