I live in a beau­ti­ful south Florida beach town, but before you start send­ing me men­tal dag­gers, take note that it's mid May which means mid to upper 80's with daily trop­i­cal  thun­der­storms pump­ing up the humid­ity. Nat­u­rally, it's time for my HVAC unit to die. I've had field ser­vice tech­ni­cians out three times in the last month to fix freon leaks so I knew what was com­ing.  The unit was nine or ten years old which in Florida A/C years is like being 90 and still play­ing golf every day.

Still, I was anx­ious about replac­ing some­thing as cru­cial and expen­sive as my heat and air con­di­tion­ing equip­ment. So in prepa­ra­tion for the inevitable, I surfed the inter­net in hopes of deter­min­ing which brands were best so I could be a savvy shop­per. Ulti­mately, I found a post called the Top Ten Lies from the HVAC Indus­try that basi­cally said all equip­ment is equal and the only thing that makes a dif­fer­ence is Field Sup­port and the qual­ity of the instal­la­tion. OK, good to know. Although I wasn't in a posi­tion to "shop" for an installer, the good news was that I trusted the com­pany I'd been using to ser­vice my air con­di­tion­ing for the last 10 years.

So today I am hav­ing a new unit installed and I thought I'd share a cou­ple snap­shots of my cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.  "Sam", a senior field ser­vice tech­ni­cian who has been here before, and his appren­tice arrived with the new A/C unit and got to work. I know the sec­ond man was an appren­tice not because any­one intro­duced them­selves but from over­hear­ing their con­ver­sa­tions . Yes, I'm eaves­drop­ping and it's very inter­est­ing.  After all I'm the cus­tomer and I have no earthly idea of how to do what they're doing. Hmm, now there's a thought. Maybe I'd feel bet­ter if some­one set some expec­ta­tions and let me know what was going on.

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: C

I know from what I've over­heard that their com­pany set an expec­ta­tion for about how long the install should take and that this instal­la­tion was going to "shoot their sched­ule all to *^#^$."  (Inter­est­ing logic. You can't see me sit­ting at my desk around the cor­ner from the work area, there­fore, obvi­ously, I can't hear you.)

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: C– and slipping

The space they're work­ing in is tight and appar­ently they don't have every­thing they need as wit­ness a cou­ple of calls to the office and a sub­se­quent quick trip to Home Depot. In a nice touch on his return, Sam said with a big smile, "You're get­ting more for your money." When I looked puz­zled he went on to explain, "You're get­ting new hoses.…because the new unit has a dif­fer­ent con­fig­u­ra­tion than the old one." Even though I had to choke back "Lucky me!" I really was very grate­ful to have new hoses and quite happy that he shared that news with me. Oth­er­wise I wouldn't know. It was a nice exam­ple of adding value and some­thing our field ser­vice train­ing pro­motes.

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: B

I was impressed with the way Sam worked with name­less appren­tice. (He seemed like a really nice guy but I never did learn his name.) Sam alter­nated between demon­strat­ing, check­ing his work, prais­ing things he did well, and show­ing him bet­ter tech­niques. This made me feel more con­fi­dent about the work being done. The name­less one was doing a good job from what I could gather. Although I did hear at one point a mum­bled "If I had the right mate­ri­als" which wor­ried me. Silly me, I'd hoped that they'd come with the "right mate­ri­als."  Hap­pily, one of the great things about good field ser­vice peo­ple  is they aren't daunted by a lit­tle set back like not hav­ing what they need. They fig­ure out how to work around it and make it work. (I hope. I wish I hadn't heard that comment.)

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: B–

Four hours later, as I wrote a check for the work, Sam took the oppor­tu­nity to rein­force that I'd made a good deci­sion and why. (Phew! I needed that con­sid­er­ing the heart­burn the check amount was giv­ing me.) He also shared some tips from his expe­ri­ence for get­ting the best air flow and keep­ing the unit at peak per­for­mance. That was very helpful.

• Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence: B+

So what did I learn?

1. Tech­ni­cal com­pe­tence isn't enough to ensure cus­tomer satisfaction.
2. What a field ser­vice rep says and does on site has a pow­er­ful effect on the cus­tomer experience.
3. While onsite, it's a good idea to speak and act as though your cus­tomer is present and observ­ing you.

With a back­ground in per­for­mance improve­ment and instruc­tional design, Mon­ica Postell works with Impact Learn­ing Sys­tems in design­ing and deploy­ing train­ing and devel­op­ment pro­grams that fos­ter real cus­tomer loyalty.

Mon­ica Postell

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