Since its formation in 1991, phs Compliance has enjoyed substantial growth. It is now a major provider of property and facilities management services, employing over 500 people and delivering over 14 million compliance inspections across 35,000 customer sites each year.
The company attributes its success and growth trajectory on its focus on the customer experience. The company’s service model means that customers are not bound by contract – they call upon phs Compliance each year when appliance testing is due.
Emily Vernon, joint Managing Director, phs Compliance: “Having a service business model means that it’s absolutely key that we delight and retain our client base. We work in a crowded market that is only growing by 1-2% year on year. phs Compliance is leading the sector, achieving organic growth of 7%+ for the last three years. To maintain this rate, I recognised that we needed innovative ways of measuring and tracking our customer experiences.”
phs Compliance has worked hard to streamline its customer base to ensure that it is focusing on and retaining clientele that is best aligned to its service model. They have put the onus on its partnerships with facility management companies and its larger clients, which represent a significant proportion of its revenue.
Vernon continues: “Given that our customer base is so valuable, we need to ensure that everyone within those companies has a consistent high-quality experience. If there are any issues, we need to know about them straight away so that we can address them and make things right.”
Previously phs Compliance relied on getting feedback from its partners or through an external customer services division. It looked at feedback solutions on the market and chose Customer Thermometer to help the company get closer to its customers. By embedding its 1-click surveys into emails, phs Compliance could get direct and immediate feedback from customers on how they were experiencing its services.
phs Compliance started to use Customer Thermometer on outbound emails from the customer service team, and then added it to other aspects of the customer journey, including order intake, planning, follow up and credit control. It’s now also being used by on-site engineers who pass a PDA to customers at the end of a job so that they can directly feedback on their experience.
Vernon adds: “We have added processes around the feedback garnered from Customer Thermometer to ensure that any customer that hits a red button is responded to promptly. This has been a game-changer for us. Previously customers didn’t have a way to contact me directly if there was a problem – now I’m on the phone within in a day and in every instance the customer has had the issue resolved and left the situation feeling happy and listened to.”
phs Compliance has been so pleased with its experience using Customer Thermometer that it has now extended the service to be used internally to measure feedback from engineers who are being on-boarded. It will also be using the tool in future as part of its marketing lead-generation campaigns.
Vernon concludes: “I have had a very positive experience working with Customer Thermometer. It’s really straightforward, with a user-friendly interface and crucially customers enjoy using it. In fact, we have even had a customer contact us to get the name of the company we were using for our ‘perception monitoring’ – so we had good feedback on our feedback – I can’t think of a more appropriate endorsement!”
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