A study conducted by the Customer Contact Council has determined that customer loyalty is driven less by delight with your product or service, and more by how easy you can make the customer experience. In the services business, especially, inefficient fleet management practices can have an extremely negative effect on your clientele. Late arrivals, extremely long service windows, and a front office staff that is more focused on managing technicians than communicating with clients can all result in customers feeling like you are making their lives more difficult, rather than solving their problems. For this reason, telematics is emerging as a key component of many companies’ customer service strategy.
Late arrivals, in particular, are a common complaint. Your customer may have taken time off from work to stay home for a repair, or is unable to leave the house to run errands. Commercial clients may be losing time or resources that could be spent on revenue-generating activities as they wait for a technician.
Many companies also start to feel like they are spending more time talking to their techs than they do talking to their customers. Action Door provides installation and service of automatic garage doors to residential and commercial customers throughout northeast Ohio. For years, Action Door’s dispatch team relied on more than 100 company cellphones to manage their fleet. After each job, the installer, technician or sales person had to call into the office to find out where to go next. Drivers and dispatchers spent too much of their day on the phone. With 70 vehicles on the road every day, call volume became hard to manage.
According to company owner Dino Mastantuono, “Techs used to have to call in after every job and get the information for their next stop over the phone. After a while we just couldn’t ignore the fact that this process was hurting our bottom line.”
Telematics can be the key to solving these problems. Making your technicians more efficient by improving your visibility and streamlining communications can go a long way toward improving the customer experience.
Today’s sophisticated fleet management technologies provide unprecedented visibility into what’s happening in the field. With real-time understanding of where your technicians are, what they are doing, and how long they are on each job, you can dispatch far more effectively, thus cutting service windows, and improving on-time arrivals.
And if your staff has all the information they need – work orders and driving directions optimized for traffic and road conditions – delivered to them in the vehicle, they become much more efficient. This results in more on-time arrivals, less fuel waste, and better driving habits, as they aren’t distracted by calling into the office or trying to find the job site.
Effective communications strategies are key to ensuring a great customer service experience. Whether its freeing up resources to handle customer calls more effectively, or improving the quality of information being exchanged by the home office and technicians in the field, telematics can have a measurable effect on your clients’ level of satisfaction. Telematics can be the key to ensuring your customers focus on the great work you do, rather than the time they spend waiting for the tech to arrive. Read our buyers guide on how to choose the right fleet management system for your company’s needs.
2 thoughts on “Fleet Management: An Important Customer Service Tool”
It’s cool to hear that customer service can take advantage of telematics. I can imagine ordering a pizza and being able to know the exact location of the delivery person. These tools seem like they are ready to break into industries that are ripe for disruption.
Wow, it’s interesting that you discussed fleet management. My favorite part of this article is that it provides unprecedented visibility into what’s happening in the field, that is really cool! In addition, I also agree that effective communications strategies are the keys to ensuring an above excellent customer service experience.