Today’s customer is highly sophisticated. The vast array of technology platforms at their disposal gives them flexibility and a variety of choices and options that customers in the past could only dream of. They have more contacts with software and applications than they do with actual human beings.
To optimize the field service and enhance the customer experience, field officers need appropriate mobile tools to assist them in doing their work efficiently and make the customer happy. Other ways an organization can optimize its field service for an enhanced customer experience include:
1. Quick Response Time
Clients hate to wait. It is important to impress upon your field staff that they must avoid keeping clients waiting. A customer’s patience for your product or service is not permanent. Any delay in delivering it could result in the client moving on to another provider. You can use a service scheduling software to ensure accurate and speedy assignment of field technicians depending on their current location, skill-sets and availability.
2. Avoid Service Failures
It is true that prevention is better than cure. Your organization should invest in service failure prevention. Nothing frustrates a client more than repeat service failure. Your technicians should be properly trained to make sure that customers enjoy uninterrupted service. Rather than spend most of your time putting out fires, have mechanisms in place to ensure that such failures do not occur in the first place.
3. Help Customers Solve their Problems
The DIY revolution has become quite popular today. Customers are choosing to solve their problems without having to call in a technician. There is, therefore, a push for self-service options, which in the past required placing a service call. This leaves the field staff with ample time to attend to more serious and complicated field tasks.
4. Investing in Diagnostics
Another way of optimizing your field service is to invest in remotely controlled diagnostics in order to minimize the number of field trips by your technicians. Installing a remote sensor in an equipment can assist in delivering comprehensive diagnostics about an equipment’s performance. With such a system, it is possible to monitor the location of the machine and the condition it is currently in without having to visit the site.
5. Providing Service Contracts
With equipment sensors, service providers can implement preventive maintenance software to ensure their customers have functional and reliable equipment most of the time. Having a maintenance service agreement with such companies ensures uninterrupted performance and hence improves the bottom line.
6. Provide Technicians with Appropriate Technology and Tools
Courtesy of field service management software, today’s field technicians are also sales representatives. They can renew contracts and establish new ones, collect signatures on site, and encourage clients to take up additional products and services. To do this, they need to be equipped with appropriate tools and software solutions that increase customer satisfaction, improve the quality of service, and optimize efficiency.
7. Train the Field Staff
Having a properly trained staff in the field is an irreplaceable prerequisite. They need training in customer care skills and in closing. They also need to understand fully the products and services they are offering and how to present your company in a professional manner. They should also be trained in how to ask the right questions and in compiling clear, detailed, actionable reports.
In most cases, field service technicians are the only people from the company that customers get to interact with in person. It is therefore important to ensure that such rare real human interface interactions are utilized for the maximum benefit of the organization. This greatly aids brand recognition, customer retention, and healthy profits.
