It’s Friday night, and your restaurant is busy as usual. You notice several diners fanning themselves with menus and realize that the front of the dining room is warm. What do you do?
If you don’t have a GridPoint Energy Management System, your next step might be to go back to your office and check your thermostat. You might change the setting by a few degrees and wait to see if that helps, delaying the issue for another hour or two. If it still seems too warm, you might call for someone to service the unit. That technician might get there that night, or it might be sometime next week. In the meantime, you have a full evening, and possibly a few days, of unhappy customers.
If you have a GridPoint Energy Management System, however, your first step would be to pull out your cellphone and open the GridPoint Energy Manager Mobile app. It will not only allow you to change a set point, but it will also give you visibility into whether the unit is circulating cool or warm air (the supply duct temperature). Armed with that information, you simply dial 866-800-8906. GridPoint customer support listens to your issue and immediately tests the unit in question. If the unit is cooling well and needs an adjustment, they take care of that on the spot. If it needs a technician to service it, they can adjust other units to compensate until a technician can arrive. Diners are happier, stay longer, and your night’s revenue is saved.
This situation is not unique to a restaurant; it happens at retail locations, pharmacies, fast food restaurants, and convenience stores. Managers are busy. They don’t have time to figure out if there is a problem with the heating or cooling, but it is extremely important to the bottom line that they function properly. GridPoint prides itself on providing world-class customer support. I am the VP of the Delivery & Support Team and have been with GridPoint for over 12 years. I can safely say that every day of those 12 years, we have made at least one store or restaurant manager happier. Whether it is through testing an HVAC unit to verify it needs service, changing the lights to come on during off-hours, or validating that a technician completed the job they were paid to do; the GridPoint Customer Support Team has become the go-to first response call for so many of our installed sites. Each person on my team comes to work knowing they will make a customer’s life easier, less expensive, or more comfortable. That is what we are here to do. The GridPoint EMS offers many things, from energy savings to enterprise-wide automation, but combine that with a strong customer support team, and you have a solution that does much more.
Current Service Offerings
GridPoint offers several levels of services to tailor to the individual needs of our customers. Below are a few options from a customer support perspective:
So far this year, the Customer Support team has handled thousands of customer tickets and resolved 98.5% within a strict set of service levels (SLA). That means our customers get answers and assistance quickly, and to their satisfaction. We offer support through several mediums, including email (Support@gridpoint.com), working with third-party customer service systems, and through phone calls which are answered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year.
When we can help someone at the site resolve a problem without sending a technician or recommending service, we refer to that as avoiding a truck roll. Using a conservative estimate, we have saved our customer base over $3.6 million over the last two years in avoided truck rolls alone. That is not insignificant, especially for those of our customers that have incentives for their site management related to budgets and spending.