How real-time customer feedback improves service recovery

Customers almost always have feedback after a service engagement and, whether it’s good or not, they want to share it. Either way, the best time to gather feedback from your customer is immediately after an appointment. This sounds counterintuitive to many – but research shows time and time again that a prompt request for feedback is an effective strategy for improving service recovery. Why is that?

The feedback you collect from customers loses value for your team over time. Negative reviews submitted days or weeks after a service call usually get a response from support teams too late to make amends. There’s also the possibility that the client doesn’t remember all of the details that made them upset in the first place. Your team might be left spinning their wheels digging for appointment details or even reaching out to those that don’t need a follow-up call at all.

Service recovery is all about righting wrongs, and you may be surprised that the impact goes beyond just making customers happy. Generating feedback in real-time can help turn around negative experiences and even reduce the workload for your team in the process. It’s a win-win situation for your team and your customers. 

In this article, we’ll discuss how real-time customer feedback improves the service experience, as well as some service recovery strategies to help keep your customers happy. 

Real-time feedback: The benefits for service recovery

As you build a service recovery strategy, first consider the best channel to ask for feedback, the next steps for the information you gather, and the most useful questions to ask. 

Here are the top ways real-time feedback can improve your service recovery strategy:

1. Resolve issues fast

The best feedback is generated in the first half hour or so, while the appointment is still fresh in your customer’s mind. This allows for time to step away from the experience and consider what went well or what could have been better while avoiding a lengthy time period in which they forget the details of their experience.

Plus, research suggests that customers’ opinions of their service experience tend to cool over time — the longer you wait to get feedback, the more focused the customer will be on the minuses of their experience. This can impact your ratings, your engineer reviews, and everything else about your customer review programme. 

2. Make every interaction count

Service calls may be the only interaction clients have with your company, which means they have a disproportionate impact on customer impressions. 

When you get feedback right after a visit, your customer care team can help to ensure satisfaction on the day of service. This allows you to get out in front of pressing issues before they affect the customer’s view of your company and gives insights about recurring challenges – a lack of materials or issues with a specific contractor – before they become a problem for multiple customers. 

Quick, responsive feedback also allows you to see what’s working well, so you can identify and reward high performers (and replicate good service experiences for more customers). 

3. Improve mobile worker satisfaction

Being a field technician is hard work. While they’re doing great work every day, they may not be aware of the positive impact they’re creating on an individual case-by-case basis. 

Timely feedback fills in that gap, so you can recognise them for any positive comments. That way, supervisors can share feedback same-day to boost employee satisfaction and engagement. Automated feedback requests collect valuable insights on technician performance without drawing away from customer care resources, so your supervisors get more actionable information delivered seamlessly to their fingertips.

4. Reduce strain on technicians and office staff

Even with the best staff, it’s unlikely that all appointments will be perfect. The faster you can deal with setbacks, the more likely you are to achieve a quick, cost-effective resolution that diffuses the situation before it becomes stressful for everyone involved.

Real-time feedback reduces support costs by streamlining the follow-up process. Ideally, technicians can use feedback results to resolve issues the same day, avoiding repeated calls and visits which can be frustrating and resource-intensive. 

If the service call goes well, you can have all details available for a follow-up phone call if needed. Many people will opt-out, which allows you to reduce customer centre workloads and conserve resources for more pressing issues. Localz’ client Welsh Water added tickboxes to their feedback forms asking if customers wanted a follow-up call and a full 83% of them opted out.

Automating aspects of your feedback process can improve your team’s bandwidth and efficiency.

5. Build trust and demonstrate openness 

Customers expect transparency and accountability from any service they use. When something doesn’t go as planned, they expect that someone will be acting on their concerns (and doing so in an efficient manner). 

Appointment based feedback lets you handle it job by job, showcasing how customer experience is a priority for the organisation. This helps to build bridges with customers, both happy and unhappy, to show dedication to service. 

It can also open up channels of communication that allow for leniency and patience when things don’t go perfectly.

6. Monitor changes to service

When big shifts happen internally or externally, services provided may need to adjust accordingly. 

For example, in light of the global pandemic, services had to adapt to adjust to longer waits, increased social anxiety, and safety measures like social distancing. Many companies weren’t sure how to handle service calls in a way that made their customers feel supported. 

Several companies asked Localz to help support real-time feedback to get customer responses on their experiences and were able to make adjustments to ensure that they got the service they wanted how they wanted it.

Conclusion

Getting timely feedback can help your staff save resources while creating positive experiences for your customers — even if things didn’t go perfectly during their appointment.

Localz has extensive experience improving service recovery protocols for companies in a number of customer care industries. Here are a few of our final tips to help ensure you’re collecting feedback in the best way possible:

• Send feedback requests right after the technician leaves the property to make space for honesty from your clients. GPS-powered automation enablement makes this timing effortless for your team. 
• Keep it simple — fewer questions usually lead to better insights. 
• Automate back-office alerts for poor feedback so your team can respond as soon as possible.
• Ensure every review is tied to a specific job so you can identify needs, see good work, and spot performance trends.