Who Cares About Customer Satisfaction?
This is the second post in my HOW series, you can read the first one here. This time I thought we could digress a moment here at the end of the busy summer; relax, sit back and just talk a little bit about something very near and dear to my heart. You.
Specifically, I mean your satisfaction with us. It’s no secret that customer service across North America has generally been in decline over the last 30 years or so. There are a whole lot of factors involved in this unfortunate business trend, not the least of which is the roller coaster economy of just the past few years. Many a company has lost valuable customer service resources and budgets, or simply taken their eye off customer satisfaction as a business fundamental. For whatever reason, customers just can’t seem to get no satisfaction. But the recent resizing of businesses is not the only culprit, bad HVAC businesses are central to this problem for us.
Sometimes people ask why I’m so concerned about warning people about the pervasive AC and heating repair thieves. Well, besides simply wanting to keep my customers from getting ripped off, unethical contractors help to give the HVAC industry I love a bad rap with their terrible customer service and fraudulent business practices. Sometimes these companies are obvious frauds, but they can also be pretty slick con artists.
How We Do Business Differently
For over 15 years, Service Experts, including all of our 3000+ dedicated employees have been on a quest. That quest has been to get to the heart of what our customers really want out of their HVAC repair company, and then deliver it to them all the time. Things like our
100% Satisfaction Guarantee, easy appointment scheduling, and highly professional technicians are just a few of the things people told us they want. The basic result of our years of consumer research became our exclusive
Five Standards of Excellence. These are the standards of service we strive to provide to thousands of homeowners every single day. To us, our Five Standards are not just words on a page; they are words we live by.
How To Give Us Your Valuable Feedback
But like any company we still fall short from time to time. So as part of our ongoing quest, we developed a new, easy way for you to let us know how well we’re meeting our own Standards of Excellence. It’s a simple 10 question satisfaction survey our customers can take online.
Here’s how it works. When you schedule an appointment with Service Experts by phone, we ask for your email address and your permission to send you a confirmation of your appointment in an email (when you schedule online this confirmation email is automatically sent). Your appointment confirmation email will include a confirmation code that is used to access the online survey.
Several days after your service appointment you should also receive an email requesting you to complete the online satisfaction survey based on your experience with our company. To access the survey, click the link in the email.. The survey itself is 10 questions answered on a scale of 1 to 10. There is also an area to provide additional comments and details. The results are calculated via a hoity toity, top secret scientific formula. The results are provided to our teams responsible for continuous improvement, and of course, all information collected is kept completely confidential.
What We Do With The Results
On an ongoing basis, any results requiring follow-up are sent to our local service centers for prompt follow-up with the customer. The complete tabulated results are reviewed monthly and quarterly, to determine areas for overall company improvement. Since we started this formal customer satisfaction measurement program in July of 2009, we’ve received over 46,000 completed surveys. Our customer’s direct feedback helps make major improvements in how we operate, communicate with our technicians, and have even changed the way we train our technicians to communicate! Your feedback makes that improvement possible. Ain’t technology grand?
So, What Are People Saying?
I’m pleased to say that since we started the online program, we’ve found that the vast majority of our customer’s have an exceptional service experience, even during the summer when we’re running emergency cooling calls at all hours of the day and night. In fact, Service Experts locations overall have a more than 90% customer satisfaction level as of July 2010. Not too shabby for a humble company that simply started with a few friends coming together to discuss better customer service practices! (But that’s another story I’ll save for a future post).
With the customer’s permission, we publish some of the comments we receive on each of our location’s Testimonials web page and share some great stories here on my blog. To read some of their experiences, just
click here to browse to your nearest location and then click on the Testimonials tab.
Believe it or not, sometimes we even get comments from happy ‘non-customers’, people who have never done business with us, but for one reason or another tell us they definitely will! You won’t want to miss reading this experience…
I just wanted to let you know. Today I was at the Martin's grocery store. One of the very nice gentlemen that work for you, he was wearing a blue short sleeve shirt with cook heating and air on it, he must have just gotten off work. Anyways I was taking my grandmother grocery shopping and I was pulling her in a wheelchair and pushing a cart and he was so very kind and helped push her out to the car in the wheelchair for me. He made me believe there are good people still in this world and the fact that he works for you makes me believe that you hire good people. Therefore due to his generosity and kindness and the fact he was wearing your uniform the next time I wanted to let you know that if I need any help for heating or cooling at my home that I will be contacting you. I do not know his name, he was a thin, taller, mid 30's maybe, but I wanted to send my sincere thank you(s) to him and appreciation on behalf of both me and my grandmother and let you know that your employee definitely won you a customer today if I ever need heating or air conditioning work done in my home. M. Wagner, South Bend, IN
If you’ve had us to your home recently, your comments (good, bad, indifferent or otherwise) will help us improve our customer service in the future. We deeply appreciate every comment; each one is an opportunity for us to improve. So go ahead, tell me what you think! If you want to just drop us a line for anything at all, just click the Contact Us button at the top of our site.