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Episode 24 – Part 4 – The Importance of Customer Experience with James Warren, UKDP
47 Plays2 years ago
In PART FOUR of this week's episode, we are speaking with James Warren from UK Drainage Professionals about the importance of customer experience and setting expectations.
Across the three parts of this episode, we are discussing everything off-mains drainage, the basics, the legislation, and the key things to look out for.
James is incredibly passionate about off-mains drainage, its impact on the environment, and helping people to really understand a quite complicated and less common topic. James has an enthusiasm that you can't help get but energised by.
James's experience has been gained in both the insurance and drainage industries. He started his career working in claims management for the UK’s largest insurer, before moving into the drainage industry in which he had the opportunity to combine both skills. James is our expert on anything from repair scopes to assessing insurance cover.
In Part 4 of this episode, we discuss:
🤓 Benefits of easy to read guides for customers who don't deal with the service you provide all the time
📣 The key to good communication=
👂 Setting customer expectations to achieve a great outcome
🤝 Understanding all your customer touch points and when the experience starts
🔍 The importance of transparency
💬 The benefits of a pre-works walk and talk meeting
💻 The importance of technology in the process and when to use it
Recommended
Transcript
What is Customer Experience?
00:00:00
Speaker
Our final topic then with James is customer experience and the importance of it. Um, and it's something we've talked about another podcast too, but, um, I suppose to start off with the context, what is customer experience for you? What does it mean to you and your customers? Um, without sounding too cheesy, it means everything. Um, a lot of our customers will refer us to their neighbors, friends, colleagues. In addition to just wanting to do the right thing anyway, I know it sounds a bit OTT and a bit Hollywood, but
00:00:28
Speaker
Unless you do something well, then what's the point in doing it? It's like the old school values, isn't it? Anyone could do a half decent job, but there's no point in that.
Building Trust with Consistency
00:00:36
Speaker
Customer experience, because we do so many different things, I know we're talking about off-main drainage, but the first job of the day might be a pre-purchase survey.
00:00:44
Speaker
And then we're doing a seller survey. So it's the same task, but a different dynamic. Then we might be looking, we might be an expert witness on the, on the next situation. Then we're looking at an insurance claim. There's, there's so many different things we do, but it doesn't matter whether the customer is a surveyor, a property owner and a state manager, a solicitor. It doesn't matter. The fact is they've entrusted us to carry out a task. We're extremely appreciative. We've been given that task.
00:01:13
Speaker
and we will have our very, very experienced, knowledgeable engineers going out and representing us beautifully on site. The report is then triple checked before it goes out because we are ridiculously on point with things like that. And we hope and we believe from feedback we've got that the customer experience is really positive and really strong. No one's perfect. Sometimes we perhaps we take a little bit too long to get a report out if we want to double check a few points ourselves.
00:01:42
Speaker
But going back to the question, customer experience
The Role of Communication in Customer Experience
00:01:45
Speaker
is everything. It's the customer making sure they feel as if they've made the right decision in the first place. And that means good, excellent communication, verbally and in writing and being satisfied with the work we do. The work might be a piece of advice on a phone call. It might be a written report. It might be a technical explanation. It might be an expert witness report.
00:02:09
Speaker
It could be an installation in their back garden. Whatever it is, it's irrelevant. They've picked us. We're very glad of that. We're very appreciative. We're going to give them the A1 service every single time. Like I said, otherwise, what's the point? You want to strive to be the best. We're not the cheapest. I don't think we're the most expensive. We're not the cheapest, but we like to think we deliver the best service. And that's what we're striving for. And yeah.
00:02:34
Speaker
We've had some fantastic feedback. I'm sure others will say that they're just as good as us. And that's great and good for them, but selfishly, we can only concentrate on ourselves and we just try and do the best every single time.
00:02:48
Speaker
I think that's the key.
Managing and Meeting Expectations
00:02:49
Speaker
You can't focus on what everyone else is doing because then you're not focusing on what you're doing and getting that right. But I think for me, customer experience is what you've said, but I think it's really going into the detail of looking at every touchpoint that customer has with you because you can have the best report, the most technically accurate, brilliant report at the end of something.
00:03:10
Speaker
But if you haven't set expectations right at different points and it's been clunky to get hold of you, it doesn't matter if things take time. You can take two days to get back to someone if you set the expectation that we'll get back to you in two to three days. Because then the customer knows they're expecting to wait.
00:03:28
Speaker
But I think it's yeah, quite often people forget that the, you know, the contact form that they've submitted, and then not knowing what's going to happen next is that first experience of what working with is going to be right. Yeah, management of expectation is key. If someone comes through, there's various ways people can get in contact with us, if they just come through our website, the guys up in Glasgow, they like to get back to people in like 15 minutes, they and they hate it when they don't they like if someone has spent time to write down their background details and
00:03:57
Speaker
They're obviously looking for help. They need help. We like to show them straight away that we actually care about their inquiry. We're grateful they've gone on our website. They've obviously chosen us and got some element of initial trust to then jump to and make an inquiry. See, absolutely, we try and help them. We manage their expectations. If they want us to come out, we'll tell them what the current wait time is. We'll tell them how quickly we get the report back after that. And then we make sure we hit it. And sometimes,
00:04:25
Speaker
If we do a report in the morning, we'll have a customer come on at lunchtime saying, I know you told me it'd be a few days, but can you just give me like the heads up? I'm sometimes nervous about that because we like to go through every detail before issuing that report. But if it's time sensitive, we'll do that because we are about customer experience. But I think customer experience is also being realistic and say to them, I can give you some information now, but we did say we needed some time to review everything.
00:04:53
Speaker
there may be some tweaks when the final report comes out. So once again, sort of managing expectations within the initial expectation. But as long as you've got that communication channel open and you're transparent and honest, I don't think you can do any more.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's actually quite difficult on that, because you can appreciate the customers angst or worry about what the outcome is going to be. So they want to get that indication and equally, you don't want to say the wrong thing, look through your photos and notes and go, Oh, actually, that's quite bad. And yeah, that up earlier. And that can happen if you're rushed, that can happen.
Setting Clear Expectations and Transparency
00:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, completely. And then suddenly the customer's going, well, why have you gone? Actually, you know, everything's okay to disaster. Exactly. It's what we tell our guys, if a customer's on site with one of our engineers, and they say, okay, so I need a new system, can you give me a ballpark figure? In the old days, under the guise of being helpful, we would do. But all that happens is you give out a range and say, look, I'm not the estimator, this is the surveyor speaking, I'm not the estimator, that from my experience, you might be looking at
00:05:58
Speaker
nine to eleven thousand pounds plus that. All the customer hears is nine thousand pounds.
00:06:04
Speaker
Not 11 plus VAT, not plus VAT, just nine. So suddenly your estimate comes back at 10 and a half plus VAT, they go, goodness me, 12,000 pounds give or take, your guy told me nine grand on site. So we don't give out any numbers anymore because even though we're probably accurate in our estimation on site, the customer will only hear the most cost-effective price. So we don't do that anymore. Zero chat around prices.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, as a consumer, you hear the lowest figure. So it's always worth saying it with fat, just to not get a 20% shock. Yeah, indeed. One of the things that you do, we've discussed this briefly off the podcast, which I think is, some surveys will probably do, but it's something
00:06:51
Speaker
they can, I think, really look into and, you know, refine for themselves is you do a pre-works meeting. And I think surveyors could definitely do a pre-survey meeting. Some will already do that, but really refining it to answer every question, set every expectation, keep the customer really, you know, calm and excited about where things are going. How do you handle that? Because it sounds like you've got a really good one from some of the posts I've seen.
00:07:16
Speaker
Yeah, the pre-works meeting to us, it just seems like a normal part of the process. We've submitted a quotation, customer says, yes, please, you agree a provisional start date for the works. And between us being approved for the piece of work and the job starting,
00:07:36
Speaker
our Works Manager will go out and spend an hour to an hour and a half with the customer. And we like to call it a walk and talk. I'm sure there's a better phrase we could give it. But effectively, the Works Manager will go out with the specification of works that we've already issued to the customer, hence they've agreed to quote against that spec. And instead of it being on paper and looking at a site plan, a drawn site plan, we're in the customer's garden. We're explaining
00:08:05
Speaker
On a particular Monday, who the guys are, who our engineers are, when they're gonna turn up, what's gonna happen first in the installation process, where materials are gonna be stored, when they're turning up, how noisy it's gonna be, how much of a disruption it's gonna be, where things are gonna be installed. Customer says, can I move it a couple of meters this way? Yes or no, explanation why. And then it's all done on a tablet
00:08:32
Speaker
And only at the point that the customer is 100% comfortable that they know and are happy with everything that's been proposed, the works manager and the customer will both sign the tablet and then a PDF copy will be issued.
00:08:48
Speaker
It's super slick. Don't get me wrong. There might be little tweaks during the job. They'll be made on a PDF. A revised PDF will then be sent out at the end of the job with the warranty certificate and any other documents that need to be issued on the completion pack. And we just find that all about management of expectations again. There's going to be no surprises for that customer. They know that dig is turning up at 9am.
00:09:11
Speaker
They know that all the boards are gonna be down that side of the garden to store the excavated material. There's no surprises. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people still don't realize how intrusive these jobs are, irrespective of how honest and detailed we are. If they're gardeners, they're pride and joy, and we're digging it up, understandably, the heart's gonna go a little bit fast. But it's all to do with keeping them calm, keeping them informed,
00:09:39
Speaker
putting it back nicely, explain to them that when we leave site after a week or two weeks, that's not the end of the job. We'll come back in six weeks because there might be a little bit of settlement. We'll put a little bit more topsoil in, rake it out, make sure you're happy. And if we need to, we'll come back again in six weeks. It's all about that aftercare and realizing that we are there to do a good job. They've paid a good price and they're going to get a good job. And that's what it's all about.
00:10:02
Speaker
With that customer experience, it's training quite important with the team
Training and Technology for Quality Service
00:10:06
Speaker
that you're working with. It's easier, I suppose, if you're an individual, you know what you've agreed and you can stick to that. But when you start scaling up and you've got more people involved or contractors or whoever it might be, how important is training to make sure that what you've agreed in
00:10:19
Speaker
in writing or agreed in verbally, whatever, it actually happens. Because it's very easy to say, we're going to put that material set of materials here and actually ends up somewhere else. So yeah, well, that's an important aspect. Yeah, it's it's absolutely critical. And the continuity is the PDF document that is agreed with the customer and our works manager.
00:10:39
Speaker
Now on the rare occasions that the works manager can't start the job with the guys, they have got this six page document in addition to the site plan and they know exactly what to do. But I actually can't remember an occasion where we've started a project without our works manager being present.
00:10:57
Speaker
He may only be there for the first hour, introduce the two or three man team to the customer, have a cup of coffee, make sure everyone's aware of the situation, make sure everyone's got the right documents, contact numbers for the excavator delivery company and so on and so forth, and off they go. And at the end of the job, on the final day, the works manager will come back just to make sure everything's okay. In the interim,
00:11:26
Speaker
There are daily worksheets that the engineers do where they take photographs. It's all stored digitally. So at any point in time, we can record what they've done, where they're up to. That's great for an audit trial and for transparency, but also it's great because every job is done under a building's notice. So if the building control officer can't be there at a certain point, but they said, I need photos of the bedding of the pipe work. I need photos of the thickness of the concrete base for the sewage treatment plant, for example.
00:11:55
Speaker
You've got the date stamp photographs, we just pull them up, send them over to building control and everyone's happy. But it's all about transparency and creating an audit trail for our own benefit as well as the customers. But yeah, the continuity is key and it's typically down to the works manager physically starting a job with the repair crew, with the installation crew.
00:12:19
Speaker
Awesome. And then one thing you touched on there actually was the tech side of things. So how important is technology in your opinion for customer experience? Because the reason I asked that is you do hear, not from everyone, a lot of people embrace tech and really work with it, but you'll have others that maybe fear that it detracts from customer experience and automation removes some sort of dialogue between customer and surveyor.
00:12:43
Speaker
Um, I think that would be the case if we allowed our technology to work as it's intended. And let me explain what that means. We, we use, um, we use a company called big change for, to effectively, we went paperless about five years ago.
00:13:00
Speaker
And a part of the software side that we use on our tablets every day and we use on our laptops is called JobWatch. This isn't a promo for them, but it is fantastic. It's increased our efficiency by about 40%. So it does work. We could fire off documents instantly to the customers.
00:13:19
Speaker
if we allow technology to do its thing. And everyone listening to this will go, yeah, that's great, isn't it? Because there are so many nuances around what we do, we prevent that, we put a blocker on that. So it's beautifully techy and efficient up to that point. And then the estimator
00:13:37
Speaker
technical report writer and myself will go through every detail of every report. Because if we make a mistake, that could be massively expensive and massively detrimental. So then we just turn the system back on again, then it can fire out the report after it's had that sort of technical manual input at the most critical phase, and then it just flows again.
00:14:00
Speaker
A lot of our customers, they do love the tech, they love the quick exchanges, they love the PDF documents, they love that electronic instant side of it, but the vast majority would still like a bit of a quick conversation after that, just to clarify a couple of points and just to really reinforce that sort of peace of mind label that we like going on about, especially on LinkedIn. But yeah, if we really wanted to speed things up, the minute the engineer finished that job at midday on a Monday,
00:14:30
Speaker
10 seconds later it could be with the customer. But then we've got to have 100% confidence that nothing has been missed and there's no typos that could be misinterpreted viciously. So we actually pause the efficiency at that point, manually check everything and then kickstart it again.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's I think the perfect way to do it. It's having that blend. I think sometimes what can happen is people fear or see that technology is all or nothing. You know, it's full chatbot, everything automated, instant or completely manual speak to the customer about every point and do everything yourself. And actually it's about creating a nice blend, you know, just because maybe an initial email has gone out,
00:15:15
Speaker
acknowledging that an inquiry has been received actually that's just about setting expectations being like here's here's some information here's when i'll be in touch it's not don't we're not going to talk to you yeah exactly same for that step later on you could send out the report straight away but actually sometimes it's better to sit automate it but have a have that gap in so that it you've got the time to sense check or have a conversation before it goes out or yeah you tell you right and i think some of the guys get annoyed with me because
00:15:42
Speaker
I send out an email to a customer of the report. And I always say, there's a lot of information, but in summary, and then I'm repeating the whole process because then I'm giving them some key bullet points like, well, we've already done that in the report, but I can't help myself. Sometimes I think people
00:15:57
Speaker
they will not read a report thoroughly. They will scan read it and they will pick out the bits that they feel are important, whether they're actually important or not. So what I always do a summary set of bullet points saying, well, everything's important in this report, but you should know X, Y and Z. So I am duplicating the process, but I don't think I'm ever going to change.
00:16:18
Speaker
No, it's difficult and I suppose also if you know a particular customer from the start of the process has given quite a lot of things already, then potentially that's quite a worthwhile thing to do. Yes, definitely. Is there anything else around customer experience you think is worth mentioning at all or do you think that covers it?
00:16:35
Speaker
I think it covers it. It's just, um, it is that management of expectation. It's clear and concise communication.
Handling Complaints Effectively
00:16:43
Speaker
And it's, um, I saw a post about it the other day. It's eating that frog. If you've got a customer that's not happy about something.
00:16:50
Speaker
just deal with it as quickly as humanly possible. There will always be a point where you're going to agree or disagree, but you can still disagree in a professional, courteous, calm, measured way. Gone at the age of having screaming matches over a phone or on site. The fact is there will be differences of opinion. People will think,
00:17:15
Speaker
we're too expensive. People will think they've done their own research and they can put in a different system. They think we've over scoped something that we are we are ridiculously squeaky clean when it comes to doing the correct job, including absolutely everything in a scope of works. We don't like going back and asking for variations halfway through a job. I think that's sometimes if you if you come across an unexploded World War Two bomb, okay, fine, the T's and C's have to kick in. But
00:17:42
Speaker
We like to be mega thorough, which also proves that we've looked at a site correctly and thoroughly. And hopefully that level of detail will translate to a customer to say, okay, then you've got 20 lines of spec against Joe blogs with five lines of spec. You're more expensive, but you seem to have included more and thought about more. And I really hope that comes across. And don't get me wrong. We do not win every job that we quote, but we've got a very good conversion rate. And I can only assume.
00:18:10
Speaker
that comes down to the level of professionalism. As you say, all the way through that touch point, an initial email, initial phone call, initial site visit, quality of report, speed of report, speed of follow-up, et cetera, et cetera. So we must be doing something right. There's always room for improvement, but yeah, if customers happy, then we're happy and it means we must be doing something right.
00:18:32
Speaker
That's a nice note to finish off. Thanks for coming on today, James. I really appreciate all your insight across the different topics. My pleasure. If anyone wants to reach out, ask any questions, get some pointers, how do they get in touch?
Need More Information?
00:18:45
Speaker
Well, they're welcome to come through. If they come through to the generic email, there's four people sitting behind it. So it's info at ukdpsolutions.co.uk.
00:18:53
Speaker
And then welcome to come through to me, james.warren at UKDPsolutions.ped.uk. And the website is just UKDPsolutions.co.uk. All the guides and blogs are on there, completely free to download and peruse. So yeah, please everyone and anyone take a look, download everything. And yeah, if you can gain a little bit of knowledge, then it'll be a good thing. Perfect. Well, thanks again for coming on. Look forward to catching up again soon. Awesome. Thank you so much. Take care.