Delivering an Exceptional Customer Experience from Online to Onsite

Consumer expectations have hit an all-time high, with buyers conditioned by Amazon, Uber, and the like, companies that strive to deliver excellent service from start to finish. Today, most customers expect this same seamless experience from every brand without exception, including service companies.

Every customer touchpoint across their buying journey influences how the customer feels about the brand. Customer experience is the only sustainable brand differentiator in today’s hyper-competitive environment. Therefore, organizations must provide their customers with a consistent and personalized experience from online to onsite, and service companies are no exception.

Because offering good service is their business, service companies often feel even more pressure to deliver the best experience possible. Unfortunately, many face challenges that include disparate systems, too many apps, and isolated workflows that cause bottlenecks, resulting in disjointed CX.

Service companies typically have a call center or customer service team that fields customer requests, but generally, the field service teams’ communication and processes are separate. This can cause duplicate systems, disjointed or manual workflows, and communication gaps internally with teams and externally with customers.

According to Microsoft, 60 percent of consumers will switch companies because of a poor customer service experience. The good news? Technology keeps up with the pace of changing customer demands and can offer a solution to these challenges.

Accelerate Operational Efficiency

Effective automation reduces and even eliminates manual processes and paperwork. A technology stack should increase employee productivity, streamline processes, and improve the efficiency of service operations. In field service specifically, it’s about ensuring the right person is at the right place with the right information at the right time, every time. It takes a modern field services management solution to make this happen.

Intelligent Dispatching

Ideally, to dispatch the most appropriate technician for the job every time, a mix of manual and assisted, automated or even AI-driven scheduling can speed up the process and eliminate human error. Manual scheduling lets customer service agents schedule complex jobs, while automated scheduling gets technicians to customers as fast as possible.

In the best case, much in the way that Amazon packages are seamlessly delivered to doorsteps,  customer call center agents should be able to schedule and dispatch teams from one app while on the phone with customers. Or, at a minimum, dispatching personnel should be able to view all customers’ details and quickly communicate the job assignment to the right field technician within minutes.

Intelligent dispatching takes previously manual processes to the next level with machine learning algorithms that expedite decisions, marrying technology with traditional in-person service excellence.

Notifications and Alerts

Leaders can help their teams adopt this changed mind-set by leading the automation of internal communications. As employees experience these efficiencies firsthand, they will also be improving their customers’ experiences with saved time, improved job satisfaction, and streamlined workflows.

Technologies including live tracking, GPS location intelligence, and automated alerts take the guesswork out of the equation. With these activities existing within an app, customer service teams can focus on expanding exceptional service in ways that go beyond dispatching.

Smart alerts transmitted to customers letting them know when technicians are on the way eliminates the need for customers to repeatedly reach out to call centers asking for a technician’s arrival time.

Let Your Service Heroes Deliver the Best Service Possible

Field service employees shouldn’t have to do unnecessary paperwork and manage duplicate or cumbersome processes. They need all of the job details accessible to them, right at the job site. Field service management technologies must solve these pain points and allow field service professionals to be on the front lines doing what they do best: service customers.

Mobile Apps for Field Pros

Smartphones and mobile applications are the lifeblood of great service on the job site. Technicians frequently make phone calls, text coworkers, use Google Maps, and rely on YouTube tutorials to get the job done.

To promote these experiences, supporting field pros with a mobile-first experience makes good business sense. Empower field service technicians to create new jobs, upsell other services, and access inventory through push notifications on job assignments, automatic reminders, and easy access to job status to help them deliver an excellent end-to-end experience.

This mobile mentality can allow employees on the job site to easily add notes, attach pictures or videos, collect payments and customer signatures, and record customers’ sentiments around service quality.

Personalized Experience Based on Customer History

In 2023, delivering an exceptional customer experience hinges on personalizing each interaction with your customer along the buyer journey. Research indicates 71 percent of customers expect personalization, and 76 percent are irritated if they don’t receive it.

One way to personalize a field services job is to use a customer’s history to your advantage. Back office staff should be able to view the customer’s past job details—or generate new customer details—schedule the appropriate field visit from a central app or CRM, rather than switching to another app or passing the customer along to another employee—making the scheduling process quick and seamless.

Customer service employees should be able to schedule and dispatch technicians from within a CRM by easily selecting a date, time, technician, and other job details based on real-time customer requests.

Once completed, technicians onsite can view the customer and job details and make any final adjustments before completing the job and collecting the payment—still within a single digital interface.

Deliver Faster, More Personalized Service

Flexibility and customizability are the most critical consideration points when selecting a solution for delivering a deeply personalized customer service experience from end to end.

Combining a best-in-class CRM with customer service ticketing capabilities and a powerful field services solution within one easy-to-use app provides a seamless and highly personalized customer service experience from online to onsite.

Carmen Williams is the chief evolution officer at Zuper. Williams has years of experience in marketing at companies such as Apex Learning and DreamBox Learning and also worked at Microsoft as a senior product marketing manager. In her current role, she helps ensure field service management companies are optimizing marketing processes and relying on agility and adaptability for growth. Williams is a marketing leader with a track record of accelerating innovation and growth at organizations, technology companies, and startups.