Communication: The Key To Success

One of my biggest bugbears in FM is communication. They were better at it in my last job than in others; people knew what was going on. The siloing of information is the biggest issue in FM customer service and we need to talk about this now.

Providing good customer service should be the endgame of every FM professional from the managers to the helpdesk to the engineers on the ground.

The Problem

Without a good grounding in best practice in communications throughout the team, even the most elementary service delivery will be problematic. I'm going to look at five areas where things go wrong in communications and advise from my personal experience on how to get things right first time.

1. Silos
2. Lone wolves
3. Poor/no annotation
4. Lack of ownership
5. Lack of leadership

Let's take a closer look at each of these and how they affect each other.

Silos

Siloing occurs when a person either decides to keep information to himself or neglects to share it with others. This is problematic because, if this person is unavailable when the information is required, we have to wait until he is available and able to share it. People who fail to share information and keep the team and other stakeholders informed slow jobs down and annoy our customers.

The most effective solution I've ever seen to this is shared inboxes; CAFMs* are only as good as the data entered.

Lone wolves

Siloing of information is common but siloing of tasks and responsibilities are problematic, too. It has a massive knock-on effect if we can't pad the point of failure by building in redundancies so someone else can fill in when that person is not around. Lone wolf managers are the worst ones in terms of customer service delivery; they refuse to delegate and won't share information so the team never knows what's going on. A culture in which lone wolf types are tolerated is one in which the siloing of responsibilities is not only rife, it's enforced. Result: clients kept waiting for service if it comes at all. Delays in decision-making has a knock-on effect that affects everyone.

Poor/no annotation

Content management systems (CAFMs) are only as good as the data entered. When the data entry is poor or not done at all there's no way of knowing what was done. Some helpdesk advisers and client coordinators/CSAs** seem to think they only need to let the system record purchase orders raised or engineers or suppliers or vendors assigned but this doesn't tell us much about the job. Engineers have told me they hate doing paperwork so getting them to write detailed notes isn't really fair particularly if the job is to just change a lightbulb. Okay, fine, but it's handy to know which lightbulb they used and the location thereof in case we need to purchase stock or the fault keeps recurring; sometimes it's the fitting or the circuit itself. I can change a lightbulb easily enough but I wouldn't touch anything requiring rewiring. If we're sending another engineer to the same location for the same kind of thing he needs to know that.

Lack of ownership

In one of my jobs the bane of my life there was lack of ownership. I actually wrote about it on Linked In.

This is what I do; when I was off for a week my colleagues were able to fill in for me, relaying information to clients as and when required because I keep the feedback up to date on the jobs I deal with. They knew how to deal with order requisitions on Ultrasys and who to send purchase orders to. They were able to find quotes, work reports, and updates from our service provision partners since all they had to do was input the related job or purchase order number. - The Snot Problem, by Wendy Cockcroft for Linked In

I owned the job and didn't stop owning it just because I wasn't there. I delegated to my colleagues by leaving the information available where they could find it in the shared inbox and in the feedback on the CAFMs we were using. Where siloing of responsibilities is rife or there's a lone wolf in the pack, the ownership isn't shared so the buck stops with one person and everything is held up until that person gets around to dealing with it. You also get gaps in service because the Snot Problem kicks in; Gerry won't do it because it's Andy's job and if Andy is too busy to deal with it, we're stuffed. Actually, the customer is stuffed and we get yelled at. You know what I mean.

Lack of leadership

Leadership comes in different flavours. The Servant leader is my favourite because I thrive in an environment where the leader is willing to work with me rather than either dole out tasks to be accepted without question or spend all the time in meetings. It's not just about being the boss, though. Leadership means assuming responsibility not just for the work but for the team that does the work. If communication between managers and their teams and between those and the other departments and stakeholders is poor, a hot mess results. Good leadership means sharing information, working effectively with other people, and ensuring records are properly kept and acted on.

The Solution

I've identified three keys to effective communication:

• Decide on what needs to be done and who needs to do it
• Ensure we have everything we need to get the job done
• Ensure that everyone knows what's going on

This is as essential to good leadership as it is to customer service delivery. Obviously there needs to be some flexibility in order to cover for absent colleagues but you get the idea: talk to people and listen to them, too. Take a look at this diagram:

Target service delivery area

I've used the term "target service delivery area" to refer to the people we do the work for who aren't necessarily the people who are paying us. We're not directly accountable to them. However, they will talk about us so I'm always anxious that whatever they say about us is positive as it will feed back to the upper echelons of their managment, i.e the people who are actually paying us.

Notice how the reported issue or fault goes first to the Helpdesk (this depends on the setup of your business. I worked in a call centre sorting things out remotely for people all over the country). The way my client coordinator job used to work was that the Helpdesk would log the job, then pass it on to either CSAs or to the schedulers to get the job actually done. This is the first point of failure; if they don't specify what the job is we could end up sending a handyman to do a job requiring an electrician. Simply acting on the job logged as it is can result in complaints down the line. We need to ask the client/caller what the actual issue is, has it happened before, where in the building it is, and whether or not we will need ladders. Since the Helpdesk is the first point of contact they need to be asking these questions instead of rushing to get the caller off the phone. They also need to get this logged on the system with comprehensive feedback. If the job came by email they can copy and paste this into the system and forward it on to the schedulers or to the CSAs to pass on to whoever attends. The other thing that could and often did go wrong was the Helpdesk also communicating with the engineers and vendors/suppliers. Cutting them out is not a good idea (it's been tried!); they just need to be better informed and trained to ask the right questions and log the feedback on the system.

CSAs usually come on board after the fact to ascertain whether or not the work has been done and the job closed down. All of the people in that layer need to be keeping the client informed as to what is going on. A quick email to the effect of "Gerry Mackintosh will attend tomorrow AM" will do, just let them know. If you haven't ascertained opening hours, etc., the engineer might arrive bright and early only to discover there's nobody to let him in.

Service providers

The actual service providers, for the purposes of this post, are defined as the people actually going to site to carry out the work required, i.e. engineers or subcontractors. If they're not keeping us informed as to what is going on, e.g. "Stuck in traffic near Wigan," we can't let the client know why they've not turned up on time and when they are likely to arrive. I like to establish communication links between them and the client so they're talking to each other and copying me in. That way, they're getting information from the horse's mouth, as it were, and aren't playing Chinese Whispers with the Helpdesk or CSAs. Daisy-chaining can cause massive problems here because the companies doing this don't like to let us know they're doing this so when things go wrong it takes ages to find out why.

Demarcation

Clients should only ever be talking to either the Helpdesk and or to the attending engineers and service providers as a rule; CSAs and managers should only get involved when they need to in order to keep the service running smoothly. The chain of command, as it were, tends to break down when someone is failing somewhere, and every time that happens I guarantee that communication has gone wrong somewhere down the line.

Effective communication is essential to best practice in customer service delivery. If we can't get that right, we won't get anything right. Let's all be thinking about how we can communicate better with each other, with our clients, and with our service provision partners so we can deliver the best service possible.

*Computer-aided facility management (CAFM) is the support of facility management by information technology. The supply of information about the facilities is the center of attention. The tools of the CAFM are called CAFM software, CAFM applications or CAFM systems.
**Contract support administrators