by Sam Klaidman | Jun 2, 2014 | Growth
Introduction After writing over 90 posts about service revenue and customer retention, it is time to show why these subjects matter. I will tell this story using publicly available data of service revenue as a percent of sales for the company. This data is from a...
by Sam Klaidman | May 26, 2014 | Growth
Remember the old expression, “You only get one chance to make a first impression”? Well, it is still valid with both employees and customers. While the steps to successful on-boarding are different for each, the success of this process is critical to forming...
by Sam Klaidman | May 19, 2014 | Growth
We recently concluded a service contract design engagement with an established equipment manufacturer who did not yet offer service contracts to their customers. We followed the following process and arrived at a recommendation for a series of focused agreements to...
by Sam Klaidman | May 12, 2014 | Growth
Why customers (or prospects) contact your business When a customer contacts your business, she has a need or wants; she is not contacting you because she is bored or wants to know the weather in your part of the world. She reaches out to you because she assumes you...
by Sam Klaidman | May 5, 2014 | Growth
If you are responsible for service revenue and profit and suffer from declining service revenue, how badly are you screwed? That depends on two questions… How long have the revenue and profit been declining? Over that time, how much have they declined? If the answer...
by Sam Klaidman | Apr 28, 2014 | Customer Loyalty
In many companies, the field service engineer has the most ongoing influence over her customers. She is their trusted adviser, is expected to make all problems disappear quickly, and is expected to shield the customer from home office mistakes. In the overall scheme...
by Sam Klaidman | Apr 21, 2014 | Growth
Law of unintended consequences This picture defines our understanding of the Law of Unintended Consequences. As you can see, this is a three-part definition. In this post, I am only talking about the last definition, a perverse effect contrary to what was originally...
by Sam Klaidman | Apr 14, 2014 | Growth
A visit to an unhappy customer About 25 years ago, when I was in my first VP of Customer Service job, I received a call from our Southeastern Sales Manager. He told me that one of our largest domestic customers was unhappy with my prices for our service contract. He...
by Sam Klaidman | Apr 7, 2014 | Growth
Leaders of a company, division, department, or project have to accomplish many things right to achieve their current success. They also had to do many things correctly many times. All these experiences become habits that we tend to fall back on when making decisions....
by Sam Klaidman | Mar 31, 2014 | Growth
This post describes what happens when someone is not satisfied with Consistent Experiences. Imagine driving to work on Monday on the same route you have driven for five years. You see a traffic light change from green to yellow, and for a split second, you think about...
