Being able to fall off your bike without hurting yourself is a great skill to have. But not falling off your bike is an even better one.
The same thing applies to managing a business. When it comes to dealing with customer complaints - prevention really is better than cure.
When things go wrong, great customer service is essential, but being able to prevent customer complaints is even more beneficial: tackling the source of those most common complaints.
When you’re delivering products and services which rely on the vagaries of the UK road system, not everything is going to run like clockwork.
But thanks to digital technology, there are now simple ways to minimise the numbers of grumbles and disputes your company is liable to face.
It’s the reason why so many companies are now moving over to mobile workforce management systems.
The real-time information they provide is great for customer services but even better at removing the source of complaints.
How mobile businesses can prevent client complaints:
- Paper free processes
- Clearer communications
- Digital trail
Paper free processes
One of the main sources of problems when it comes to the everyday running of a business, is paperwork. It’s all those things that can go wrong when you’re reliant on the shuffling of pieces of paper - the work orders which get mislaid, the customer notes which go missing and invoices which get forgotten about.
A digital system such as MyMobileWorkers removes the reliance on physical pieces of paper and paper based management, everything is handled digitally. Mobile workers receive all the information they need for a job via the smartphone app and mobile workforce productivity is improved.
Clearer communications
At the root of many complaints is a lack of knowledge. It’s when a customer or client feels they’re left in the dark - not knowing what’s happening to an order or why a scheduled delivery hasn’t turned up.
And if you don’t have real-time monitoring of your mobile workers, you’re going to struggle to give them that information when they contact your company. With a digital system, you have everything on hand, down to what street a delivery van is currently in.
But you can also allow customers and clients to see the latest information for themselves. The MyMobileWorkers system lets you set-up a client portal where they can access all the latest updates to an order’s status.
Digital trail
A great way to minimise complaints and disputes is to remove fuzzy areas from your work processes. Those are the areas where it’s hard to say who’s in the right or wrong - lateness of a delivery, quality of a job, mess caused by workers etc.
A digital system lets you remove these grey areas by automatically creating a digital record of the entire work process. As well as all the details of where and when a job’s carried out, you can also integrate photos into the process.
So, for example, the workflow for a maintenance worker may include taking a picture of a finished repair job, this gets bundled together with all the rest of the job details.
If there’s any kind of dispute or complaint, you have the information at hand to prove exactly what was done and how the location looked when the mobile worker left.
