Business gurus often stress the importance of creating a memorable customer experience. This concept has become so established that many big companies have a chief experience officer.

We think that the present situation in the industry calls for going above and beyond the customer experience. We believe that service and maintenance contractors should raise their sights to the totality of their business experiences, i.e., their customers, employees, suppliers, community and many others.

With that thought as a starting point, we propose four new guidelines for success in every category of service and maintenance, with a percentage value assigned to each to signify its relative importance.

No. 1: Create consistent business experiences (40%)

Business experiences begin with the employee, not the customer. Though customer experiences are a close runner-up, in an era marked by universal worker shortages, employee recruiting and retention has been very challenging.

Here is where the “customer comes second” philosophy kicks in. It means that if service providers take good care of their own employees, the employees will take good care of the customers. To this, we add “supplier experiences,” since product shortages and lead times for engineered equipment have been at unprecedented highs.

In the meantime, while slogans and taglines often tout a company’s reputation for “excellence,” success depends more on reliability. Consistency eats excellence for breakfast.

Thus, we rate the value of creating consistent business experiences at 40% of the sum of the four.

No. 2: Nurture every business relationship (30%)

From the earliest days of management science, experts have touted the value of long-standing relationships versus short-term transactions.

Every savvy service and maintenance provider espouses the value of preserving and protecting existing customer relationships. These days, we believe that it is equally important to maintain relationships of every kind, to go the extra mile with employees, suppliers and as needed with many others.

But here’s a twist: Relationships are simply the ongoing summation of transactions. A relationship can be compared to the steady stream of single frames that creates the optical illusion in every motion picture.

No matter who the other parties may be—customers, employees, suppliers or others—they constantly require the addition of new frames to keep the movie playing.

We rate the value of nurturing every business relationship at 30% of the sum of the four.

No. 3: Share teachable business data (20%)

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion,” said W. Edwards Deming, 20th century management expert. Today, data is even more important.

We have called it “teachable” business data to drive home the imperative of regularly sharing data with everyone in and around your service and maintenance organization. Here we are referring to much more than ordinary financial data such as the pluses and minuses on job cost reports.

Rather, we mean the kinds of nonfinancial data that measure the day-to-day realities essential to the development and growth of a service and maintenance business.

Contractors that choose not to share financial and nonfinancial information with their service and maintenance team in a sensible and accurate way run the risk that they will freely speculate about it in a senseless and inaccurate way.

We rate the value of sharing teachable business data at 20% of the sum of the four.

No. 4: Explore logical business expansion (10%)

Unbridled expansion has led to the undoing of many electrical contracting firms. Yet, the right amount of growth and diversification under the right circumstances opens the opportunity for an organization to renew itself by adding fresh talent.

The key word here is “logical.” The best way to reconfirm the logic of any kind of expansion is to involve as many capable thinkers as possible, inside and outside the organization, to test the basic assumptions behind it.

Contractors with misplaced concerns about confidentiality often shy away from calling on enough people for advice on critical matters such as this. Note nondisclosure agreement forms are readily available online.

We rate the value of exploring logical business expansion at 10%. That’s the least of them, but it often involves the biggest wager.