As the old adage goes, the customer is king in any business, and this is especially true for companies in the field service industry. To maximise customer satisfaction, field service businesses stick to their own brand of strategy. Field technicians are often required to respond to the ad hoc demands of the customer, and the challenges are bound by both time and location. Let’s take a look at some ways field service companies can try and maximise customer satisfaction.
Delivering a shorter-than-expected turn-around time
Often, customers are unaware of their own needs and their dynamic requirements mean maintaining a short turnaround time can be challenging at best. Furthermore, if the problem is not resolved in a timely manner, the
resulting delay can cause a snowball effect, turning what was originally a minor problem into the stagnation of an entire project. Loss of time is loss of revenue for the customer.
Keep a channel of communication open
It’s never a pleasant experience to have clients constantly calling the back office, asking for updates about their project. This process is not only time-consuming but it can be an important source of frustration for your staff as well as your customers. To tackle this problem, field service businesses can support their customers through a client portal. This portal can be used to update customers with the engineer location, send across authorisation documents, request the dispatch of parts and record project notes among other applications. Without customers calling in, technicians and other staff members can spend more time working on key projects.
Improve asset handling efficiency
For field service companies, the inefficient logistical handling of field assets is a silent time sink. For example, assigning the wrong engineer for the job means you’ve wasted the customer’s time, and depending on priority levels, you’ve also wasted the time of the engineer who has to drop/postpone his current project and travel to the new location. All of this translates to a considerable time waste and an extremely unhappy customer. Using smart team management or field service software can help reduce such instances. By ensuring the correct technician—selected on the basis of his skillset—is mapped to a specific set of jobs, the process of allocation can be automated and efficiency automatically improved.
Incorporate customer feedback in future projects
Customer feedback is another vital aspect that can optimize the efficiency of small service businesses. Customers can sometimes have specific requirements that are not part of standard protocols. For instance, some customers can request a part of a specific make. By ensuring your technicians always use the same make for future projects, you can create a significant positive impression. Similarly, by creating a record of customers and tracking patterns of repeated concerns, your technicians can take measures to ensure such issues are not repeated.
