Six strategies to improve customer service...

Every year we receive or record hundreds of requests to attend to or investigate a problem with essential safety measures. We have been recording these issues as cases within out business management system for a couple of years now and can report interesting trends.

What I am most excited about is the since the start of 2009 we have changed our case management model and it has paid big dividends.

As you can see from the graph, we started to record all issues in the new system in late 2008 and over the next 12 months we migrated all of our reporting into the new system. The build up of open cases over this time was massive, and the work load to resolve these issues seemed too big to jump over.

As I said earlier, since the start of 2009, we have completely overhauled our case management process, and the results can be seen in the chart. The first thing we started to do is prioritise each case, according to the following criteria;

• class (class is our term for the type of equipment fire alarm, sprinkler, extinguisher, etc.)
• source who reported the case
• issue type What was reported as the observed cause of the case or problem

Once a case is logged, it is then carefully managed by our Level 1 - Support team who keep a regular eye on the progress of each case according to priority.

Colour codes are also used as part of the new process to quickly identify cases according to their priority. 1-Critical, 2-Urgent, 3-Important, 4-Normal, 5-Low, 6-Scheduled and 7-Observation.

We also dedicated a white board to the task, which is situated right in the middle of the office for everyone to see. This is used to visually track each person throughout the day and for each week.

Every day now, we track two key metrics;

• Cases Logged
• Cases Closed

Obviously if you are logging more cases than you are closing then you are falling behind an not meeting the customers expectations.

During this time, we also implemented a customer portal, a new billing process and a new service report. Each of these also have improved our overall service delivery and customer satisfaction.

While there is always further improvements available, I am very pleased with commitment of our team to improve our service and response times.

If you would like more information about our case management systems or improving customer service, feel free to email me of give me a call.

Russ