6 Ways to Develop a Customer-Centric Business Approach in Field Service

2018-03-30

Field Service Management is all about people. But you already knew that. There’s a complex dynamic to field service workers who actively assist clients directly. There’s face-to-face interaction involved, which can either turn out really great, or really bad.
But what does the outcome of YOUR field service management depend on? We’ve listed 6 customer-centric approaches to field service management and gone into detail on how to implement each one.

Create a Mission Statement and Create Your Company Culture Around It
Before you even spring into action with your new resolve to become more customer-centric, stop!
There’s an important ignition key you first have to turn: your mission statement.
A customer-centric mission statement speaks directly to your clients. It’s a way to promise them something extra when they use your service. It’s an unspoken agreement which you need to ‘speak’.
Read this article as a template on how to set up a mission statement for your particular field service category. But personalize it and make it uniquely identifiable with your company.
Once you’ve established a solid mission statement, it’s time to live it out through your managers and your staff. Each individual must be aware of what the company believes in and how to live out that philosophy.
It’s up to you and your managers to create a culture that’s in line with your mission statement—every single day.

Evaluate Your Marketing to Make It Conducive to Your Philosophy
Your company philosophy must be broadcast. Utilize all channels at your disposal, such as:

• Social media
• Press releases
• Your own marketing
• Vehicle signage
• Logos
• Documents
• …and everything else!

Your mission statement should be a template from which you construct all these company elements. These are what the public sees, and that’s how you get more customers—and retain old ones.
Facebook posts should showcase your mission. Advertising billboards should speak your mission into reality. Every vehicle should reassure clients about your mission.
It must become a culture if you want it to work. And once it gets momentum, it becomes second nature to your frontline staff and the clients who deal with them.

Get Better at Hiring New People and Focus on Low Staff Turnaround
Your hiring process needs to be on point. Human Resources must understand the importance of hiring the right people.
But who are the right people?
Various tests are made available to HR departments that help them assess staff before hiring and during employment. What you’re looking for is people with:

• talent
• leadership skills
• emotional intelligence
• a team player mentality
• ambition
• ethics
• the ability to resolve conflict (both customer & colleague)

Hire Managers Who are Leaders Instead of Bosses
A large part of customer-centric philosophy is the ability to empower your staff. Staff who feel empowered are more productive, more likely to grow within the company, and less likely to leave any time soon.
Leaders understand how to empower staff. Bosses don’t.
Learn the difference between leaders and bosses and centre your manager hiring/promoting process around hiring more LEADERS.
Sound leadership at your company will promote the values you may have included in your mission statement. Values such as:

• Loyalty
• Growth
• Accountability
• Honesty
• Hard work
• Confidence
• Work satisfaction

And in case you were wondering: empowered staff treat customers like gold.

Develop a Sound Service System Where Accountability is Key
From that initial phone call all the way down to final payment; there’s a process your company undertakes when servicing clients. It’s that process you need to evaluate on a continual basis.
We all understand that it takes a team to make a service happen. Perhaps your company processes look similar to this? Someone answers the phone and does the sale. The next person handles the technical details of the order. Then there’s the service delivery process which is manned by someone else. Invoicing is also undertaken by the people in your accounts department.
If all goes well, great! But if there’s a glitch in one of these processes, it becomes easy to lose track of where the fault lies. Which is why accountability is so important.
Implement accountability into each of your processes and even involve your clients in this. Since they are being forced to deal with multiple departments and people, give them a way to keep track of the entire service process—from start to finish.
Examples of this include:

• Updating your clients digitally on each respective person they are dealing with
• Recording every process as much as possible to ascertain where a fault took place when one does and dealing with it accordingly to prevent reoccurrences
• Tracking every process and making it available to the customer
• Steering staff away from a ‘pass the buck’ mentality and teaching them to take ownership of client queries

Create a Perpetual Feedback System and Build It into Your Processes
Your business needs to become an active conversation between clients and the company. The 6th and final strategy for building a customer-centric state of mind within your company is to implement a feedback policy that all staff are aware of.
By doing this you create a culture where customers are always involved in their own service process. They should be continually communicating with you about what they want, what dissatisfies them and where your staff shine.
Through feedback you can begin to evaluate whether your mission statement is coming to life, or nothing more than a buzz phrase. And if not, where can you look for improvement? The answer? Ask the customer.
This also motivates staff, because they are constantly driving their individual levels of service to be recognized. It incentivizes them to try harder at making the customer experience a pleasurable one.
Which is what customer-centric is all about. It’s about the customer. The ones who have the potential to drive profits, or sink you. Treat them well and they’ll do the same for you and your business.