4 minute read
Your business
How to be a star performer
What does customer service excellence looks like in the heating industry? Viessmann service director Andrew Lambert takes a look.
Getting customer service right has never been more important. We have been living and working through an extraordinary period and the longer-term societal and economic impacts are not yet fully apparent.
Indeed, the Covid shockwaves will continue to shape the customer experience and service landscape for months, maybe even years into the future. If findings from the latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) are anything to go by, companies across all sectors need to put significant resources into promoting excellence in customer service.
Covering Q1 of 2021, the UKCSI research shows that the proportion of customers who are willing to pay more for excellent service has grown to 32 per cent, up considerably from the 25.9 per cent figure recorded in January 2020, prior to the pandemic. It’s a clear indication that consumers are placing a higher value on customer service than they did 18 months ago.
Gas engineers, whether self-employed or employed by large businesses, can make gains by reflecting on customer service principles that are relevant to all.
Key components
It is important to consider that in most cases where a boiler engineer is dispatched, customers are already likely to be unhappy, or at least inconvenienced. According to our latest customer service figures, 80 per cent of callouts involve fixing some kind of problem or complaint.
This means customer service should be centred on restoring confidence and turning any initial negative feelings into a positive customer experience. In the same way that themed attractions are designed with a beginning, a middle, an end, and a ‘wow’ moment, it’s not such a strange idea to think of your basic customer experience as a performance.
It starts before you arrive at the property with the scheduling process. Even during periods when demand peaks, it is essential that customers can reach you without having to endure long waits.
It’s worth mentioning that digital customer experiences recorded in the UKCSI reached a 50 per cent high for the first time. As a heating engineer, do you always offer your customers
the means to get hold of you via email, webform or even WhatsApp? Setting and then meeting ambitious responsiveness targets is key.
Once the engineer is on site, the customer must be reassured that they are caring and competent. Customers value time. If an engineer is rushed because they know they have to complete seven or eight callouts in a day, it reduces the opportunity to connect with them, deliver the right outcome and complete that turnaround to delight.
The UKCSI’s findings back this up. Asked what things organisations could do to improve their service, three of the top five responses involved friendlier and more helpful staff, quality of product/service and more knowledgeable employees.
At the end of a visit, the engineer should be able to explain exactly what has happened or gone wrong and why, what work has been carried out to fix it, and how customers can help prevent it happening again.
Customers, from our
experience, are reassured by knowledge. They want to know what has happened and why it has happened – when you’re able to walk through this at the end of a job, without having to rush off to the next call-out, they will be less worried about their boiler and more confident that you are caring and competent.
Transition to data-driven services
What we see and aspire to achieve is customer satisfaction improving as the journey progress through from arranging appointments to completing the job. What will be defining over the coming years is how tech-driven preventative maintenance will enable us to start that customer journey from a higher satisfaction level.
Currently, the majority of work (80 per cent) involves being called out to fix a problem. This will decline as more new boilers are installed with remote monitoring capabilities. For instance, the latest Viessmann models are Wi-Fi enabled and linked to our Vitoguide software platform. This enables us to track data and flag issues before they turn into problems for customers, prompting either an engineer call-out or contact with the customer to advise on action that they can take themselves.
Data should also underpin wider customer service strategies. Good customer service can only exist if it is constantly, thoroughly and independently measured. And it seems very few of us are exempt from this these days, with online review sites judging our performances, just like a theatre review.
Viessmann relies on independently surveying random customer samples regularly, measuring our performance across metrics that take into account the entire journey, from booking an appointment to the appearance and manner of our engineers on site.
This way, key trends can be identified quickly, strategies can be refined, and informed actions can be taken. ■
