How Leading Grocery Brands Pick The Best Service Providers

When facilities managers pick the very best providers—the ones rated in the top percentile across speed and quality—they end up saving a lot of money. They do more professional, more reliable work. And they complete jobs faster, on the first try. They also have fewer incidents of returns for additional repairs. 

All of these factors combine to lower your invoices from service providers every month. So, to lower your repair and maintenance costs, try making your decisions based on performance instead. Let’s talk about how to do that.

A new, smarter era of service provider sourcing 

Many facilities managers are tempted to lower costs by going with the person with the lowest hourly rate. But that doesn’t mean they’ll have the lowest final invoice cost; in fact, it’s often the opposite. ServiceChannel tackled this problem by tracking the performance of all service providers. If you work with us, you can compare them based on their actual final invoice cost, the quality of their work, and how quickly they get the job done. With these rankings, you can make confident procurement decisions, instead of relying on the traditional guessing game.

It may sound like a lot to keep track of, but we’ve already done the work for you. ServiceChannel ranks providers in each trade and regional market across cost, quality, speed, and compliance metrics to make your jobs easier. You can call it data-driven procurement, but our customers just think of it as the new era of service provider management. 

Deep dive: measuring service provider speed

If you’re just looking at a provider’s website, it’s hard to tell how they’ll perform against certain factors that make the difference in your facility’s uptime. How can you know in advance who completes jobs quickly (but poorly), just so they can move on? How can you tell who moves fast because they have the most experienced workers? If you’re not relying on data to track performance, you can’t really know until it’s too late.  

ServiceChannel works with half of the top 10 grocery brands in the US. We’ve tracked how over 70,000 service providers carry out work for them. Among the metrics we track, speed is one of the most important. Here are the factors that go into our speed measurements:

• First-time Completion
• Defect Rate
• Satisfaction Score
• Communication Score
• Dispatch Confirmation
• Recall Rate

We know that, for example, top-performing service providers complete the job on the first visit twice as often, meaning fewer repeat trips and lower travel charges. Not only does this mean fewer billed hours, but you’ll have less downtime on the store floor. This means even more money saved. 

To see more of the metrics we measure to determine the quality, speed and compliance of work done by service providers, please visit our Grocery Facilities Benchmark Report. 

Experience the difference by selecting the best

Do you know for sure whether you’re working with the top providers in your region within each trade? Are you aware of what you can save by upgrading?

Here’s one example of our data in action, where we measure the difference between the top and bottom quartile of refrigeration providers:

Better benchmarking leads to better grocery facility performance

When you run the numbers, it’s clear: Hiring the best providers saves you money in the long run. Finding those top providers can be challenging, though, and that’s why so many facilities partner with ServiceChannel. We do the leg work for you and connect you with the best providers to help boost your bottom line. It’s that simple. 

For a look at the full report on how grocery stores can save on costs and select the top-performing service providers, check out our Grocery Benchmark Report.