Recently my family changed houses. In the process I had a good chance to see customer service, especially field service, in action. I kept track of my experiences to see who was doing it right and who wasn't.
I was prompted to evaluate this service by the recent Gartner report on field service vendors, which warned them that next year's evaluation will be looking for social media integration. This means integration for customers and technologists talking to each other and sharing best practices.
Additionally, TOA Technologies recently released its annual "Cost of Waiting" Survey, which said that "word-of-mouth can be a powerful factor in influencing consumer choice, and a significant proportion of consumers who wait complain about their 'waiting experience' to family and friends: US (49%), UK (54%), Germany (42%). A number of people may also choose to make public their disappointment via the Internet: more than one in ten of the online survey respondents reported to have posted a complaint online when made to wait: US (13%), UK (16%), Germany (10%). Fifty-eight percent of respondents said they would recommend a company with an on-time arrival. However, if the company is just 15 minutes late, the number of respondents who said they would recommend the company drops to just 10 percent.
Clearly something is brewing...
In my new home experience I dealt with three furniture companies, an online retailer, a cable company and a satellite company. I had my wife "judge" the vendors by how well they met delivery schedules, how well they tracked deliveries, the levels of professionalism, their appearance, and their rescheduling ability. Of course this was not a scientific study, but the results seem to dovetail the service experiences of many people I know. In this blog, I will give credit by name to the good, high performing ones, and keep the mediocre/bad ones nameless.
Field service is growing in importance as more things are bought online and vendors realize this may be their ONLY face to face customer contact. Think about that for a second--their only contact--and that happens in the customer's house. And now if they don't perform well, people go public. And here is the reality of this situation. Few people have the courage to tell the service delivery repair person that their service was bad, because human nature is typically to avoid confrontation and conflict. And the service person in your house can be intimidating. Also, how many people out there want to bother filling out a customer service survey when angry?
On the other hand, writing a tweet of 120 characters or less is easy and swift. Who knows if a survey is ever read? But tweets and complaints on social media are instantaneously accessible for anyone with an Internet connection. And given from the many companies now selling social media listening services, companies are reading social media. Even if companies are slow to react, the reading is still being done.
As companies realize the growing impact of social media transparency and field service, you will start to see some field service terms creeping into the vernacular such as "drip feed" and "automated rescheduling." For the layperson, an automatic field service scheduler based on a drip feed hands out tickets during the day in drips, not just at the start of the day. And with such systems in place, you can react to your deliveries/jobs running long or your customers being delayed getting back to meet the repair person. Think of that: You have a repair window of 3-5 pm. You are going to be late. And you call the company saying you won't be there until 3:45. And they say NO PROBLEM. This is not rocket science; the technology is here today from Click, TOA and Oracle ORS. It's the business change that is hard.
Recently, I met a CIO who told me he thought the concept was great, but joked that his technicians might oppose because they could not plan in their donut shop stops. To be honest, though, I actually asked the techs in two companies what they would do with such a drip feed system. They loved the idea. Understand that they face the customer daily; executives do not. The technicians want to please the customer too.
So on to the results. First, I applaud Haverty's Furniture. The company gave us a two hour window day of purchase for delivery, as well as a URL to their "Follow the Truck" website. Sure enough, on delivery day I went to the site and could see we were the fourth delivery of the day and a red arrow moved along the timeslots as the truck traveled along. Sure enough, the red arrow hit our slot as the truck pulled in. It was a nice painted Haverty's truck. Technicians were clean cut and in uniforms. They put on covers for their shoes-pads where they walked in. They were done and gone in 30 minutes.
The satellite TV company with whom we dealt performed in the middle. They did not offer a follow-the-truck website. Plus they were late. They got a call from me, which cost them money to answer, to tell me where their technician was. This is the part I find hard to understand. Follow-the-truck portals are easy to implement and have huge call avoidance savings, which reduce time and costs. Why doesn't everyone do this yet?
When they did the actual visit though they were nice, in uniform, and dealt nicely with some messy wiring of the previous owner.
The cable internet provider for my high speed internet was not so good-late. They did not offer a truck web site. The technician rushed the install because he had to go meet his girlfriend (who called him a couple of times during the visit). And he didn't look professional. And there is a part two to come...
An online retailer had advanced ordering in that they let me schedule the exact delivery window online during the order. That was nice, but the delivery was not ideal. It was done by a random contractor based in the area with underwhelming phone skills. The truck and the delivery people were completely unmarked, arriving in a white blank truck.
The worse service provider turned out to be a a childrens furniture specialist. The firm decided to move up their delivery when we could not be there. And it was a contractor. Then they told us that I had to talk to their manager. They escalated me. Then this higher-level manager told me that I would have to reschedule myself with the furniture store. Meanwhile, he had what sounded on the phone like a party going on in the background. I was surprised. So I waited to see if the store would call me. They didn't. I had to call them. Having no record of the event, they told me it would be a week before they could come back!
Then one month later lightning struck. Literally, the house next door got hit. My home incurred enough of a shock to fry the set top boxes and the cable modem-even with surge suppressors. I think something got in via my powerline network, which I don't use anymore. Anyway, the satellite TV company gave me a "case manager" and a direct number to call, which was convenient.
Now back to cable internet provider. The company told me three days before they could come out. But they told my neighbor, even though he has the same service as me, that they could come to his house the next day. Stop right there. Even if they don't care about me as a customer, how does it make gas mileage sense to come to the same address area twice? When the technician showed up at my neighbor's house, I asked if he could check out my equipment as well. He told me couldn't and was sorry, explaining that he had to follow the pre-planned schedule. Turns out that they didn't fix my neighbor's situation correctly. They came back a day later and still they didn't merge the visits. So I asked this technician from the same company if he could help. He was willing to come in because he thought it was silly not to while he was there. He agreed the issue was the cable modem. But because he was a contractor, he was not allowed to carry extra modems with him. He had to return to the parts depot on every job. How is that efficient for anybody? Finally, on the third day they came and fixed my cable Internet service.
As you can see from these examples, there is a win-win here. Better field services saves the company money and boosts customer service. Based on my home experiences, I gave Haverty's and Macy's good Tweets. The others didn't get the same.
Final Thoughts
Given the rise of social media, companies need to re-evaluate and re-tool their field service approaches. Technologies are out from multiple vendors to make service better at lower cost, such that social media becomes positive advertising for companies delivery and installation. There are real costs to waiting, and social media transparency will accelerate these costs. So it is advisable to develop an answer now before it is too late.
Joseph Hughes is a managing director with Accenture Customer Service and Support business. He can be contacted at [email protected].