What Do Clients Expect from Your HVAC Company’s Customer Service?
Customer service isn’t about doing everything right. It’s about meeting your customer’s expectations. If you do that, customers can forgive mistakes and think of their experience and your business in a more positive light. So, understanding your customer’s expectations is the critical first step to understanding how to provide the best customer service, and therefore get referrals, reviews, and future business. Here are the key expectations your clients have from your HVAC company’s customer service.
Patient, Expert Advice
When customers first reach out to you they may have very different attitudes. Some people are reaching out about a concern, but they’re not really sure it warrants your attention. Others know their equipment needs work. Maybe it’s even an emergency situation.
In any case, they expect you to listen to them and offer expert advice patiently explained at their level of HVAC understanding. It is important that the person answering the phone knows how to offer good advice, and when to reach out to you for complicated problems. If they instead get responses like “I don’t know” and “it could be anything,” they’ll feel less secure in their choice to hire you.
Timely Arrival
A simple thing you can do to provide excellent service is to arrive when you say you will. If you struggle with this, you may need a different scheduling strategy. Slightly under booking and arriving early (as long as it’s not too early), can be beneficial to start arriving on time too.
Arriving on time shows that you respect the customer’s time and understand that they have a schedule they have to work around too. When clients know that they can rely on you to arrive promptly, they’ll be more likely to be flexible during scheduling itself.
Quick, Informed Service
When it comes to actually completing your job, you have to balance competing expectations from customers. Your first goal is do you work properly, but customers also expect fast service. You can help make your work feel faster if you give clients a clear timeline of how long your work should take. It’s fine if that timeline changes, so long as you keep the customer informed of the change and why. When they aren’t left wondering what you’re up to, time passes faster. And, when they know why you’ve added an extra few hours to the work, they’re more understanding.
Clean-Up
Most customers want a hands-off experience when it comes to HVAC. That means they don’t want to have to clean up after you when you’re gone. Cleaning up may take a moment or two, but it’s worth doing so that the customer never feels inconvenienced by you.
Follow-Up
You know that a customer’s problem is resolved, but in their mind, there’s no way for you to really know unless you follow up. Have your receptionist call customers a day or a week after you’ve completed their job. This shows customers that you truly care about them, and it leaves a great impression in their minds. Besides, the call doesn’t cost you anything but a bit of time, as almost all customers will confirm that their problem is resolved.