Keep them in the loop

Keeping your customers waiting for you to do your job is bad business. With mobile communications there’s no reason for not keeping your customers in the loop.

They say it never rains, but it pours – and it never comes down heavier then when your clothes dryer breaks down.

Ours broke down during a recent wet spell and a frantic call to the whitegoods repair centre resulted in an appointment time “between seven am and midday”.

Having run a service business for over a decade, I know scheduling field technicians is a challenge. No matter how good your telephone staff are, it’s impossible to estimate how long a tech is actually going to be on site.

Most big companies overcome this with “appointment windows” where they give you a rough timeframe of when to expect the service person to show up. You’re expected to hang around and wait for them to arrive.

Should slight inconveniences happen such as work, dropping kids off at school or even just not hearing the doorbell ring, then tough luck – the tech drives off to the next job.

The bigger the company is, the worse this gets. There are legions of pay TV and cable internet customers who’ve wasted days waiting for technicians not to show up while post and courier contractors are possibly the worst for skipping deliveries that have a hint of difficulty.

So I resigned myself to a morning of pottering around the house and the possibility of an irritated call at 10 minutes past noon to find out where the mechanic is.

As it turned out, I was the first call for the day. A polite, friendly and efficient service man arrived at the doorstep at exactly 7am. We now have a dryer working perfectly in time for a fortnight of sunny weather.

The mechanic was an excellent advertisement for the company, and that’s why we use them.

But those well trained, courteous staff are let down by the company’s communications. A simple text or phone message could have kept me, head office and the field agent working together. Everyone would have been happier, the system more efficient and the business more profitable.

In this age of mobile communications there’s no real reason for the “service window” at all. It’s simply a symptom of businesses not prepared to use their tools to do a better job.

The businesses that are prepared to use these tools are the ones that will survive and prosper after this downturn passes. While the ones who expect their customers to sacrifice a day so they can show up at their convenience are as doomed as hairy mammoths once were.

There was another pleasant surprise, as the serviceman left a voucher for $100 off a new machine. Given dryers and washing machines are classic “deferrable purchases” as we discussed in an earlier column, this is a great way of getting customers to buy.

So it seems the marketing department is on the ball. Perhaps there is an argument for marketing people to run service teams.

Paul Wallbank has spent 15 years helping businesses with their technology issues. Over that time he also grew PC Rescue into a national IT company and set up the IT Queries website. Today Paul assists business facing the challenges of today’s market and believes entrepreneurs and new thinking is what will fix the global economy.

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