Customer Intelligence - Key to grow your field services business

'If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it', goes the good old saying.

However, field service businesses in 2020 are expected to move past the break-fix repair approach and go by fool proofing their disparate installation to the limit where the breakdown instances aren’t a regular share for triggered job orders.  

Customers now want full-fledged delivery on the promises made to them; right from the first sales consultation to when the installation team got the job done. Customer sentiment is the profound factor that governs the success and growth rate of a field service business. And failing to abide by the same means losing out on intimate customer relationships and the insights that this engagement can thereof bring about. 

In one of our previous blogposts, we talked about customer insights and how they impact customer satisfaction. So, talking about ‘Customer Intelligence’ and how its right exploration can enable whole new revenue models, is the right way to move ahead. 

For field service organizations, it is crucial to systematically gather the right amount and right kind of customer data, analyse the qualitative and quantitative aspect of it, and consolidate the same to refine the view of customer relationships and customer environment. 

Customer Intelligence is the outcome of all the above where context of the data supersedes the mere numbers on the dashboard to further provide a meaningful understanding of each customer or group of customers. 

For field service organizations especially, the customer is the most important aspect. Hence, all the field service functions of an organization must be thoroughly based on user experience and the interest of the target. If by using all the customer data in the world, a business is not able to gain and retain a customer’s trust and loyalty, they are lacking the insights on maintenance and consumption patterns for Customer Intelligence.

An example:

By the implementation of AI-driven schedule optimization, a single dispatcher becomes easily enabled to support many field service agents and help them tend to the customers as human touch-points, delighting them in the process. 

Customer data is information in raw form such as information from a customer survey. This data lacks context and doesn’t tell you anything about customer behavior. To get interesting and meaningful, this data needs many layers to it. 

Customer Insights are the actionable form of the above information such as customer preferences and sentiments. Whereas Customer Intelligence is the contextual outcome of the analysis of all the data above that comes from multiple sources. 

All customer interactions at various touchpoints yield data. And this data gives out insights that help organizations deliver outstanding customer experience and grow their customer’s lifetime value. 

Here’s how this data on Customer Intelligence can help you nail your field services business:

• Transform your field force into customer service agents based on the insights from job interactions and the sentiment of engagement.
• Segmentation exists but treating every customer as a unique persona and delivering tailored field experiences based on their needs and preferences is the secret recipe
• Customer-centric training for your field force is the need of the hour. This helps technicians engage with varied customers on a unique basis
• With the use of data triggered by remote connectivity, sensors, automation, and other AI and IoT tools, organizations can reduce the dependability on in-person repairs and maintenance.
• Data from anomalies is a deep insight into asset performance and the number of service interruptions.
• Always remember, asset and customer data go hand-in-hand.