Promoting the adoption of Dispatch across your network is one of the most important things you can do to get the most value out of our platform.

Courtesy of their partnership with your brand, providers in your network have access to a wide variety of features in Dispatch, and to a great new training resource called Dispatch Academy. Dispatch Academy is a dedicated help and training center for providers in your network, which includes a variety of blissfully brief tutorial videos (most are under 3 minutes). 

Dispatch Academy covers a wide variety of training topics for your providers including:

• Getting the most out of our mobile apps
• Creating estimates and billing documents
• Communicating with you and your customers
• Pulling reporting and analytics
• Ensuring a great experience for your customers

We think it’s important for your providers to have access to quick demos of all of the tools they have at their disposal and the ability to see these features in action, and the new Dispatch Academy is a great way to provide ongoing support and education for them.

Dispatch Academy is accessible to anyone by visiting academy.dispatch.me in your web browser.

Help your network reap the full benefits of Dispatch for their business and pass the word along!

The post Dispatch Digest – Is your network leveraging Dispatch at its fullest potential? appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

By using Dispatch, Flo was able to engage their contractors, optimize their service operations, open up transparent messaging across all parties in the service experience, and provide loyalty-inspiring experiences to their customers.

“We needed to be able to connect the homeowner to the contractor and to have visibility into the job. We needed to be able to communicate with the contractor and see their activity, and then to follow up with them and find out about what happened with each job.

We found Dispatch and it’s allowed us to bring a great experience to our customers and our installers. It’s allowed us to build a great relationship with them, and to get feedback from our customers that our installers are doing what they should be doing – giving great service.”

With Dispatch, Flo by Moen was able to:

• Reduce service call volume
• Reduce time spent on operational task
• Reduce job cycle time
• Increase customer NPS and CSAT

Download our case study today to see how we did it.

The post Case Study – How Dispatch Helped Flo by Moen Gain Visibility and Increase NPS appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

By using Dispatch, KeyMe was able to implement a new home-service business model, ensure locksmith compliance, and significantly improve the end customer experience – all through an out-of-the-box solution requiring little effort from their team.

“Our customers care about three things – urgency, up front pricing, and a flawless experience with our locksmiths. Dispatch enables us to deliver on all three.”

With Dispatch, KeyMe was able to improve customer NPS by 5x and locksmith NPS by 2x.

Download our case study today to see how we did it.

The post Case Study – How Dispatch Helped KeyMe Differentiate with Customer Experience appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

In this issue of the Dispatch Digest, we will highlight a few lesser-known but majorly powerful features inside Manage, and show you how to access our great training materials to make sure you are getting the most out of Dispatch.

Let’s get started!

Account User Filters

There is an abundance of valuable service intelligence data in Manage – so much that it may be overwhelming, especially if you have users who need different levels of visibility into the data. 

We recently launched a way to allow different levels of access to different users within each company that uses our software. Account User Filters allow you to display or suppress certain data depending on the user.

This flexibility opens up endless possibilities around who can benefit from Manage, even if you don’t want everyone to have complete visibility into all of your data.

This even allows you to enable users outside your organization to see certain things. This is great for distributors, dealers, or service providers who work closely with your organization and could benefit from some of the great reports you have access to.

Account User Filters are available to all Manage users. Work with your Dispatch account manager to enable them today!

Technician Reporting

When you look at your service providers in Manage, you can see valuable data such as SLA compliance and average customer reviews. Our reporting gets even more granular, though, allowing you to see metrics about the people in the field actually doing your jobs. We call this Technician Reporting – though it isn’t limited to just field service technicians.

Service providers sometimes have difficulty determining performance at a technician-level. With Dispatch, we monitor metrics such as: 

• First time fix rate
• Technician rating
• Average time to complete

Gaining access to these metrics can help you work with your pros to identify the best technicians, and help lower-performance technicians improve their performance.

Combined with Account User Filters, you can share versions of Manage with distributors or key service providers, giving them direct access to this valuable data.

Manage Training and Support

Don’t forget, the Manage help center is always available for you inside our platform. It can answer frequently asked questions and help you discover even more great Manage features.

Check out the short videos for each Manage dashboard, available now in the help center!

The Help Center is available to all Manage users, and can be found quickly by clicking “Help Center” in the bottom left corner of every Manage screen.

The post Dispatch Digest – Getting the Most out of Manage appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

So I type “home service repair” into Google and find the highest-rated service company. After I call them and leave a message, I get a call back to schedule my appointment. At that moment, I realized that most service providers unknowingly neglect the most important thing about “home service” – the experience.

So, to all service providers, OEMs, or any company that offers in-home service, please listen to this plea…

My blood doesn’t boil because my pipes are leaking, my blood boils because of the moments between where I’m left in the dark with little to no communication from the service companies. These moments are the “experiences” that every home service company neglects – the hopeless minutes homeowners feel when waiting for the technician to arrive.

Modern companies have noticed that we live in a customer-centric world and customers now expect to be kept in the loop about everything! They want to know:

• Who is arriving?
• When will they be arriving?
• What do they look like?
• Can I leave feedback?
• Can I communicate with them ahead of time?
• Can I easily reschedule or cancel the appointment?
• Can I do everything on my phone?

With consumer expectations rising, it’s time to demand more of your brand and deliver a modern customer experience.

In this post, we break down how to turn those hopeless moments into tech-driven memorable experiences.

Step 1: The moment a customer needs help

Ask yourself this, how frustrating is it when companies make it difficult to schedule an appointment? You search for the “book now” button only to realize that they don’t have one. So you dial the dispatcher, wait for someone to call back, and schedule a time that most likely isn’t built around your schedule but theirs. Nothing about this sounds like an optimal customer experience does it?

The importance of customer experience in the age of instant gratification is now higher than ever.

How to fix step 1:

Simple. Build in a process that allows homeowners to schedule appointments with your company at a time and date that works best for them. Here’s what you do – add a “Book Now” button that takes homeowners to a form where they can share details about their need, fill out their contact information, select the best days and times that work well for them, and easily send their service request with a click of a button.

Then, and this is the most important part, the company sends the homeowner a text message confirming that they received the service request. This immediate communication lets the homeowner know that you have their best intentions in mind and you’re on it. It adds a little bode of confidence in their mind that your brand has everything under control.

Step 2: The moment the customer starts to feel left in the dark

How annoying is it when you text someone a question and they don’t get back for a few days? You start thinking – Are they mad at me? Was I too pushy? Why aren’t they responding? The silence messes with your rationality and just like any other human being you craft a narrative that explains/justifies their silence – often based on zero evidence.

The same goes for service companies. When I schedule an appointment and don’t hear anything from the company for a while, I begin thinking:

• “Did they forget about my appointment and do I need to call to confirm?”
• “Did I actually submit my request?”
• “Is this the right company to go with?”

So what do customers typically do? They call to confirm that the company got their request.

This weekend, I witnessed this exact thing. Before a scheduled carpet cleaning, the homeowner called to confirm that the appointment is still on. I thought to myself, why is it that people assume service companies will inevitably forget about them? It’s not the same in other industries. I don’t call my airline to make sure my ticket is still valid before my flight, so why should I call a home service company to confirm my appointment after it’s already been scheduled? It’s because we’re nurtured to expect a late technician or worse, a no-show.

This stems from the infrequent communication service providers have with their customers, causing homeowners’ latitude of patience to become exceptionally thin.

How to fix step 2:

It’s easy. Implement a tool like Dispatch and send automatic status updates to customers through SMS and/or email. Companies can pop off appointment confirmations, status updates, appointment reminders, on-my-way appointment notifications, feedback surveys, and much more. All of this helps your customers feel informed, aware, and most of all valued.

Step 3: The moment a customer can’t leave feedback

Before I purchase anything (product or service), I read online reviews. I do it before I buy online, and I do it while I buy in-store. I want to know what others are saying. I want to know what type of experience they had. I want to know if 3-weeks later the person still found value in it. I’m very willing to go to yelp or Google and leave a positive review if I had a good experience. Here’s a review I left after getting my tires changed.

I also left it on Yelp…

I wanted to blast it everywhere because I had a great experience and I want to push as many businesses as possible to the companies I enjoy. Most modern customers want their opinion voiced when someone does a good or poor job. It’s just the world we live in! The stigma here is that people only use reviews for negative things…this simply isn’t true. Case in point, look at all the reviews Car Zone has.

How to fix step 3:

Most companies don’t like asking for reviews – which is okay. Dispatch removes that awkward moment with a survey link that is authentically sent the moment a job is complete. So now you can collect every possible review and begin to solidify yourself as an excellent company to do business with.

As a customer, if I’m presented with a quick survey on my phone, I’m much more likely to fill it out – versus getting a link and having to type it in online.

Because of Dispatch’s feedback flow, they’ve helped companies increase their survey feedback response rate by 220%.

So if you’re a company and you’re looking to improve your last-mile customer experience then check us out. Everything presented here is why we exist as an organization. We strive to help home service companies deliver memorable customer experiences.

To learn more, request a demo.

The post How to make your customers feel extremely informed and incredibly valued appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

Sadly, it all falls apart during the “last mile”—the time between when you hand the customer off to your third-party service provider and when the technician finishes the job. For example, the technician doesn’t let the customer know he’s running late…he doesn’t have the right tools for the job…or he hands the homeowner a messy paper invoice and asks for a check.

Your third-party service providers are a reflection on your home warranty brand, so read on to discover how digitizing the last-mile customer experience—also known as last-mile CX—impacts your customer retention, profits, expenses, and more.

Every Stage of The Customer Journey Is the Most Important Stage

It’s a mistake to frontload all your amazing customer experience capabilities and then let it drop off at the end of the process. This excerpt from a white paper on customer experience by Jolt Consulting Group does a good job of explaining why:

CX is a cumulative result of each and every touchpoint; therefore, the impact of service on customers’ perceptions and experiences with a company must be evaluated through the complete service delivery chain—from service initiation to call centers to online portals all the way through to on-premise delivery of service. To achieve service excellence and improved CX, service organizations must develop best-in-class business processes, create new and unique ways to interact with their customers and invest in service technology to optimize these touchpoints.

Digitizing your last-mile CX helps optimize every touchpoint. For example:

• Omnichannel communication lets the homeowner interact with the service provider in the way they’re most comfortable with.
• On-my-way customer notifications give the homeowner the confidence of knowing when they need to be ready for the service visit. (No one likes wondering if they have time to duck out for a carton of milk before the technician arrives!)
• Automatic appointment reminders mean the homeowner doesn’t have to worry that they’ll forget about the service visit.
• Mobile payments let the homeowner pay quickly and easily using the method they prefer.
• Mobile feedback forms end the experience on a positive note by showing that the service provider cares about the homeowner’s experience.

From the beginning of the customer journey to the end, digitized last-mile CX offers homeowners a great experience that reflects well on your brand.

Customers Always Remember the Last-Mile CX

Let’s say your home warranty company delivers good CX all the way through the entire customer journey, but there’s a minor glitch in the last mile. What will customers remember most? 95% of the time you and your service provider delivered a positive experience or the 5% of the time that it was just “meh”?

Surprise: The “meh” last-mile CX is what will stick in their minds, giving customers an overall view of your service as “just OK” even though you scored well during the rest of the process.

Here’s why: The Peak-End Theory, developed by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, says that people don’t average out the highs and lows of an experience—they judge an experience by how they felt at its most intense moment, and how they felt at its end.

So unless you created an intensely positive or negative moment somewhere along the line, that last-mile customer experience is what your customers will remember most.

A Better CX = More Profits

Now we know that customers judge their experience based on the last mile. But how much is that worth to your home warranty company?

We admit: it’s hard to measure ROI on customer experience—so we’re lucky that the smart folks at Harvard Business Review did it for us.

In businesses with transactional revenue models (which are based on the sale of goods), customers who had the best past experiences spend 140% more compared to customers who had the worst past experience.

Even more relevant for a home warranty business are the data from subscription services: members who have the worst experience have only a 43% chance of being a member a year later, while those who have the best experience have a 74% chance of remaining a member for at least another year.

That increase in subscriber retention makes focusing on the last mile CX well worth the effort.

Focusing on Last-Mile CX Saves Money

Sure, digitizing the last mile to create a better customer experience boosts customer retention—but since you have more control over the first portion of the customer journey, why not spend your efforts on attracting new customers instead?

Developing loyal relationships actually costs less than building new ones. This is from a research report by Bain & Company:

Consider the cost of serving a long-standing customer versus the cost of courting one. Across a wide range of businesses, customers generate increasing profits each year they stay with a company. Why? Return customers tend to buy more from a company over time. As they do, your operating costs to serve them decline. What’s more, return customers refer others to your company. And they’ll often pay a premium to continue to do business with you rather than switch to a competitor with whom they’re neither familiar nor comfortable.

Digitize the last-mile CX and you’ll see expenses drop even as profits roll in.

Ready to Improve Your Last-Mile CX?

Businesses that offer digital customer experiences with Dispatch’s Last-Mile CX see a 35% increase in their Net Promoter Score. Reach out for a demo to see how Dispatch lets home warranty companies offer service reminders, on-my-way tracking, instant customer reviews, digital invoices, simple payments from the field, and other features that improve the last-mile CX.

The post How Digitizing the Last-Mile Customer Experience Pays off for Your Home Warranty Brand appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

The post Attracting New Talent While Building Independent Service Provider Loyalty appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

To boost customer loyalty, it makes sense to start at the end: Customers often judge your brand by the last interaction they have with you—and since that final interaction is usually with your third-party service providers, these partners can make or break your customer loyalty scores.

If you have constant turnover in your service provider network, your customers are the ones who feel the pinch. Miscommunication, missed appointments, service professionals with little knowledge of your brand, and other problems pop up, sinking the customer experience you spent so long building up.

Because service provider loyalty can have a huge impact on customer loyalty, you want to make working with you as easy for them as possible.

So how do you keep both of these groups happy?

How Can I Improve Service Provider and Customer Loyalty?

Consider your service providers and customers as a two-sided market and your field service management software as the intermediary to build loyalty among both parties.

• Offer multiple ways to connect. Keep important information—like job status, contact information, and customer photos—flowing between your brand, your customers, and your service providers to keep all parties on the same page.
• Make sharing job details easy, fast & clear. Use an app that shares customer and job details with your service providers—so the customer doesn’t have to explain the issue multiple times, and the service provider has easy access to the information they need to get the job done quickly and efficiently.
• Increase service provider loyalty with the right tools. A field service management tool that doesn’t integrate with your providers’ in-house software is just another app for them juggle—which can affect your service provider loyalty.
• Let customers have their say. Customers want to be heard, so make it easy for them to share their kudos and critiques.

Now let’s get all the details on the table.

Offer Multiple Ways to Connect

Nothing frustrates a customer faster than communication issues with their order. Whether it’s a missed tracking number or a multi-layered phone tree to reach a customer service rep, every stumbling block put in your customer’s way reduces the chance that they’ll buy from you again.

Your service provider network needs easy communication with both you and your end customers to keep appointments on time and customer information up to date.

In both cases, offering multiple channels of communication can help keep information flowing where it needs to go. For example, you might offer a web portal where customers can upload details about their work orders, including photographs. With access to this information, along with a centralized database of customer information, your service providers can do their jobs more efficiently. An app can come into play for service and appointment updates, reducing the number of customer no-shows.

Make Sharing Job Details Easy, Fast & Clear

Forbes says that 77% of consumers consider convenience a key factor in choosing service providers. If your order or service process is confusing or requires customers to jump through too many hoops, they’re going to start looking for a clearer experience elsewhere.

One sticking point for customers is in getting the details of their service order to the provider. If you’re making your customers explain their situation to two or three different people, they’re going to be frustrated before your service partner ever arrives at their home.

You can eliminate that problem, and increase customer loyalty, with a field service management app that allows your providers to easily view the customer’s history and information. They’ll arrive at your customer’s home with the right tools and parts, and your customer won’t have to repeat the whole conversation they just had with your customer care team.

Your field service management software makes the process more convenient for your service partners, too. You can give them access to product information, knowledge bases, and customer data that they need to find answers to any customer questions and get the job done quickly.

An FSM tool also helps improve service providers’ first-time fix rate (since they’ll have a better understanding of the job before they arrive at the customer’s home), which will further improve customer experience.

Increase Service Provider Loyalty with The Right Tools

The service management tool you choose needs to enhance your service provider’s workflow. Otherwise, it becomes just one more app taking up space on their phone or tablet—hardly the way to increase service provider loyalty.

The right platform gives you visibility into how your service partners are doing, while also helping them do their jobs. Give them an easy way to assign and track jobs, see customer notes and photos, and accept payments in the field, and your providers will be much happier to use the tool.

If your platform can integrate with tools your service providers are already using, like QuickBooks, ServiceMax, and Zapier, it’ll improve compliance even further. No one likes having to enter the same information into three different web portals, or having to juggle payment processors.

But if you can bring all of these pieces of their business together into one field service management tool, they’ll be much happier to use it.

Let Customers Have Their Say

Customer feedback is essential to understanding what you’re doing right, and where you need to improve. Tweaking your business operations based on common feedback is a great way to improve your customer retention rates.

But your customers don’t want to have to type in a URL or call a phone number on their invoice. If you make it difficult for your customers to give you feedback, you’ll probably only hear from the really motivated ones (both furious and thrilled). This can give you a skewed sense of how your customers feel about your field service business.

Instead, give your customers a way to leave feedback instantly. Asking them to rate you and/or your service provider immediately after the job’s done means that the job is fresh in the customer’s mind. And with the right customer feedback tool, you and your service providers can spot trends and opportunities for improvement.

Customer loyalty and service provider loyalty are both critical to your brand’s success. By employing tactics and tools to keep both of these groups happy, you can cut down on customer service-related expenses—and keep your business growing.

Struggling with ways to help your third-party service providers delight your customers?

With robust communication, scheduling, and feedback tools, Dispatch can improve your customer experience from purchase to service delivery. Schedule a demo to see all it can do for you.

The post How to Ace Your Customer and Service Provider Loyalty appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon. July 13, 1999

Today’s consumer has access to more information and tools than ever before. With a single Google search, consumers can find the best price for a given product in a matter of seconds.

The only sustainable, long-term differentiator for companies is the end-to-end customer experience customers receive when interacting with a brand. Brands which differentiate by delivering superlative customer experiences will cash in on greater customer wallet share and lifetime value, ultimately netting greater profits and investor returns.

This is because a happy customer contributes 2.6 times as much revenue as a somewhat satisfied customer and 14 times as much revenue as a somewhat dissatisfied customer. Thus, the need for better customer experience spans many different industries.

The biggest hinderance home service brands face today is delivering a seamless, omnichannel, digital and data-driven experience that connects all parties, including 3rd-party service providers, throughout the customer purchase and home service fulfillment process.

After powering millions of home service jobs in over 30% of the homes in America, here is what we’ve learned for how you can cash in on the home services space.

Why There is an Opportunity to Cash in on the Home Services Space

In the early 2000s, home service companies built customer relationships on their own terms. Brands only communicated with customers when they wanted – typically through mailers and calls, or worse, no communication at all, leaving customers in the dark about the status and timing of their home services. Traditional retailers did a fair job executing product sales and deliveries but struggled to execute on expectations set with customers about the home services experience customers would receive.

Over time, due to the rise of the internet, mobile technologies, social media, and lower barriers to entry for new retailers due to the commoditization of hardware/cloud computing, the consumer rose to the forefront, ultimately having an unlimited choice about who, when and where they would purchase. Consumers suddenly had a megaphone to share the negative (and positive) experiences they were receiving from brands, and the ability to quickly and affordably shift their brand loyalty to brands who focused on CX. Industries outside of the field service arena adopted and implemented new technologies to help bridge the gap between the brand and the customer.

This puts pressure on brands to offer the same level of service to their customers in a tech-driven way. When they do, they can expect to see some drastic improvements to their customer SAT, NPS, revenue, and customer lifetime value.

Here are some of the outcomes service brands can expect after implementing customer experience tools.

Two-Way Communication Tools Improve Brand Perception

Kudos to you if you’re messaging with your customer about their home services appointment. MAJOR kudos to you if your tool allows for two-way communication with that same customer to create engaging experiences.

Home service companies that enable dynamic communication between them and their customer receive more information up front, which does two things: creates a sense of confidence in the customer’s mind, and allows for seamless fulfillment of the service.

Dispatch allows customers and service providers to directly connect with each other in a bi-directional, modern and meaningful way while empowering the consumer to provide information (notes, photos, updates) to the service provider in advance of service execution. Not only is the customer-empowered, but the service provider is well informed about the service the consumer is expecting to have fulfilled….and before appointment execution.

Automatic Appointment Reminders Improve Customer No-Show Rate

By keeping consumers informed of the status of their service appointment, including on the day of service, brands can reduce costs associated with customer no shows and reschedule requests. Automatic appointment reminders prevent this from happening.

54% of millennials prefer to communicate with brands through either mobile or email.

Not only do consumers prefer to communicate bi-directionally, based on experiences they are having with brands, but consumers expect this level of communication so they are informed and not left in the dark waiting. According to Forrester “The majority (66%) of adults feel that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online customer experience.

Dispatch’s omnichannel communication tool delivers email, SMS, push, WhatsApp, or whichever communication method your customers prefer at the right moment.

Instant Feedback Helps Monitor NPS

As we evolve in today’s tech-driven world, the importance of immediate data capture becomes vital to reduce customer churn. While every brand will occasionally fail with service delivery, it is essential to be able to immediately act on subpar customer feedback. If your service experience is lacking, then customer switching costs are low and the customer won’t buy more of your product.

Gauging service experience and remedying poor experiences as they happen has led to a 6% reduction in customer churn (2018 Dispatch customer data study).

What is the next step for service companies?

Brands looking to capitalize on the service space need to realize that it’s all about customer experience. Jeff Bezos had it right in 1999 – amazing service is one of the most important long-term and sustainable differentiators that a brand can build. Done right, positive home services experiences will net greater customer wallet-share, customer lifetime value, and incremental product and services revenue for any brand.

The post How Superior Customer Experience is Changing the Home Services Industry appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.

The world of sales is data-driven. The modern sales rep has access to data that helps them sell more efficiently than ever, but without attribution and conversion data, you’ll only get so far.

As a manufacturer, you are driving leads to your dealers – and your distributors are just as invested in helping convert them as you are. This ecosystem is the critical backbone of your sales channels, but when the time comes to understand lead conversion rate or the effectiveness of your marketing spend, working with independent distributors and dealers can be a challenge.

Want to see Dispatch in action? Request a demo here.

What happened to this lead?

We hear this question constantly. Each lead that comes in through your website represents not only potential revenue, but also valuable and actionable data about the effectiveness of your marketing spend, the performance of your dealers/distributors, and the satisfaction of your end customers.

However, the separation between all of these parties means it can be difficult or impossible to actually understand what happened to each lead you send out. Was it accepted? Did a sale occur? Did the dealer perform up to your standards? Did you build loyalty with your customers?

The Dispatch Platform answers these questions. Manufacturers who have implemented Dispatch and worked with us to engage their dealers are able to see what is happening to every lead coming through their website – as a matter of fact, our customers have found that dealers who use Dispatch are 50% more likely to status leads than dealers outside of the Dispatch ecosystem.

Dispatch Lead Conversion Reporting

Further building on this use case, we have just rolled out the Dispatch Lead Conversion Report, which gives you dealer-level and lead-level visibility into:

• Lead conversion rate
• Lead status and final outcome
• Dealer geographical coverage
• Close rate by dealer
• Lead win/loss reason
• Dealer decline/cancel reason

Tracking this lead data over time can help you and your distributors make more informed decisions about the performance of each dealer, allowing you to cultivate the perfect network of dealers that represent your brand, leading to higher lead conversion rates and more revenue.

This, of course, is only made possible by using Dispatch, which connects you with your distributors, dealers, and end customers on one unifying platform.

Empower your Distributors

Making this data available to your distributors will allow them to identify high performing dealers who effectively convert leads in a quick and transparent manner, and help them work with lower-performing dealers to improve their ability to sell and close.

This powerful new lead reporting is part of our Explore reporting suite inside our Manage platform, available to manufacturers who want to close more leads and gain visibility into their business.

Want to see Dispatch in action? Request a demo here.

The post It’s 10pm, do you know where your leads are? appeared first on Dispatch Technologies.