Service reliability and gaining repeat business are of course related – when service reliability improves so does the chance of gaining a customer for life - or at least until the next time your HVAC services are needed.
And conversely poor service reliability erodes the chance that a customer will call you the next time they need their air con unit or heating system needs to be serviced.
Service reliability is essentially made up of four factors – effectiveness, predictability, reliability and customer-friendliness.
All of these factors are influenced heavily by the technician themselves – their product knowledge, problem solving skills, customer service ethic, interpersonal skills and more. However, components of the first three factors – effectiveness, predictability and reliability – can also be positively influenced through the use of standardised job sheets available in job scheduling and dispatch software.
Read now: Ultimate Guide to HVAC job dispatching
Let’s take each one in turn – how does standardising air conditioning job sheets and workflows drive each factor?
Effectiveness: HVAC installers are skilled technicians.
However, if they arrive onsite without a clear idea of the job scope, it is very hard to be effective and productive. A clear maintenance job brief will mean that the technician will arrive with the right tools, standard spare parts for that unit and a clear idea what is required. Nothing is worse than a technician showing up without any idea of the problem.
In a similar way, a new air con install that has been properly scoped and sized prior to install day, will mean that the technician has the right parts, tools – and even enough time to manage the project on the first visit.
The heart of a job brief is standardisation – standardising all job sheets into workflows removes the chance for what a job involves. It means all the necessary information is collected from the customer when the job is booked. Flexible job management software should be able to cope with any level of detail, job type, fields and other requirements when creating workflows. Once the workflows are set up - administrators can create automatically repeating maintenance jobs at the agreed intervals or alternatively enter information for ad hoc jobs as the need arises.
One of our HVAC customers has over 40 types of job sheets in vWork to help his team maintain effectiveness – and as a result, they have installing contractors lining up to work with them as it is driving up the productivity of installers.
Predictability: Predictability creates consistency. And it is consistency which increases confidence and builds repeat business.
A simple example illustrates this point – if a technician cleans and tidies up the work area after finishing a job, customers will expect that this happens on their next visit. This set of agreed actions that happens on each visit gives the customer a sense of your organisations values and what they can expect each time – on the whole, this appeals to most people. Using standardised job sheets with a final site clean and check built-in will ensure there is a greater chance of a consistent service experience and therefore is predictable. This simple example shows how standardised job sheets drive predictability.
Reliability: The final factor is reliability. Reliability can take many forms.
For many people, it relates to punctuality or the technician having enough time to complete the job during the allocated time. But if we are considering reliability in the context of job sheets, it is the measure relating to completing a job in full first time. A lot of the ground work behind building reliability into each job sits with standardising job sheets. If for example, the dispatcher asks a standard series of questions from the customer for each of the different servicing scenarios, then there is a greater chance the technician will arrive with a better ability (and the spare parts) to complete the repair.
Job management software, such as vWork, can absolutely help you build a strong base of repeat customers. With a no-code set up, it can be configured to any process, job sheet or health and safety needs. And with the added layer of compulsory fields, you know that your HVAC service experience will meet your reliability, predictability and effectiveness goals every time.
Get in touch or request a demo if you’d like to see what vWork could do for your business today.