The use of mobile devices has forever altered two things:

– Customer experience

– Customer expectations

For every field service enterprise, seamless communication between third-party technicians and homeowners has tremendous benefits. After working with these types of enterprises, we’ve seen a dramatic reduction in a handful of key performance indicators.  Those being, “no-shows,” improved scheduling coordination, happy customers, and churn rate. All of this is because of one thing, mobile technology that enables better customer experiences.

In this post, we’ll take a quick look at how mobile technology is creating quality experiences for both the homeowner and the contractor.

A quality experience from the homeowner perspective

The homeowner’s expectation for service quality is unfortunately pretty low. Whether it’s because of word-of-mouth, online reviews, popular culture, or personal experience, customers expect to get a five-hour scheduling window and know that whenever something in their home needs fixing that it will be a pain to resolve.

This isn’t good.

Even when the home service visit successfully resolves the problem, customers may be dissatisfied because of the inconvenience.

Mobile technology offers the opportunity to change all this. It allows customers to have better, more transparent communication with contractors. This isn’t anything new. Look around your current life, we’ve seen mobile technology improve the customer experience in areas like transportation (Lyft and Uber) and food (GrubHub). These well-known, mobile-enabled platforms have created heightened customer expectations for transparency and simplicity, which now have spilled over into other industries – the reason for this article.

These heightened expectations have now become pervasive. Indeed, customers will reward home service technicians who adopt these mobile trends (with their loyalty), simply because the home service industry is late to adopt it. So, if anything, this blog post can be your wake-up call for jumping on this competitive advantage. We, for example, enable customers to have simple, transparent, and constant communication with contractors through our out-of-the-box solution. Customers can:

– Receive mobile appointment reminders, so they can schedule their time accordingly.

– Track the estimated time of arrival (ETA) of their third-party contractor, which again promotes scheduling convenience and transparency of information.

– Send text messages to their third-party technician about any scheduling concerns, or perhaps to update them on the home service problem as it unfolds.

– Pay online for any service costs.

– Rate their overall experience for each service visit.

When you add up all these benefits, each one giving customers more communication, convenience, and control, what you get is a vastly improved customer experience enabled by mobile technology. It’s already happening for customer experience outside of home service, and now it’s happening (and long-overdue) in home services.

Quality experience from the contractors perspective

A contractor never wants to enter a job meeting an angry, frustrated homeowner who’s seething because of long waits and a lack of communication. The “last mile” of service is massively important for service quality. Get it wrong, and customer experience suffers, fast. Get it right, and you have fewer “bad surprises” to worry about — because you will have real-time insight into how the customer is experiencing your service.

Transparent communication doesn’t just create certainty for customers, but for third-party contractors too. You’ll know what to expect when you walk into a home and you’ll know when problems arise, allowing you to deal with them in real-time. Here are a few of the clearest benefits of using a mobile-enabled platform:

– You’ll increase the number of communication touchpoints with your customers, sharing relevant information and enhancing coordination. In fact, Dispatch users typically increase the number of communication touchpoints by more than 200%, vastly improving customer experience.

– You significantly decrease the number of “no-shows” by 86% when you use the “On My Way” notification, another huge win for customer experience.

– You gain mobile-enabled transparency that allows you to make a bad situation better, turning an angry customer into a loyal one who appreciates the efforts you’ve made to make things right. More communication means identifying and solving problems faster. Less communication may mean not knowing the customer even has a problem.

– Your mobile device can become your most important tool for driving quality customer experience. You can manage almost everything, scheduling, communication, after-service, and more, from your mobile device. No matter where you are, you have the ability to run your business and offer your customers a professional and customer-centric experience.

We know, for instance, that Net Promoter Score or NPS is a clear indication of the quality you deliver to your customers. Technicians who use Dispatch see a 35% increase in their NPS score. Customers appreciate the transparency and simplicity of a mobile-enabled experience and they’ll reward you for providing it to them. Customers will remember you, speak well of your service, and return to you when they have a problem.

The Bottom Line

If you offer a great customer experience through mobile technology, your customers will become the best marketers and advertisers for your business. If you want to drive the kind of customer experience that builds customer loyalty and grows your business, mobile technology is a necessary tool for doing just that.