The current labor market and gig workers
As a result of both the Silver Tsunami (older workers retiring) and the Great Resignation (employees quitting in large numbers), most field service teams have many unfilled jobs. Kevin Bowers of TSIA reports that 9 out of 10 field service companies have outsourced some or all of their calls. Service leaders depend on two solutions: third-party service companies and independent gig workers. Both solutions can solve immediate problems while creating long-term ones unless something changes.
To read more about the Aging Workforce, tap here
The problem is integrating gig workers into the workforce
When you hire a permanent employee, you bring them into your family. You and your team members make them feel welcome, build relationships, develop mutual trust, and handle comfortable discussing personal issues that might impact their performance on a service call.
If one of your employees has a situation that is distracting them, causing schedule constraints, or even forcing them to look for a new job sooner or later, you will hear about it. The employee may ask to talk with you or speak with one of their peers who appreciates the difficulty the employee is dealing with and tells you, or their direct manager, in confidence. Either way, you can approach them and start helping them cope with their situation while doing their job.
But what happens when the troubled person works for a third-party company or is independent (gig worker)? How do you discover their problem, and how can you help when you do not have a trusting relationship?
Unfortunately, a common way you find out that someone representing your company is not meeting your standards is when a customer complains. If you are lucky, the disappointed customer will contact you when the employee still works at her facility.
A more common situation occurs when the customer needs another engineer to visit and tells the dispatcher, “Please do not send me the same person who was here last time.” At that moment, you are screwed. When the gig worker is the engineer assigned to that territory, and your other engineers are solidly scheduled for the next three days, how can you instantly send someone else to the customer? A technical support engineer must fly to the customer and fix the problem. You must eat the extra costs because your representative created an unsatisfactory customer situation.
To learn more about not meeting customer’s expectations, tap here
The solution
You must implement a process to email a short satisfaction survey to the customer who signed the service report within 24 hours after closing it. The survey should consist of two questions plus a place to add a comment:
- How satisfied are you with our overall performance in dealing with this work order? ✩✩✩✩✩
- How happy were you with how our service engineer interacted with you while working on this work order? ✩✩✩✩✩
- Please add a comment here:
Include the two ratings and any comments with your closed work order record. The ratings should also be tallied for each engineer, both permanent and outside workers, and analyzed by person, product, and type of work (installation, PM, repair, upgrade, etc.) It would help if you considered these suggestions after you have a substantial number of returns for most engineers:
- Reward the top-tier performers with a quarterly bonus. They can be either full-time employees or gig workers.
- Publicize the top performers internally and when you acknowledge the engineer’s scheduling in an email to the customer.
- Make sure you consider customer ratings when evaluating promotions.
- Provide extra training to the employees with low satisfaction ratings.
- Keep reminding the service engineers not to influence how customers rate their performance. Trying to control a customer should be a severe infraction and consequences.
Suppose you discover an engineer employed by a third-party service organization has a poor satisfaction score. In that case, you must talk with your contact at the organization and jointly agree on a plan to either correct the problem or take it off your account. If the engineer is an independent gig worker, you must develop a replacement or find another solution to the problem. You cannot continue to send an engineer to your customers when you know the customer will not be satisfied!
Conclusion
Over time, the service engineer you send to any customer spends more time with them than any of your company’s employees. They become the face of your company, and they form the company’s brand image. That is why field service has become the most significant brand differentiator for any OEM. After each work order is closed, you should send the customer a short survey, including a question about your field service engineer or a gig worker.
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About Middlesex Consulting
At Middlesex Consulting, we partner with the field service teams of B2B capital equipment companies challenged to grow their top and bottom lines. We use value creation, service marketing, and customer experience techniques to identify and create service offers that achieve customers’ desired business outcomes. To discuss how we can grow your business, write to Sam here.