How Your Plumbing Business Can Ensure Customer Satisfaction
April 27, 2021 | Read: 9 minutes
Being able to ensure customer satisfaction is one of the biggest drivers for successful businesses.
Ensuring high customer satisfaction is essential for achieving long term success and helps build a strong reputation that encourages repeat business.
As any plumbing business owner is sure to know, satisfying customers is rarely as easy as doing a great job. That’s what customers expect and pay you for, after all.
“Good” isn’t enough: you have to go above and beyond to stand out.
But how?
That’s exactly what we’re going to cover today.
Let’s get started by looking at why you want to ensure customer satisfaction…
Why You Should Want to Ensure Customer Satisfaction
For a plumbing business, it might seem like there’s an easy answer: to make more money.
Making a profit is a great goal, but if money is the only thing driving you, it’s very easy to fall into traps that actually cost you money.
Instead, focus on positive customer satisfaction: this leads to better business outcomes, such as increased customer loyalty, more revenue, and a stronger reputation.
From a business point of view, Simon Sinek said it best:
People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.
What does this mean? Well, people can get emotionally attached to the choices they make, especially when these choices are attached to an important place, like their home.
If a customer is to let you carry out work in their home, they need to trust you. That means getting them invested in choosing your business, giving them confidence in your services and, hopefully, building a long-lasting relationship.
When thinking about “why they should choose you”, it helps to consider the answer you’d give a customer. Saying it’s all about the money won’t work very well here.
Instead, give customers a good reason, like the ones below:
Some reasons why customers might choose your plumbing business:
- You’re a family-owned company, who delivers a personalised service: we treat every single customer like they’re part of the family.
- You’re the company that can deliver convenience and peace of mind, you use digital alerts and notifications that keep them in the loop, so they always know what’s going on.
- We have high-skilled engineers who go through regular training; they know their stuff, train hard, and take pride in their work.
As you can see, you’re not simply going for price. It’s about appealing to emotional triggers: a personalised service, awareness, quality: customers are far likely to focus on these traits.
Of course, you’ll need to deliver, but if your actions align with your words, then you’ll succeed.
The perceived value of your services plays a major role in a customer’s decision to choose you over competitors, as they weigh the benefits and overall experience against the price.
How Do You Ensure Customer Satisfaction?
It all starts by creating a great customer journey.
If you can identify every step that a customer takes with you, you can take time to ensure every interaction is a great one. From booking a job, having a technician visit, to even paying for your services: every step should be as smooth as possible.
One of the reason Amazon is so successful is because their 1-Click-Buy is a perfectly seamless buying experience. While it’s not that easy to adapt it to the field service business model, you can still take your cue from the best around!
More often than not, you’ll be surprised by what a customer highlights as less than ideal service.
If you spend even a couple of hours looking at plumbing company reviews in general, you’ll see that mentions of high prices and poor workmanship pale in comparison with complaints about tardy technicians, unresponsive admin teams, or lack of openness to feedback.
If you’re struggling with reviews like these, be sure to check out this response template to help you sort out negative posts.
Why The Customer Journey Matters:
Think of it like this. Customers expect to:
- Work with a company who communicates well
- Interact with businesses who they can trust
- Feel as though a business has their best interests at heart
- Trust that feedback will be taken seriously
Expectations are high these days, and that’s because great customer service has become synonymous with any service. Disruptors like Amazon and Uber raised the standard everywhere.
They didn’t upgrade or invent a particular product or service, instead, they made every customer journey easy, emphasized convenience, and met demand everywhere.
These days it means every service business needs to provide an excellent customer journey experience. If you don’t, customers will go elsewhere.
For instance, the CX Lead reports that:
74% of consumers will ditch a brand if they find the purchasing process to be too complicated.
Great customer journeys includes:
- Smart booking processes,
- Easy payments,
- Responsive customer service, and more,
Many of these no longer require human interaction, meaning control is in the customer’s hands, giving them access 24/7 to the services and information they need.
However, by paying attention to the finer details and addressing the basic needs of your customers, you can encourage them to stay.
Customer Satisfaction at Commusoft
At Commusoft, we refer to these touchpoints as “customer journeys”.
We’ve seen that businesses who take care of these journeys find great success, whether it’s thanks to things like:
- payment portals,
- booking confirmations,
- automatic invoices,
- or improved contact options, to name a few.
Just check out the graphic below for some notable stats we’ve heard from Commusoft users:
Applying this framework will allow you to identify where weak points may exist in your business and even how you might unintentionally be chasing customers away.
If you find friction, then it’s time to smooth it away!
Whether you do this by implementing a 24/7 online booking portal or allowing people to pay on the spot when a tech visits their home.
The point? Make it easy for customers to complete their buying journey with you.
How Do You Measure Customer Satisfaction?
To ensure customer satisfaction, you need to listen to the Voice of the Customer (VoC).
This is a process where businesses compile everything customers say about them, from reviews to social media mentions, to suggestion forums.
Then they take this information, compare it with what they’re currently offering, and deduce the gap between expectations and actual experience.
The first step in your VoC strategy is to know where to listen.
There are a number of places you can go, including:
- Review sites
- Social media channels
- Net promoter score
- Interviews & focus groups
- On-site feedback forms
- Calling customers to discuss their experience
After gathering your data from any of the channels above, you need to set a benchmark in order to measure precisely how satisfied customers are with your plumbing business.
Whether it’s always staying above 4.5/5 stars in reviews, or calculating a net promoter score, it’s a good idea to base this on a metric you can quantify and assign a number to.
This will make it easier to track success in the future and act as an alarm bell in case you’re falling behind on customer satisfaction.
Learn more about Customer Journeys at Commusoft
Give staff the tools to go above and beyond for the customers
When it comes to ensuring satisfaction, you want your staff to be in the best position possible to interact with customers.
Interactions may be going increasingly digital, but face-to-face will always play a big role in field service work, and your employees’ soft skills are a major player in ensuring quality is consistent.
Whether they’re working online at home, out in the field, or in the office, everyone in your business should know the best way to get their respective jobs done on time.
This is where your management software comes into its own:
- Removing repetitive tasks from your admin’s day
- A database of loyal customers
- Contract software that prevents SLA breaches
- Mobile devices to helps techs on field not burden them with admin
- Automated service reminders
- Automated invoices & quick payments
- Make gathering data easy with customizable forms
And these barely scratch the surface of what good software can do for your employees and your business.
Software helps them communicate faster, smarter, and more efficiently by reducing manual input, as well as human error.
Check out the best Plumbing Software you’ll ever find!
It all reflects on your customer satisfaction.
Quick responses make a person feel important and increases their trust in your business’s capabilities.
If your staff are able to deal with issues faster because information is readily available, actionable, and syncs up in real-time, then everyone stands to benefit from these simple adjustments.
This will make them happier and more productive, which in turn can give the customer a positive boost too!
Ensuring Customer Satisfaction as a Plumbing Business
At the end of the day, what everyone wants to feel is special.
Software and good processes can only take you so far, but if you don’t prioritize the customers in your attitude and work ethic, ensuring satisfaction will definitely be a challenge.
On the other hand, if you’re motivated and ready to make customers as happy as possible, then we’ve got all the resources to support you right here.
Check out the customer communication toolkit below:
