Reviews
Debra Dennis, CopyPro Inc., Greenville, North Ca
"I have to admit, I was a skeptic. Would the BTA Service Success Training be worth it? Let me say … it was worth every penny! Our director of service signed up for Ken's course and the amount of usable information he took away from the training was nothing short of amazing. Great value! This course is a must for service management."
Jeremiah Shepard, Dove Print Solutions, Florence, South Carolina
"Thank you for sharing your insight and helping make other service managers more effective. The class had a great agenda that flowed seamlessly into other topics."
Jose Espinoza, Team Solutions Group, Sherman Oaks, California
"I thought this course was great. It covered a wide variety of topics. Coming from a strictly technical background, this course has helped me better understand the roles of being a manager. The segment on coaching/mentoring employees and setting goals I think will be very helpful in getting the techs to be more efficient. I also liked the part of SMART expectations for the team or new hires. Service incentives are a great idea for team motivation; it's something we are planning on implementing next quarter."
Rick Hays, Eakes Office Solutions, Grand Island, Nebraska
"Whether a new manager or seasoned leader of men, Ken Edmonds' approach to service management training for the copier industry will help you take an honest inventory of your management style and focus on how to improve it. The skills Ken teaches are easily accessible to all and have real, tangible effects on your department if you apply them. Setting S.M.A.R.T expectations, fire prevention, and working to better your team members — even if it means you might lose them — are just a few of the items that resonated with me and that I have worked to implement in my department. I would highly recommend the class to anyone looking to sharpen their people management skills, as well as understand particular metrics that help to identify where attention may be needed to maximize efficiency."
Jeff Thompson, BES - Business Equipment Service, Loveland, Colorado
"I really enjoyed this course. Ken's extensive experience and deep knowledge gives him the ability to provide the material in terms of real-life scenarios and examples. He does a great job of engaging the students and getting them to think, as opposed to just regurgitating information. I was particularly interested in learning more about standard metrics being used by others to track performance and improvement, and certainly was not disappointed. In addition, the material that was not necessarily new to me was often presented in a new way, which serves as a great refresher course to remind one of the basics that are necessary to running any department or business. I highly recommend this course for both new service managers and seasoned ones. There is enough content here to benefit both."
Anthony Leuckel, DEX Imaging, Tampa, Florida
"The BTA Service Success Training adds another layer of operational and service-oriented focus. The in-depth approach that Ken Edmonds takes is extremely beneficial. The curriculum is centered around a practical application of proven tools. I thoroughly enjoyed drilling down into the data in order to identify both positive and negative service trends. The tools provided to analyze service-focused data was very interesting and eye opening. I enjoyed the delivery mechanism and the open discussion platform throughout the calls as well. This class allowed for service professionals with all levels of service experience to gain valuable knowledge."
Dan Drees, Copy Systems Inc., Des Moines, Iowa
"I wanted to let you know that I did get a lot out of this course. I have been in this business for more than 30 years and moving toward retirement. Your course has brought out things that we used to do, but have not done in a while. The two books of required reading were very interesting, especially the book from Carl Sewell, 'Customers for Life.' He has a lot of great points in the book that we are currently doing and things we are looking at as a company. His book also shows us how important great service is and how important our customers are to our business. We have that in our mission statement here at Copy Systems: 'Our mission and purpose is pleasing customers. Our customers pay our wages. We will treat them right and keep them with us.' I really enjoyed the week on the difference between coaching and mentoring. I sometimes forget the difference between the two and how important it is on using the two in different instances. I did enjoy the class on key elements. Sometimes we need to be reminded as leaders to step back to evaluate our leadership skills. We need to take time and effectively listen to our troops. Also, how to deal with challenges of day-to-day issues and to try to anticipate those issues. I thought it was very interesting on the cost of getting a new technician up to speed and how long it usually takes. Eye opener! Evaluating the team was a good class. The formal and informal evaluation. We do a formal evaluation each year, but I fail at times to do an informal one monthly. It was good to put this in front of me so I can start doing this again on a monthly basis. I like the class on effective team meetings. I do have weekly Monday-morning meetings with service, but at times I would just wing it. Now I use an agenda for each meeting and it's consistent for each meeting. Motivating your team was a good class too. Using the pyramid analysis was great. Motivational style, achievement and recognition, and what motivates people. Cost of labor (burden rate): We already use the ProFinance model, but putting together the cost involved on labor for the burden rate was a good refresher for me. The class on parts cost was another good refresher for me. Gave me other ideas to look into. Lastly, I really enjoyed the last three classes on the case studies. Everyone saw something different that I didn’t see. I see the numbers one way, but others saw things that I wasn’t looking for in the case studies. We already do a lot of things right here at our business such as customer surveys, technician benchmarks and the ProFinance model. My company does a good job of giving us all the numbers and keeps everything transparent, but this class still gave me a lot of tools to use and pass along to my team and my replacement."
Ken Oneill, Corporate Business Systems LLC, Madison, Wisconsin
"I found the class very helpful and well worth the time. I learned about what I was doing wrong and reinforced some of practices that I was already using. After going over some stuff that seemed to be just common sense, it made we wonder why I wasn't doing [those things] all along. I learned how much other departments not doing things correctly can negatively affect not only service, but the entire company. I have always had trouble with letting coworkers know when they did something wrong. I would just correct it and move on, and not even bring it up. I have been working on bringing issues up as soon as they happen instead of waiting until the next time I see them face to face to go over the three or four things that were wrong. When a tech gets a good survey back, it is now sent to all employees and the tech is given the credit they deserve. If a tech gets a bad survey, I deal with it one-on-one. The one thing that I feel would make this class more effective would be to have one for upper management/owners so they realize how a little more investment in service helps overall profits. I definitely recommend this class for all service managers and supervisors."
Russell Ledford, tte IMAGING / The Toner Exchange, Wilmington, North Carolina
"I have thoroughly enjoyed the course. There were things that I thought I knew about, however, being exposed to all the different perspectives, by being in a classroom environment, has taught me to look at things from different angles. For example, the metrics that I was getting every week now have more meaning to me. I have learned the difference between leadership and coaching. I have always done both but having them separated in my mind has already had an impact on my team. I look forward to using all the new skills that I have acquired through this course. I have already begun to use some with a positive outcome. Listening has always been one of my downfalls, but I have listened more and feel that I have become a better leader because of it. Ken is a great instructor. He is not only very knowledgeable about what he is teaching, but he also practices what he preaches. For example, one of the first things I can remember him saying is the best thing to do is listen. Ken always gave an opportunity for us to speak up before he gave us his input. I would recommend this course to anyone in a supervisory role within a service department, no matter their experience level."
Doug Shaddox, Copiers Northwest Inc., Seattle, Washington
"I have been with our company for 17 years and within the past year I have become the service manager for western Washington. Previous managers did not have a class like this to help with industry knowledge. Call it school of hard knocks. When this class came out, the director and vice president asked if this would be a class I would be interested in. Of course I said yes, and am so glad I did. The Service Success Training really opened my eyes to many different ways of coaching, mentoring and managing individual technicians. Every technician learns at a different speed or ability; this is nothing I didn't know, but it definitely gave me more options for management strategies in the future. The knowledge I gained from this class has been very well noticed by my boss and will be very useful in my new career going forward. Thank you Ken for the time you spent with all of us and really explaining why these areas are so important to our future in our industry. Thank you!"
Dan Koopman, Managed Solutions Group, Dubuque, Iowa
"I thought the course was definitely worthwhile and was pleasantly surprised. I typically go into these types of things not expecting much, looking to get a nugget or two. The stuff I already knew and would consider common sense at this point in my career was presented with a new perspective that made it fresh and it was a good reminder to adjust some bad habits that have developed over time. I am relatively new to this industry, so the statistics and the reports were particularly valuable. Our organization is very different from the typical copier dealership and the focus audience of this class, but there was enough good information to give me a baseline for some solid numbers to track with a little tweaking. Classes were interesting and kept me engaged. I had been working on some reporting, so these classes will allow me to be much more focused on the data I need to look at and pull from e-automate. I thought the reading material was good and relevant despite it being older material. I think there are a lot of businesses outside of the office technology sector that should take the customer service and leadership portions of this class."
Steve Robinson, MC Business Solutions, Chatham, Ontario, Canada
"When I was first told to take the class, I was not sure what to expect. After just a few classes I was 100% on board. The course content covered a lot of areas. I am sure in some dealerships some of these areas are just not within our control. Having more details helps fight and plan for the best outcome. It quickly become the refresher I needed to get my head back in the game. After 30 years in service, you tend to glaze over some details, but this brought new light to old things."
Les Blalock, Bagwell Document Solutions, Shelbyville, Tennessee
"The BTA Service Success Training class was a great educational experience for me that was long overdue. As a manager in a small company, I was never given the opportunity to take any courses that were industry specific. This course has not only helped me to look at my department and my day-to-day practices in a new way, but it also let me know the things I've been doing right. I would recommend it to new and experienced mangers alike."
Colin Bailey, D L Gallivan Office Solutions LLC, Portage, Michigan
"Great course Ken. I think splitting off into groups was a big plus. I get more out of a discussion with peers than I do anything else. The content was exactly what I was looking for and the metrics you provided were very good. Metrics were the biggest reason I took this course. It's hard to compare yourself or see how well you're doing when you have nothing to compare it to. Thanks again!"
Bill McMurray, Kraft Business Systems, Grand Rapids, Michigan
"I thought the class was very informative. As I've gone through this, it has really helped me grow as an individual in this industry. I personally found it very helpful and would recommend this to any new service manager or even a lead tech."
Bobby Hawes, CDS Office Technologies, Springfield, Illinois
"I think this course was very well taught and provided a lot of great information. For me specifically, coming from a print background, it was extremely useful in learning some of the crucial aspects of service management."
Jim Lansing, Copy Systems Inc., Des Moines, Iowa
"The class has a lot of useful information in it. I like how you go through the different reports and show us how to pull out dates to run our service departments better. "
