One of the biggest ways that service providers can improve telecom service call satisfaction is to improve timeliness, according to a new report from J.D. Power.
The inaugural J.D. Power U.S. Telecom In-Home Service Technician Study found that scheduling an appointment satisfaction is 49 points higher among customers with service windows of one hour or less than among those with a two-hour window. That gap jumps to 104 points when customers are given a four-hour window. J.D. Power uses a 1,000 point scale, with higher numbers meaning more satisfaction.
Telecom Service Call Satisfaction
Other study findings:
- Overall satisfaction among customers whose technician arrived on time is 871. That score drops to 819 when technicians arrived early and to 683 when they arrived late. Despite the huge importance customers place on timeliness, 12% of technicians arrived outside of their service window (5% were early and 7% were late). Among the 7% of technicians who arrived late, 20% were at least two days late.
- More than one-fourth (26%) of customers indicate that not all of their issues were fixed on the first technician visit. Overall satisfaction scores are 112 points higher when the issues are fixed on the first visit.
- Scheduling an appointment satisfaction among customers who were contacted prior to the arrival of the technician arrival is 138 points higher than among those who were not contacted.
“The more flexible telecom companies can be with offering service windows that work with their customers’ schedules and the more precise they are at hitting those target times, the higher levels of customer satisfaction they can realize,” said Peter Cunningham, J.D. Power technology, media, and telecommunications practice lead, in a prepared statement. “Though this may seem like common sense, there are huge performance gaps among the different providers. Those that are getting it right have developed strong skill sets in both managing customer expectations and delivering on them.”
According to J.D. Power rankings, Dish Network rated the highest (885 points) for in-home technician service call satisfaction, followed by Charter Spectrum (860), AT&T/Directv (859), and Verizon (856). The industry average score was 853. Frontier ranked lowest at 810.