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What can art teach us about industrial maintenance and service business? Joan Hexter-Christensen works at Konecranes as VP, Office Operations & Industrial Service Excellence. She shares her five learnings on building a successful service business.
“I recently watched an Andy Warhol documentary, and there was a quote that really resonated with me: When you think about a piece of art, you have the artwork, the artist and the viewer. For me, we have our company, our employees, and our customers. They each bring their total selves, with their own lives and personal circumstances, to work every day. And that’s what makes the service business a human business. No matter what product you’re rolling out or what service you’re providing, there is a human at the end of it.
As a service provider you must remember: your customer is stressed about the situation and bringing whatever baggage they walked in with that day.
In our line of work, we are sometimes putting people 50 or 100 feet in the air, to work on a crane in dangerous environments. In those situations, factors outside of work can wildly impact their success and safety.
Our customers are no different. Let’s say one of their cranes has broken down temporarily. That can cost them thousands of dollars per hour in lost production. As a service provider, you must remember: your customer is stressed about the situation and bringing whatever baggage they walked in with that day. Customers remember how you made them feel.”
“Nobody is calling us to say, ‘Everything is running smoothly.’ Of course, we have great relationships with our customers and advise them on what success looks like for running their equipment, offering predictive maintenance. But generally, if they call us, it’s because there is a problem.
Nobody is calling us to say, ‘Everything is running smoothly’.
And when there’s a problem, how you show up for the customer really matters. The industrial sector is a complex business. Everything we build is highly engineered, so it’s been through many hands. But when the customer has a problem, the complexity doesn’t matter. You just need to solve the problem. We must act as one team, the whole value chain from the salesperson to the engineer, all solving the problem for the same customer.”
“We now have all these smart machines and connected equipment. But these systems are only adding value if you can understand what they are telling you, and if you can translate it into an action.
This became crystal-clear to me through working with our customers who were using our remote service for maintenance. We had engineers in Finland reading the data and saying: “It’s throwing error code XYZ.”
But the salesperson sitting with the customer is thinking: ’What does that actually mean?’ The data was in crane-to-engineer speak – not human language. So, then we had to figure out: how am I empowering that front-line person to know what action to take next? Data alone is not that useful, it’s what you do with it.”
“I started at Konecranes relatively young. One pivotal experience I often reflect on was when I was 25, trying to convince a boardroom of people 20 years my senior about a new tool and system we were rolling out globally. In that meeting, I remember thinking, ‘I’m being set up!.’
What I realized later was that my bosses were looking for the energy I brought, combined with the knowledge the broader team contributed – and together, that created a powerful balance.
That's what I do now when I look at my team. If everyone has the same strengths, then we're unbalanced and missing an opportunity.
And that’s what I do now when I look at my team. I ask: what does balance look like? What gift does each person bring? And how does that gift compare to the team members they are working alongside? Because if everyone has the same strengths, then we are unbalanced.”
“When you bring in different perspectives, you can get friction. And with the way the state of the world is, all of us are feeling a little bit ground down, a little bit weary. I try to remember that the feeling of grinding, that friction, can also be a positive force.
Grinding away is how you get the spark that lights a fire.
For you to make a change successful in your business or to create a long-lasting partnership with a customer, you may hit a few of those friction moments. We see it in our Voice of Customer (VOC) scores. The best strength indicator is how we solve a problem when that occurs. Sometimes we forget that grinding away is how you get the spark that lights a fire.”