What is the Serviceability Quotient Of Your Business?

No more late appointments, no haggling, a pleasant service experience, and a satisfied customer!

“Starting all over again is not that bad, because then you get another chance to make things right”.

Poignant, sure, but if the same was being said of service fulfilment, be assured that the panic siren would go out of control in no time. This is no philosophical discussion.

In the Venn diagram comparing scheduled and instant services, it is the intersection that most businesses aim for, rightfully so. If options like ‘Schedule for Now’ and ‘Schedule for Later’ ring a bell, those are what form the crux of the said intersection. And what makes it all the more demanding is the fact that it is a moving target.

In a convenience economy, the servicing infrastructure is under a lot of pressure from unpredictable demand and the capricious nature of consumer behaviour. Service executives start their day off with their tasks, schedule and routes already laid out to them. When new orders are created on the go, the ones that demand instant gratification not only figure into the existing schedules, they also mess it up. It is not that businesses do not pull through these situations, but when they do, it comes at great cost and effort.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

John Doe would want to schedule an optometrist appointment for later in the day, at a particular time of his convenience. He has to place a separate call to the phone support centre to arrange this. What follows is a lot of ‘choosing the right option’ and eternal waiting. Experience, ruined!

Jane, on the other hand, would prefer to have her food delivered at the earliest.

Now, the business has to scamper through to figure out the most suited agent for the delivery. Time, lost! In a last-ditch effort, they let a different agent take on the newer orders, and planning has to start from square one. Long story short, the choice made by the business is guided by how and when the end customers want to consume the services.

What makes planning a thing of nightmares are the factors that figure into it. The agent’s proximity to the new customer, their availability, on-going schedule and working hours, the SLA windows, all have to be taken into account while assigning a new task and charting a new route for it.

The ability of a business to take on new demands within its existing bandwidth is a measure of their serviceability. If they can fulfil services on the go without having to compromise on crucial factors like time, money, consumer satisfaction, and efficiency, they are said to have a high serviceability quotient. Most importantly it is a measure of how happy your customers are with the service you provide. And keeping up this quotient is easier said than done!

Locus’ Serviceability Tech, however, brings together the aforesaid factors and evaluates them in setting up customer-based, real-time schedules, before you could say Jack Robinson. The engine provides available time slots to customers for scheduling and the ETA of the most optimal field agent, without further deployment of agents. With reduced turnaround times and efficient resource utilisation, the serviceability quotient is set to soar.

Locus aided India’s leading online optical store, Lenskart, achieve over a 60% increase in the number of service requests done per service agent, while 8% more of their customers were served within SLAs.

So.. Are you ready to find out what is the serviceability quotient of your business? Locus is here to show you how to increase it and serve your customers better!

With the evolution of consumer needs, newer layers of complexity are added above the business model, to aggregate the growing demand. One such detail to be accounted for is the skill-set’s of the service executive. How and why it figures into the equation is a different story. Find out, in the next issue in this series!

To know more on Serviceability tech, Schedule a free demo with LOCUS now!