Does your company have a system in place to monitor quality, or do you just wait for complaints and address them? The larger the company, the easier it is to have a quality assurance inspector. Yet a large percentage of the industry has 15 or fewer employees, which makes it difficult to afford such an inspector. Nonetheless, a quality assurance process should ensure each customer is provided with the highest possible level of service and each employee is provided with accurate and timely feedback about his performance.
Customers demand a different level of service than years ago. With social media, the activity of every employee is scrutinized. With that in mind, an inspector should be responsible for completing a certain number of review audits per week or month. This will be different for each company, but you have to set up a protocol to follow.
Stops to be audited should be selected randomly from the previous week’s completed work. Each audit will have a completed quality form that should be given to the technician who performed the service for review. The technician will have the opportunity to make comments about each of the audits completed if he wants.
The total number of audits that illuminate problems can be divided by the total number of audits completed to derive each technician’s quality result. Each technician should be required to maintain a 90 percent-or-better accuracy rate to meet the company standard. The monthly results should be tracked and used for evaluations, training and development, as well as employee incentive plans. Any employee who continually falls below the company standard of 90 percent should be counseled through the use of a company corrective action process.
A quality assurance inspector also should be responsible for making calls to customers who just had their initial service completed. These telephone calls — or sometimes, physical site inspections — should be done one to two days after the initial service. A job details form should be used on each initial service to track the information obtained as a result of the call with the customer.
All information gained from these inspections and calls should be passed on to the service or office manager or owner as it pertains to the company. For example, my company has moved from annual performance reviews to monthly goals, and I recommend completing monthly reports so managers or executives can review the results of the company as a whole.
The goal is customer loyalty, but getting that isn’t always easy. We have to continue to work hard and smart to win customers for life. pmp
You can reach Johnson, a past president of the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) and current president of Sevierville, Tenn.-based Johnson Pest Control, at ray@johnsonpestcontrol.com
Leave A Comment