The modern customer has high expectations and many assumptions about what your business should offer them. Increasingly, it is assumed that all businesses operate online in one form or another to enable fast communication, payments and service provision. In order to keep up with such demand and maintain your position in the market, it is becoming absolutely essential, even for the smallest businesses, to be digitally savvy and satisfy customers in this way.
Now, the question is, how exactly can you use software to achieve those two things?
Manage your projects and job orders
Businesses are relying less on manual paper and pen logbooks and sign-off sheets thanks to project and job order management software. No business is the same, and when it comes to offering a service within the field service sector, exemplary organizational management is critical. Often, teams of technicians work remotely on job-sites, whether they be cleaners, plumbers, or landscapers for example, and it can quickly become unwieldly trying to schedule multiple appointments on multiple days with multiple teams. (1)
Smart technology can take care of all these headaches. Jobber is one such example and offers bespoke cleaning software as well as other industry specific software to support businesses of all sizes attract new customers, schedule teams, and track job and all customer details in one place.
Finding software that is niche to your sector will help you streamline your internal systems and processes and ultimately enable you and your teams to work more productively.
Manage your accounting and finances
Hiring an accountant to join your company may be too high an investment for some small business owners. While it may be beyond the budget to get someone to do the financials for you, you may want to consider using an accountancy consultancy alongside learning how to manage the books yourself.
Thankfully, Jobber as above, and many modern accounting applications can support in solving a lot of accounting and invoicing issues, as well as usually being very cost effective. Office administrators can still manage to do payroll, tax, and bookkeeping but also take ownership of cash flow too.
Choosing good accounting software lets you reap the following benefits:
- Have accurate financial records
- Save time doing financial work
- Automate calculations
- Improve productivity
- Streamline invoicing
Create estimates, generate quotes, and process invoices
Modern business programs are highly effective and quick at being able to dispatch estimates and quotes for jobs. Integrating specialist software on your website will allow prospects to directly request what they want and get immediate responses which they can then choose to follow up further. This is of absolute importance if your customers are to have a good experience when they come into contact with you.
Following a manual inspection to share a final job quote, should this be applicable, the estimate can then be translated instantly into a quote for the work to proceed. Laborious and time-consuming administrative tasks are a thing of the past. Human error is also reduced.
Improve customer relationship
Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are one of the most essential business applications for customer centric companies.
A CRM’s primary purpose is to store all pertinent data you’ll collect from your customers in one single place. These databases can be used to generate reports and analyze performance to gather strategic insight into customer acquisition, care, and retention.
Knowing and understanding what your customers want from a service provider is mandatory for you to operate one successfully. While it’s not enough to impress them, it’s needed to—at the very least—meet their expectations.
Unify and simplify customer communications
Communications technology has evolved over the past few years. Before, you couldn’t operate a business without a landline. Now, you can have as many communication channels for you and your customers as you want whether that be cellular, SMS, email, social media, or even internet messaging apps. (3)
However, while it’s convenient to have plenty of communications channels available, it’s also inconvenient if these all operate on different devices. Use software to integrate them all into one place so you don’t miss important messages. Do your research and find the technology that works for you and your business.
Conclusion
Software is highly effective in making your business operations more effective and productive. It is also a smart way to be able to cater to your customer base and service them to the level to which they expect and which your competitors are offering. Research the market to find the best business software solution for you and make that your investment to being able to scale and grow your business in the sustainable way it deserves and needs.