Customer Service

Updated: August 2024

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises; he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”
— Kenneth B. Elliott

In a time when college costs are rising rapidly, the days of in-house facilities resources as the sole option are in the past, and more and more frequently, the facilities leadership is being asked to consider the business case for outsourcing. While outsourcing can be viable, most educational facilities professionals see value in an in-house capability.

By one formal definition, customer service is the “provision of service to customers before, during, and after a purchase.” It can also refer to an organization’s culture. An additional definition for this process is related to customer satisfaction, or when a customer is satisfied with the service provided and that the service meets his or her needs, wants, and, most importantly, expectations.

In today’s facilities management organization, most education-related entities endeavor to survive with limited resources. The rising cost of the educational enterprise has become a prime issue for both public and private institutions. Unlike a manufacturing environment where you can stockpile resources for peaks and valleys in production, human capital is finite and far more difficult to plan for when considering service demand. This challenge presents one of the best cases for a strong customer service program/culture. In short, in a service industry, you have to market service, and that service must be top-notch.

Most educational facilities organizations operate within the framework of a work control and dispatch function that addresses some combination of the following: preventative maintenance, operations and maintenance, planning design and space utilization, deferred maintenance/capital renewal and replacement, renovation and alternatives, estimating, and construction. In these units, the customer requests a service, receives a design and estimate, if applicable, and then the service is scheduled and completed. Good or bad service can occur at any touchpoint within any of these functions and may involve one or many facilities team members.

Many have said the customer experience is only as good as the last contact with the service provider. When you consider how that “last contact” is multiplied by the sheer number of customer contacts in an average facilities organization daily, it means there is great room for error or a great opportunity to succeed.

By simple definition, the customer is the individual who requests your service. However, in an educational facility, that concept is too finite. As educational facilities managers, the customer is anyone who utilizes our facility. Faculty, researchers, students, parents, visitors, and staff are all consumers of what we offer. For this chapter, we will focus on the person to whom services are being rendered at any given moment. In addition, to truly grasp the complexity of the service concept, we must also include internal customers with whom we interact to do business. These internal customers are key to achieving great customer service, as service to these customers reflects directly to our external customers; we cannot expect our team to treat external customers differently than the internal customers.

The art of understanding customer needs is dependent on an excellent communication network. Separating needs from wants is a delicate and challenging process. In most facilities organizations, customer requests are filtered through a work control section that receives requests, tracks progress, and communicates status information to campus clients. However, most work control units concentrate more on data entry, dispatch, and financial entry than on customer service and follow-up.

“The black hole theory surfaces time and again as one ventures from one facilities management organization to another. As the campus feeds information into the facilities organization, it disappears from view, is transformed, passes through several hands, and eventually is acted upon. The campus client asks: Where does it go in the meantime?

“The perceived bottomless pit into which the campus pours information and requests for service can be viewed by clients as an incorrigible monster. Pieces of information from the client enter the system and somehow, within the guise of plant management, are then formed into tangible products (designs, specifications, construction, maintenance, renovation, and repairs). How this happens is often viewed as a perplexing and frustrating process by campus users; a process that most prefer to view only from a distance.”

—Paul F. Tabolt, Director, Physical Plant Operations, University of California at Berkeley

Efforts to communicate effectively with the customer base can take many forms.

“Typically, new construction or major capital improvements create a host of related relocations, renovations, and alterations, yet while all of the demands for designs and estimates for renovations and alterations are pouring into the facilities management organization, so are the pressures to care for capital renewal in the form of deferred and major maintenance projects. The community will be interested in major maintenance projects they can see or feel, while the facilities management staff silently cares for the hidden enemies that are waiting for an opportunity to disrupt the smooth operation of the plant. Deciding what information to communicate will vary from individual to individual and from campus to campus, but whenever the activities of one organization disrupt the activities of another, some form of communication is advisable.

“An interactive process that enables projects of the highest priority to surface for appropriate review enables the facilities management staff to educate, coordinate, and share problems and concerns with college and departmental appointees. By drawing upon the support of those at the highest levels, facility coordinators can be appointed to deal with specific renovation, alteration, and major maintenance projects that impact a specific college, department, or building. Alternative approaches can be employed for this formal communication structure. One approach is to create appointments by buildings, such as one appointment for a major building or several buildings, or one appointment for individual colleges or departments.”

—Paul F. Tabolt, Facilities Management: A Manual for Plant Administration, 2d Ed., (APPA, Alexandria, VA,), Part III, pp. 1175–1176.

In other organizations, facilities councils, customer advisory panels, and focus groups are utilized to solicit information on service needs and quality. These may comprise major campus user groups or any combination of users that present a balanced picture of service delivery.

Another feedback possibility is the use of survey instruments. Though popular due to the simplicity of implementation, return statistics may be sparse in a survey-rich world and not yield as much feedback as more personalized contact. Some facilities professionals have utilized the concept of semester visits to great advantage.

In this scenario, the leadership of the facilities organization schedules appointments with major campus customers (i.e., deans, vice presidents/provosts, athletics, research, students, and housing). An open-ended discussion may begin with a simple question, “How are we doing?” As a rule, this will solicit a response regarding services and quality. From there, a discussion of improvements or additional needs may take place. The bonus to this concept is the positive feedback, often forthcoming, that can be passed on to team members.

Perhaps the most critical factor in creating organizational culture is the leadership component. The top of the organization must strongly focus on customer service as an organizational value.

Leaders of facilities organizations can manifest this focus in many ways:

• Visible messaging: Talk the talk. Bring your message to the team in all you do.
• Modeling: Walk the walk. Lead to facilitate or serve your team in accomplishing the job. Show good customer service skills and attitude at all times.
• Review of Processes: Review to assure ease and clarity of customer and team member use. Few things discourage use more than dysfunctional processes.
• Repetition: Send multiple messages on an ongoing basis. Repeat, repeat, and repeat the message. Write about the message. Talk about the message. Make customer service a central focus in every way.
• Rewards: You get what you reward. Find ways to celebrate service success and excellence. Team members are more likely to repeat good customer service behaviors that are rewarded by recognition and encouragement.
• Training: Make sure your team has the skills and tools necessary to provide a great customer experience. Seek ways to enhance their abilities with technology where appropriate. Training in basic customer communication is a critical component of team development. In addition, team members should receive training on managing customer service breakdowns. The following provides a good synopsis of recognizing how to guide effective customer communication:
  • Let them vent.
    • Encourage them to describe what happened.
    • Listen and pay attention to what is said.
  • Apologize.
  • Ask what you can do to help.
    • Get the customer’s ideas on how to solve the problem.
    • Attempt to reach an agreement on a mutually acceptable solution.
  • Thank the customer and follow up (do what you say you will).

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said, “you can’t expect your employees to exceed the expectations of your customers if you don’t exceed the employees’ expectations of management.” Coach your leadership team to model excellent customer service with team members. After all, the leader is there to serve the team and should lead the effort to develop organizational philosophies that define and describe those expectations.

A strong component in creating a customer service culture is developing functional and service philosophies. Creating these guideposts defines the what and the how of your service mission. The functional philosophy should include:

• What you do
• For whom
• Your uniqueness

The questions that you should address as you create this philosophy are:

• What is the unit mission?
• Whom do you serve?
• What added value do those you serve receive?
• What contribution is your organization making to society as a whole?
• What are your organization’s strengths; what are you especially good at providing?
• How is your organization distinctive and unique?

Now that the functional philosophy has been developed, it is time to develop a service philosophy. This service philosophy is the roadmap for the organization’s approach.

The service philosophy should include:

• How you will approach service and interactions with others
• The type of environment you want to have
• The mindset used to approach interactions

The questions you should address as you create this philosophy are:

• What do we want people to say about how we approach service?
• What kind of environment do we want to have?
• What words or actions demonstrate a service-oriented approach?
• What benefits do the constituents get from what our department does?
• How do we want our constituents to feel about their interactions with our organization?

Once the organizational philosophies are completed, implementing a focused customer-service culture relies on developing a service strategy and method of delivery that understands and addresses the customer perspective in evaluating services. The “customer voice” is critical to the process. The following areas are a “starter list” for how the customer evaluates services:

• Waiting time, delivery time, process time
• Hygiene, safety, reliability
• Responsiveness, accessibility, courtesy
• Competency, dependability, accuracy, completeness, credibility
• Effective communication

Once the service strategy is developed, evaluating all operational processes to include a service-quality emphasis is crucial. These process evaluations must include:

• An emphasis on reliability. Processes impacting customers must work well over the long term.
• A process with service emphasis that is easy for customers to use. Instructions are simple, clear, and convenient.
• The process must be easy for employees to use. Processes that form impediments to positive employee behavior send a mixed message.
• Processes must be accurate and produce results.
• Processes must be fast for both customer and team members, demonstrating an understanding of the need for urgency in response and respect for a customer’s time.
• Processes must be integrated where possible and proceed logically without passing responsibility from team member to team member or unit to unit. Few subjects are more frequently the subject of complaints than when the customer is passed around among team members and receives no resolution.

An organizational team charged with developing and implementing process improvement can be a major component of an effective strategy. This team may consist of team members from involved process units in any combination but should also include a customer’s voice. Processes to be reviewed should be identified and analyzed for the following:

• Efficiency
• Cost-effectiveness
• Outdated procedures/tools such as the work management system (CMMS or IWMS)
• Metrics (as developed by the team)

Next, the team should evaluate the available tools to implement a service strategy. The increased use of technology has created opportunities and challenges. The facilities management unit’s increasing ability to input, store, and analyze data has provided many tools to track progress and offer more immediate customer responses. In many cases, accessing information on projects and work orders can be controlled at the customer level. However, too much reliance on this type of communication removes a personal touch that can make the customer feel ignored and uninformed. Voicemail, auto answer, and email can combine to create an “invisible assistance” culture.

One example of technology in the customer service culture is email and texting on handheld devices. It’s an opportunity to combine high-tech and high-touch.

Former Yahoo chief solutions officer and best-selling author Tim Sander suggests these five rules of emails:

• Never send angry emails
• Use “reply all” only when necessary
• Carbon copy only those who need to know
• Do not send emails at a time of day or night you wouldn’t phone
• Avoid sending emails to someone in your proximity and to whom you could speak in person.

The last rule is perhaps one of the most frequently abused. In the tech age, it has become too easy to email rather than walk next door and discuss the issue. While emails can be an efficient paper trail or file record, this also applies to customer contact. In addressing customer concerns, the time often comes when the arrival of a team member in person to discuss an ongoing issue is not only preferable but, in many cases, necessary.

On his blog, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin names three things customers really want: results, thrills, and ego.

Results from an FM organization often mean an acceptable response time, resolution of the issue, and good communication. The organization needs to produce and track metrics to monitor this.

Thrills, or heroism, are more difficult to quantify but most often result from emergency responses. These are responses that go above and beyond what the customer expects when the institution really needs the facilities management team.

Ego addresses the team’s ability to make our customers feel important, i.e., treating a customer better than anyone else. This is the area for the little “extras” that combine to say “We Care.” The short phone conversation or personal visit will develop a customer relationship that gives valuable feedback about your services and the necessary process improvements.

A chapter in the BOK, Work Management, authored by Mark Webb, EFP of the University of Virginia, is devoted to the importance of the role of the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) or, as referred to by others, the integrated work management system (IWMS). As discussed in this chapter, the CMMS provides “the ability of facilities management and its customers to accurately study the past and make informed plans for the future.”

The CMMS plays several significant roles in customer service; properly implemented, the CMMS will be relatively easy for customers to use. It may have features that provide common requests through drop-down menus. Some organizations are adding artificial intelligence through a series of questions designed to get the work order to the right person quickly; for example, the work order entry web page may go through a series of prompts about water dripping from the ceiling: Is it raining outside? Are you on the top floor? Has this been reported previously?

Many CMMS systems can also generate customer satisfaction surveys to solicit feedback on the work performed. Each system has different strengths and weaknesses, and the facilities organization must implement a CMMS that meets the institution’s needs.

APPA provides facilities organization evaluation services through the APPA Advisors and Facilities Management Evaluation Program. It is a rare report that does not recommend improving the CMMS’s role in customer service, which is typically the first interaction that many customers have with the organization.

The organization has defined the customer and developed a functional and service strategy, and the leadership has been tasked with building and sustaining a customer service culture. As facilities professionals, we are responsible for the physical assets of our institutions and the physical well-being of the members of our campus community and their workplace. Our responsibility is to be constantly vigilant for new methods and techniques to communicate with our customers and lead a customer service culture. To accomplish this task, we must remember that “customer service is not a department; it is everyone’s job.”

Author

This article was updated by Glen Haubold in 2024. It was originally written by Polly Pinney.

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