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Customers 28 | 13TH - 19TH JANUARY 2017 | UTILITY WEEK Market view F ield service teams have become water companies' biggest brand ambassadors and play a key role in the overall cus- tomer experience. But how can water companies monitor the customer experience of their field teams? And more importantly, how do they make sure that this experience is consistent with the ser- vice offered in the contact centre, on the web and through social media channels, etc? This is a question being asked more and more in the water sector, where oen the repairs function sits outside the control of customer service leaders. It also seems to be a conundrum for those businesses who have service contracts with outsource part- ners oen using multiple suppliers to fulfil repairs and maintenance issues. Customers expect a high level of service whichever way you interact with them. How they and their homes are treated is a highly emotive issue. Consistency is key and having a clear understanding of this vital part of the customer journey can have big implications for customer satisfaction and loyalty. The first thing to review is, have you built a truly customer-centric organisation where service is the responsibility of everyone in the organisation? Oen, customer experience is considered a function of the contact centre alone, but it is equally important to analyse whether your frontline staff have the relevant training, support and mindset to deliver the best possible service. Field teams are typi- cally measured on job effectiveness, focus- ing on speed of completing the work and an ability to fix first time. Customer satisfaction is rarely measured and companies have lit- tle idea of how good the service experience is. The best performing companies, however, have customer experience in their target structure and create a service-first culture. Second, proactively ask customers for feedback aer the repair interaction. Use a customer feedback tool tailor-made for your field service team and think about creating a relevant survey question set. By analys- ing voice of customer data, a company can quickly establish service consistency and can pinpoint common causes of dissatisfaction. Questions could include: • Did our engineer explain the reason for the fault and demonstrate the repair? • Did they arrive at the time you were told? • How satisfied were you with the quality of work carried out in your home? • How would you rate the engineer's level of respect for you and your home? • What could we have done to improve your repair experience? So what about survey methodology? In the past, customers were asked to fill out a satis- faction survey on a personal digital assistant (an intrusive and bias-inducing process). A better practice is to tap into your customer relationship management and workflow tools and when a job has been completed use this to trigger a survey – as real time as you can make it, so you don't lose the customer's memory of the interaction and more impor- tantly allowing you to create a remedial pro- cess to reduce complaints and dissatisfaction. Once you've collected customer feedback aer your repair interactions, how do you then make sure you can use this insight to drive valuable improvement? Wherever possible, try to build in some level of accountability. If you can tag survey responses to specific individuals, great, but at the very least you want a team or sup- plier view. This will help you evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the teams you're employing and will help you drive effective- ness. What's more, businesses using external contractors can quickly work out who drives value and who is turning off customers. By giving your field team access to the data you can also encourage operatives to take ownership of their development and use the insight to drive friendly competition. Your contact centre teams will also love it. Every day they are faced with a barrage of customer issues about repairs people not turning up and problems not being fixed. Not only is this demotivating (because agents have no control over this), it's also very dif- ficult for them to quantify the impact this is having on the business and the overall cus- tomer experience. By using customer feed- back with a decent data analytics tool they will quickly be able to establish how oen customers are dissatisfied and can evaluate this impact on customer loyalty, for exam- ple. Business leaders can also then crack the whip and drive down avoidable contacts. If you want to add in an extra dimension, why not look for correlations between pro- ductivity and service levels. By comparing data you can quickly establish which teams or individuals are the most effective but at the same time provide great customer care. Below is an example. By collecting cus- tomer feedback using a joined-up, real-time approach, you will quickly unlock a gold- mine of insight that if used correctly will help you drive down customer complaints and improve customer satisfaction levels. What's more, training and coaching oppor- tunities will present themselves, helping you to better engage with your field repair teams. Simon Thorpe, head of sales and marketing, Bright UK A shift in service culture Collecting customer feedback to give you a clear understanding of their experience with repairs and maintenance teams can have big implications for their satisfaction and loyalty, says Simon Thorpe. TEAM PRODUCTIVITY DATA VS CSAT 100 88 76 64 52 40 Jobs completed per day 53% 57% 60% 64% 67% 71% Company X Birmingham London Business Support Data & Internet Sales Service Ben Harrison Christina Murray Henry Richmond Johnny Smith Larry Jones Luke Wallin Maria Liles Mats Rennistam Microscope Richard Beard Sarah Logan Tony White General satisfaction (CustSat) CSAT Teams with higher productivity score higher on CSAT