Market view: A shift in service culture

Collecting customer feedback to give you a clear understanding of their experience with repairs and maintenance teams can have big implications for their satisfaction and loyalty, says Simon Thorpe.

Field service teams have become water companies’ biggest brand ambassadors and play a key role in the overall customer experience.

But how can water companies monitor the customer experience of their field teams? And more importantly, how do they make sure that this experience is consistent with the service offered in the contact centre, on the web and through social media channels, etc?

This is a question being asked more and more in the water sector, where often the repairs function sits outside the control of customer service leaders. It also seems to be a conundrum for those businesses who have service contracts with outsource partners often using multiple suppliers to fulfil repairs and maintenance issues.

Customers expect a high level of service whichever way you interact with them. How they and their homes are treated is a highly emotive issue. Consistency is key and having a clear understanding of this vital part of the customer journey can have big implications for customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The first thing to review is, have you built a truly customer-centric organisation where service is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation? Often, customer experience is considered a function of the contact centre alone, but it is equally important to analyse whether your frontline staff have the relevant training, support and mindset to deliver the best possible service. Field teams are typically measured on job effectiveness, focusing on speed of completing the work and an ability to fix first time. Customer satisfaction is rarely measured and companies have little idea of how good the service experience is. The best performing companies, however, have customer experience in their target structure and create a service-first culture.

Second, proactively ask customers for feedback after the repair interaction. Use a customer feedback tool tailor-made for your field service team and think about creating a relevant survey question set. By analysing voice of customer data, a company can quickly establish service consistency and can pinpoint common causes of dissatisfaction.

Questions could include:

• Did our engineer explain the reason for the fault and demonstrate the repair?
• Did they arrive at the time you were told?
• How satisfied were you with the quality of work carried out in your home?
• How would you rate the engineer’s level of respect for you and your home?
• What could we have done to improve your repair experience?

So what about survey methodology? In the past, customers were asked to fill out a satisfaction survey on a personal digital assistant (an intrusive and bias-inducing process). A better practice is to tap into your customer relationship management and workflow tools and when a job has been completed use this to trigger a survey – as real time as you can make it, so you don’t lose the customer’s memory of the interaction and more importantly allowing you to create a remedial process to reduce complaints and dissatisfaction.

Once you’ve collected customer feedback after your repair interactions, how do you then make sure you can use this insight to drive valuable improvement?

Wherever possible, try to build in some level of accountability. If you can tag survey responses to specific individuals, great, but at the very least you want a team or supplier view. This will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the teams you’re employing and will help you drive effectiveness. What’s more, businesses using external contractors can quickly work out who drives value and who is turning off customers.

By giving your field team access to the data you can also encourage operatives to take ownership of their development and use the insight to drive friendly competition.

Your contact centre teams will also love it. Every day they are faced with a barrage of customer issues about repairs people not turning up and problems not being fixed. Not only is this demotivating (because agents have no control over this), it’s also very difficult for them to quantify the impact this is having on the business and the overall customer experience. By using customer feedback with a decent data analytics tool they will quickly be able to establish how often customers are dissatisfied and can evaluate this impact on customer loyalty, for example. Business leaders can also then crack the whip and drive down avoidable contacts.

If you want to add in an extra dimension, why not look for correlations between productivity and service levels. By comparing data you can quickly establish which teams or individuals are the most effective but at the same time provide great customer care.

By collecting customer feedback using a joined-up, real-time approach, you will quickly unlock a goldmine of insight that if used correctly will help you drive down customer complaints and improve customer satisfaction levels. What’s more, training and coaching opportunities will present themselves, helping you to better engage with your field repair teams.