Despite its leadership reputation, Honeywell Building Solutions (HBS) wanted to demonstrate significant growth. One of six strategic business groups under Honeywell Automation and Control Solutions, HBS offers design, installation and service capabilities, primarily in heating, ventilation, fire and security, to the commercial sector.

Service is provided not only for proprietary products, but also for equipment manufactured by third parties.

Honeywell's European leadership team wanted to reduce contract cancellations, which they perceived to be their major impediment to growth. At the same time, they wanted to improve long-term customer satisfaction. In both cases, engineers played a key role. The Delivering Service Excellence Project, was developed to train 1,500 engineers across Europe, including 1,000 in the United Kingdom, in service excellence.

AchieveGlobal was selected as the training partner, based on a successful relationship spanning over 10 years.

Planning and implementing service training

The life cycle of a Honeywell client's relationship with the Company typically begins with a high level of customer satisfaction. However, as the relationship progresses, customers and engineers may begin to take the relationship for granted.

Management determined that the Company needed to become more aggressive in reminding customers why they had made a good decision to choose Honeywell, and that engineers who maintained daily contact with customers needed to become more proactive in meeting customer needs and ensuring that they were aware of value-added activities undertaken on their behalf.

"It was vital that service engineers stay current with what was happening with their customers' business and the needs of their individual contacts, so they could demonstrate how Honeywell should be perceived as long term allies and part of necessary solutions,"

says Caroline Taylor, HR Manager, HBS "We wanted our engineers to solve problems as they occurred and anticipate future issues, and not be perceived as always trying to sell the customer something." Implementation of The Delivering Service Excellence Project began with a conceptual phase that included the following:

Identification of critical success factors and success measures
Identification of key competencies
Research on the part of AchieveGlobal to collect anecdotes to use in development

Partnership with AchieveGlobal Yields Measurable Results

With research completed, AchieveGlobal and Caroline Taylor designed and customised the programme to suit Honeywell's needs. Programme elements included:

Selected service supervisors were trained to co-facilitate the service engineer training.
All supervisors attended a Driving Service workshop where they learned how to coach and reinforce the skills of their engineers.
Supervisors briefed their engineers before training to ensure engineers understood why they were being trained and what their expectations were of training results.
Service engineers attended a two-day interactive workshop during which they learned what service excellence meant to Honeywell, the customer and themselves, and why this was so critical to business success.

Training taught them how to obtain complete and accurate information from customers to prevent misunderstandings. They were also trained how to manage angry and emotional customers calmly and confidently, transforming customer complaints into sales opportunities.

Overall, training was designed to ensure customer expectations of their engineers and the service they provided were met and exceeded. In addition, it would increase the competence and confidence of engineers and assist them to deal successfully with conflict. Delivering Service Excellence was intended to increase the scores in the voice of the customer survey as well as increasing revenue by virtue of retaining customers and winning new business from them.

For three decades AchieveGlobal has emphasised the importance in the balance of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and the success and profitability of your business.

Click on the relevant section of the triangle and see how AchieveGlobal will help your organisation.

It's easy to benefit from our Achieving Stellar Service Experiences training programme.

It provides a systematic approach to improving your customer service skills vital to client satisfaction and loyalty, as well as business success.

AchieveGlobal approaches the organisation at four levels across five workshops (see left), each requiring different development needs.