White Paper Overview: A guide to delivering Field Service Excellence

Dec 21, 2015 • Features • Advanced Field Service • resources • white papers • White Papers & eBooks

Resource Type: White Paper
Published by: Advanced Field Service
Title A guide to delivering service excellence
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Synopsis

To satisfy direct customers or retain the business of contract customers, field service companies must provide professional service time after time.

Overview

This guide outlines how you can deliver winning service at a profit by strategically deploying today’s field service technology including the following sections...

Provide a professional response

Whether you operate in the business-to-business or consumer/domestic markets, you’ll need to consistently meet basic criteria, such as responding within the set timeframe or appointment window.

A field service solution helps you to deploy your engineers with maximum efficiency and equip them with everything they need to know to do a proficient job, from the customer’s contact details to inspection sheets. Technology gives you the option to send the customer the engineer’s estimated time of arrival by SMS or email.

Live capture of onsite data

The information engineers enter remotely through their PDAs feeds back to your call control centre and back-office reporting and billing systems. Customers can be sent up-to-date compliance certification within minutes after the job is completed.

While not strictly speaking a customer service issue, having fast efficient billing processes reinforces your image as a professional service provider and helps to speed up payments and improve cash flow.

From the information captured onsite, you can shorten the time to invoice, where applicable. Sending an invoice promptly while the job is still fresh in the customer’s mind avoids queries and delays further down the line. While not strictly speaking a customer service issue, having fast efficient billing processes reinforces your image as a professional service provider and helps to speed up payments and improve cash flow.

Collect customer feedback

Rating product suppliers and service providers has become a way of life. Customers are accustomed to completing online surveys and logging their opinions on review sites.

Without bombarding customers with survey requests, you can collect their feedback using standard forms on the engineer’s PDA or schedule a survey to be emailed to them after the job is complete.

Improve customer satisfaction through self-service

In a highly competitive market, customers will always expect you to add more value to your basic service.

It sounds a contradictory statement but enabling your contract customers to access information about their service history online improves their perception of the service they receive, without adding to the workload of your service administrators. Customers can download their certifications, view weekly and monthly statistics, the progress of any jobs, invoices…a whole wealth of information.

Rather than having to navigate spreadsheets and other documents, a graphical dashboard can give them an at-a-glance view. This information can be made available to customers on their tablet devices and branded with your corporate identity.

Conclusions

Your delivery of service excellence is reinforced by how you handle information: sending information out to your field-based teams, capturing information from your engineers and flowing it into your back-office systems, sharing information with customers…

Modern field service technology makes all this possible in a way that would be unthinkable using manual systems or older technology. Mobile devices and web technology add another layer of agility by making location no object in being able to collect and publish this information