Customers today are well informed. They have easy access to specialist knowledge and, before choosing who to work with, they do their research. So how do you attract customers to your service business? If you are one of many companies offering exactly the same thing, you have two options. The first is to cut your prices blindly, which is a road to nowhere and can end badly. The second, far more interesting approach, is to build a strong relationship with the customer. How do you do that?

Say you install a piece of equipment at a customer site. You know it will need servicing in six months. The customer knows that too, but you have no guarantee they will pick you to do it. To improve your chances you gather information, make notes and, of course, put the task in the calendar so you can remind them in good time. You bring all that material back to the office, where perhaps somebody transfers it into your electronic notebook. Prepared like that, you wait for the right moment to arrange the service. In theory it looks fine, but you know as well as anyone that in practice you lose part of the information at each stage. You send a different technician to the next job, that person does not have the full picture of the customer, and you are back where you started.

Service management systems come with a rather useful feature for gathering data. You can make simple notes with them, typed or recorded as audio. You can also collect information about earlier repairs at that customer and about their situation: a sick dog, a difficult neighbour, a new swimming pool being built. Most importantly, those notes are attached to the customer automatically. So when you send a different technician six months later, they can easily check before the visit what has happened so far, how the service went, and learn about the swimming pool.

A technician armed with that knowledge does not just carry out the repair or the inspection when they meet your customer, they build a connection. Your service does not have to be the cheapest on the market. If you know your trade and you build the relationship, price stops being the most important part of the deal.