Why is a customer's phone call important? Stupid question may be, but what's your answer? 'When making a call, customers don't differentiate between industries, the type or nature of the call, and they don't make allowances if it is a business-to-business rather than a consumer call. The bar has been raised in terms of levels of expectations and people are far more likely to defect if they are unhappy today.'

That's why - according to Anne Marie Forsyth, chief executive of the Call Centre Association (CCA). When people call up with a service issue, it is generally when something has gone wrong says Forsyth, and you must be aware that this automatically means it is an emotional experience. 'Even if you can fix the problem but don't deal with it sensitively, you could lose the customer. Looking at the issue from a positive stance, you can actually gain customer loyalty if you deal with it sympathetically because most people accept that problems do occur - it's how you deal with the problem that is important.' Forsyth gives another reason why the days of the purely functional phone call are over.

'You have to offer more than just the basics in a call today, customers can log and even fix many issues for themselves on-line, so when they do have to call you, they are expecting a personal experience.'  The difficulty, not just within the world of field service but for customer service operations everywhere, is in gaining perspective about what is important. Trying to focus on the long term aim of improving service to create customer loyalty and generate word of mouth about your great service is hard when you are struggling to meet the immediate demands to answer calls and address issues. Forsyth says that the shift is worthwhile and that you need to change your strategy to benefit from the reduction of repeat calls and unhappy customers that improved service can offer. 'Don't think of answering a call as being a nuisance; work out who is dissatisfied, and work out how important customer satisfaction is in what you do. If you don't set aside time for staff to deal with these issues and incentives for them to do so, they will carry out tasks which are core to their role and deal with the service calls if they have time,' says Forsyth.

One of the reasons why the service management market in particular has been slow to see the importance of the initial point of contact is that it is still trying to establish how the most basic functions should be managed.  Keith New, vice president of mBusiness for system vendor Aspective, explains that there are a multitude of methodologies employed in the service management world and says, 'everyone is a bit right. Some companies have specialists dealing with just calls (first line fix) who may or may not be in a dedicated call centre. Then there are those who attempt to fix faults (second line support) sometimes having taken the call or possibly been handed the details from someone else. And in some cases, there is with yet another team which handles engineer dispatch and schedules.'

Basically if you take one example, you might find that one team deals with all of these processes, whereas within the next company there could be overlap between the support layers to create yet more permutations. When you figure in the use of auto logging and customer self-service and consider preferences for who owns the call (New suggests that some companies prefer the engineer to take the mantle once the call has been handed to them, others like the idea of the original call handler taking responsibility), there is an almost infinite number of ways of dealing with the issue.  The response for this apparent lack of agreement is that each company has different requirements and style of working, especially between verticals. Although this is true, the thought does raise the question as to whether the field service industry is blighted because it is unable to collectively pool its ideas?

Well-established best practice methodologies such as ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), which is used to help establish IT service processes, serve an important purpose. Although very few people ever replicate every process indicated by a best practice framework, it can at least provide a benchmark and serve as a roadmap to help decide which areas must be addressed, which processes are needed, and which ones can be rejected or overhauled to suit the particular requirements of the host organisation. Because, unlike IT service management, there is no agreed best practice which focuses on field service management, are practitioners spending far too much time creating rudimentary processes and not enough time looking at the wider implications of their role? Take the example of customer service, the meaning of which has been overhauled several times in recent years. That good service in the right context can generate revenue is fairly well understood today, but is the service management market up to speed? 'The discussion regarding whether service can be a profit generator is fairly advanced now, but the service management market still lags behind.

This kind of advancement is beyond so many operations which have yet to come to grips with the basics of service and are certainly too cost-centric to understand the revenue opportunity service offers. Many organisations still think it is acceptable for customers to take a day off work to wait for a call-out. You can send to the customer's mobile phone a fairly accurate window for an appointment, say within two hours, with a decent scheduling and planning system,' says Keith New. New says that the mooted convergence of field service with CRM (customer relationship management) has so far failed to happen. Is it possible that the idea was hatched too soon and that the experience may have soured the idea for some people? Whatever the reason, the lack of real commitment to customer service is something of a missed opportunity for the service management market. If organisations were to start to look in more detail at the benefits of quality calls and service, then this could change.

Giuseppe Ciaffarafá, business analyst for Yorkshire Water, says that commitment to customer service and a dedication to long-term service improvements are what have driven his company to make changes to the way in which it operates. A single contact centre that is fully integrated with the workforce management systems handles all operational calls. This single point of contact is important to Yorkshire Water for many reasons. Most importantly the organisation wants to log every single interaction it has with its customers so that it understands clearly the customers issue and makes them feel that the problem is owned by one person. The integration with the call logging and workforce systems means that Yorkshire Water is able to offer and confidently achieve two hour appointments over an 85 hour week (evenings and weekends) so our customers don't need to take time off work - this is currently a better service offering than any other utility.

These changes are aimed at creating long term customer satisfaction and might be beyond the scope of what many service management operations aspire to. But Ciaffarafá also advises that upgrading the call handling process can immediately improve service and save money by limiting the number of engineer call outs required. 'We are supporting the call centre agents with call guidance scripts and giving them appropriate knowledge to ensure the basic issues can be addressed at source. We have established processes that ensure when customers are affected by a break in service details are logged and updated, so that future calls from that area can be responded to with current information.' One of the main goals at Yorkshire Water is to reduce the frequency of reactive/emergency call outs. 'The aim for Yorkshire Water is to be aware when a failure is going to occur and plan in a visit to prevent service failure. We use remote monitoring and on-line telemetry to warn of imminent asset failure giving us enough time to plan a visit before service is actually interrupted,' says Ciaffarafá.

Investment in information systems can have major benefits for the service company, argues Giuseppe. 'Having real time feedback can mean the difference between giving the customer an answer now thus closing the call on first contact and leaving them with the feeling we know what we are doing and resolution is in hand. The alternative is leaving the customer feeling unsatisfied, thinking that we don't know what is happening to our own assets with a high likelihood they will call again. ' No matter how good your first and second line support, you will still have to book engineers at some stage. Call handling can again play a vital role by arming engineers with the information they need to fix the problem in a single visit. 'The engineer should know lots about the customer requirements. If you can integrate a couple of systems within your organisation, it is possible that you could easily coincide a site visit with planned maintenance job,' offers Keith New.

Ciaffarafá, explains some of the process used at Yorkshire Water to equip the engineers with the necessary intelligence. 'We use call guidance scripts to guide the agent through standard questions to gather the information in a structured way. Most important for efficient field visits is the contact details - a telephone number, the right and full address, and a brief description of the problem defined by the customer/ interpreted by the call agent. It is vital that customers are not forced to repeat why they wanted a visit, and that there is an opportunity to do some prep work beforehand to ascertain if a visit is needed' says Ciaffarafá.

In essence, your call handlers should arm engineers with as much information as possible regarding the location they are visiting and the nature of the fault to increase the chances of making a fix. Taking this idea a step further, Anthony Harrison, divisional marketing manager for Computer Software Group (CSG) field service and hire, says that the engineer might be able to consult this information before setting off to the site, and call ahead to advise the customer how to make the fix themselves. This extra layer of support could free up a lot of resource and if you had a knowledge base the information could be fed back in, meaning that if your first line call handler encounters a similar incident, they might be able to fix it far earlier in the process.

You can however take this idea too far warns Harrison. 'It is important to remember that engineers will not adopt a technology that is too complex or difficult to use. Keep the implementation simple, and involve at least one of the engineers because take up will be much better if the engineers are trained by their peers.' The short term benefits of improving the knowledge of call handlers, equipping them with better and more timely information, and helping them to increase the first time fix rate should be a priority for any service manager. The next step of improving customer service to help generate revenues may seem a daunting and unrealistic task, but the leap may not be as great as you might expect and the potential rewards are great.