It’s not easy to maintain good old fashioned customer service while trying to improve the productivity of your business. Both of them take up a lot of time, money, and effort; as a result, one or the other tends to suffer.
There is a lot of talk about smart automation. But, what is it? And, can it really be applied to a pest control business? Formitize – the company behind the Pest Control App – have been looking at the industry from the small operator’s point of view. We have developed some powerful business automation solutions that can really help small businesses outshine their bigger competitors.
Matt Burge of Formitize explains, “We love the benefits that smart automation can bring to small business. It can level the playing field by enabling small businesses to be smart and automate so many of the time consuming and mundane activities that can take up so much time. Even better, the same automation tools can actually improve the level of customer service and client satisfaction.”
Recent developments by Formitize have been focussed exactly on this, and the results are impressive.
The new features include:
1. Automated Job Status Updates
Job Status Updates are designed to trigger automated communications to the customer or your internal team as a Job moves through its different stages. They are a really powerful way to keep everyone updated in a professional way and is fully automated. You can create as many different Job Status Updates as you like for each Job Type and you can customize the wording and timing for each Update that you create. The Updates can be triggered when the job is Created, Assigned, Accepted, Completed, or is Overdue and can be sent by email, SMS, Letter, or Notifications.
When a Job is Accepted by the technician, an automated email can be sent to the customer thanking them for the appointment and providing a photo of the person that will be visiting them. When a Job becomes overdue, a Task is sent to the office alerting them to the fact that the job is now overdue as this may affect later appointments in the day. If the technician is running late for an appointment, they simply click “Late” and provide the customer with an SMS with expected time of arrival.
2. Automated Post Job Communication
The Post Job Communications can be triggered automatically when the job is completed and again can be sent by email, SMS or notification. This is the perfect tool to say thank you, to request referrals or to offer loyalty rewards.
3. Automated Future Reminders
A big part of any regular work, like annual inspections, is the reminder process – both for the customer and the internal team. The Formitize Future Reminders can be automated and fully customised for each type of job completed combining perfectly timed letters, emails, and SMS sequences to ensure no future business is ever missed.
4. Automated Quote Follow Ups
So much business is lost due to not having the time to efficiently follow up Quotations and Estimates. Again the Formitize solution solves this problem with automated follow ups based on either Quote Status or days.
5. Automated Overdue Invoice Chasing
Chasing outstanding invoices is a negative, time consuming process and for small businesses can be a major distraction. Formitize enables automated outstanding invoice chasing to be triggered at defined time frames with fully customized wording for each stage of the follow up process.
Customers love to be communicated with and kept up to date. Now, all of these items can be delivered professionally and automatically so the business owner can focus on making money, knowing that smart automation is improving their customer relationships and ongoing business value.
For more information visit PestControlApp.com.au or call the Sydney office on 1300 552 008.
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