It has to be one of the most painful parts of managing - trying to resolve disputes with customers and clients.
And when you’re managing mobile workers, it doesn’t matter how good a team is, you’re always going to face occasional complaints.
It m
ay be somebody angry about a late delivery, or claiming that your employee damaged their property or they failed to spot something during an inspection.
The problem is that some of these complaints will be perfectly valid and others will be a misunderstanding or somebody just trying it on.
It’s trying to determine this which makes handling complaints such a painful, time consuming and potentially costly process.
Get something wrong and you’re liable to soon be reading about it in the form of angry customer rants on social media and damaging feedback left on ratings sites.
While there’s no magic button to stop complaints, technology does provide us with ways to massively reduce the amounts of stress and strain caused.
It’s one of the reasons that so many companies are now moving over to mobile workforce management software, providing a replacement for old paper-based processes.
The software logs everything - where each fieldworker is, what tasks they’re doing, what safety checks have been completed; when a job is started and finished.
Manage customer complaints
With a system such as MyMobileWorkers, it can be configured to integrate photos into each task log – a snap of a delivered item or a finished repair site.
Because all of the information is stored and updated in real-time, you always have the information needed to deal with complaints, to work out it’s valid or not.
It’s a solution to the old problem of now knowing who to believe when there’s a dispute between a customer and one of your employees.
With a mobile workforce management system, if a customer calls to say that an item wasn’t delivered, your team can instantly pull up the job info and have all the details at hand.
It will identify the mobile worker, what they did, when and where they did it. It will also include any digital signature provided by whoever signed for it.
So at a glance, a company can judge the validity of a complaint and make an informed decision on the best way to handle it.
And if there has been a genuine mix-up, the system will help to quickly untangle the problem and allow your organisation to put things right.
Damage claims
Another example of how the system can help is if a client accuses one of your workers of causing damage to a property during a site visit.
By using software such as MyMobileWorkers, organisations can enable employees to include before and after photos of a work site to be taken. It provides visual proof that a location was left exactly the way it was found.
The images are automatically uploaded and integrated into the log of the job, along with all the rest of the details.
But perhaps the biggest advantage of using digital systems is to prevent customer complaints, rather than cure. With access to accurate, real-time data, it removes those grey areas from which problems are most likely to emerge.
