Maintenance for Services

Lessons that service providers can learn from the industry in order to restore, understand and impress.

Our entire world was shaped as the result of the industrial revolution, the last great and transcendental shift our specie had to experiment in terms of social evolution. Think about urban centers and traffic jams, management systems and marketing strategies. It all can be traced back when machines started to replace artisans in the production of goods.

And as though things have pretty much evolved since the beginning of the 20th century, it seems that much of that evolution has been incremental. An industrial mindset is still very active even though three quarters of the world's wealth is based on the service economy (the other quarter as well, but that's a matter of point of view and subject for a whole new article).

In a service dominant economy, most of what organisations do is adapt industrial concepts to its service offers, creating processes that most of the time aren't at all desirable to customers and only appear efficient and profitable from the inside. There is, nonetheless, one rather fundamental and simple concept from industries that can inspire a very good strategy for services: maintenance.

A type for every need

In the industry, there are most commonly three types of maintenance: predictive, preventive and corrective. All of them are important concepts and have different functions. Before we continue, it is important to understand them. Please stay with me …

Corrective

The original and most common type of maintenance is the corrective one. Corrective maintenance exist when a problem of some sort forbids something to function properly. For instance, if you forgot to change your car's oil and your engine starts malfunctioning. Probably the losses caused by this would be much greater than when performing preventive maintenance correctly. Most industries have come a long way learning and implementing predictive and preventive maintenance in order to avoid having to do corrective ones. But it still happens. It implies stopping to perform to change whatever is wrong.

Predictive

When you take your car to a gas station and someone asks if you want to check the oil, that’s a predictive type of maintenance. The main purpose of it is to measure the status of a specific element (in this case the oil). This type of maintenance is interesting because it is not something that people are obliged to do, but rather only should.

Preventive

Last but not least, there is a middle term between corrective and predictive called preventive maintenance. Using the same car and oil example, this kind of maintenance happens when you take your car to a garage because you know it’s about time to change the oil even though there’s nothing wrong with it. You change the oil even if there’s no apparent failure at that exact moment because if you don't something could eventually happen. So instead of having a bad time by the road side, you avoid it by preventing it.

But what if those concepts were used to understand and improve the way a service is provided or how to relate with clients?

Instead of approaching the concept of maintenance as a process to avoid machines' malfunctions, let's make an exercise and try to transfer it to take care of relationship malfunctions. Is it even possible?

Correct to Recover

As stated previously, corrective maintenance is what we do when something goes wrong, so that’s pretty straight forward. As industries have their procedures to immediately solve a problem with a certain machine, as service providers we must also think of our service recovery strategies, determining actions to restore the transaction and the relationship. Services have an opportunity to excel when something goes wrong but is fixed right away — user’s tend to find the biggest value in those fixing situations so here is a great opportunity to gain loyalty.

Corrective strategies may also manifest itself when users decide to interrupt a relationship and leave. In those situations, most companies try to stop customers from doing so by offering them a better deal (and that’s generally just terrible). When doing so, clients realize that those companies were making a fool out of them, since they learn that they could have had a better deal the whole time.

Although recovery strategies are disseminated as a concept in the business world, a good comeback is not something we see everyday. Service providers that determine the right correct and recover strategies will most certainly have more loyal and happy clients.

Predict to Improve

As industries perform tests in machines to verify their current state of performance, service providers should measure how is their relationship with its customers. That means understanding how users are experiencing their service through multiple touch points — always remembering it is the whole experience and not isolated contacts that really matter. Keep in mind that how users perceive a service offering isn't exactly the sum of all parts, but rather a much more complicated formula that must take in consideration things like fluidity, expectations, needs and many other factors. As with corrective methods, the concept of "customer satisfaction" has also been somewhat explored by service providers. And although many companies still don't get it is about the user journey and not individual channels, the biggest problem here is knowing exactly what to do with the information they get from those surveys.

Companies that take serving and its clients seriously must establish routines to check how the relationship is at every moment of interaction. This means knowing exactly who the client is, what are they needs, barriers and expectations and making the right changes based on those results.

Prevent to Impress

If you've gotten up to this point in the text, here is your reward. Up until now there I just explored mandatory concepts that organisations should already be addressing. But when, as a service business, you know what your most common problems are (corrective maintenance) and also have a clear picture of what are your strong and weak points as a provider (predictive maintenance) you can start preventing to make an impact. And that's where something new emerges.

There is no company right now actively pushing relationship boundaries in order to suggest changes to improve the relationship. If you use your mobile or your bank less than what you've payed for that is seen as your problem and their gain so of course they will not contact you to show a better and more suited option for you. This is the kind of thing that only happens when it hurts their internal processes (and then when it must be done we go back to corrective instead of preventive maintenance).

There is a huge opportunity for companies to keep track of how their clients are experiencing their services and suggest better ways for them to interact, more so to enhance the relationship than to prevent a malfunction. Companies that pay attention to this unexplored path will most certainly cause a great impression in their clients (since relationships don't normally get better without a certain effort from users and not the provider).

Customer Experience professionals should look at those three types of maintenance (of relationships) and create programs focusing on leveraging them to understand how their clients relate to the brands they are managing. Only fixing clients problems and measuring their satisfaction rates is too much of a passive way to play the game. With care, there's a possibility of establishing new kinds of relationships by making sure that they are working and also improving continuously.