Balancing customer satisfaction and operational efficiency can be a challenging undertaking for most companies. We all know designing a top notch customer experience can come at the expense of operational efficiency. Some companies add touch points or extra steps to close out a service event, others might leave fresh baked cookies behind to provide that unique touch. In highly competitive service environments, it can be challenging to determine if the service you are providing is having the desired affect.
Field service technicians and call center representatives are usually the first face for your company that customers "see" on a service event. These interactions should be closely monitored and measured to serve your customers well and to recognize opportunities for improvement. This not only ensures a consistent experience for all of your customers, but also provides you insight into the affect your service experience is having on your customers. Here are a few of the main Customer Experience Survey metrics that should be measured after field service events.
Response Time
In our 30 years of experience, response time has had a direct impact on a customers overall satisfaction. Response time is usually measured as the time it takes to get someone to help resolve an issue. This can include the time to get someone out to the site or even the time to get call or email back to acknowledge that support is coming. We've seen clients tracking response time including hold time and the time it took to get connected with a technician. Many times low scores on response time can be an early indicator of an unhappy customer or future detractor. Simply asking, "On a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is very satisfied and 1 is very dissatisfied, how satisfied were you with our response time." can tell you a lot about your customer's experience.
First Fix time
First time fix is the measurement that measures the productivity or the efficiency of each service event. While pretty self explanatory, First time fix measures how many times a customer had to contact your company to resolve their issue where the goal is to resolve as many issues as possible the first time. This is not only a measurement of the effectiveness of your technicians but also a way to track cost. Simply put, the more visits a technician needs to make, the more it costs your company to service that customer. This measurement is extremely important because the efficiency of the technician directly affects the customer satisfaction. If your technician does not have the right tools, technical knowledge or parts, your customer will likely become frustrated. Measuring this metric will give insight to the productivity of your technicians to improve the challenged areas of the event and increase customer satisfaction.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The ease of doing business with an organization has a direct impact on how your customers view your business and according to an article in the Harvard Business Review can have a direct impact on customer loyalty and retention. If you’re sending a service technician for a break/fix or preventative maintenance visit your employee should be easy to work with. The easier it gets to do business with you, the more likely overall customer satisfaction will increase. Here we simply ask, "How easy was it to work with our company?".
Overall Customer Satisfaction
Front-line employees play a huge role in your overall customer satisfaction in the service industry. In a service event most of your impact on overall customer satisfaction rests on the shoulders of your technician and call representatives. This metric will provide insight to the level of satisfaction of your customer had felt. Depending on your customer’s rating it is also a best practice to add a follow up question right after to further drill down the reasons on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. We recommend using something around the lines of "What can we do better to improve our rating next time?"
Today’s field services industry is constantly changing and companies must evolve with it. Measuring field service metrics to improve your organization’s service performance to outperform your competition is the first step on your path to improvement.
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