How can you deliver a better experience and more satisfied customers for your field service business?

In the never-ending quest to ensure that you can develop repeat business from customers, the most important thing you need to do is keep your customers satisfied. Maintaining satisfied customers can mean different things to different people, though. Ultimately, it's all about understanding what your customers want, and for the field service sector, delivering customer satisfaction means focusing on fixing the problems they face efficiently and transparently. We've outlined the most common issues and how you can solve them by using the latest field service management software and technology to help you get to grips with your customer satisfaction so you can leave your customers happier with your service than ever.

Efficient job scheduling and dispatching

Nothing annoys customers more than being forced to wait for an engineer to turn up without any idea when the engineer will be arriving. If you can assign, schedule and dispatch jobs efficiently, you can ensure that your customer is fully aware of what's going on.

Scheduling jobs efficiently requires you to be able to track and monitor your field team whilst also accounting for factors such as their current availability, location, and skill set. Maintaining all these requirements manually is doable, but you can make the job much easier with the right software.

How can field service management software help

Field service management software allows you to schedule and dispatch jobs from a simple drag-and-drop interface. By allowing you to filter our team members based on their skill sets, you can quickly assess who is available to complete a job and assign it to the best engineer. This will allow you to update your customers with information such as when they're likely to be seen (based on the engineer's schedule), helping remove one of the biggest frustrations your customers face. Overall, this approach has been shown to reduce response times and minimise customer delays, leaving them satisfied with their experience.

Provide real-time updates on jobs

As mentioned above, leaving your customers in the dark about the job can frustrate them. While efficient scheduling can help get jobs done quicker, you still need to communicate with the customer about the job before the engineer arrives; otherwise, they'll still need clarification about what is happening. The best way to do this is by offering real-time job updates to customers at specific trigger points (such as the engineer heading to their address) or by providing them with a customer portal that they can access to see the job status.

How can field service management software help

To keep your customers in the loop by providing real-time updates, you'll need to be able to do three things:

1. See the job status yourself so you can manually send updates as and when required.
2. Be able to set job status as triggers for automated messages to be sent to the client
3. Provide your customers with a customer portal where they can see what the status of their job is.

With field service management software, you can see and manage the status of jobs to keep the customer informed and provide a portal for them to check things themselves. You can even connect the software to automated messaging systems, enabling automated messages to go out at set trigger points.

Fix their problems the first time you visit them

The best way to satisfy your customers with your service is to fix their problems as quickly as possible. That means you must focus on increasing your first-time fix rates so your engineers can complete jobs in one go. The best way to do this is by enabling your engineers to access all the relevant data and information they need through a mobile device they have with them when they head out to complete jobs. This will allow them to access whatever information they need on-site and give the engineer access to everything they need to complete the job the first time they are on site.

How can field service management software help

The key to increasing first-time fix rates with field service management software is ensuring the engineers can access data via a mobile app. With this app, they'll be able to access the complete historical data of assets they're working on, the customer's work history, general notes about previous jobs, and be able to access stock levels for parts so they know that they have everything they'll need to complete the job. With this level of information access and the ability to update information live on the site, your engineers will be able to access and update information in real-time, making their lives easier and leaving the customer more satisfied with the service.

Reduce admin errors

Administrative errors are one of the most significant issues affecting customer satisfaction. Admin errors can occur at any stage of the job lifecycle and cause substantial problems for your business and customers. By reducing admin errors, you'll minimise issues arising, which will help leave your customers satisfied.

How can field service management software help

Field service management software allows you to digitise and store paperwork in one system. Job sheets, invoices, work orders, purchase orders and more can be stored in the software, which means you can process paperwork more efficiently, get more accurate buildings and access all the information you need in one place. On top of this, you can integrate systems with other software your business uses to minimise the amount of work manually, reduce duplicating information, and remove opportunities for information to be missed across systems.

Collect, monitor and act on customer feedback

Ultimately, if you want to make your customers more satisfied, you need to be able to monitor and report on customer satisfaction. Without analysing data, you won't be able to identify the core issues causing dissatisfaction for your customers and won't be able to act to fix them.

How can field service management software help

With field service management software in place, you can take information and data about jobs that are stored and run reports to identify any areas that need improvement. This can provide valuable preferences and pain points for your customers and allow you to improve your services and offerings to leave them more satisfied.

By focusing on these areas and bringing in the correct software and strategies to manage them properly, you'll find that your customers will be happier with your service than they've ever been before. You need to ensure that you have the right field service management software to measure, strategise and implement ways to improve customer satisfaction.

Suppose you'd like to help improve your customer satisfaction by using field service management software. In that case, you can book a demo of Joblogic and see how it can help enhance your field service business' customer satisfaction.