Accidents happen and technicians probably won’t show up to appointments exactly on time, one hundred percent of the time. Despite that dose of reality, tardiness can still come back to bite a field service company, and here’s why. One study found that 67% of customers won’t rehire a service business if its technician is more than an hour late for an appointment. Further, 36% said they wouldn’t rehire after just a 30-minute delay.
With customer expectations at an all-time high, many field service businesses find themselves searching for unique and innovative ways to keep their customers happy. While we applaud those efforts, we believe many of those same businesses are overlooking the difference that a refined focus on one particular foundational building block can make. Here’s a quick look at the importance of scheduling and dispatch for customer satisfaction and how technology like field service management software can automate and ease that process.
We’ve all been that consumer who needed a service call at the house and had to cancel a different engagement. Maybe, we even stayed home from work or scrambled to find availability just to make it happen. For at least some of us, that experience ended poorly with the technician either arriving later than expected or not at all.
As a customer, there may be no worse feeling than knowing you’ve put in so much effort, only for the service company to let you down. When you’re scheduling and dispatching jobs for your field service business, it’s best to think of the person on the other end of the transaction as a person — not just a customer. Doing so will greatly increase your chances of obtaining more satisfied customers.
In a survey where consumers named their biggest pet peeves about service visits, would you believe that unfriendly technicians and failure to fix the problem on the first visit were not the biggest complaints? That crown goes to “the dreaded 8-hour appointment window.” The appointment window isn’t necessarily the problem; it’s the fact that consumers are left feeling powerless, and most likely devoid of information.
With no insight into when the appointment will occur in that window, consumers are essentially trapped in their homes. They’re at the whim of the technician’s ability to complete the job. The way to correct this problem and satisfy the consumer is through ongoing communication. Provide the information they need and alert them throughout the day with updates. When you’re controlling multiple appointments in different locations, this approach is possible with the help of technology like field service management software.
Though field service management software often has a variety of embedded modules, we’ll focus this section on the scheduling, routing, and dispatch module. The opportunities to maximize efficiency, improve arrival times, and enhance productivity through this module are nearly endless. In particular, proper scheduling and routing can have a far-reaching, positive impact on customer satisfaction.
For example, field service software enables companies to create profiles on their technicians. Leadership can curate each technician’s skill set, licenses, competencies, and preferences. The back-office staff can quickly peruse those profiles to ensure the right technician is assigned to the right job. This is a strategy that inevitably helps with first-time fix rates.
These software solutions also utilize GPS-enabled mobile devices, so schedulers and dispatchers have visibility into where any technician is at any time. That means dispatchers can quickly identify and assign a task to the technician closest to an emergency call. Additionally, field service software like EnSight+ offers a map view, enabling schedulers to assign dynamically based on location. They can keep technicians working within specific, zoned areas to reduce travel time and other potential delays between customer visits. If a technician leaves the geofenced area, the dispatcher receives an instant alert and can get in touch to find out what happened.
But dynamic scheduling isn’t the only thing that gets technicians to and from jobs faster. With field service management software, your technicians receive turn-by-turn directions keeping them on the most direct route. This approach also helps to reduce mileage and fuel waste, a boon for the company’s bottom line. Armed with these details, technicians can let customers know when they are en route and give an estimated time of arrival.
Ready to learn more about how field service management software can improve customer satisfaction? Book your demo with EnSight+ today to see our comprehensive, cloud-based solution in action.
All monitored by you, in real time. Are you ready to take control?