Who You Partner with for Asset Maintenance Matters

Recently, we explored the importance of strong customer service in your facility asset maintenance relationships. Whether you use local self-performers for maintaining HVAC/R, electrical, lighting, plumbing, and signage systems, or you partner with an aggregator, it’s clear that customer service in facilities maintenance makes a significant impact on the overall success of your program. Here are a few key reminders why:

  • If you don’t have trust with the partner, you won’t have a successful partnership
  • You need a dedicated team to turn to when urgent matters arise
  • It’s important to know status 24/7/365 — the right partner makes this happen
  • They’ll be there to support you strategically to ensure lasting program success

The need for capable service from vendors and partners is more pressing than ever — with facility leaders pulled in multiple directions, ensuring that your organization has the support it needs will not only provide peace of mind but also ensure you and your team are able to focus on other strategic priorities and goals. Here, we’d like to dig deeper into even more advantages that come with strong customer service in facilities maintenance.

The Extended Benefits of Customer Service in Facilities Maintenance

  • Reduced administrative workload — How busy would you say your team is right now? Between addressing the various needs of your locations to communicating with vendors, your team is likely swamped at all times — and that’s not even considering the time and effort needed for new objectives and projects for the year. Good customer service from your partners and vendors proactively ensures that your team doesn’t have to continually come back to them for callbacks, complaints, questions, and so on. They work tirelessly to ensure you’re well taken care of and issues or needs are addressed before bringing them to your attention.
  • Work order management — Simply managing the day to day work orders for your locations, whether preventive or reactive, is itself a heavy burden that requires attention to detail and consistent follow-through. Again, whether you’re working with self-performers or an aggregator, strong facilities maintenance customer service ensures work orders are processed and managed efficiently and consistently. Additionally, the systems used to manage them are also considered — e.g., does the vendor need to adapt to your current system, or is a new system needed? All of this should be considered to make your program run as smoothly as possible.
  • Service vendor consolidation — This one is huge. If you work with self-performers, it’s likely that you have quite a roster of vendors to manage every day. Good customer service ensures that the vendor keeps its place on that roster, or whether it sees itself promptly dismissed. When working with an aggregator, strong service translates into less self-performer management for your team while also holding current vendors accountable for the quality and timeliness of their work.
  • Team training support — The amount of knowledge and experience that is about to exit the facilities industry is astounding. More people are retiring than are replacing them. A partner that prioritizes training will offer this educational support for your team members to maximize their knowledge and skill. At CLS, we offer cost-free training to both clients and commercial service vendors to keep their teams skilled and sharp.
  • Performance analysis — Last but certainly not least, good customer service knows that it can’t make things better or move the needle further for your organization if it doesn’t understand how work has progressed thus far, what has gone well, and what could stand to be improved.

Get the Reliable Facilities Maintenance Support You Need with CLS Facility Services

For more than 50 years, we’ve been partnering with organizations across multiple industries nationwide — from retail and restaurants to financial institutions, medical facilities, offices, and more — to deliver a better approach to facility asset management. Our preventive maintenance programs proactively assess everything from HVAC/R and plumbing to electrical and lighting systems — and more. Working closely together from day one, our team builds and manages an asset maintenance strategy that delivers countless benefits:

If you’ve been looking for a partner with stronger customer service that can support virtually all of your facility asset maintenance needs, our team is ready to help. Connect with us today to learn more about our capabilities.