Service Academy

"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. — Rick Hays, Eakes Office Solutions, Grand Island, Nebraska

"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." — Jeff Thompson, BES - Business Equipment Service, Loveland, Colorado

"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." — Anthony Leuckel, DEX Imaging, Tampa, Florida

"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." — Les Blalock, Bagwell Document Solutions, Shelbyville, Tennessee

"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." — Ken Oneill, Corporate Business Systems LLC, Madison, Wisconsin

"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." — Jeremiah Shepard, Dove Print Solutions, Florence, South Carolina

"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!" — Colin Bailey, D L Gallivan Office Solutions LLC, Portage, Michigan

"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!" — Doug Shaddox, Copiers Northwest Inc., Seattle, Washington

"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." — Dan Koopman, Managed Solutions Group, Dubuque, Iowa