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 | | Call Centre & Helpdesk Solutions : Commentary |
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 Comment: Making your mark with benchmarking
There are a couple of oddities about Service Management – beyond the staff that is - that make it a bit special. Most of the people who read it are from small to medium sized organisations and they come from a very wide range of industrial sectors such as vending machines, local government, emergency services on top of a strong base in traditional IT and electromechanical industries.
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Comment: Culture shock for AFSMI?
So what are we to make of the recent moves in the service associations? My view has always been that industries benefit from strong associations. I also believe that associations should be run by their own target membership – this keeps them relevant and maintains integrity.
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Comment: Suffer the little children
Children will often kick and scream about the food that is put in front them despite the fact that yesterday they loved the same fish fingers. Is it because they really don’t like them or is there another message they are trying to get across? Sulking because you wouldn’t let them play on the Xbox, annoyed because they are missing football practice to have tea with their parents or just trying to grab some attention?
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Comment: Mobility to continue to drive the service business
By its very nature field service is a mobile business. So it should be no surprise that mobility technologies are increasingly important to service managers. Integrated mobile communications, computing and management systems now bring a level of command and control which managers could only previously dream about.
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Comment: Is team building back in fashion?
It has been a while since Service Management has run a story about a brand new field service team being set up. Well that is what we have with the energy utility Scottish & Southern Energy setting up a team of boiler and heating engineers (see: Utility sets up domestic service team ).
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Comment: Running and maintaining the human machine
In an episode of the eponymous comedy TV series, Father Ted once bought his housekeeper, Mrs Doyle, an automatic tea maker in a well-intentioned effort to ‘take the drudgery out of making tea’. ‘But I like the drudgery of making tea’ came the churlish response.
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Comment: Our engineers are a bunch of diamond geezers
As a writer on service matters, I often mingle with similar trades people. One of my pet hates about this group has been the habit of using their tiresome personal anecdotes to berate the modern service provider. Essentially I am not really a great fan of using one’s editorial position to extract personal revenge on (or, even worse, recompense from), an organisation under the guise of first hand reportage.
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Comment: Is service in the loop?
Service can often be regarded as a one-way street from base to customer site. When an important customer has a serious problem, resource is thrown at it: take an engineer or two off the jobs they were doing, buy and then ship spare parts by express courier (often the spare part is already in stock but no one knows it was there so now there’s added waste, but that’s another story), tie up the techies in the second line and don’t rest till the job is done. All very service conscious but is it business conscious?
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Comment: Fear of change and failure are not excuses
There is a saying about never looking gift horses in the mouth. The expression sprang to mind when considering the results of the Service Management survey – for the second part of our article click here. In particular, the low level of implementation of mobile data caught the eye.
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Comment: Learning from experience
Life is a constant learning experience. Today we have the capacity to learn so much about the world so quickly. Our transport systems mean we barely have to think twice about the ease or cost of jetting around the world. The internet gives us access to massive amounts of data deliverable at the click of a button. Some of it is passive but we can learn from others through chat rooms and bulletin boards. The internet also offers the attractive proposition of not having to move from your desk.
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Comment: Sacred cow goes to pasture
In the turbulent times that service has suffered over the last 20 years or so, one thing has remained constant – customer satisfaction. Even (or perhaps especially) in the old, dark days of cost centre service, its only real purpose was to keep customers happy, usually in the form of a rescue mission after the sales people had over promised.
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