Field service personnel have a job to do, and this job will often require leaving the workplace and attending a range of sites or locations for them to carry out their work. In some cases, this will include attendance to private property. Most property owners are interested in caring for their property, and that means vetting anyone who asks to come in, for whatever purpose.
As such, inspiring trust in your service professionals will ensure a clean in-and-out task completion without necessarily being held up by mistrust or miscommunication. In other words, it’s important for your business to understand being let into people’s homes or places of business to work on critical systems or assist with infrastructure requires tacit acceptance from those letting them in.
For that reason, we must do everything we can to inspire trust, confidence, and convenience. This way, your personnel will never be artificially held back and can complete their projects on time and to standard.
In this post, we’ll discuss eight methods of inspiring trust in your field service personnel, the use of which will reflect positively on your brand and its values:
1. Appointment Reminders & Tracking
When a customer or client can feel fully informed about a technician’s arrival, they will feel less qualms about letting them in and giving them time to perform their duties. This may also include tracking to let them know when they’re the next stop on a technician’s schedule.
Appointment reminders can also remind certain clients to allow access to trucks or other vehicles that may need to carry inventory for the particular task set.
Perhaps you can remind them to offer any temporary access codes that the technician might not have access to otherwise or to allow access if the client won’t be around at that time.
Of course, offering the chance to postpone and reschedule that meeting ahead of time can prevent your staff from arriving only to see their duties impeded.
This careful planning effort will genuinely make a difference in the transparent communication your staff use to commit to their workday.
2. Verified Identifiers & Call To Confirm
Licensed badges, identity cards, and an official contact number for your client to call and verify the correct staff member has been assigned are all appropriate and should be shown at request.
This way, you can ensure clients feel safe allowing strangers into their homes or commercial premises, as you will have given your consent to the visit.
Most of the time, this method will be enough to continue the service call. It’s also worth making sure those identity badges are clear, use a photo ID to verify with the person in front of them, and they make have a unique seal or identifier that cannot be printed by others.
This way, you enhance security on both sides and ensure your staff are the only people who can confidently operate under your commercial banner.
3. Robust Conduct, Communication & Safety Training
Of course, ultimately your staff’s conduct in the role will define how your business is viewed and to what extent it’s trusted. That’s why it’s important to schedule robust conduct, communications, and safety training, so every colleague can be affable when trusted with entry into someone’s home or commercial quarters.
This might mean learning how to communicate their complicated job to a layperson with confidence, how to properly quote, how to generate an on-site invoice, how to schedule further work, and how to give calm instructions to render the space safe before work can begin.
Safety training can also include first aid training in case someone is injured on the task, securing the data rights of the clients you manage, and more. Finally, diversity and inclusion training can help staff understand and better connect with the range of different people they’ll meet regarding on-site tasks, including how to be culturally sensitive and aware.
With these efforts combined, you’ll be sure to see a positive and healthy outcome, and moreover, can trust your staff to operate without your constant oversight.
4. Documenting Work Conducted
Stringent documentation will allow for appropriate accountability where necessary, while also ensuring jobs are tracked from the moment your personnel arrives on site. Logging procedures that help establish every task undertaken, reports that help finalize and summarize work conducted, and also a valid complaints procedure that permits issues to be raised to the higher-ups will all count, and will all be useful.
Again, training staff to properly complete these documents and giving them the tools to update them throughout their site attendance (perhaps with robust tablets and other management tools) can be nothing if not helpful. Using these tools, you can also empower decision-making at the field level, ensuring staff feel trusted to make autonomous decisions and give their reasoning for that in acceptable documentation that will back their case.
5. Correct Field Service Management
Ultimately, you can’t expect staff to act independently and well if you fail to manage them appropriately. You have to provide the framework in which they can act, attend sites, and know how to conduct themselves in each instance.
With the best field service management software, this is more than possible. That might include planning site attendance, keeping up with regulations and working parameters, backing up essential information to the cloud, and ensuring clients can rely on your dependable job planning system.
Without this backbone to help your on-site personnel, it’s hard to get a clear reading of which clients are being served, the tasks being undertaken, and any flaws or improvements you could notice or make.
6. Fostering A Culture Of Trust
It’s good to foster a culture of trust between your managers and your personnel. If staff are expected to operate in an affable sense, to provide good documentation, to handle a range of new sites, to drive there, to be in continual management with your team and the software you use to direct them, well, that takes trust.
As such, it’s important to be clear about how you trust your staff, and what practical outcomes that might offer. For example, if there’s a disagreement between a client and a staff member, it’s important to de-facto consider that your staff had acted appropriately until proven otherwise.
It’s also important to avoid penalizing staff for jobs that run over time, to demand constant updates about where they might be unless truly deviating from the fleet course, nor to count their lunch breaks to the minute.
Treating them like people on the front lines of spreading your brand value and qualities to people will encourage them to do that, and they’ll be proud to wear the smart uniform you supply them – for free – as they move from task to task.
7. A Robust Error-Reporting System
Not all tasks go to plan. If a staff member cannot fully complete a scheduled project, then error reporting with documentation such as videos, pictures, and texts of the broken equipment will help you plan a new course of action.
This robust error reporting system should check against warranties, offer the clients a sense of recourse like replacement or remuneration, and stay in continual communication with them year-round for convenience.
This way, even when your personnel might have to disappoint,t they still have something robust and worthwhile to offer.
With this advice, you’ll be sure to inspire trust in your field service personnel, from the top down and the bottom up. When these staff members are given the freedom and trust to operate well on a daily basis, they reflect the best of your firm.
