Gather Customer Feedback to Increase Satisfaction in Field Service Organizations

You might hit all your financial targets for the year and have your technicians hit team-high first-time fix rates, but if you are not providing reliable customer service, you might still lose customers. Worse, you might not even know why.

High-quality customer service is critical in any industry, especially in highly-competitive field services. You may think your organization delivers a good customer experience, but you will never truly know if you are not collecting customer feedback. Even if the answer is yes, feedback often reveals essential information your organization may not see from the inside. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to push your field service team to the next level.

This article is the second in a series of seven about the best ways field service operations can provide superior customer support. The second way: gather feedback.

Customer feedback directly leads to improvements

It sounds trivial, but sometimes it takes honest customer feedback for even seasoned field service providers to be reminded that they are in a service industry. You are not just delivering a product, you are providing a service, and that requires a level of care, attention, and interaction with customers that takes a great deal of effort.

You’ll only know whether you’re providing good customer service is to ask your customers. Customer feedback leads to insights which lead to changes in your process. That leads back to seeking new feedback, and soon, you have established a powerful, self-sustaining feedback loop of self-improvement.

The most challenging part of seeking feedback is often just getting started. Who do you ask first? Keep it simple, but keep it sustained. You want to collect regular streams of customer feedback.

It is not as hard as you think, either. Here are four of the most important best practices you can follow are:

• Send surveys and actually follow up on results
• Log cases to track complaints
• Create reports that track KPIs
• Collect e-signatures via mobile devices

Send surveys & actually follow up on results

Sending feedback surveys is a straightforward way to connect with your customers once a job is complete. As we suggested above, keep it simple. Ask open-ended questions, like:

• Did we do a good job?
• Would you use us again?
• Would you recommend us to other organizations?

Those simple questions can illuminate how customers feel about working with you.

Asking is only the first step, though. After you have asked and received an answer, you must actually do something with that information. Follow up on your feedback results. Are there improvements you should make? Then produce a plan right away to make them.

Log cases to track complaints

Some of the most important times to collect feedback are when things go wrong. These are your greatest learning opportunities as a service provider. When there is a reported issue—or even a potential issue—track it.

Get that issue logged into a system and get an owner assigned to it who can track it. Then you have accountability. Repeat that logging process whenever there is an issue, and you can generate a meaningful report.

• What kinds of complaints are coming in?
• Are you seeing more of that type over time?
• What other trends are you seeing?

Logging problems this way makes your response efforts measurable. If you do not measure it, it does not matter.

Create reports that track KPIs

Performance data is another form of feedback, and high-performing field service operations track many of their key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, one of the most popular metrics in field services is mean time to repair (MTTR), which measures how long it takes from when a customer first reports an issue to when you repair it.

Track those metrics over time, and you will also be able to generate insightful reports from them. You will be able to identify trends and future performance benchmarks.

Collect e-signatures via mobile devices

Connected to gathering feedback is collecting e-signatures on mobile devices once work is completed. They are another form of customer service you provide and information you collect that can improve your customers’ experiences.

Collecting signatures is one of those little things you can do to make your customers’ lives as easy as possible. Your technician is showing your customer that they are confident the work is complete. And they can do it just by grabbing the phone or tablet they have with them to collect a signature. That is much easier than asking them to sign some paperwork that might get lost. Or wait for receipts to be mailed.

Velosio can help you gather better feedback from every customer

Field service software, like Dynamics 365 from Velosio, can help you gather feedback and KPI data. Choose the best data collection methods for your organization and customers and have all information available on one unifying platform.

If you’re ready to enhance your customer service, contact Velosio about Dynamics 365 for Field Service today.