Century Fire Protection is a comprehensive fire protection business providing systems that meet each client’s unique needs. They offer expertise in hazard evaluation, training, installation, inspection, and beyond. From start to finish on each job, they leverage their 20-plus years in the industry with customer experience at the forefront of their minds.
It can be difficult to perfect the customer experience but Century Fire Protection is so practiced at it that they’ve even been able to turn negative feedback into repeat customers and bigger deals. Lee Cox, COO at Century Fire Protection, recently spoke with us about how AskNicely has helped them continuously close the loop with customers and win them over.
The Century Fire team is made up of 32 offices across the United States. With more than 1,500 employees they help owners, property managers, and end users protect their properties and the people inside of them, too. As COO, Lee wears many hats and oversees the risk, safety, quality control, and customer experience departments. He also plays a crucial role in training and guiding managers to use customer feedback to improve and transform the customer experience.
After years of growth, several large partnerships and acquisitions, and an influx of repair, service, and inspection work, they needed a way to better connect with customers, Lee told AskNicely.
They started using a surveying tool in 2017 to foster closer relationships with their clients. However, they still weren’t getting the metrics they needed and wanted a more streamlined feedback process. That’s when they found AskNicely and started working to close the loop with their customers. A habit that’s paid off significantly in the last five years.
Century Fire Protection uses AskNicely's customer experience management platform to survey its customers, sending net promoter score (NPS) surveys out three times a week. Doing this helps them collect a steady stream of feedback from their customers, though they take care to ensure that each customer is surveyed no more than once every six months.
Lee and his team then use that feedback to work with managers across the business and determine the best actions to improve the customer experience.
"By and large we have seen the scores get better because we've been able to use the feedback to do focus trainings."
This dedication to feedback is exactly what helped Century Fire Protection turn a $500,000 deal into a $1.2 million deal. They were working on a project and sent NPS surveys to the client’s office manager and on-site manager. While the office manager was pleased with their work, the on-site manager for the client gave Century Fire a net promoter score of one out of 10. This low score immediately set off one of the many workflows that Lee and his team had set up in AskNicely.
When negative feedback comes in the correct employee, usually a division manager, is notified. Then a personalized automated response is sent to the customer asking if they’d like to schedule a call to discuss improvements.
Luckily, in this case, the customer did want to hop on a call. “We sat down with him and went over the legitimate things he was upset about,” Lee said. They were then able to resolve the issues and help improve the experience.
After receiving such a prompt and effective response and building a relationship with Century Fire Protection, the client hired Century Fire for another project. “It turned a half million job into about $1.2 million, simply because we were able to save the relationship and make it stronger,” Lee said.
This wouldn’t have been possible without AskNicely. “Had we not been using NPS and had AskNicely not provided us with such an easy platform to see the responses and train our people, then it would have been tough to gather the information we actioned on,” Lee said.
“When we sent him another survey six months later and the job was finished, he responded, ‘Century didn't start out so great on my job but once it became apparent that I had an issue they not only stepped up, they stepped up in style and became the leading part of our project team.’”
Using AskNicely makes it possible to turn an unhappy customer into a happy one every single time and Lee and his team are trying to do just that. “I look at that success story as a reason to get better at what we do and how we conduct our focus trainings,” he said. That success shows that fostering a relationship with a client can make a world of difference to them, and the business. With collection and action in place, Lee’s next goal is to start sharing these success stories with others across the broad organization to encourage more stories just like it.
