Put your best face forward

Good design makes a small company look big or a big company look like a leader. Whether that’s on a website, in emails, social media, on proposals, or in customer service, it’s worth a service contractor’s time to create unique, engaging, modern designs.

You do not have to spend a lot to get something good. We think that we put together good-looking designed pieces on our own. And when our needs are beyond our capabilities, we’ve found some affordable outsourcing options.

Here are five tools that service contractors can use to create professional-looking marketing materials.

Canva
canva.com

Canva is an easy-to-use online tool for creating images for websites, emails, advertising, invitations, posters – just about anything. They provide templates that you can use as a starting point or you can start from scratch. It does not give you as many options as the Adobe Creative Suite – nor the hefty price tag. For simple creative projects, Canva is our go-to tool.

Cost: FREE

The paid version is $12.95 per user per month and I like it because it offers a few important features like saving PNGs with a transparent background, establishing brand preferences, and setting up teams of users that can share an account.

Samples that we’ve created with Canva:

Animoto
animoto.com

Animoto is great for creating short marketing videos that use photos and existing videos. We’ve used it to create a video that loops in our booth at tradeshows, check it out below.

Animoto has a stable of storyboard templates. Once you choose a template, the customizations you can make are pretty limited, so be sure to try out a few template options to find the right one for your project.

I like Animoto because I am overwhelmed by video editing applications. For simple projects and short videos that combine existing elements, Anomito is a very usable tool that’s saved me a lot of time and aggravation.

Cost: They don’t offer a free version. I seem to have everything I need at their Professional level for $264 a year.

Sample booth video:

Beautiful.ai
about.beautiful.ai

When you need a beautiful presentation, Beautiful.ai is a tool for creating stylish slide decks with the option for cool animations. It’s another point-and-click tool that produces professional results. They offer about 50 templates, and like other tools, the templates are only somewhat customizable but are a fast way to put together attractive slides for those of us who are allergic to PowerPoint and want a slick design.

Cost: It’s free for now. They have plans to add a paid pro tier later in 2018.

Sample slide:

Stock Photos

It is hard for any company to have a full supply of their own high-quality photos that they can use on a website or other projects, so that’s when you turn to stock photos. Choosing stock photos is a matter of personal style and brand personality, so I can’t give you much advice there, but I can tell you about some sources for stock photos that we’ve found helpful.

Here are three stock photo websites we use most often:

Pexels – there are a ton of sites that offer free stock photos, but I like Pexels for its good search function and large library

New Old Stock – lots of black and whites from days gone by

Shutterstock – where we purchase most licensed stock photos.

As I’m browsing free photos, I save the ones that I hope to find a use for in the future that strike me for being beautiful, funny, or relevant to our messaging — including these gems.

CAUTION: Try not to chose cliche or over-used photos. How many times have you seen (or even used!) a vanilla stock photo of a smiling person wearing a headset? Be unique! Need advice for choosing photos? Start here.

WARNING: Do not use licensed stock photos without buying the license. The owners of the license (companies like Shutterstock, Getty Images, iStockPhotos, to name a few) have highly intelligent systems that find where their images are being used online without proper licensure. I know someone who learned this lesson the hard way by receiving a bill for $900 for using a photo after the license expired. Always buy the license or choose royalty-free stock images instead.

99 Designs
99designs.com

My biggest challenge is recognizing when I need the help of a professional designer before I spend hours working on a project before I realize I’m in over my head. When that happens, I usually turn to 99 Designs.

At 99 Designs, you begin a contest where you describe the project and set your budget ($199, $299, or $399 are common amounts – do you see why they’re called 99 Designs?) and how many days you want to run the contest. Then designers within their network choose to participate and submit an initial design for your consideration. This is where the contest part comes in – after designers have had a certain number of days to submit designs, you go through them and choose the designs that you want to go to next steps with and request revisions. Once you have chosen a final design, you award the project to the winning designer and they hand over your final files. The winner is the only designer who gets paid.

I enjoy the contest element and having a number of options to consider. For the price and the amount of time each designer can invest in the project, I realize that I’m getting a lot of template work that the designer has on file, but that’s usually just fine for us.

A recent 99 Designs project:

What other tools do you use that I should know about? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

A Story of Growth – AAA Fire Protection, Seattle

“When we started with ServiceTrade we had one pipefitter. Now we have five.” When Mary Krinbring of AAA Fire Protection in Seattle told us that in September 2015, everyone on our end of the phone’s eyes opened wide at that 500% growth. “Tell us more, Mary…”

Mary Krinbring, AAA Fire Protection. November 2017.

When AAA Fire Protection joined ServiceTrade in August 2014 they were bogged down with paper processes and wanted to go digital. They adopted ServiceTrade to speed up the time it took to send Invoices to customers.

Mary told us that they didn’t use ServiceTrade for quoting at first because they felt like they had it covered. But after learning how ServiceTrade’s built-in quoting could help them turn regular inspections into more repair jobs, they gave it a try. Mary attributes their need for more pipefitters to the nice workflow that converts deficiencies into quotes for repairs. Before long, they were having a hard time keeping up with their repair opportunities and added an estimator to create repair quotes for their expanded pipefitting team. Mary reports that using ServiceTrade has increased their quote volume by at least 50%.

Today, AAA’s pipefitting department has more than doubled again and the company has achieved 20% growth. Mary sat down with us at the 2017 Digital Wrap Conference to explain why she thinks that ServiceTrade and a Digital Wrap helped AAA break through barriers that were holding them back from reaching the growth they’d been working hard to achieve.

AAA Fire Protection is dedicated to smart growth and using technology to keep their customers around. ServiceTrade is proud to be their partner.

Are you writing a happy story?

I remember reading books in grade school where I could choose my own adventure. The book began by introducing characters, a setting, and some trouble. As I read along, I made decisions at forks in the story. Should they turn left or turn right? Should they enter the castle or continue through the forest? Should they follow the trail of candy to the witch’s house or turn and run? I knew the beginning of the story but my decisions would change the ending.

You are writing that type of story every day in your service business. You have your cast of characters, the setting, and maybe an evil villain or two. But can you predict how the story will end? QuickSight reporting will help you make better decisions in the midst of writing the story of your business that lead to a better ending.

As we were deciding on the reports we wanted to show during the QuickSight webinar we hosted this week, I realized we were examining plot twists: Which sales rep is the most successful with their quotes? Which technicians are and are not recording deficiencies that represent new revenue opportunities? What does the labor demand curve look like for planned contract work in the next six months?

Here’s how you can approach setting up your QuickSight data analysis to uncover insights that will help you make good decisions:

Define what you care about. What are the key performance indicators for your business? There will probably be a lot of them and that’s good.
Choose your cast of characters. ServiceTrade data can be analyzed in six major datasets:
- Deficiencies
- Jobs
- Recurring services
- Invoices
- Quotes
- Technician productivity
Ask some questions. Parameters around your reporting generally fall into two buckets: Time and money — or both. Craft a one-sentence question that data analysis can answer for you like:
- How many of our quotes for deficiencies are being approved?
- Which sales rep in the Durham office has the highest quote approval rate?
- Which technicians record the most deficiencies?
- What service lines generate the most revenue throughout the year?
Collaborate. Create a team that’s responsible for generating reports and finding the best ways to discover what it is that you want to learn. Once you’ve built a few reports and are familiar with the app, you’ll think of new ways to uncover new insights.

While you’re discovering new insights from your ServiceTrade data there’s one more thing to do:

Take action. Insights require action, whether that’s doing more of what’s working or making changes where needed.

QuickSight reports tell you the whole story of your business – the comedies, adventures, dramas, and the horrors. Use this reporting tool to measure the health of your business and learn where you should make changes for better growth, profitability, and efficiency.

Who do you think you are?

What’s your brand promise? A brand promise is a powerful, shorthand way for companies to tell their customers what to expect. They’re what makes a company different and better than their competition, and a good brand promise gives you permission to focus intently on living up to that promise.

Here are a few popular examples:

Geico: 15 minutes will save you 15% or more on auto insurance

BMW: The ultimate driving machine

Jimmy John’s: Freaky fast

So who do you think you are? What does your company promise to your customers that they can’t get from your competition?

Don’t fret if you are scratching your head right now – it’s not uncommon for service companies to lack a clear, concise statement like BMW’s “The ultimate driving machine.”

There are a few things you can do to reveal your brand promise. But we’d like to start with what not to do, and that is to offer empty platitudes. Have you ever uttered any of these phrases?

We have better techs.
We give better service.
We work harder.
We care more.

It’s ok if you have because you aren’t the only one — by a long shot. Benign statements like these are hard to prove and are meaningless to the customer. While it’s nice that you work hard and care about doing quality work, it isn’t unique to your business and it isn’t compelling to your customers and prospects.

Gain Perspective

The best way to determine your brand promise is to step into the shoes of your best customers. What do they want? Why do they love working with you?

They want a better program designed to fit their needs
They don’t want any hassle
They want to see the value in your relationship

Be Unique

How are you different and better than everyone else who does what you do? At ServiceTrade, our mission is to make commercial service contractors more important to their customers to grow their business.

At BMW, it’s to create the ultimate driving machine. BMW shoppers know that they’re looking at an automobile that offers a driver’s experience, not granny’s slow, comfortable ride around town. Jimmy Johns does everything it can to be freaky fast. Even to the point of limiting their menu to a single option for mustard or cheese. (Did you know that? Dijon or provolone – that’s it.)

What makes you unique isn’t a question you can find the answer for in Google. It takes introspection. Involve your team in this project of self-discovery.

Get Uncomfortable

And, finally, get ready for some uncomfortable conversations. You’re definitely going make some customers unhappy if your brand promise doesn’t match their values. You may even lose some deals. But it’s worth it to focus your business on delivering the type of profitable work that is in your sweet spot. Uncovering your brand promise will help you win more of the customers you want and help keep them for longer.

Who do you think you are? Spend some time to figure it out.

Celebrating Five Years of ServiceTrade

Earlier this week on Tuesday, September 26, ServiceTrade turned five years old. If you don’t know our origin story, the roots of ServiceTrade go back to a national service company called DunnWell. A couple of smart, entrepreneurial fellas saw that the technology that DunnWell created was strong enough to evolve into a product that could help other commercial service contractors. That technology became a company on September 26, 2012, founded by Billy Marshall and Brian Smithwick.

What Billy said in the first blog post that introduced ServiceTrade nearly 5 years ago remains true today:

We were created to help service companies deliver better service, grow faster, and be more profitable.
Services still remain an underserved market for integrated SaaS applications – though it is improving.
Our application will always be better next week than it is this week.
(Read 5 years of release notes here.)

Some members of ServiceTrade at one of Billy’s famous Low Country Boils.

Today ServiceTrade employs 21 full-time employees in 3 states.
We have more than 300 customers in 45 states and 4 Canadian provinces.
More than 14 million photos and documents are stored in ServiceTrade.
About 23,000 photos and PDF docs are added each day.
Around 2,600 invoices are created each day.
Over the life of our app, our customers have sent 240,000 quotes representing $483,000,000.

One of the earliest subscription contracts has a $3 per tech per month rate. Being first had its advantages. (Everyone in sales wants me to tell you that this rate is no longer available.)

Our first beta testers are now our oldest customers — these folks shared our vision and saw the opportunity for their businesses early on. They have become good friends and some of our most trusted advisors.

ServiceTrade’s first customer appreciation event and fishing tournament at the Outer Banks in 2014 was attended by 11 people. This year we’ll have 150 at the Digital Wrap Conference.

2016 Digital Wrap Conference

Storytelling has been part of the fabric of ServiceTrade since the earliest days. Our blog has been active since early 2013. The five most popular blog posts for our first five years are:

Now is the most exciting time in our five years. Everyone on our team believes strongly in our mission and that they have a part to play in making our customers’ businesses more successful. Our customer roster has always held the most innovative service companies across the U.S. and Canada who push themselves – and us – to do new and better things. Let’s meet back here in 2022 to see how things have changed for our 10th birthday.

Build a Services Brand that is Worth Something

ServiceTrade talks a lot about using technology and great customer service to increase the value of a service contractor’s brand. It is worth exploring what we mean when we talk about a brand.

What do we mean when we say brand?

As your personality makes you different from everyone around you, your company’s brand is a collection of characteristics that make it unique. Your brand is the truth about your company and what makes it special.

ServiceTrade’s mission

I used to work at a branding and marketing agency that helped companies define and communicate their brand. Brands are the fabric of the business – what it does, what it values, and how it engages with the world around it. A genuine brand should reflect what’s happening in the business during normal operations — not the aspirations of what anyone thinks should be happening now or in the future.

At the agency, we used an employee survey to help discover the truth of a company’s brand. One of the questions is “If <your company> was a car, what kind of car would it be?” I know it sounds like a silly question but it revealed so much. It wasn’t uncommon for owners and executives to claim high-end, high-cost luxury vehicles while people in the trenches in the lower reaches of the organizational chart identified with affordable, four-door family sedans. It was one of the strongest indicators of consensus or uncertainty across the company about the brand. For a fun exercise, ask this question of your employees and look at the range of responses.

Why is branding important?

A clear, engaging brand is as important as a person’s winning personality. Your brand sets expectations for what it’s like to work with you. Your brand is your reputation. It is what you are known as or known for. Your brand reputation should be protected as a valuable asset.

Besides establishing who you are, your brand defines what makes you different from your competition when someone cares to compare. Your brand helps people feel a connection to your company by understanding what it stands for and how it can help them. Your brand’s mission also directs your company’s initiatives and your employees in their work. The next time you face a tough decision or a rough patch, take a look at your brand promises and see where they direct you.

Elements of your brand.

Hopefully, it’s clear that your brand is more than marketing, it is how you work every day. But there are some tools in your marketing toolbox that help you communicate your brand:

Logo
- There are countless logo styles. Putting your brand into words can help a talented designer create a logo that reflects your brand.
Color palette
- Choose a suite of colors to use on all of your materials and use them consistently. Creation of a brand color palette is usually part of a logo design project.
Imagery
- Here we’re mainly talking about the style of photos, videos, or illustrations that you use on your website and in your sales and marketing. Do you have a cartoon character or set of iconography that you rely on? Do you prefer photos of environments over photos of people? Give this some thought, and use these elements consistently.
Tone of voice
- If you were in a law firm instead of a services company your tone would be formal business language. But in services, you can be more casual and talk in direct, simple language to your audience. Be thoughtful about how you write on your website and in your proposals. If you’re easy to talk to (or read), maybe they’ll also think you are easy to work with.
Mission statement
- Mission statements are usually for internal use to make sure that everyone agrees with what kind of car the company is (going back to my favorite branding survey question.) Craft a short mission statement. Share it. Repeat it. Let your mission drive everything you do. ServiceTrade’s mission is in the image at the top of this post.
Elevator message and key messages
- Your elevator message is used externally when someone asks “What does your company do?” If you ask any employee in the company, you should get a similar response that could be delivered in the short amount of time of an elevator ride.

Who cares about your brand?

Everyone who has a relationship with your company.

Employees – Employees know what is expected of them as they deliver on your brand promises in their work.
Customers – Customers reap the benefits of your brand promise in every interaction with you.
Prospects – Your brand tells prospects if the things that matter to them matter to you.
Community – The communities where you do your work should also see you living your values in visible ways.

Live your brand.

I have four tips for you for living your brand to keep your company focused on the things that matter.

Be genuine about your brand and your mission.
Use your mission as a touchstone for your daily decisions.
Talk with your customers to learn if their perception of your brand matches yours.
Don’t stop building up your brand. It should evolve as your business grows and moves forward.

Increase the value of your brand.

Let’s be clear – adding to the value of your brand means adding to your bottom line. Here are three things you can do to increase the value of your service contracting brand:

Stop competing on price and sell a premium program that provides better outcomes to customers.
Give your customers a modern, online customer service experience that reduces their risk and aggravation and makes them want to work with you forever.
Enable and encourage your employees to make decisions that support the mission and the brand so they can embody it fully.

Here are some resources that can help you increase the value of your service contracting brand.

Webinar: Don’t sell on price. Sell a premium program.
Webinar: SWOT plan for service contractors
Book: The Digital Wrap Book (download five free chapters)
Blog: Blog Posts for Shareholders

Case Study: Ressac Implements Sage Intacct with ServiceTrade Integration

For more than 85 years, Ressac has established itself as a high quality, low-cost commercial contractor for heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration systems. Specialties include low-rise office parks, mall retail, and big box retail sites.

THE CHALLENGE

Ressac recently implemented ServiceTrade to improve their service management and customer service. While this solved their challenges on the service side of their business, they were still using an outdated version of Dynamics NAV, a server-based accounting platform, to maintain financial records. “We were so focused on making improvements to the service side including customer service and earning more revenue that accounting was an afterthought,” explains Nick Rohan, CEO at Ressac. “We lacked real-time visibility into our financial information,” he says, “and we had to double key everything.”

With no transparency into financials such as working capital and cash flow, decision-making was more like guesswork. In a very competitive industry, and with a profit margin as low as 5-7%, it was critical to know the current situation when making business decisions. And since data wasn’t being shared between the accounting system and ServiceTrade, the finance team carried a large time burden related to too many AP and AR manual processes.

“Connecting to the old accounting system was cumbersome,” Mr. Rohan explains, “and we had a lot of issues getting into the system.” And with no AP approval process in place, service managers had to approve purchases, which took them away from more strategic job-related activities and created time-consuming invoicing of their clients. Additionally, data siloed within spreadsheets led to inefficient and time-consuming reporting processes throughout the organization.

Ressac desired a cloud solution that could streamline its AP workflow and approvals and provide real-time visibility into its multiple locations’ financial results. Sage Intacct’s financial management software was selected and was seamlessly integrated with ServiceTrade to eliminate many hours of manual data entry and reduce costly errors inherent in their old system.

THE SOLUTION

Nick recalls, “We relied heavily on ServiceTrade’s recommendation of Sage Intacct. When we looked at various systems,” he says, “what sold us on Sage Intacct was the reporting.” And selecting Wipfli as the service partner was easy. Wipfli provided full-service implementation, integration assistance, and ongoing support through a collaborative team approach as Ressac navigated through the process. “We liked the feeling from Wipfli, and had confidence in the team we were talking to,” explains Nick.

Everyone worked together to ensure a smooth integration. “The ServiceTrade integration is behind the scenes, so you don’t really notice it,” reports Nick. “With the Sage Intacct and ServiceTrade integration, we’re operating differently now,” he says. “The time we’ve saved on double data entry allows us to code our transactions, which allows for better financial reporting.”

With real-time visibility and transparency into their financial results across their multiple CA locations, Ressac now has the “right information at the right time” to make critical business decisions. “We’re getting more information out of our systems and doing a lot more meaningful work,” he says. The improved financial reporting means Nick Rohan and his team can easily see where their financials stand on a day-to-day basis.

What’s more, according to Nick, “the thing we really enjoy with Sage Intacct is our ability to access it anywhere from a browser, whether we’re at home or out of town. We can get in and see our daily runs and see how cash is doing,” adding, “it’s been fantastic!”

Overall, with Sage Intacct in place, Ressac taps into deeper financial and operational insights and is able to tackle more strategic issues, keeping the whole organization focused on their customers. Now the pressure of competition is less of a burden as Ressac has the insights its team needs to “grow strategically in existing markets and into other regions.”

LEARN FROM RESSAC’S EXPERIENCE

Key Requirements

Implement cloud-based financial solution to automate and streamline workflows and provide financial visibility
Integrate their new system with ServiceTrade to allow for one single set of data to run the business reliably and remove the guesswork

Key Challenges

Remove data from spreadsheet silos and make it available for decision-support across organization
Save time and reduce costly errors associated with manual data entry
Enable managers to focus on strategic initiatives

Key Outcomes

Gained real-time visibility into their financial results across locations
Saved time, money, and effort through automating processes, enabling greater focus on customers
Positioned to make long-term strategic plans for company

EXPLORE INTEGRATIONS

ServiceTrade can help whether you’re looking to integrate your current accounting system with our application or explore a new accounting solution. Call your representative to talk about the best way to start weighing your options and understanding the scope of integrating ServiceTrade with your accounting or other operational applications.

Is your service company’s training program missing something?

“I read the book and followed the instructions.” These words from Samwell Tarly in the third episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones stood out to me. Sam is a student in a university where he’ll gain an education in medicine, science, and history. In the real world, students gain a general understanding of basic subjects in our school systems and universities.

In technical schools, relevant educational teaching is augmented with specific skills-based training. With the growing skilled labor shortage, figures like the immensely likable Mike Rowe challenge us to shift the pendulum back from pushing everyone to seek a four-year degree to encouraging skills-based training for a large number of students.

On the job – especially in service companies where a lot of training occurs – is teaching about the interconnectedness of every role in the business being skipped in the effort to get people working productively as fast as possible? Are staff members being taught only about the trees and nothing about the forest?

I bet you have a pretty well-defined training program. How much teaching goes on during that program? Do you take the time to teach your employees why the tasks they’re performing are important? Does everyone understand how the quality of their work affects operations, customer service, and overall profitability?

Sam is in a long-term educational program but was feeling the urgency to learn a few skills. He took a simple approach to learning these skills when the structure of the long-term education program wasn’t getting results fast enough – he read the book and followed the instructions. The lesson for us in Sam’s going rogue is to balance teaching and training.

At ServiceTrade we offer both teaching and training. In our blog posts, at conferences, and in The Digital Wrap we teach about the value of customer engagement in a service business. We teach service managers why online engagement is the best medium for informing and engaging customers. We teach business owners how it’s possible to give their customers an experience that has characteristics of the great customer service we all enjoy from Amazon and the convenience we find in the tools from Google.

When ServiceTrade offers training, it is specific task-oriented instruction in how to use technology and our application to efficiently run a service organization, provide helpful information online to customers, and earn more revenue for providing good outcomes for a predictable price. Training takes the form of online courses in ServiceTrade Certification and in live training sessions led by our services team either in person or online. But even our task-oriented training has teaching moments so that students understand the why behind the tasks we’re about to show them how to perform.

You can’t only teach and you can’t only train. Success comes from a foundational understanding through teaching and training specific skills atop of basic learning. Read the book and follow the instructions. Sam is the most unlikely hero, but with the right learning and a surprising amount of courage, he is just that. What heroes can you uncover in your skilled labor when you help them learn?

Looking for a good book to read? You’ll find helpful instructions in The Digital Wrap.

WFH (Working From Home) FTW (For The Win)

There’s some sort of bug working its way through our sales team this week, so everyone who doesn’t feel 100% is working from home. The rest of us appreciate not being exposed to sickness while those affected remain productive in their home office. That’s just one reason why having a flexible working environment is a good idea.

Service businesses that use SaaS and other modern technology have the freedom to offer such conveniences to their employees. If you’re looking for a low-cost perk to offer employees, run a pilot program of working from or dispatching from home and see what works and what doesn’t. Some ideas for a paperless office:

Dispatch technicians from their homes.
Allow schedulers and dispatchers to work from home. Forward their desk phones to the mobile phones and they can manage where field crews are needed now and in the future.
Sales and account managers use SaaS apps to access everything about their client accounts to make recommendations, create quotes, or create audits that will help sell a contract program.

I can’t say that the risk of employees abusing the privilege is nonexistent, but if your expectations are clear it becomes the employee’s responsibility to work ethically and do their job. I bet you’ll find that many will do their work even better in appreciation for the trust and the convenience. Here’s some evidence to back that up (source):

According to Gallup, remote workers log an average of four more hours a week than their on-site counterparts.
People who work from home get more sleep and are more attentive, according to Penn State University.
A typical business can save $11,000 per employee per year by letting them work from home 50% of the time according to a study by Global Workplace Analytics.
Meanwhile, Gallup found that people who work remotely 20% of the time are more engaged in their work.

Many of us at ServiceTrade work remotely from time to time. Some examples:

David Varnedoe writes and records scripts for ServiceTrade Certification courses from his home office. Sometimes he records audio while in his closet, but that’s a topic for another time.
Wes Cox conducts remote training from his home office. Wes and the rest of our services team can conduct webinar-based training from anywhere – and often do.
Shawn Mims spends hours doing the detail work of data management from the relative quiet and comfort of his couch under the close supervision of his two dogs.
I do a lot of writing from home for the same reasons – the quiet environment of my home office is more conducive to certain types of work than the bustle of the office. #2 above is a really strong selling point for me, too. That extra hour of sleep I get because I’m not commuting makes me a new person!

One thing that stood out to me at the 2016 Digital Wrap Conference was watching several owners of our customer companies log in to their ServiceTrade account to check in on what’s going on in the field. You simply don’t have to be in the office to know what’s going on in the business and to keep it efficiently moving forward. Today’s technologies offer many employees the freedom to do their work or dispatch from home, the coffee shop, or even on vacation if an emergency pops up. Why not offer this as a low-cost perk to your employees?

Good Enough is not Good Enough for Commercial Services

There’s a new article on forbes.com by customer service consultant Micah Solomon that’s worth every commercial service contractor’s time.

Read Is ‘Good Enough’ Customer Service Good Enough For Your Business? I’m sorry to steal Micah’s thunder, but anyone who wants a profitable, growing service business already knows that the answer is no.

Micah Solomon’s five elements of extraordinary customer service are:

A perfect product or service
Caring delivery
Timely delivery
An effective problem resolution process
Anticipating and serving unexpressed wishes and needs

They’re especially relevant for companies like yours that are competing for commercial service contracts. What would these look like for a service company?

#1 – A perfect product or service. Perfection in services means predictability – providing predictable outcomes for a predictable price. Reacting to unexpected breakdowns, system failures, or emergencies is bad for everyone and can be minimized by proactive maintenance and early warnings about potentials problems.

#2 – Caring delivery. We don’t often use the word caring in the rough-and-tumble world of facility services. Your customers will know you care when they have visibility into what’s going on in their facility. Sharing photos or videos online where the customer can refer to them anytime is part of #5 below. Not every vendor does this, and the ones who do stand out.

#3 – Timely delivery. Ensuring that business operating systems are in place to keep you on schedule is a job for technology. Timely delivery is dependent on a web-based application that is available to people who need it in your office and in the field.

There’s another element of timely delivery where service companies often fall short, and that’s setting the customer’s expectation. Do your applications inform customers about scheduled appointments or when they can expect you’ll be performing future inspections or contract service calls? You may be focused on an operational scheduling system, but be sure that it puts customers in the know, too.

#4 – An effective problem resolution process. We don’t talk about this one with you much, but Micah is right that things will inevitably go wrong. After an apology and making the situation right, take the time to analyze the source of the issue. You’ll probably find it fitting into one of the three buckets: Work not done to standards, operational inefficiencies, or human error. Solutions might be training or revamping business processes or updating your application infrastructure. What’s most important is recognizing when you have an issue that requires a solution.

#5 – Anticipating and serving unexpressed wishes and needs. Micah says this is the one that moves your service beyond good enough to exemplary. We think this is where you earn distinction as a leader in your space and can command prices above the lowest labor rate.

What conveniences do your customers enjoy from online retailers or banks, but don’t think about getting from you? Maybe the convenience of getting online reports, an online quote with a picture of the problem for repair, or a self-service online account where they can access all their records and service history.

Be sure that you make #5 an everyday part of how you work with your customers when #1-4 might pass for good enough. Here’s another link to the Forbes article.