Partner Article

Aberdeen analyst highlights how best-in-class organisations are delivering on customer service

Trimble FSM recently collaborated with Aberdeen Group to present a webinar on ‘Delivering Service Excellence: Redefining the Customer Experience’, and in an interesting Q&A session Analyst, Aly Pinder, revealed that best-in-class businesses are putting customer-centricity at the heart of their field service operations.

Optimising the customer experience

Customer reporting - With field service becoming a lot more customer centric, companies are looking to improve the customer experience in a number of business areas. Providing better customer reporting is essential and it is important to relay the data that you’re collecting back to the customer, allowing them to effectively be an advocate and partner of your business. For example, if you provide predictive/preventative maintenance let the customer into the story that is there to be told. A satisfied customer is therefore going to help drive a higher level of engagement with the service organisation.

The value of service - Different parts of a field service organisation affect the customer experience and the Sales and Marketing department has a major impact. However, a key issue Pinder is seeing is sales representatives giving away service for free. When a sale is given away for free your ability to deliver that ‘exceptional service experience’ is greatly devalued. Therefore, ensuring your sales organisation understands the value of service internally and that they can communicate that to your end customers is important.

Some organisations have been incentivising technicians to sell more services. This is not necessarily the right thing to do for every company as you need to understand the skill set of your technicians and understand which technicians could be good sellers and which aren’t. The opportunity available is pulling in that customer data, having technicians go out in the field, whether incentivised or not, understand the needs of the customer and then bring that information back into your sales team.

For those organisations that understand the skill sets of their technicians, incentivise technicians that are really good at selling and incentivise those that aren’t good at selling at bringing that data back in and passing that along to the sales and marketing team.

The importance of engineering and design - An additional area that doesn’t get much credit for its impact on the end customer experience is engineering and design. Best-in-class organisations pull in data from technicians, give that back to engineering and design and have those teams create products that fulfil customer needs. The technician incorporates the insight provided by customers to create a product or new service that is tailored to customer needs.

Avoid a Customer Service faux pas

Aberdeen Group research has found the top reasons that customers are dissatisfied with their service organisation to be:

The technician did not resolve the issue first time The wait for the appointment was too long The technician didn’t show up for the appointment at all

Organisations can improve the customer experience by making sure the technician to be sent to the appointment has the correct skills set and tools for the job. Make sure you call the customer back to set up appointment and when you say the technician is going to show up they actually do show up.

Mark Forrest, general manager of Trimble Field Service Management said, “Achieving customer satisfaction in today’s marketplace is tough. On-time performance is the Holy Grail – problems must be solved the first time, and solved effectively. As a result, more and more organisations are beginning to realise the value of ‘intelligent scheduling’ - incorporating technician knowledge, parts availability, and capacity into their scheduling processes to ensure that the technician arriving on site is actually the person who can resolve the customer’s issue first time.”

“Businesses can address the challenge of making better in-day decisions by utilising a work management self-learning tool, continued Mark. “To avoid large data set-up exercises of skill sets and work areas, a self-learning tool supports the assignment of work orders to the field technicians by remembering who has the right skills and their usual work areas. The user also has the ability to enquire what has been learnt by the system and correct it.”

Who owns the ‘customer experience’?

The question is often asked, ‘Who ultimately owns the customer experience?’ Aberdeen has been tracking this across its practises and has found that there is one owner of the customer experience across all of its research. However more recently it has found that more top performing organisations have a customer service and support team that is in charge of owning the customer experience. Additionally, technical support centres are now being considered as part of the overall service strategy and are being looked upon as being profit centres.

The full recording of the webinar can be downloaded here http://ow.ly/qgqwH

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Cameron .