Bright Ideas: Customer Service

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Service Level Agreements
Service level agreements (SLAs) ensure consistently high customer service and satisfaction levels. Becoming more common in public sector fleets, SLAs are designed to fulfill end-user requirements, documenting allowable downtime and identifying cost issues and customer performance requirements. Fleets using SLAs usually have multiple agreements with different user departments, such as fire, solid waste, police, public works, or street maintenance. SLAs create a professional business relationship with a customer department by outlining mutual expectations to help eliminate miscommunications, misunderstandings, and mistakes.

Best Practices

• Create a fleet team culture that values customers, even the difficult ones. Continually rein force service standards.
• Use metrics to track customer satisfaction and progress.
• Solicit regular feedback from customers using annual customer surveys, but also use informal methods as simple as conversations and direct observations.
• Be proactive — contact customers for their input and evaluations.
• Gauge staff job satisfaction. Walk the shop.
• Reward staff behavior that exhibits a customer-service mentality.

Tagged for Immediate Feedback
The City of Long Beach, Calif., the County of San Diego, and Palm Beach County, Fla., all use customer service feedback hangtags placed in serviced vehicles. Customers answer a few yes/no evaluation questions. In Palm Beach County, customer surveys on new in-service assets help fleet staff determine most important services and allocate resources to meet customer expectations.

"The City of Portland, Ore., fleet department created a “Red Zone” in the maintenance parking area. When alerted by the user department fleet liaison to take a vehicle in for preventive maintenance, the operator leaves the vehicle in the specially-lined slots, where it is found the next morning after servicing. The system saves time and enhances productivity and communication, factors that have helped improve fleet PM compliance from 34 percent to 93 percent."
—John Hunt, fleet manager, City of Portland, Ore.