Tag: Habit Breaking

By Brandi Loudermilk, CSR Coach at Service Excellence Training

The ongoing conflict between field staff and office staff is not new. It has been a pain point for business owners for years. It is like siblings bickering over who gets to sit in the front seat of the car for the short drive to the grocery store.

This does not only does this conflict annoy leaders, managers, and owners. It can also negatively impact business. Depending on the severity of the conflict, everything from the quality of customer service to revenue may suffer from the fallout. Another huge side effect of this conflict is employee turnover.

So, what causes this costly and time-consuming conflict? If you ask the technicians, they will say the dispatchers are at fault. And if you ask your dispatchers, they will say the technicians are at fault. However, the truth is, there is fault on both sides.

In core training that Service Excellence Training provides to CSR’s and dispatchers, there are always four major pain points that escalate the ongoing conflict between office and field workers. These four points are universal, and any company can fall victim to the consequences of these issues.

1. Misaligned Goals

The dispatcher has a goal to keep the schedule moving on time. The technician has a goal of diligently working through their calls, making money, and getting home to their family at a decent time.

The Fix: Get their goals aligned and communicate those goals to everyone.

• Dispatch the correct technician to the correct call. ServExtra recommends dispatching based on performance and communication style of both the client and the technician.
• Provide exceptional client transformations on every call. If goal one is accomplished, this one should fall into place.
• Create an environment where everyone wins. The client wins with a great service experience, the technician wins by getting to the right calls, and the dispatcher wins by having a clear protocol to follow. The company also wins because everyone is working together.

2. Lack of Appreciation for Teammates

The root of this conflict point is the “us” vs “them” mentality. It is vital to help team members understand the importance and challenges of different roles in the company.

The Fix:

• Have your dispatcher ride along on calls with a technician. This will give the dispatcher a deeper appreciation for the process that technicians do, the challenges they face, and the discomfort they deal with.
• Have your technician sit with the dispatcher, and not during a slow time! Let the technician see the game of “Tetris” that dispatchers play every day. Make sure the technician understands that when they do not communicate delays or hiccups with the office, the level of service to the client decreases and the job of a dispatcher is much more difficult.

3. The Ever-Changing Schedule

When a technician sees their whole schedule and then sees it change for any number of reasons, they feel like they are being slighted. As any dispatcher knows, schedule changes happen all the time. It is important for the whole team to understand that until they are actually dispatched to a call, the schedule is tentative.

The Fix: Only show the technician one call at a time. That way, they are not aware of changes. They can also focus on the call they are on and not the other calls on their schedule.

4. Communication.

This is by far the biggest hurdle in ending the conflict between dispatchers and technicians. The reason is, dispatchers always want more communication and technicians do not want to feel micromanaged. It leads to a lot of animosity between the two groups.

The Fix: Set up non-threatening communication channels. For example, have the dispatcher text the technicians 30 minutes or so before their next scheduled call asking, “How much longer do you need on this call?”

This is a very non-threatening message. It is not putting pressure on the technician to finish faster, it is not interrupting them like a phone call would, and it gives the technician a reminder in case they need to notify the office that they need more time.

It is also important to reinforce the need for communication both to the dispatcher and the technician. Dispatchers need to know if a call is going to take longer than anticipated so they can notify the next client in line. No one likes to show up to a call where the client is already angry. The technician may just need to understand the ‘why’ behind the communication requests. This will help them feel supported instead of micromanaged.

The conflict between the office and the field does not have to happen at your company. By eliminating this conflict, your company can continue to grow, provide amazing client transformation, and retain quality employees. It all starts with a culture that supports team members and does not pit them against each other.

If you would like more information on how you can help your CSRs and dispatchers improve their communication skills with your technicians, you can contact me at Brandy@ServExTra.com.

Brandy Loudermilk is a CSR coach at Service Excellence Training. She teaches call takers to close more calls, increase client satisfaction, and outbound for season leveling. 

Service Roundtable is dedicated to growing your bottom line and helping your business maximize its full potential. These group of contractors work together to assist you with marketing, sales, business, and so much more. Twice a month, seminars around the United States and Canada are held to network and further assist your business. Visit Service Roundtable.com to see if there are Success Days in your area!

By Steve Mores, VP of Training and Sales of Dynamic Air Quality Solutions

We have all heard this before: “You just have to get into the habit of doing it.” And that’s sometimes the advice and solution that owners and managers give their team when discussing how to correctly work a service, maintenance, or sales call to increase average tickets and close rates. Well, that may be easier said than done, and just saying it doesn’t make it happen. We all have habits, some good, and some bad. From our personal morning and daily to-do’s, to things we go through at work every day. We all have dozens of habits that get us through our daily routine. Some are bad like smoking, and some are great like regular visits to the gym.

Work-wise, some are bad as well. Like just going through the motions on a call to get it over with, and others are good like working with enthusiasm and sharing equipment problems, solutions, and accessory benefits with a homeowner on every call. Since we realize that our habits can be useful or detrimental behaviors, we often strive to correct the bad and improve the good.

Let’s take a deeper look at habit forming for a better understanding of where you may be in your company culture when it comes to promoting great habits.

Our phones now have apps that count calories, steps, and many other functions designed to help us form habits. These apps can be very useful if used regularly, and over time will form better habits. The question then becomes, “how much time does it take?”

There have been many scientific studies on the amount of time that it takes to form a habit. In Maxwell Maltz’s book titled “Psych-Cybernetics”, as plastic surgeon, he noticed that it took approximately 21 days for his patients to get used to their new facial look. So, many of these apps and other forms of creating new habits, or breaking old ones, base their time span on this 21 day assumption.

Yet, in 2009 Researchers from University College London studied the new habits of 96 people over a 12-week period and found that it takes an average of 66 days for a new habit to stick. The time span in this study varied from 18 to 254 days.

Psychology Professor Susan Krauss Whitbourne says that sometimes a habit can be broken quickly. “In extreme cases, the habit can be broken instantly, such as if you happen to become violently ill when you inhale cigarette smoke or nearly get hit by a bus when texting and walking. But in most cases, it’s going to take longer than that, and you should probably allow for at least two months.”

When examining several of these types of studies on the subject, many researchers throw out the low and high time span numbers and we end up with an average of 90 days. The take-away here is that to develop a new behavior, it will take nearly three months of constantly repeating the desired habit daily to get a positive result. As you stick with it beyond the 90 days, you’ll end up with a habit that you will keep without thinking about it.

This goes the same for breaking unwanted bad habits. As psychologist Timothy Pychyl explains, there are two sides of the same coin. “Breaking a habit really means establishing a new habit, a new pre-potent response. The old habit or pattern of responding is still there (a pattern of neuron responses in the brain), but it is less dominant (less potent).”

Neuroscientist Elliot Berkman reports that “It’s much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behavior…That’s one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.” It’s replacing one habit for another. Berkman also says that, “People who want to kick their habit for reasons that are aligned with their personal values will change their behavior faster than people who are doing it for external reasons such as pressure from others.”

Experts agree that other factors fall into play for breaking habits or creating new ones, and the right recipe is going to be a mix of personality, motivation, circumstances, and the habit in question.

You can see how all of this can apply to our personal lives, yet let’s address how we can apply this information when trying to mentor and motivate our team members.

• Meet with team members one-on-one to set personal, family, and career goals. This is to give them skin in the game and something that they want to shoot for, not pressuring them to just do it for you and the company.
• Discuss with them in this meeting their strengths and weaknesses. Then identify behaviors to start doing and those to quit doing to create great work habits that will help them achieve their goals.
• Post their goals in the training/meeting room as a daily reminder of the purpose for their new behavior that will help them progress.
• This should be a 90 day-plan where bad habits are substituted with a good replacement behavior. (i.e. Try to replace rushing through a maintenance call with pulling the blower wheel on EVERY call, cleaning off two fins to show the homeowner the dirt that’s getting through their current filter, and asking, “Would you like to see a better filter to prevent this from happening in the future?” This opens the door for an IAQ conversation and solution options.)
• Hold them accountable to the new behavior by identifying the new behavior or task such as a KPI that is watched and measured.
• Make it fun by adding it to your weekly training sessions and have a group discussion about the successes that the new habit is creating. This will also create comradery and support from other team members to keep each other on track to succeed in achieving their goals.
• As you get closer to the 90-day mark, they will realize that the old habits have faded away, and they have become comfortable with the new habit that they will continue to do without thinking about it. It becomes habit!

To successfully break a habit, you need to think of your strongest motivation and goals, which will drive you along. Always think of replacing a bad behavior with a positive one. Just trying to stop a bad habit without a replacement is much more difficult to accomplish. And be patient with your team. The longer they’ve had a habit, the longer it will take to get rid of it.

Neuroscientist Elliot Berkman explains that “Longtime habits are literally entrenched at the neural level, so they are powerful determinants of behavior. The good news is that people are nearly always capable of doing something else when they’re made aware of the habit and are sufficiently motivated to change.”

As a closing note, I would encourage you to share this quote from Margaret Thatcher with your team. It says it all.

Watch your thoughts, they become words;
Watch your words, they become actions;
Watch your actions, they become habits;
Watch your habits, they become character;
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

Service Roundtable is dedicated to growing your bottom line and helping your business maximize its full potential. These group of contractors work together to assist you with marketing, sales, business, and so much more. Twice a month, seminars around the United States and Canada are held to network and further assist your business. Visit Service Roundtable.com to see if there are Success Days in your area!