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Providing an Excellent Customer Experience
August 14, 2023
Providing an excellent customer experience is vital to your business’ success. You’re more likely to retain current customers and gain new ones if you’re ensuring your customer has an incredible experience from their very first interaction with your company. The question for many transporters is, “How can I possibly provide an excellent customer experience if I’m struggling to get my drivers dispatched, or to send invoices, or to….” it goes on and on.
The good news is getting started on improving your customer experience is easy, and often, it’s free. There are three major things to keep in mind when embarking on a journey to improve your customer experience:
Even if the customer isn’t always right, they always come first
In service, you always hear about how, “the customer is always right.” Since you work in service, you know that this isn’t necessarily true. However, even if your customers aren’t always right, they do always need to come first. This does not mean you should be ignoring your employees or their workload, but instead, you should be empowering your employees to work with a customer-first mindset. This outlook allows your employees to prioritize the customer’s experience over their own productivity.
As the leader of your company, it is up to you to encourage your staff to have a customer-oriented mindset by developing one yourself and accepting that some tasks will be completed later on so that a customer can have a better experience. Would you rather have a customer waiting 20 minutes for their driver so that driver could complete some paperwork, or have that customer picked up on time because that driver feels comfortable filling out that paperwork when he or she has a break?
If an administrator is placing a higher value her own productivity, she may let a phone call go to voicemail so she can finish putting an invoice together. After she finishes getting that invoice together, she gets ready to send it out. Next thing she knows, an hour has gone by, and she has not listened to that customer’s voicemail or returned their call. If you empower that administrator to have a customer-first mindset, she will answer that customer’s call immediately and help get their trip scheduled. Now, that customer feels valued and is ready to have a great experience with your company. The invoice she was working on will still be completed, just a couple of minutes later.
It is really that simple! An amazing first experience with your company will set customers up to be happier and more pleasant in every interaction with your company.
ALL of your employees and staff are your customer experience team
It’s not just up to drivers and administrators to think and work this way. Even if a member of your team won’t be directly interacting with customers, chances are, their job will still affect your customers. Think about the team that services your vehicles, cleans your office space, etc. While it is likely these teams are committed to providing the best service to you and your company, they may not be thinking of your customers and their experience.
Make sure when you’re hiring members of these teams, you are instilling the customer-first mindset as well. Perhaps the team servicing your vehicles does a great job with keeping the vehicles running, but they need to make a larger effort to keep the inside of the vehicles comfortable for riders. By knowing your service team has a customer-first mindset, your drivers will be more comfortable asking them to take an extra couple of minutes to look at the heating or the upholstering on one of the seats.
Every person you hire will impact the customer’s experience in one way or another, even if it isn’t incredibly obvious. Empower them all to value the customer over their own productivity, and you will see a massive improvement in your customer’s experience.
Getting organized is key
Being willing to let some tasks get done later than you’d like is vital to empowering your employees to shift their focus to the customer. But at the end of the day, those tasks still need to get done. If you do not have your day to day operations organized, it is going to be hard to stay on top of everything.
It is possible to keep your company organized through platforms like Google Docs, Trello, Asana, and more, but there are several software solutions specifically made for transporters that can help you stay organized across your company. Transportation software is going to help you and your staff by:
- Reducing the amount of manual data entry needed
- Streamline communications between dispatchers and drivers
- Automatically pricing trips accurately
- Streamline the billing process for insurance carriers, Medicaid, and private pay
- And more
At the end of the day, all of these things will help your company provide a better customer experience. Try out a few free options and do your homework on paid software before committing to anything. Understanding the tools available to you and the tools that will be most helpful to you will allow you to make the best investment possible into your customer experience and company as a whole.
The Take Away:
Getting started on improving your customer experience does not need to cost you anything. You need to be willing to adjust your priorities and empower your employees to do the same. Take a good look at how you are currently organizing your company; what’s working well and what isn’t working at all? Decide for yourself if there are free organization tools that can help or if it’s time to start researching some software solutions that will be able to get the job done.
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From the beginning, RoutingBox has remained committed to removing barriers for transportation companies attempting to provide access to healthcare and community services. Now, we want to help you.