Connecting your field-based workers with your contact centre

Giving your customers the best service experience relies on old adversaries, the contact centre and the field worker, working closely together.  mplsystems share their top tips.

The contact centre invariably places emphasis on customer service and ensuring that all requests are dealt with quickly and politely.  Similarly, those delivering services directly to the customer out in the field are tasked with ensuring customer satisfaction is their priority.

However, too often, these two ends of the service operation are managed in isolation from each other and so the actual response the client receives is slow and error prone.

Whatever the service offering – fitting, delivering or fixing products, attending medical or sales appointment – how can you ensure the contact centre and the field-based workers work effectively together to the satisfaction of the customer?

1. Give field workers live access to job details via a smart phone

Don’t rely on browsers; with advances in mobile technology and applications, field workers should be able to get live updates on changes to their bookings or job details. This negates the need for paper trails and so, if a client requests a change, communication is made in real time without them having to log into a browser-based application – a simple solution to the problem of workers attending an appointment which has been cancelled or arriving with the wrong parts or plans.

2. Give customer services a live view of field workers’ loading, location and skills

GPS technology on mobile phones enables agents to see field workers’ locations live.  Make this information available and agents are able to do much more than just taking messages, and can allocate new jobs according to your field workers’ locations, skills and workload.

3. Give customers online visibility of jobs and allow self-service bookings

If some jobs are run of the mill, requiring little expert knowledge and are a nuisance rather than a production-halting, expensive disaster for the customer, can you keep your own costs down by offering self-service access to a fault logging and call-out request facility? An online ‘service portal’ reduces admin time and repetitive contact centre calls, especially if it is part of a holistic field-service solution and can also give updates to the customer without them having to call the contact centre.

4. Empower agents with a simple tool

If the contact centre agent needs to access information from parts, road operations and accounts systems to help their, by now, very frustrated caller, that’s one stressed agent.  Multiply that across all their calls and all the agents on each shift, and productivity drops off the cliff. It’s not just about making the agent’s life easier, it’s about providing an accurate and efficient service to the customer; make them wait, either at the contact centre end or for the field engineer’s arrival, and the customer experience suffers and you’re going to have to work twice as hard to rectify that. A fully integrated agent desktop is perhaps the most valuable piece of kit to have in your field service tool kit as it is from here that you can ensure a job runs smoothly from start to finish, with the opportunity to really impress the customer thrown in.

5. Learn from every job

Whether it’s scheduled maintenance, fitting a new domestic appliance or a call-out for an urgent repair, take the opportunity to learn if things could have been done better or what worked particularly well, and build that learning process into each and every job.  While the engineer packs up, the customer can complete a feedback survey on their mobile device or the worker can be ‘forced’ to fill in a job detail screen prior to closing that job and moving on to the next one; automatic data transfers from their mobile device back to the contact centre can provide invaluable management information on how to improve services, and details can be fed back immediately to the relevant departments so that the very next job benefits.