Your home service business is growing, and clients are pouring in, sure you get an occasional 1-star review, and the occasional disgruntled customer despite your Techs doing a fantastic job. The truth is, to remain in business, you NEED quality control.
In this blog post, we will go over what quality control is and isn’t, and look at it from the perspective of 3 questions.
- What’s your customer service quality control?
- How do you check quality from the office to the techs in the field?
- How are you documenting all of that?
1. What’s your customer service quality control?
Customer service quality assurance (QA) is the process of reviewing customer service conversations with the goal of delivering high-quality support.
Quality customer support could mean different things to different businesses, but in general, it includes: using the right tone and language, following protocols, and solving customer problems efficiently.
Quality assurance ensures that your customer service goals are achieved consistently, but most importantly it also helps detect any inefficiencies in the process.
To really know where your business is, in providing quality customer service, a review is needed. Typically, to conduct a customer service quality assurance review, a QA manager listens to or reads customer support conversations across channels like email, phone, live chat, and social media and checks if they meet accepted standards of quality support against a quality assurance scorecard. Findings from these reviews are then used to coach your customer rep team for improvement.
However, most home service businesses DO NOT have a quality assurance manager, instead, a member of your senior management team with some experience in customer relationship management (the client-customer relationship, not the software) would be the best person to manage the customer service quality assurance review.
It is important that they review all touch points with customers such as phone calls, zoom meetings, live chat, emails, social media, etc. to check if the quality of customer service being provided meets the standards your business aspires to.
The Quality Assurance manager, or in this case a senior manager, will review the quality of services being provided for things like
- Helpfulness to the customer
- Empathy
- How well you know the customer (so that the customer doesn’t need to repeat things they already said, and expected to be documented),
By assigning points from 1-5, with 1 being bad and 5 being excellent, to grade the quality of the customer service they provide to customers
It is also important to have a list of rules and checklists that your customer service rep should and should not do, such as
- Using a lot of tech terms in communicating a solution, when the customer is not tech-savvy.
- The conversation bounces from topic to topic, there’s no clear lead from start to finish.
- The customer support rep sent a troubleshoot for the wrong query.
- The screenshot of the issue sent by the customer wasn’t saved and was automatically deleted.
- The customer support rep copied and pasted some portions of instructions from the internal documents without changing the formatting. As a result, an email had different fonts, colors, or font sizes.
- The customer support rep made screenshots and accidentally shared them publicly
- Violation of the replying on-time policy.
- The provided solution led to bad consequences
- The customer support rep asked for additional details when there was enough information to solve the case.
- The customer support rep helped with an issue that wasn’t acknowledged by the customer / showed initiative
- The customer support rep was able to upsell to the customer
Giving a score to each of these whether positive or negative will also help in scoring the quality of service your customer service team is providing to prospects and customers.
2. How do you check quality from the office to the techs in the field?
Now that you know how to assess the quality of customer service your home service business actually provides, it’s time to check the quality of customer service your techs offer directly or indirectly in the field.
When your techs are out in the field, it’s hard to get honest feedback unless something went wrong and the customer had a bad experience. When that happens and the complaints roll in, it’s often clear what went wrong, how your business didn’t meet the customer’s expectations, and what you can do differently going forward,
But that’s a very reactive stance to take, and assuming “no news is good news” isn’t the best way to assess actual performance. You also cannot 100% base the quality of your service based on customers’ compliments and reviews. Those are part of it, but that is not all there is to gauge the quality of service your techs provide at a client’s home.
If you want accurate and well-rounded evaluations of your field tech performance, you’ll need to create additional channels and opportunities to collect feedback.
Here are a few ways to prompt customers to give you a better sense of how things are going in the field.
Follow-up courtesy calls
A quick call to check with customers after a site visit is a great way to show how customer-focused your home service business is while gathering feedback on the visit. One thing to keep in mind is that this call should NOT be an interrogation.
No one likes that, and it’ll make the customer suspicious of the techs who just left their home. Instead, the call should be a friendly and quick conversation where you ask them a few questions like:
- Were you satisfied with the experience?
- Was there any issue the techs did not solve?
- Did the tech leave the site as they found it? Any mess or things out of place?
- Did you feel like the work was completed in a timely manner?
- Is there any recommendations you might make for the next time we do work for you?
- Is there anything we could do to improve?
TIP: Make the call as soon as possible, after the appointment while the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind, and – unlike a formal survey or interview – they won’t overthink their responses.
Using Reviews and/or Surveys
There’s no better way to gather customer feedback than through a review or a survey. Both have immense value in helping you learn from the experience that you just delivered that customer, from the first touch to job completion. And there’s no easier way to collect this feedback than through an automated solution. We believe that there is no better automated solution than NiceJob.
NiceJob helps service companies to send smart review requests to customers at the “moment of peak excitement” which is typically right after the job has been completed and your tech is standing in the customer’s door. NiceJob will follow up with your customer 4 times to achieve the best conversion rate possible and will ensure that customers don’t receive follow-ups after they leave a review.
With their Topic Insights tool, they can highlight the positive or negative topics a customer mentions in each review and it tracks the most frequent topics over time so you can understand if you’re addressing the problem or if it’s continuing to happen and which techs are contributing to it.
Online surveys are a cheap and easy way to get feedback from your customer, you can send them to all your customers at once or distribute them individually after specific field service visits.
Stay away from questions that provide vague responses – if it’s not specific and actionable it won’t be very useful. Questions about the tech’s knowledge, professionalism, and communication are good areas to focus on. Mix in a variety of yes/no, multiple choice, and open-ended questions to get quality feedback.
If you have a standard playbook that field techs should be following on a service call, be sure to ask questions to verify they’re on point. Otherwise, it’s hard to know if they’re just checking boxes or actually performing each step.
TIP: Automating this process is the best way to ensure that you’re capturing timely feedback and giving customers the opportunity to share how great your company is with their network and the world.
End every interaction with a question
Building a business that is customer-focused and geared towards providing quality service, doesn’t start and end with one after-service phone call. Instead, create a culture of customer feedback by continually asking for it.
By ending every interaction with open-ended questions that requires your customer’s input, there’s a better chance you’ll receive useful information that will help you provide quality service and stand out from other competitors.
Measuring efficiency
A field tech’s real value, no matter the home service industry, is in their ability to complete tasks and solve issues quickly so that they can move on to the next appointment. That said, field service work is not as simple as making an instant coffee, speed is not the only way to measure efficiency.
The quality of the work is just as important as speed when it comes to making a customer happy. It’s great for field techs to get the work done on time, but the job must be done right and no return visits should be required.
You can measure the quality of your field tech’s work based on turnaround time, and accuracy in solving the issue.
Mistakes happen, sure, but try to avoid having to repeatedly apologize to customers and having to redo the work of a Tech because they screwed up while trying to hit a new record on time spent at an appointment
Your business is only as good as the services you offer, the quality of which should remain consistent to all customers, regardless of the kind of work done.
3. How are you documenting all of this stuff?
Now that you know how to implement quality control in your home service business, you need a way to document things like:
- The specific criteria the QA or senior manager will use to review the quality of customer service your customer reps provide
- Regular Quality Assurance scores from your customer service team
- After-service client feedback
- Field tech performance
- Recommendations to improve quality this month/quarter
TIP: You can use tools like Trello to document the entire Quality control and assurance process
How Pink Callers Can Help
You’re already great at providing expert home services for your customers. That’s why you’re in business! But, while you’re out solving your customer’s problems, it can be easy to forgo other important parts of running a successful business, like responding to customer queries, scheduling appointments, collecting payments, and following up on leads. Whether it’s due to a shortage of skilled workers, or limited operating hours, Pink Callers can step in to help.
Pink Callers Customer Service Rockstars (CSRs) can man the scheduling and customer service front while you handle the more important stuff. You do what you do best while your CSR handle:
- Managing all forms of communication like phones, email, texts, and website leads
- Follow-up calls and callbacks
- Scheduling of estimate appointments and accepted work
- Quoting and sales over the phone
- Monitor your social media accounts and marketing outlets like Home Advisor, Angie’s List, Yelp, and more for potential incoming leads
- Collecting payments and completing work in your CRM daily
Reach out to us today to learn more about how our CSRs can help you grow your business, and stand out in the industry. Call us on (888) 325-7465 or fill out the Contact Form to find out how Pink Callers can help your Home Service Business.