How to Improve Customer Retention in Field Service

Customer retention is vital for any business to stay afloat, particularly in industries that rely on field service workers. Not only do repeat customers keep revenue stable, it’s easier and more cost-effective to retain a current customer than it is to market to and capture a new customer. Plus it’s easier to cross-sell or upsell people who’ve already purchased from you and trust your brand.

But these days, customers’ expectations are at an all-time high. According to a 2023 Zendesk report, 72 percent of customers expect immediate service, and a recent Microsoft report states that 55% of customers expect companies to improve their customer service year after year. 

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. 

To stay ahead of consumers’ rising expectations for the customer experience, companies need to implement thoughtful strategies to keep people coming back. In this article, we’ll cover some of those strategies to boost customer retention and how your field service workers can help you get there.

Deliver excellent customer service

One of the most critical ways to improve your customer retention rates is to offer outstanding customer service. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, 80% of respondents claimed that the customer service they experience is just as important as the products and services themselves. Of customers who report feeling less valued, almost half (47%) said poor customer service is the leading reason why. 

For field service workers, that means coming to each job site with the right tools, knowledge and up-to-date information to hit the ground running. But what does that mean in practice? Let’s discuss some specific strategies to support field service staff in offering the best possible experience for their customers. 

Arrive on time

The first step to excellent customer service is to show up to the job site when the customer expects you. To help your field service team members do this, you need effective schedules. That means accounting for variables such as travel time between job sites, the type of service, and the skill levels of the staff available for the day. It also means you have to be agile enough to manage unexpected changes, like unplanned staff absences. 

Improve response times

Showing up quickly for emergencies is one of the best ways to avoid frustrated customers and keep important field service key performance indicators (KPIs), like mean time to service, in healthy territory. Not only do timely responses provide a superior customer experience, they help build brand loyalty, too. 

To ensure your team is nimble enough to juggle emergency calls with regular appointments, you need a sophisticated scheduling system. It should keep the job queue balanced and ensure emergencies are marked with clear visual cues to staff.

Communicate well and often

Good communication translates to results across all industries, and it ties back to every single stage of your customer’s experience. 

• Pricing – Start by being transparent about pricing for goods and services and what each price point entails. 
• Pre-appointment – Follow up by sending reminders for upcoming appointments and cancellation policies—even better, automate these reminders to take this onus off staff.
• Provide service – Make sure you actively engage the customer during their appointment to see if they have questions about anything. These questions could lead to the chance to upsell or offer complementary services. 
• Post-service – Once you’re done, promptly provide any necessary status updates. According to that same Salesforce report, 82% of customers are already using or interested in using a self-serve portal. So ideally, you have a robust scheduling platform that offers a self-service portal for customers to check on these updates or any follow-ups. 
• Personalized lead nurture – After follow-up appointments or services, it’s critical to stay in touch with your customers to stay on their radar and improve customer retention rates. For example, a week after the customer’s appointment, you might offer a coupon they can use for future service. 

Come prepared to do the job

Set your field service workers and technicians up to do their job well the first time. That means they have the right physical tools and access to necessary data from your customer relationship management (CRM) platform, like key information about the current job and the customer—plus historical data on past appointments. It also means they have enough time, including travel to and from sites, baked into their schedules.

The best way to set your team up for success here is to use an intelligent field service management platform that integrates with your CRM and allows for custom rules, like prompting technicians to view customer records before a job starts or updating the job status only when the assigned worker is a specific distance from the job site. These sorts of actions can improve key field service KPIs, like first time fix rates (i.e., whether or not issues are solved in a first appointment), which can bolster brand reputation and reduce customer churn.

Be consistent

Excellent customer service can’t happen in spurts—it needs to be consistent. In one recent survey from PWC, 59% of U.S.-based respondents reported they’d stop doing business with a brand after several disappointing experiences—and 17% said they’d leave after just one bad experience.  

To make sure bad customer experiences don’t plague your brand, start by ensuring processes and workflows are clearly documented and easily accessible to the right people. Then incorporate regular quality assurance (QA) checks to get a good sense of how well staff are doing their jobs. Depending on your industry, this could mean sending out post-service customer surveys or having designated QA technicians physically check behind workers.  

Regardless of your industry, this data should all feed into a field service management platform that can transform this data into easy-to-read dashboards that provide insights into how to improve.