A new HVAC system call center for the company
After outsourcing our call center for years, we realized that the strategy needed to be fixed for our HVAC company for a few reasons. The main reason was the outsourced parties did not have qualified HVAC repairmen who knew more about heating and could provide help with indoor comfort to our customers. We also noticed the operational cost for outsourcing was through the road, and with a recession looming, we needed to cut off unnecessary costs. We met with the board of directors and devised a new strategy to have our in-house call center with well-trained HVAC technicians. We would have the specialist do a rotational roaster between the call center and the fieldwork. The fieldwork includes going to the customer’s turf to fix or replace their HVAC equipment. To ensure that our staff was as efficient as possible in dealing with customers over the phone, we took them through a comprehensive phone estimate and customer service training. The training involved knowing how to operate the system and log in appointments. There were also one or two dispatchers per shift to ensure they dispatched help to the customers who needed HVAC maintenance or furnace/heater repairs. The more we interacted with the computerized system, the more we discovered efficient ways to serve our customers. We categorized customers’ common issues with their HVAC systems into easy and challenging classes. For instance, changing furnace filters would be under the easy class, while heat pump service would be under the problematic category. We also categorized the systems into furnace and heat pump classes. Over time, we got very efficient and have provided quality heating to our customers who call our in-house service answering center. We have also significantly cut down the company’s operational costs.