Customer satisfaction starts with keeping promises

Jan 06, 2017 • Features • Kirona • Laraine Geddes • optimisation • scheduling • Software and Apps

Laraine Geddes, Marketing Manager, Kirona explains how dynamic resource scheduling & mobile working can help you keep promises to customers...

Driving efficiencies in your organisation and ensuring the highest level of customer satisfaction do not have to be mutually exclusive.

Regardless of whether you are managing planned maintenance, reactive field based tasks or complex projects, efficiency comes from doing the right things, at the right time with the most appropriate resources. For the customer, what they want is exactly the same, for you to keep your promises, to perform and complete the task required when you say you will.

Kirona have outlined four ways in which organisations can deliver their promises to customers.

Setting expectations:

It is a careful balance to ensure that customer preferences for appointments are taken into account while also optimising resource utilisation and minimising travel time of operatives. When procuring dynamic resource scheduling software ensure it provides available appointment slots to be offered to customers, whilst highlighting the most efficient slots for the organisation in terms of resource utilisation and travel time.

Setting the right expectation & keeping promises can achieve Customer Satisfaction of 95% or higher.

Communicating with your customer:

One of the primary reasons for appointments being missed is no access to the property, often caused by the customer not being at home.

Kirona’s Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) makes it easy to keep customers informed. Each appointment can be confirmed by email or SMS, with reminders being sent at time intervals such as 24 or 48 hours before the job is due. When an operative updates the job on their mobile device to say that they are en-route to the property, an SMS can be sent to remind the customer.

There will always be exceptions that occur.

Not only does this approach reduce the negative impact on customers, it can also reduce calls from customers to your contact centre chasing progress.

Whether it is an unavoidable overrun of a previous job or delays caused by traffic, it is essential that the customer is kept informed. Through the seamless and real-time integration of DRS and Kirona’s Job Manager mobile workforce application, such delays can be proactively managed with a communication sent to the customer informing them that their operative has been delayed and resetting expectations of when they will arrive. Not only does this approach reduce the negative impact on customers, it can also reduce calls from customers to your contact centre chasing progress.

North Lanarkshire Council’s no access rate dropped from 40% to just 3% through use of Kirona’s DRS and Job Manager.

Dealing with the emerging day:

No two days can be the same and it is common for events in the day, including emergency work, to require changes to the schedule. The challenge is to cater for overrunning work or new work items while keeping customer promises and also ensuring that you continue to operate in the most optimum way.

By utilising Kirona’s Job Manager as your mobile working solution integrated into Dynamic Resource Scheduling, you gain full visibility of the work being performed in the field. You can see in real-time potential delays and the impact that this will have on your intra-day schedule Rather than having to hold back emergency slots in your schedule or allocating emergency work on a first availability basis, DRS enables you to take a more efficient approach. As changes in the day occur, DRS re-evaluates the day’s plan, adjusting work allocation to take into account the emerging work or availability to ensure you maintain the most optimum work schedule across all available operatives.

Delivering a first time fix:

Not all jobs run to plan. A job can simply take longer than expected. The efficient way to deal with this is to provide the operative with the time they need to complete the task. This avoids an additional appointment being required and ensures that your original promise to the customer is kept.

Not all jobs run to plan. A job can simply take longer than expected. The efficient way to deal with this is to provide the operative with the time they need to complete the task.

Step one to increasing the rate of first time fix is ensuring that for each job you have the right operative, resources and time allocated. Key to this is an effective triage process that ensures you can define the key parameters used for scheduling work. Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS) enables you to define different categories of skills and qualification of each operative and to align this to job requirements ensuring you always send the right operative.

When complications or work variations arise, the seamless integration of Job Manager (JM) and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS), enables for this to be immediately notified to planners. With full visibility across all operatives of the day’s work and its progression, they are able to quickly sanction job variations and realign work items to ensure other customer commitments are met.