3 Steps to Reimagining Your Field Service Customer Experience

Customer expectations are changing faster than at any other time in history. COVID, new mobile technology, and underlying social trends affecting how we work all play a role in what field service customers want today. Their experience with your employees and the service you offer can make or break your company’s future.

Field service providers know customer service is important, but many haven’t taken a systematic approach to designing their customer experience. This article unpacks what a customer experience-driven approach to service delivery looks like and shares a simple, three-step process any field service provider can follow to reimagine the customer experiences they offer.

What is a Customer Experience?

Customer experience—commonly abbreviated as CX in marketing and design—is the complete set of interactions between your company and a customer and the impressions of your business and brand they’re left with. Even if your interactions don’t lead to a signed SLA, they’ve still gone through a customer experience journey with your company.

Framing interactions as an experience means you can systematize how you interact with customers. That might sound cold and sterile, but the goal of managing customer experiences is actually to make them more personalized and meaningful. The goal isn’t to follow a set script. Instead, it is to provide your agents and technicians with a framework for interacting with customers in the most meaningful ways possible.

But what if your FSP business already offers good customer service? Does managing customer experiences like this actually matter? In short, yes. PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted an exhaustive survey of business customers and found that 86 percent were willing to pay for a superior customer experience (PDF). And the more premium the product or service they bought, the higher that figure crept.

So, it is worth the effort to design a high-quality customer experience for your customers. But how do you do that?

3-Step Process for Improving Your Customer Experience

How you customize your experience will depend entirely on your market, your customers, the specific field services you offer, and many other factors. But the good news is that no matter the specific solutions you implement, the process you take to get there can be straightforward.

Here is a tried and true three-step process we recommend all Velosio customers apply if they want to improve their customer experience.

1) Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

Before making changes to your customer experience, you must first understand your customers’ business needs and motivations. But, of course, that is easier said than done. Most of the time, it takes some digging.

Train all of your customer-facing employees to listen for pain points when they’re interacting with customers. That includes your sales reps, of course, but it can also include agents communicating with customers and technicians. For example, you may already have an established contract, but technicians could hear about evolving needs or new problems when they’re on-site that your organization might not otherwise learn about.

Also, ask questions. Sometimes customers know what their greatest problems are, but it just may not have occurred to them to bring them to you. Have your customer-facing workers find opportunities to ask pertinent questions. What causes your customers to lose their own customers? What do they think they spend too much time dealing with each day? What is preventing their business from growing?

2) Redesign Your Customer Journey

Armed with a better understanding of what customers want, your next step should be redesigning your customer journey. Remember, the goal is to systematize all interactions from first contact through service resolution and billing. So, preparation is key here.

Get organized.

You need to ensure you have all the right resources in place before a new or existing customer contact you. Tose resources are your field technicians, of course, but also your agents’ answering phones and managing operations, parts and equipment, vehicles, and software to manage all of these resources together. So, look for ways to align and manage your resources before the customer even picks up the phone. You’ll boost customer satisfaction and likely your first-time fix rates too.

Execute service calls.

Then once you do receive notification that a customer needs service, you must execute efficiently. That means getting your technicians and equipment to vehicles fast, then getting them on the road and to the service site as quickly as possible.

Your supervisors and customers also need to be updated throughout that entire process. When redesigning your customer journey, look for tools that support scheduling, dispatching, and communication. Especially tools that can automate work wherever possible.

Keep customers engaged.

Finally, identify how to maintain customer engagement after the service call. Immediately after calls is an excellent time to find out what customers liked and what pain points might still exist. Building a process where you collect data immediately will help you create a feedback loop to continue optimizing how you structure your customers’ journeys.

3) Leverage the Right Technology

Investing in reliable field service management technology can help you improve all aspects of your customer experience. It can be especially useful for automating time-consuming tasks and personalizing your service to each customer.

Software like Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service pulls together data from all your disparate business units in one place. Sifting through customer data collected by technicians, accounting, marketing, and other teams is only possible with that type of unifying platform.

The right technology doesn’t get in the way of how your agents and technicians’ work. It makes it better.

The right technology enhances your workers’ skill sets. Dynamics 365 for Field Service makes scheduling and dispatching easy, so your agents can focus on providing a human touch in their customer interactions. It can also send automated surveys after work is complete to get immediate insights into how your customers feel about the work done.

Remote problem detection through IoT sensors on site can even help you get work orders automatically dispatched before the customer even knows there is a problem. As a result, you’ll be able to deliver proactive service that exceeds your customers’ expectations.

Velosio Can Help You Reimagine Your Customer Experience

Velosio helps you manage your customer experience by leveraging Dynamics 365 for Field Service. So, if you’re ready to improve your customer experience, get work dispatched faster, and improve first-time fix rates, get in touch today.