Facilities Check List
Practical, step-by-step guides for the busy FM
October 2002
Facilities Service Delivery and Evaluation
In the tactical sense, service delivery begins at the time the customer places a request. In the strategic sense, service delivery begins well before the first call: when a menu of services is distributed, customer information meetings are held, or a customer service marketing plan is prepared.
Service delivery is a process. Service delivery is providing appropriate services to the customer when and where they are needed. Therefore, it is more than the accomplishment of each procedural step in a particular service, such as space renovation or a preventive maintenance checkup. It means all services should provide the customer with the following:
- Easy access to the delivery system
- Reasonable response
- Solution to the problem
- Service by pleasant, knowledgeable persons
- Notice of progress and problems throughout the process
- Participation in closure of the process
- Evaluation of the service provided
A system should be in place to allow the facilities manager to monitor the activities and the effectiveness of the services reception center. If the volume of work justifies it, a telephone sequencer device can be used to electronically track the total number of calls received, the length of time customers wait for a call to be answered, the number of customers who hang up before reaching services reception, and other types of response data. You can also test the center’s effectiveness by occasionally placing a service request to judge the competence, courtesy, and friendliness of the staff.
The services reception center should prepare quarterly or monthly reports that compare total incoming requests with those closed within the designated time, by both service and priority classification. Ideally, those reports will match response times with customer satisfaction data by service area, customer department, and individual service request. All of these tools provide substantive analysis of how facilities service delivery is working and how it could be improved.
A systematic approach to the evaluation of service performance can yield great benefits. For example, the data collected from a work order tracking system may have strategic value for budget preparation. This aspect of facilities is quantifiable and easy to understand; therefore, it is very useful for demonstrating the scope of facilities operations.
Management indicators for facilities performance should be generated in the following six general categories:
- Customer Service
- effectiveness
- efficiency (cost effectiveness)
- responsiveness
- Financial Performance
- budgetary efficiency
- cost reductions/containment
- unit costs
- Benchmarking
- similar companies
- competitors
- best-in-class
- Technical Performance
- by building system
- by environmental characteristics
- Space Utilization
- by type of space
- by organizational unit
- by type of activity
- Business Indicators
- periodic reports of facilities operations
- reports on specific projects
This installment of FM Check List is adapted from BOMI Institute’s Fundamentals of Facilities Management, a course in the Institute’s Facilities Management Administrator (FMA) designation program.
