Three Crucial Tactics for Keeping Your Customers In the Loop

“We’ll get back to you.” 

Those four simple words are a surefire way to alienate your customers. Today’s customers demand immediate answers and want continuous updates about the service you’re providing to them. For field service deliverables, that translates into expectations for continuous, real-time information such as: 

• realistic estimates for a technician’s arrival time
• the current location of a technician en route to an appointment with the customer
• alerts about any changes or problems that could affect service delivery

ZInier delivers robust capabilities to keep customers in the loop about the status of their appointments and the technicians they’ll be interacting with. These capabilities are easily managed, despite the underlying complexity of the data that needs to be coordinated. 

When deploying functionality to keep customers informed with this type of information, keep in mind three key tactics that your solution should provide: 

• robust abilities to track technician locations with a variety of options needed by different stakeholders (e.g., customers as well as backoffice personnel)
• privacy protections (particularly vital when technicians are using their personal mobile device on the job)
• a customer-centric approach to sharing and displaying information

Track My Technician

Zinier’s Track My Technician functionality (part of Zinier’s Appointment Booking product) can be enabled via a simple configuration choice by any administrator of your Zinier solution. You can also configure the location interval – that is, how much time should elapse (five minutes, for example) before providing the next update on the technician’s location. 

The system also tracks last time seen data, which refers to the most recent time when each technician has used the app. This can help the dispatcher pinpoint the whereabouts of a technician in the event of a connectivity issue. It also helps backoffice personnel manage a situation in which, for example, a technician is delayed in traffic en route to a service appointment. Armed with this information, the backoffice can take the necessary steps to address the situation. 

Privacy Protections

As with any application using location-based services, permission is required to track the location of each person associated with a mobile device. The Zinier mobile app requests approval to track a technician’s location in the background, which they can easily toggle off. (Many technicians use their personal mobile devices on the job, so tracking their location may be inappropriate outside of work hours.) Additionally, as soon as the technician reaches the customer location, the customer’s access to the tracking data will end. 

Customer-Centricity

The technician's live location can be shared with customers along with a mix of visual information (maps) and text. These details can include the appointment date and time, as well as details about the behind-the-scenes progress, such as timestamps showing when the appointment was created, scheduled, and so forth. This provides customers with reassurances about their upcoming appointment throughout the experience. This kind of customer-centric experience ultimately helps to improve customer satisfaction with their service provider. 

The ability to keep customers in the service delivery loop is a critical part of many field service operations and provides an opportunity for service providers to deliver a significant differentiator to their customers.

For a deeper dive, you can see a short video demo of Zinier’s no-code customization capabilities here.