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I’m sure you’ve heard that old adage: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Similarly, particularly in this connected age, if a service is delivered to one of your customers, and there’s no online record of the value the customer received, did the customer actually receive any service?
Like the sound created by a falling tree, the value created by your service is small to non-existent if the customer does not get to experience it. And the only way they will likely experience it is if you provide an online record that demonstrates the improvements you delivered and the risks you removed as part of your service.
Engage customers
Consider a “digital wrap” in the same way many contractors wrap their trucks. The wrap features your logo, contact information and brand promise that all make a positive impression. Your brand gets exposure as part of your company’s daily routine driving from service call to service call. Your truck wrap, however, is fleeting – when the truck leaves the site the potential for the impression disappears.
Instead, imagine infusing your operations with cutting-edge technology to forge deep, lasting connections with customers and anchoring them to brands – a win-win so service contractors get more revenue, and customers get more value. Your digital wrap is how you take your tech’s work – arrival notices, service summaries, videos and photos of deficiency conditions with equipment, before and after photos, quotes for repair, etc. – online to make lasting impressions on your customers.
Engage customers with regular updates that not only showcase the “what” but also the “why” behind your work, highlighting the problems you expertly averted through your timely interventions. Those interventions are the ‘snakes’ you unearth during inspections – the lurking issues within the machinery that your proactive measures prevent from materializing into costly disruptions.
The online impression is much more valuable because the customer can retrieve, review, reply, forward, respond and generally enjoy your brand value anytime.
These digital wraps generated by modern contracting applications help you create better connections between your value and your customers. These premium connections in turn allow you to upsell and deliver more work because the customer is more likely to respond positively to your recommendations and upsell offerings when they can see for themselves that you are looking out for their interest.
The trick is to use technology applications that creates and share this digital experience with the customer without you creating a whole passel of extra work for the office to present the records to the customer.
Let’s have a look at how digitizing your business improves the value you offer to customers, then discuss the questions you should ask your leadership team to be sure your digitization strategy is customer-focused.
Show me
Maybe you’re reading this in the Show Me state of Missouri. But if not, consider that all your customers come from the Show Me state and you’ll need to present them with evidence of the value of your service.
This presentation, however, is not going to happen with the tech taking them on a grand encore tour of the equipment recently upfitted and polished on the roof or in the mechanical room. That approach is uncomfortable and inconvenient for the customer, and it is certainly expensive and impractical for you as the contractor.
You have to present the case for your value online and using modern digital mechanisms like photos and videos. It makes perfect sense when you consider that Facebook zoomed to dominance online initially with photo sharing, and now TikTok has assumed the mantle of online king of the hill with videos. People expect to consume content online and in living color. Are you delivering this value for your customers?
Your techs should be outfitted with service applications that allow them to easily collect evidence of your value with photos, videos, and audio recordings. A picture is truly worth a thousand words, and a video is literally a collection of thousands of photos – making them super valuable as a medium for communicating.
These recordings, however, should not just be dumped as massive and unwieldy file attachments into an already cluttered email inbox. Instead, they should be presented via an online storybook that documents the service call for the customer. The email you send should have a quick summary that piques their interest with a link to the full story they can access via their browser.
Even more interesting, artificial intelligence can now read the video and audio recording of your technicians and transcribe them into a summary to draw the customer into the full digital story.
Get started
As a savvy commercial service contractor you likely already use some third-party tools and software. But as you continue your journey to digitize more aspects of your business and use technology to scale, make sure you are putting the customer first.
Ask a few questions to help ensure you have the right infrastructure in place so you can meet your customers’ current and future needs at scale. These are all the types of white glove interactions today’s customers have come to expect from service contractors. For instance:
• Is it easy for your techs to create digital records of their work (photos, videos, audio recordings) within their service application without extra steps involving email and texting?
• Is it easy to share these records with customers, likewise without extra steps associated with emailing and texting outside of the service application?
• Does your service application make it easy to turn digital records collected relating to risky equipment into online quotes that the customer can approve without extra steps for printing, signing, scanning, etc?
• Can you show prospective customers a differentiated process that exposes them to their equipment status and service routine online so they believe in your promises of better service?
• Does your service application use AI to direct the tech to the most likely causes of failures and most likely areas of risk for the equipment being serviced? By summarizing the history and the operating outcomes for millions of related service calls and equipment failures?
• Can customers see their history with your company online? Service summaries? Quotes? Invoices? Is your value easy to understand?
• Does your service application use AI to generate sales leads for equipment retrofits based on service history and equipment operating condition? Earning you new revenue and eliminating hassles for the customer from unplanned service calls?
Using applications to provide a top-notch customer experience is absolutely the right step to become a premium brand and maintain a good reputation as you grow. Your customers want ease, transparency, reliability, and clear communications from their service contractors.
By always putting your customers’ experiences first, you’ll be able to properly digitize more of your workflows so that you can improve customer happiness and your bottom line.
Billy Marshall is the founder and strategic advisor at ServiceTrade, a software platform that helps commercial HVAC, mechanical, and fire contractors streamline service and project operations to reduce administrative costs, optimizes field performance to increase revenue per technician, and boosts sales and client retention to grow margins.