Use all 9 MIPS to Impress Your Customers

With ServiceTrade, you interact with your customers a lot during the service cycle. We call these interactions MIPS – Marketing Impressions Per Service.

Do you know what the 9 MIPS are and how to use them?

Or how to tell your customers about those MIPS and get customers to use them?

See how in this ServiceTrade training webinar.

Q&A

Read answers to questions submitted by guests of the live webinar.
If you have additional questions, send them to support@servicetrade.com.

Can service reminders be done from service opportunities vs jobs?

Service reminders can be sent from either the job page or through the appointment search/list page accessed through the jobs search/list page. The service opportunities page is specifically for creating jobs from upcoming services that are not yet assigned to jobs.

Can the ETA time wheel be in 15-minute increments, not 1-minute increments?

That depends on what kind of device you are on. If it is an iOS device then it will be in one-minute increments, but if it is an Android device, it looks like a clock. Whatever operating system you are using determines how the clock will appear.

Can Technicians choose multiple contacts at once for the en route notification?

Yes. As long as the contact has a valid email address, the technician can select to send a notification to them when clocking in en route.

Can we add a PO number later, before we send an invoice?

PO numbers can be added to the job page at any time.

Can the dispatch board send technician ETAs?

Not from the dispatch board. It is sent from the technician’s device when they are en route. You can, however, use the appointment search/list page to isolate just today’s appointments and send messages from there as we demonstrate in the webinar.

Is possible to have “Primary Contact” added as an option when sending ServiceLinks to customers from the office?

Yes, if the contact is already in ServiceTrade, you can click “Add Existing Contact” and you will see the option at the bottom to change the contact to Primary. We can submit a feature request to have that added to the Create Contact option as well.

Does that contact now show in the account under that location for future use?

Yes, it does. If you Create a Contact anywhere in ServiceTrade it will save that data for future use.

Can the Service Links be sent via text message? The Work Acknowledgement? Can the En Route message be sent via text?

We have plans to add this functionality in the future. We can currently accomplish this by creating and setting up a custom integration using our API and a third-party service. If this interests you, please reach out to your account manager and inquire about having our professional services team build something like this for your company.

Can one contact have multiple roles, i.e. financial, primary, scheduling, etc., so that when I bulk send to scheduling, I do not have to send to everyone who is a past contact on that job, but it will send to the scheduling person only–who might also be the financial for invoicing, but there might be a separate finance person.

One contact cannot be assigned multiple roles but you can create multiple contacts with the same email and name, and then assign each copy of the contact their different roles.

Is there a way to confirm within the web platform that technicians are having the customer complete the work acknowledgment?

Yes. Once the work ack has been completed it will be uploaded to the job page the completed services are associated with.

What kind of research has been done with customers about branding “fatigue,” as in being annoyed or desensitized with all the MIPS so that eventually they ignore them–not knowing which are important and which are just company fanfare?

This is a great question and we recommend two things:

1. Be sure to send the right MIPS to the right people where they are actually helpful instead of an annoyance.
2. All of the MIPS emails sent by the ServiceTrade application use similar email subject lines and email appearance so that customers learn in time that they are important service-related alerts that need their attention.

There was an option during the “Brand” tutorial to add a website. Where does the website link show on the account? Will it pop up when an invoice or Service Link is sent to the customer?

The website appears on the left, just beneath the brand logo on the Service Link. On the Invoice Link, it appears under the Remit To address.

A lot of these system-generated messages seem to go to Junk more than Inbox. Any way to correct this problem.?

Yes, you can make sure that your company as well as your customers have whitelisted ServiceTrade in their email accounts. This link walks you through how to do this: https://clean.email/how-to-whitelist-an-email

Where can I find the Customer Portal example?

The portal demo is at aardvarkservice.net. You’ll find the login info on the page.

Where can I see how a customer pays the invoice through ServiceTrade?

You can view all of the information about Invoice Link and how we partner with Stax for payment processing in these articles: Invoice Link Payments

When using the reminders in Job/Appointments is there a reason that you don’t see all the appointments that are on your dispatch board in (job/appointments/scheduled status)?

What you see on that list will depend on what filters you have set up. If you think you are missing appointments that should be there, reach out to support (support@servicetrade.com) and have them help you set your search filters correctly so you get exactly what you want.

Are customer reviews automatically uploaded to social media?

Service Reviews are handled through third-party integrations and can be automatically added to SEO services so that when a potential customer searches for your brand or your services on Google, they will appear. Other functions are also available but are dependent on how you have the integration configured.

Are there plans to expand the customer portal job history beyond 90 days? I have customers requesting past years of reports, that I’d like for them to be able to access from the portal.

If you view an individual location in the Service Portal, you can see activity older than 90 days.

Can “Primary Contact” be added to this dropdown menu as an option?

The contact roles that are in the dropdown are different than what a Primary contact is because you can be both one of those roles (owner, financial, etc) and the Primary contact. We can submit a feature request to have this added to the Create a Contact section, but you can also select a contact as Primary in the Add Existing Contact section in the ServiceLink.

Can message templates be created in ServiceTrade for Service Links?

Unfortunately not at the present time, but many customers have requested this feature, so I know it is on our Product Team’s radar. Stay tuned!

How do we give customers access to their portal?

The customer would Request an Account on the Service Portal section of your website, then you will need to approve them in WordPress before they can log in to the portal. You can view more information on this here: Accessing the Service Portal as a Customer