ARCHIVE FOR THE ‘customer-satisfaction-and-expectations’ CATEGORY

Study links high customer satisfaction with service providers who fix it on the first visit

A  study commissioned by Trimble as part of awareness for National Customer Service Week in the UK,  finds field service organisations need to become more efficient, develop better time-saving approaches and fix a problem on the first visit in order to meet customer expectations.

The study, which surveyed 2,000 adults in the UK, revealed that over half (52 per cent) considered fixing the problem on the first visit to be the leading factor in determining their satisfaction. Yet, one in four participants reported that a return visit was required. The most common reason for a return visit was that the technician lacked the appropriate tools or parts (40 per cent), while the technician lacking the appropriate skills was also revealed as a top factor (27 per cent).

"Clearly, operating a skilled and efficient mobile workforce is critical to meeting customer expectations. To achieve that, organisations need real-time access to information about the performance of workers in the field," said John Cameron, general manager of Trimble's Field Service Management Division.

"Technology is available that provides technicians with the visibility they need to get to the right place at the right time with the information they need to do their job correctly the first time," Cameron added. "Customer expectations are only going to increase, so having the infrastructure in place to meet and exceed these expectations is critical to keeping customers happy."

Respondents also are not happy with wait times. More than 50 per cent considered 1-3 hours an acceptable appointment window, yet few had experienced this, with 32 per cent reporting wait times between 4-9 hours. 40 per cent of consumers claimed their biggest frustration with using a service provider was long appointment slots.

 

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The Internet of Things is predicted to have a huge impact on customer service. In this article,  Paul White, CEO mplsystems, identifies the top three changes he expects to occur.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects embedded with electronics, software and connectivity that are able to be controlled remotely with the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

Gartner have predicted that three years from now, 5% of customer service cases will be autonomously initiated by connected devices as more objects connect to the internet. This is supported by Nicola Millard, Head of Futures and Insight at BT, who recently commented at mplsystems’ customer conference, “I think a lot of the technologies we are starting to see like the Internet of Things could be used more proactively with the contact centre so it becomes more in charge of demand rather than just responding passively to it.”

The IoT introduces opportunities, but how will it really change to the day to day running of the contact centre and the role of the agent?

1. The contact centre will start delivering proactive rather than reactive customer service

Our number one prediction for the Internet of Things is that it will transform the contact centre from a reactive inbound customer service centre to a proactive outbound service. This will be achieved by devices being able to self-diagnose problems and immediately alert the contact centre of the issue, often before the customer realises. The integrated system will automatically trigger an outbound call to be delivered to the agent desktop who will then offer proactive customer service, rather than waiting for the product to fail and the customer make an inbound enquiry.

For example, washing machines will be able to self-diagnose problems and notify the manufacturer when a part needs replacing, the contact centre is then able to make a call to the customer to notify them and fix the device before a more serious problem can occur, significantly improving the customer experience.

 

Alternatively, products that needs refills, such as drinks dispensers, will be able to send a notification straight to a field based workers mobile device, who can then add this to their list of jobs and deliver with their boot stock. This means that they will never need to alert the contact centre, alleviating the number of calls and requests they are having to deal with.

2. The role of the contact centre agent will become more specialised and they will be better prepared

As a result of devices detecting and alerting the contact centre of problems, the contact centres agents will transition from receiving high levels of inbound, reactive customer requests to delivering an outbound proactive service. This will result in the agent’s role transitioning from a generic customer service role to a specialist in a specific product or problem type. Agents are going to need to know about the faults that are being alerted in the contact centre as they will often be more informed about the issue than the customer and will need to convey this information. At the point of engagement, they will not just be aware of the issue but will have remedies in place and may even have started applying them to resolve the problem. From a business perspective, the level of customer service is greatly increased, agents are more knowledgeable and productive and the business should experience cost savings through a more streamlined, proactive way of working.

3. Masses of new data will help to improve the customer experience

The Internet of Things will bring with it a whole new explosion of data that, if managed correctly, can be of enormous value to the contact centre and customer experience delivery. Contact centres will be able to gain more control of customer service by the Internet of Things providing them with new streams of information that is integrated in to their existing infrastructure. Customers will not have to wait in long queues, go through time-consuming security questions or try to explain complex faults, as agents are presented with all the information they need from multiple sources of data.

 

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Skill sets rather than price are the important factor for businesses when choosing contractors, a survey by ClickSoftware has revealed.

A survey by ClickSoftware conducted with 250 UK business decision makers has found that skill sets are the most important factor for 30% of businesses when choosing third party subcontractors. Just 4% of UK businesses consider cost to be the most important factor when making a procurement decision.

The report: “Field Service Best Practice: Don’t let subcontractors subtract from the bottom line” said that while getting the job done to a high standard is the primary concern for businesses subcontracting work, increasing emphasis is being placed on the experience the end customer has in completing the job.

Of those surveyed, 98% also had some metric for customer satisfaction measurement. "With price no longer a primary concern when making a procurement decision, businesses must be able to demonstrate a high level of customer experience when bidding for work," was one of the report's conclusions.

Businesses reported the quality of work, ability to complete jobs, having the right equipment and materials to complete jobs made up the 41% of complaints made about contractors in the past six months. More than three quarters (77%) of companies had received a complaint about contractors or subcontractors in the past and more than one in ten (12%) complaints are happening on a regular basis.

The good news for the UK subcontractor industry is that complaints are relatively low. Over half of the businesses spoken to rarely had to deal with complaints about subcontractors, the report reveals, whereas a similar survey in the US revealed 95% of customers had made a complaint about contractor service.

 

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Investment in new smart mobile technology pays off for Kings Security Systems with improved productivity and service levels and elimination of over half a million paper records.

Kings Security Systems, the large Bradford-based independent national security services provider, has boosted efficiency and performance of its field service technicians by deploying Field Link, the scheduling and mobile workforce management technology from mobile network operator EE which incorporates Aeromark's Optimatics technology.

Kings has increased the productivity of its 300 field-based service engineers by 25%, improved customer service levels by 30% and  replaced over half a million paper records with automated electronic documentation.

The company had already been using automated scheduling and mobile applications for over 5 years, but in January 2014, it decided to investigate what improvements could be gained by using the next generation of technology.
After a comprehensive selection process to upgrade its existing systems and improve performance, Kings chose EE Field Link, powered by Aeromark's Optimatics mobile workflow management solution, to replace a number of legacy systems used by its field service division.

Kings’ Engineers cover a wide geographic area, and the reach and reliability of EE’s mobile network combined with the offline capabilities of the Mobile app ensures total system availability. EE Field Link provides Kings with a single platform for dynamic real-time job scheduling, integrated mobile workflows, vehicle tracking and seamless integration with engineers’ devices. This system allows planners central visibility of engineers and jobs, meaning planners can manage the workforce quickly and efficiently. The system shows how many jobs are outstanding and closed, allowing greater visibility and helping Kings to keep its service level agreements with their customers.

Previously, King’s workforce was managed using a variety of solutions from different providers that proved unreliable, and prevented planners having full control over outstanding jobs and locations. The smart mobile technology provides a comprehensive solution that not only integrated with Kings’ existing business processes, but also allowed Kings to launch new processes and features that were previously undeliverable using the old systems.

"Before we started using the Field Link solution from EE and Aeromark, we had a similar system for dispatching calls electronically to engineers’ PDAs. However, Field Link has completely changed the way we work in that we can now see outstanding jobs at the site, or within a radius, improving our planning and boosting efficiency as we deliver an excellent service to our customers." Said Kerrell Cronly, Service Manager at Kings.

 

Within 3 months, Field Link has already helped reduce operational costs and enabled a quicker service delivery. "Since we have been using Field Link, we have seen an increase of over 1 job a day per engineer and a 30% increase in SLAs which is not a result of working longer but by working smarter," said Kerrell.

Steve Evans, Chief Operating Director at Kings said; "Our investment in this new technology was an essential part of our strategic plan. It will enable us to grow significantly with automated and streamlined processes that ensure the service we offer to our customers and our cost base are fully optimised. As a result of the success that the system has delivered for our service division, we have already rolled out the solution to all other divisions within the business."

Anthony King, Chief Executive Officer at Kings said; "EE and Aeromark have a unique technology and agile approach which not only delivered in the agreed timescales and costs but the results exceeded our expectations. That’s almost unheard of with large IT projects and credit goes to the combined team at EE, Aeromark and Kings who have dedicated their time to this project."

 

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In Part One of this interview in our Industry Leaders series, John Cooper, Head of IT and Workflow Solutions in Sony’s Professional Solutions unit in Europe explained why he and his colleagues needed to revisit their existing service infrastructure and replace a 15-year-old legacy system with something better suited to the growing complexity of their service organisation.

In Part 2, he talks to FSN's Kris Oldand about how he and his team reviewed both off-the-shelf systems and customised solutions to determine which was fit-for-purpose, their reasons for making the choice they did and the impact on the service operation.

“We had a remedy based solution that actually had its routes dating back almost 15 years believe it or not,” Cooper begins. “It was initially designed for specific service offerings we had which were very much one-to-one. One customer , one product. So a kind of classic repair-related issue. They’d call the help desk, raise a remedy ticket, we’d determine if a repair was required, we’d pull the units back and we’d issue replacements;  a nice simple system.”

“Of course now we are in a situation where we have technology that sits across multiple partners of Sony, plus hardware and software vendors,  and we look after it all. It may be multi-site, it may even have multiple SLAs within contracts.” Cooper explains.

So despite having updated and improved their existing system across the years, its core purpose was as a backend system, and it lacked the reporting functionality and dashboards that it was becoming more and more apparent Cooper and his team required.  “We got to the point that we realised the bits that really mattered to our customers were the bits that we were finding it hardest to do.”

 

As the need for a more modern service management system became apparent Cooper and his colleagues had some clear expectations of what they wanted. “We thought about this issue of the ecosystem and how do we get everybody involved. Pretty quickly we came to the decision that what we needed to do was get something that sat within the Salesforce world; our sales and marketing organisation use Salesforce - it’s a standard platform in Sony,” he explains

Bespoke or fit-for-purpose?

However the next decision was whether to opt for a ‘fit-for-purpose’ solution or create something bespoke. Something Cooper clearly gave great consideration to:   “We had two other big choices – do we bespoke something or do we look for something that is fit for purpose,” he begins.  "In the past I didn’t see much in ‘fit-for-purpose’ solutions that I felt actually really understood something as complex as what we wanted to do. At the same time I was very wary about bespoking because it gets you a solution for today and,  if you're clever,  maybe for the next two or three years. I didn’t want my team to be thinking what to do next about IT, I wanted them to be thinking about making the customers happy."

 

“So we looked around and we found ServiceMax amongst a number of systems that we had already looked at. I just thought: this is a system that has really been thought through by service professionals, people who really understand what happens. It’s not just a standard set of processes.”

“Despite it being an off the shelf package there is such as degree of configurability that you can work how you want to work. There is such a good degree of best practice built in it pushes you down a path of best practice and I’m a big fan of that.”

 Dual benefits

Of course there are numerous benefits to a next generation service management system such as ServiceMax, including easy Salesforce integration, breaking down many of the data silos that can exist within an organisation.

And perhaps the most important of these is the ease of access to reporting which Sony had found lacking in their previous solution.  This is of course indicative of how business is done today and a common expectation of Sony’s customers, so it was a key necessity for Sony when implementing their new system.

However, given the changing nature of Sony’s business with both a shift towards a more service-orientated business structure and also, through the use of remote diagnostics tools, a move towards a much more proactive and preventative service offering, such reporting tools also provide an important second function  - namely,  being able to report on all of the service value Sony are delivering that may otherwise potentially not get noticed or acknowledged.

“Sometimes we can have a conversation with customers and they’ll say well we’re not really aware of you doing that much for us.” Cooper explains.  “And that’s a facet of us keeping processes and systems nice and clean in such a way that systems continue to run. So the desire for us to want to demonstrate all the good stuff we’ve done is really strong.”

 

“The flip side of course is that no service organisation is perfect and sometimes when things go wrong the first person that hears about it is someone senior on the customer’s side and then the second person that hears about it is the account manager.  So if you’re not careful the only time people hear about service is when there is bad news and the reality is that 99% of the stuff is going wonderfully but there is not any awareness of this.”

In fact Cooper believes such easy access to reports and dashboards, is as powerful tool for his account managers as it is for his service managers.  “One of the other drivers for us in this quest for the right sort of system was something that keeps the whole ecosystem aware of what’s going on and what we are doing for the end customer.”

“We have this dream of the account managers turning up at customer sites and being completely clued in with all the stuff that’s happened in a nice simple to understand graphical way. So they don’t need to get into technical complexity but they know what we’ve done for the customers, they know of any live issues and they’re not going to get ambushed with you’ve got this problem or that problem.”

And Cooper sees this as perhaps one of the biggest changes in service today.  “That sort of thinking wasn’t there many years ago in our industry but now it’s becoming imperative, ” he asserts.  “Our feeling is that that service will really help us differentiate ourselves with our customers. Our goal at the end of the day is we want customers to come back to us and keep renewing service contracts and then when their technology gets to the point where there is something better for them out there they come back and buy from Sony.”

 

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Continuing our series of interviews with industry leaders, Kris Oldland speaks with John Cooper, Head of IT and Workflow Solutions in Sony’s Professional Solutions unit in Europe. 

John Cooper is man with not just one division to oversee but many. Each has particularly demanding service challenges and, of course, due to the high technology industries that Sony inhabit, each is also an ever evolving sector.

With a pan European team of around 110 field engineers working alongside other members of the wider Sony workforce and various third parties, Cooper’s responsibilities are essentially across the entirety of the non-consumer portfolio of the tech giant, and it seems service is an increasingly important part of the wider business strategies and plans.

The areas that fall under Cooper’s remit also each have their own unique service challenges.

Firstly there is Sony’s healthcare solutions unit which has evolved from simply producing medical printers to now working on much more adventurous projects with hospitals and surgeons such as transmitting operations as part of a training program and even potentially aiming towards remote surgery by utilising a mix of cameras, high quality displays and 3D technologies.  Of course in such an environment, uptime is essential. “As a service challenge it’s quite an interesting one as you don’t want anything to fail mid-cut as it were” Cooper comments wryly.

Another of the divisions in Cooper’s area of the business is the theatre solutions division, which is focused on digital cinema. Here the products include high-end 4K cinema projectors and the clients the likes of Vue and Everyman.

 

And whilst the pressure on the service operation here is perhaps not a matter of life and death as it is in Healthcare, it certainly still exists. Quite simply the clients in this division are reliant on the technology functioning for them to make any money at all, so if the projectors fail, then they don’t pay.

And of course then there is the Classic AV/Media side of the business, the largest of Cooper’s divisions and a key area for Sony as a whole. Again the pressure to deliver reliable uptime is paramount.

With high profile clients including the unusual (Sony is responsible for the archiving and recording solutions for Vatican City) to the more standard broadcast clients such as UK terrestrial provider ITV and Spain’s Telemadrid, there is an expectancy for the products and solutions they provide to be wholly reliable.

As Cooper states “if you think about News and just TV broadcast generally that whole industry was built around reliability. It’s so rare for the screen to go black and so it’s [100% uptime] an expectation.

Challenges of service complexity

To deliver these expectations Cooper’s team is comprised of a number of differing elements within the service -chain focused on maintaining the various different technologies at play. Firstly there is a service management team that focuses separately on those technologies with a team of field engineers with the requisite skills based in and around Europe. Then there are the other equally important components of Sony’s service delivery such as centralised repair locations, where they pull all sorts of technology back to a select number of places across the continent to get fast turnround time.

Essentially,  part of their service operation is in the field, part of it is remotely placed in terms of repair and then in addition to this they also employ a number of remote technologies that allow them to log in to systems quickly to make initial diagnosis.

And in the midst of all that there is an ever increasing complexity within their product set which in turn adds further complexities to the organisational structure, making the smooth handling of operations even harder.

Cooper outlined three facets to this complexity.  One is the increasing challenge of potentially lots of different partners in the service chain. “IT workflow solutions for example, might well have an oracle database plus harmonic storage and we have to look at the whole piece,"  he explains

Then there is the issue of Sony’s customers reducing their own internal expertise with many shedding engineers, particularly as engineers retire and aren’t necessarily replaced. In the theatre business, for example, there is no need for a highly skilled projectionist who in the days of analogue might have had a greater understanding of the machines he worked with and the ability to potentially undertake maintenance himself or at least provide a detailed overview of the fault when reporting it.

 

In a modern cinema the technology is much simpler to operate so that skillset is lost on the client side, adding further emphasis on Cooper’s team to be able to work at optimum efficiency.  As Cooper asserts:  “Our ability to diagnose has to be very good because the fault diagnostics aren’t always fantastic as you might imagine.”

Finally, there is the fact that Sony themselves are also facing their own price pressures.  The price of a high end broadcast cameras for example, have fallen dramatically in the last ten years and this hit to the bottom line also is of course felt by the service division. “We used to be able to, in certain instances, give some of our service elements away for free because it was built into the margin, that’s no longer possible," Cooper concedes.

Bespoke service offering

And it is these challenges that have ultimately led to Sony having to adopt a much more focussed approach to their service.

“In order to protect our customers and to deliver the levels of service that we want to be recognised for, we give a fairly high level of service at point of sale but then we sell our additional service contract offerings up to any level including up to full bespoke.” Cooper explains

Add to this the growing trend of servitization, which for Sony at the moment is currently something of a pull market with their customers more and more frequently seeking to engage with Sony on a pay-per-usage basis.

 

A perfect example of this is a new system Sony have just implemented for Telemadrid.  Replacing a previous Sony system which was over a decade old, the suite contains the latest technology and is provided on a pay-per-usage basis. “It’s a fully managed system, and in that instance it’s all about the service - the technology is just an enabler.” Cooper explains. “And we are starting to see the pressures on the broadcasters, big lumps of cash are harder to come by, many are now starting to ask about pay per usage. Then it’s all about service delivery, ” he adds.

With such significant shifts in business principals, service is quite rightly becoming a much more fundamental part of Sony’s wider business strategy.

As a result of these shifts however, Cooper and his colleagues needed to revisit their existing service infrastructure, with a view to replacing their 15-year-old legacy system with something better suited to the growing complexity of their service organisation. “We used to be able to, in certain instances, give some of our service elements away for free because it was built into the margin, that’s no longer possible,“ Cooper concedes.

And it is these challenges that have ultimately led to Sony having to adopt a much more focused approach to their service. “In order to protect our customers and to deliver the levels of service that we want to be recognised for, we give a fairly high level of service at point of sale but then we sell our additional service contract offerings up to any level including up to full bespoke,” Cooper explains

Add to this the growing trend of servitization, which for Sony at the moment is currently something of a pull market with their customers more and more frequently seeking to engage with Sony on pay-per-usage basis.

As a result of these shifts however, Cooper and his colleagues needed to revisit their existing service infrastructure, with a view to replacing their 15-year-old legacy system with something better suited to the growing complexity of their service organisation.

 

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Look out for Part 2 of this interview, when Cooper will talk about how he and his team reviewed both off-the-shelf systems and customised solutions to determine which was fit-for-purpose, their reasons for making the choice they did and the impact on the service operation.

 

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Today’s world of industry is evolving at a faster pace than ever before. Agility is key to surviving and thriving in this modern era and agility in service can be the difference between you and your competitors writes Tom Bowe of IFS.

At IFS we talk a lot about business agility, because we believe organisations that are able to respond rapidly to internal and external environmental changes without losing momentum or vision will be game-changers in their field. Why is being adaptable and flexible so important in today’s business world? The world is changing at an exponential rate. The youngest generation of the workforce is further removed from those leaving the workforce than ever before.

Then, of course, you have the learning lessons of those businesses that failed to respond effectively to the rapidly changing technological landscape. Nokia failed to recognise evolving customer demands in the smartphone market and ultimately were destroyed by Apple and Android’s fast paced R&D and delivery cycles. They were the world’s dominant mobile-phone maker but by the time Microsoft bought them in 2013, they claimed just three percent of the global smartphone market. The New Yorker put it aptly, stating; “Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.”

Agility is something that will not only allow your business to survive and keep up with an ever evolving market, but it will also give your organisation a competitive edge, particularly in the service sector. This flexibility must be driven internally with a scalable approach. The buy-in must be company-wide, and one place to start is with your processes and systems. The implementation and application of ERP software is most often considered traditional, rigid development, but that is not necessarily the case. ERP software from IFS is built with an architecture that lets you pick and choose what you need for your business. It is optimised to be the best option for service organisations, it is user-friendly, and developmentally adaptable and scalable.

 

Imagine having this flexibility and usability across your organisation, driving your service as a profit centre. An integrated service management platform gives you the consistency, reliability and speed to react in real-time to real-world events. It is an enabler for agility. An integrated solution is provided all on the same platform, so changes to business processes and workflows don’t need to be implemented across multiple systems. This means that processes and workflows are applied seamlessly across the organisation, ensuring efficiency, productivity and accuracy of information. Implementations of multiple systems take time, are tied to prohibitive costs, and are fraught with risk. With one fully integrated system rather than multiple systems connected together, you as an organisation benefit from speed of change, ease of change, reduced costs, and less risk.

Having a fully integrated system gives your organisation true visibility into not only operations, but the field as well. From call intake to financials, the entire process is documented, tracked, and easily accessed at any point during the entire service life-cycle. This gives an organisation visibility of day-to-day activity, and business intelligence needed to forecast accurately for the future. Imagine a flexible system that automatically applies certain determined processes to specific workflows, that identifies parts needed for specific jobs and then instructs technicians on what procedures need to take place during certain projects.

An agile system provides automation and optimisation, coupled with complete configurability and usability, allowing you to operate on a level that continually ensures success. Business agility is particularly important when it comes to service. Customer demands are at an all-time high, thanks to social media and the instant gratification culture created by having things available, immediately, at our fingertips. Service organisations must meet, or better yet, exceed, these expectations.

 

Agility in service not only drives speed-to-market, but also speed-to-delivery, which creates a competitive edge. So what can you do to achieve this agility when it comes to your software solutions and business processes? Evaluate the challenges and failings you have in relation to your current systems and delivery. Consider replacing your current back end system with something that will give you flexibility as your organisation grows internally and externally.

Often with larger, monolithic systems, internal change is static or too complicated to be effective. IFS Applications 9 is able to provide a business edge when it comes to visibility with perhaps the industry’s first user-configurable role-specific interfaces in IFS Lobby, enhanced usability within existing mobile service management tools and strategic customer relationship management (CRM) embedded directly in the applications for real-time visibility and control over the customer lifecycle.

Change the game by approaching the market with a system that will give you the visibility and flexibility needed to truly operate in the fast changing service industry. By making this fundamental change to integrated service management, you will be more prepared for external change, including trends like IoT, share economy, drones, and more. With a foundation based on agility, your organisation is guaranteed to adapt, no matter the situation.

 

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New levels of customer service performance are now the norm and it’s about time we all realised this,  writes Bill Pollock, President, Strategies for Growth

Until only recently, the Services Lifecycle Management (SLM) solutions purchase/acquisition cycle was a fairly closed-loop, highly structured, and oftentimes formal process. Potential users obtained most of their decision-making data and informational input directly from the vendors, sought the recommendations of published buyer’s guides and directories, and picked up on the latest “buzz” at industry trade shows or via services trade publications – all historically serving as powerful and rich resources.

This was the way SLM solution decisions had been supported and made for decades. But then, the LinkedIn, blogs and social media changed everything – including the means by which information is gathered, reviewed, and analysed; how potential vendors are evaluated and selected; and even the way in which customers position themselves as potential buyers in a largely buyer’s market.

The White House Office of Consumer Affairs has reported that dissatisfied customers will tell between nine and 15 people about their negative experience, with roughly 13 percent (i.e., or about one-in-eight) telling more than 20 people. Satisfied customers, on the other hand, will only tell about four to six people about their positive experience.

 

Therefore, according to the report, customer service failures are likely to be communicated two-and-a-half times more often than customer service successes. As a result, services organisations need to maintain a ratio of roughly 2.5-to-1 satisfied vs. dissatisfied customers just to break even in terms of word-of-mouth customer service feedback.

In all likelihood, customers will become even more critical – and communicative – about their service experiences in the future, based on the widespread usage of social media tools and technology devices. This presents a new front for services organisations to address in an increasingly social media-influenced marketplace; however, there are still many other challenges that must also be addressed.

The three most uniquely daunting challenges faced by services organisations over the past few decades have included the following:

 

• Transforming themselves from manufacturer/OEM cost centers to strategic lines of business (i.e., with their own executive-level management and P&L responsibility).
• Shifting their operational focus from company-centric to customer-centric, whereby the customer represents the focal point of their universe.
• Learning how to treat their business-to-business (B2B) accounts with the same high level of service and support that other vendors use to treat their business-to-consumer (B2C) customers.

Surely there have been other equally daunting challenges facing the services industry throughout this period, as well, including:

• The globalization of business operations.
• An uncertain cycle of volatile economic upturns and downturns.
• The proliferation of new technologies and applications.
• The continuing shakeout of marginal performers, and the resultant consolidation within the supply side sectors.
• The widespread growth of social media for business purposes.

However, while each of these business game-changers ultimately impacts all business segments, the three challenges outlined in the top list above focus uniquely on the services sector.

 

It is no longer good enough to tell your customers that your organisation is “no worse” than any of its competitors (the “like-company” comparison); because, if you do, you will risk hearing something in return such as, “I understand that. But what I don’t understand is why you can’t process my order as accurately as Amazon.com or QVC, or handle my return – and process my credit – as quickly as American Express!”

Companies like Amazon.com and QVC are maximizing their use of the Internet’s communications capabilities by making not only the purchasing process easy – but the returns process as well. For example, you might purchase an item from one of these vendors via telephone, laptop, iPhone, tablet or other handheld device. Once you obtain a customer number, it’s all very easy to place an order.

The overall customer experience is then heightened even further by the high level of communications provided to the consumer (i.e., the receipt of a near-instant e-mail confirmation of the order; the subsequent follow-up e-mails when the item is shipped; notification of when an item is on backorder; etc.). Even the return process is easy: if the item isn’t what you thought it would be (e.g., wrong color or size, you already got one for your birthday – whatever!) you can simply return it in the same packaging used for the initial shipping along with the supplied return mailing label, and a return receipt and credit notification will be forwarded to you (typically) in a matter of days – if not hours! By comparison, can your organisation match these industry-leading practices with respect to its parts sales?

By simply delivering (or promising) the same-old, same-old treatment to your existing customers, you are guaranteed to continue treating them as “just another business account” (i.e., the “B” in B2B). However, your customers are quickly becoming accustomed to being treated better as “C’s” by some of the most successful B2C vendors. They are also increasingly being empowered by the Internet; a seemingly unending number of new technologies, apps and devices; and the ongoing explosion of social media tools.

The time has come for your organisation to recognize that these “new” levels of customer delivery performance are now the norm – and that its customers will increasingly settle for nothing less than the best.

 

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Warranty, claims and customer care provider Castelan Group is using scheduling software from Paragon Software Systems to centralise the planning of its UK home service operation and manage the allocation of its mobile technician team.

The Paragon software schedules service calls for Castelan’s nationwide team of mobile technicians, enabling the company to improve the customer care experience it offers on behalf of the UK’s major high street retailers.

Castelan (previously Homeserve Warranties) provides furniture and electrical warranty and care packages to more than 1.5 million households. With a team of over 80 service engineers carrying out home visits ranging from damage assessments to TV repairs and French polishing, Castelan wanted to streamline the routing and scheduling process, enhancing the overall efficiency of its technical service operations and in turn improving the company’s customer satisfaction levels.

Castelan chose Paragon’s Multi Depot system with HERE Map Content, enabling the company to plan the routes and schedules for its entire team of mobile technicians as a single planning task. With each technician treated as a “depot”, the system is able to flex the depot boundaries automatically to take into account the availability of its technicians, and provide a higher level of route planning capabilities. This results in improved efficiency in a multi depot planning environment.

“We’re very happy with the support we get from Paragon,” said Lisa Harbison, Network Deployment Coordinator, Castelan. “Paragon’s support team helps us with software upgrades and to use our solution to address new business requirements as they arise. For example, we needed to incorporate the collection of spare parts from stores prior to the service engineers’ visits into our planning process. These collections are now routed through Paragon.”

William Salter, Managing Director, Paragon Software Systems concludes “Paragon’s flexibility helps our customers create efficiencies in many different ways including fleet optimisation, cost control and reduced planning time. Paragon Multi Depot has facilitated the switch to central planning for Castelan, providing the ability to share results and incorporate changes from other sites across the operation. Not only does this reduce planning time, it also improves visibility of the service schedule and gives the planning team added flexibility, helping Castelan to distribute the workload evenly between its service engineers.”

 

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