Guidelines for Measuring Service Quality in Facility Services

It's crucial that you give your customers the best service possible. With so many choices available, clients will go toward the facility services companies who consistently exceed their expectations and satisfy their needs.

Despite the importance of providing remarkable service, many facility services companies struggle to quantify the quality of their services. Because it is qualitative rather than quantitative, it might be difficult to evaluate.

Guidelines for Measuring Service Quality

How you measure service quality depends on the situation and what the brand promises, and the quality of service is measured in different ways depending on the industry. The industry standard and most widely used metric is SERVQUAL.

SERVQUAL - Five dimensions of service quality

The SERVQUAL model is predicated on five dimensions that customers across all service sectors have identified as crucial to a positive service experience. The SERVQUAL assessment method describes these parameters as follows:

• Tangibles: the appearance of things like facilities, equipment, personnel.
• Reliability: reliability and precision in delivering the promised service.
• Responsiveness: capability of quickly responding to customers’ needs and requests.
• Assurance: staff members' competence, friendliness, and knowledge.
• Empathy: the company's dedication and care for its clients.

The SERVQUAL framework uses these five factors to calculate the degree to which the service delivered falls short of customers’ expectations. Over time, can assist you understand client expectations, service perceptions, and quality improvement areas. It is beneficial in identifying aspects of service that need improvement and targeting training opportunities for service staff.

If developed and implemented properly, SERVQUAL provides rich insights that can help facility managers to practically improve the service.

Service quality survey

To be able to provide better service, you need to understand client expectations as well as customer satisfaction. This can be done by asking for feedback from your customers using service quality questionnaires. These are typically completed after the service by sending email, SMS, QR or using a feedback kiosk. It is important to understand customer dissatisfaction as early as possible before your customers become detractors and have a negative impact on your brand.

Service quality questions

Facility services questions should focus on measuring the customer’s interaction with service reps, the service that was provided, the overall experience, and if the service will be used again. Giving an open text option will enable customers to and details to their feedback that they think would be helpful. Sample questions that can be asked from customers:

- How satisfied are you with the service provided?

- What did you like the most about the service you received?

- Please rate the helpfulness and knowledge of the rep.

- What can be improved about the service you received?

- How likely are you to recommend our service to your colleagues?

Facility services quality

If you want to know if you are delivering good service to your customers, you need to know exactly what they are looking for in terms of the quality of the service and their expectations. In facility management, when service quality is done properly, it will save cost and time, enhance productivity, and improve customers’ satisfaction.

In facility management, service quality tends to focus on timely service, customer satisfaction, reduction in customer complaints, and employee job satisfaction.

Identify key performance indicators and measure the operations. Define the benchmark and monitor the performance against it to identify performance gaps. Facility Management KPIs are the foundation of facility management because many are performance indicators that reflect a performance measure per unit. Lagging metrics are useful to tell how well our facility services team performed while leading metrics are useful to forecast the likely trend. Metrics are also used for facility benchmarking because they can be compared between different facilities and teams.

How to act on your findings

After you have defined and measured the quality of your service, it is time to act and develop a more satisfying customer service experience. While customer satisfaction depends on many subjective and out-of-control factors of your team and your business, focus on improving actions you can control. It takes time and effort to create excellent service for the customers.

First, focus on the right way to measure the five most important dimensions of customer service. Determining how effective your team is delivering high-quality service to your clients can seem challenging. You need to have a deliberate strategy for gathering customer feedback, putting that feedback into action, and developing exceptional experiences for your clients. After that, you’ll be on your way to making the most effective improvements to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

There are many "feedback solutions" that facility managers, building operations professionals, and decision-makers can choose. Facilities services companies that make use of the appropriate customer feedback solutions platform are in a better position to determine service gaps and where they can make improvement in their day-to-day operations.

Our mission at Press'nXPress is to help our clients improve customer satisfaction by continuously monitoring customer experience. You can reach out to our experts to see how PXP Facility Services Feedback Solution can benefit your business today! If you have questions or would like to learn more, get in touch. Reach out and talk to us.