Service Businesses Face Challenges

Posted By ê¿ê on September 18th, 2009

I work for a service company. We provide maintenance and repair services to other companies for their food service equipment. That means we are a 24/7/365 business. Thank goodness I work normal hours.

But I digress..

We try to do most of our administrative tasks in-house. We did try outsourcing our data entry at one time, but that was pretty bad. They were trying to read from faxed copies of handwritten documents and our technicians

a. don’t spell well to begin with and
b. have terrible handwriting.

The data entry people made a hash out of the information they were putting into our database and I spent a lot of my time cleaning up typos, or correcting poor grammar and spelling errors.

Now the techs have laptops and we’ve created a web-based portal for them to do data entry into that utilizes a lot of drop-down lists and has spell check for the other areas that accept free-text. That’s cut down on a lot of the spelling errors at least.

Another area we’ve outsourced has been our call center services. They used to rent space in the same building as we were in, so keeping them apprised of new customers and changing business models wasn’t such a big deal, but now they are not so convenient and it’s becoming an issue.

But these things notwithstanding, I find I’m still having to spend a lot of time correcting errors that should have been avoided and could have been if the call taker were just plain aware of what I take for granted like the proper two letter abbreviation for states. We had a call yesterday that was in Arizona and the call taker had put in AR instead of AZ. There’s a huge difference between Arkansas and Arizona! I guess it could have been worse — it could have been Alaska and they used AL instead of AK. Making a mistake like this one costs us in time as much as anything because the system balks at giving that call taker the correct tech assignment and then if someone actually gets dispatched, they end up at a site that hasn’t called for service or worse, an address that isn’t even a customer’s! Some of our contracts have stipulations that we must arrive on site within a proscribed period of time or we can’t charge them for the service.

Staying competitive in today’s market often hinges on the effectiveness of the back office personnel. It doesn’t do much good to meet the contracted response and solution goals when you don’t get the invoice out the door and into the customers’ hands! We’re working on automating a lot of those processes which, if what we’ve done so far is any indication, will result in a big improvement in collections and billings.

We still have challenges to face, though. The face of business changes daily. Are we up to it? Yeah, I am confident that we are barring a spelling mistake or two.