We’ve mentioned (here and here) how much more profitable it is to sell a premium program that gives the customer better outcomes than it is to negotiate on labor rates.
You’ll need a few things to sell a premium program:
Technology-enabled differentiators
A proactive maintenance and/or inspection plan
A defined service level agreement (SLA)
The goal of your SLA is to clearly state your customer service promises that will reduce their pain and indicate how easy you’ll be to work with. Your SLA should cover:
Your commitment to respond. Be specific about how quickly you will respond to emergency work.
A promise of a priority response. Give your attention to them first for maintenance or inspection work over customers that haven’t committed at the premium level.
How you’ll share the risk. Explain that by buying into the program, they’ll receive a valuable customer rate and/or eliminate some additional charges that non-plan customers pay like trip charges or OT labor.
You don’t have to go so far as to promise to love, honor, and cherish your customers, but let them know what you promise in return for their agreement to buy in at your premium program level.
Fill the Stadium for Your Customer Service Features
So now what?
You’ve completed a big project to add new capabilities or value for your customers – something like implementing ServiceTrade or adding the Service Portal to your website. How do you get the word out so your customers start using and appreciating it?
If you have asked those questions, you aren’t alone. I’ve heard them half a dozen times so far this year. While you’re basking in a successful implementation, it doesn’t take long to realize that implementation was just the beginning. So what’s next? Driving adoption is the next project – and you’ll want to jump on it fast.
Feed Adoption with Customer Marketing
Every time we talk about marketing with service contractors, I feel like the response is something like “I got 99 problems and marketing is #99.” But marketing communications will help your customers understand and use your great customer service features.
Billy said this in chapter 7 of The Digital Wrap: “The strongest benefit of the digital wrap approach to marketing is that your marketing and sales impressions are actually valuable to the customer instead of being an aggravation or interruption.” He was writing about the marketing impressions that should be built into your service cycle, but it’s a pretty good rule for every marketing impression.
Marketing outreach is a good way to educate your customers about what you’re offering and why it’s good for them. You don’t want to send your first Service Link (online after-service report) and get a call from the customer asking, “What is this and why did I get it?” But your marketing must be seen as helpful, not annoying. Here’s how.
Invite Your Customers to Play Ball
Since a few people have asked for our advice for bringing awareness to their new customer service features, we have assembled examples, templates, and first-draft copy that you can use. Some of the materials available in our marketing resource center are:
Example websites from our customers
Bannerstand for trade shows or conferences that you can borrow
Powerpoint slides
Example email, invoice insert letter, and handout or postcard
Screenshots of customer service features, and more.
Take a look at those marketing resources and use them as a starting point for your own programs. You can run a marketing communications program without dedicating a ton of time or financial resources – doing a little is more effective than doing nothing at all.
Bring Them on Home
With a little bit of thoughtful outreach and follow up, you can:
Get your customers to adopt all your customer service features.
Help your customers understand how the program they bought from you continues to be good for them.
Keep the stream of communication open and ongoing.
Your account managers could do this work 1-to-1, but marketing can do the same 1-to-many. Make marketing communications do the heavy lifting, and have account managers follow up with their accounts.
There was a quote in the movie A Field of Dreams, “If you build it, they will come.” Why that may be true for lost baseball legends on a farm in Iowa, it is most decidedly not true for service contractors who want customers to take advantage of their new, modern, online customer experience. Like with modern baseball, you’ve got to do some work to get butts in the seats.
Read Chapter 7 of the Digital Wrap for free! You’ll gain an understanding of how many valuable marketing impressions you can earn with your customers (and sometimes with prospects) during your service cycle.
Bust Customer Service Data Out of the Silo
Integration is a popular topic at ServiceTrade. More people are coming up with ways to integrate their customer service data with other operational programs – their website, CRM, accounting, or marketing programs. Once shared across applications, data becomes information that can be used by people throughout the company. Are you thinking about all the ways that your customer service data can be used in different departments?
If these groups don’t have access to your customer service data, give it to them and see what they can do. These ideas should be just a beginning.
Sales
Create demo accounts to use in sales presentations. You’ll win new customers when you show them a demonstration of your great customer service in action.
Convert deficiencies into jobs and revenue. Make sure that the deficiencies and repairs your techs find on the job are turning into quotes for your customers.
Monitor your quote approval rate and experiment with ways to improve it. Try new patterns and methods of following up on quotes to boost your approval rate. Experiment with the number of photos or try including video. Test a few new methods to build, send, and follow-up on quotes that convert.
Account Management
Ensure contract SLAs are being met. Wouldn’t you rather proactively know the reality of SLA performance than wait for an unhappy call from a customer?
Use service history to inform renewal contracts. Studying the service history for a location can help you build a preventive maintenance contract for the following year that is based on the reality in that facility.
Continually share useful information with customers. Whenever the customer calls with a question on a past job, send them an online report where they can get all the information they need.
Accounting
Get more information about the services that were offered on a job to create complete and accurate invoices.
Make answering questions about invoices a whole lot easier when you simply look up the job’s details in the customer service application.
Speed up the time to bill when information about a completed job syncs into your accounting platform as soon as it’s complete.
Marketing
Email customers based on shared criteria like a particular type of asset or their location. One of our favorite examples is when there are changes in weather in a region and you want to issue some advice for heading off problems from changing conditions.
Email customers based on their service schedule. How about sending an email to your customers who are due for a regular inspection or service call next month and ask them to start making a list of things that they might need you to look at or take care of while you’re there?
Send letters or mailers to customers based on criteria in their service data: Geography, business type, asset types, services you provide, etc.
Publish and promote the review content that comes in from happy customers. Post this prominently on your website to entice prospects and use them as excerpts or quotes in all of your marketing communications.
Service Managers
Tech report cards. There are a few ways that you can measure the performance of technicians across the board – how much billable time they tracked to jobs, how many of their jobs include media (photos, videos, documentation, audio), how many customer reviews they collect. Monitor the metrics that matter most in your company.
Monitor completeness of job records. Techs are on the front line of that great customer experience you want to provide, and that includes building complete job records of what they do on-site.
Create contests or reward programs for techs based on happy customer reviews. Take advantage of their natural competitiveness to drive them to collect more reviews from happy customers.
Advanced scheduling allows you to better plan the use of your fleet and predict its maintenance requirements.
Owners and Senior Leaders
As an owner or leader in the company, the best thing you can do is give people access to data and encourage them to use it. Heck, if you’re a ServiceTrade customer, office users are free, so there’s no reason not to open accounts for these users today. You might be amazed by the ways they can turn data into useful information for your company and its customers.
Sometimes inspiration comes from unexpected places. Like space and a government agency.
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is shrewdly launching (pun intended) the GOES-16 satellite and sharing their excitement with the public.
Service contractors can learn from two things that NOAA did exceptionally well:
They engaged their audience throughout the process of adding new technology
The way they shared data made it meaningful to their audience
NOAA has been building awareness of GOES-16 for months. The communication picked up when the new weather imaging satellite was nearing launch in Nov 2016. Now that GOES-16 is in orbit, NOAA shared the first images from the new satellite.
Follow the GOES-16 Launch Sequence
You can build a lot of goodwill and interest in new customer service technology you’re putting in place if you include customers early in the process.
Tell customers it’s coming
Give them updates throughout the launch
Once you’re up and running, share information and give it context
Give examples how the new technology will help you do better work for them
Repeat #3 and #4 liberally
Then answer their question: What’s in it for me?
Like NOAA’s shiny new toy, great customer service technology can help your company provide customers with rich information, like photos, to help them make informed decisions. However, like the images collected by the GOES-16, the pictures you can collect in the field require technical expertise to understand. Fortunately, NOAA has provided another great example of customer education to overcome this technical hurdle.
NOAA smartly used photo captions to explain their new technology: How it’s better, what it tells us that it didn’t before, and what they’ll do with this information. They did a great job of this in just a few simple words. Click through to their website for the full article, or here are some examples that you can click to enlarge.
Photos from your service calls are critically important, but a lot of times they aren’t enough to tell your customers exactly what you want them to know.
Don’t just share raw data, tell people what they’re seeing
Don’t let them draw incorrect conclusions, apply your expertise to explain the current situation and how it could impact their future
Tell them why it’s better than what you gave them in the past
5 Things that Service Companies can Learn from Google Analytics
Business owners and managers need reports to monitor the health of their business; to measure what works and what doesn’t, to see how they fit in the world around them, to find the best methods for gaining new customers. Part of that information can be gleaned from Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is free, robust and it can tell a service contractor a lot about their business today and trends over time. Things like:
Who is coming to your website and how they got there
What people are looking for when they come to your site
If your conversion goals are being met
What’s working to drive high-value visitors to your site
If your content meets their needs
1. Who is coming to your site and how they got there.
The Audience section of Google Analytics can tell you a lot about your web visitors. Three of the most important and interesting to monitor are geography, network, and new vs. returning.
Geography will show you where your visitors are located. This is a good way to monitor your local SEO and ensure that you are reaching the people in locations where you work. Once you segment your web visitors by location, you can study them by other metrics, like source and goal conversions (more on that in a minute.)
For example, I can see that the majority of ServiceTrade’s visitors in the past month in Raleigh come to us direct, but most of our visitors in Greensboro are referred by our email outreach with the source info.servicetrade.com. Knowing that, I might be interested in browsing my recent email list for prospects located in Greensboro, and can start to cobble together an understanding of where those prospect(s) are interested in our web and email content.
Network is one of my favorites! It lists the internet service providers for your web visitors. For a lot of smaller companies and home users, this will be the name of their provider (like AT&T, Time Warner, or dozens of others), but for a lot of businesses, their network name will display as their company name. When you see a company name, you know immediately what customers and prospects have been on your site. It is fantastic for sales outreach.
Once I pick one of my prospects out of the Network list, I can see how many visitors came to the site and when. I can see their city and state. I can see their landing page. Their exit page. And I can see if they converted on any of my site’s goals.
Network data in Analytics can be used for sales optimization. And that’s why it’s my favorite.
New or Returning Visitors Keep track of how many new visitors come to your site in a time period and track it over the long term. Cross-reference your new user data against how they came to your site, and where they’re located. All of this information will help you understand where your customer acquisition programs are the most effective – and it’s one of the most important long term trends you can monitor.
2. What people are looking for when they come to your site.
There are a couple of ways to uncover what people are looking for when they come to your site.
By the pages they visit. Rank your content pages by number of page views. For ServiceTrade, the most visited page after our home page is pricing so we make it easy to find in our navigation. After pricing, we look at what feature pages are most visited to understand what problems our web visitors most want to solve. For service contractor websites, those pages will be the services you offer. Giving each service its own web page or section of your website will make it easier for you to later measure site engagement to see where your audience is interested.
By the keywords they search for. Visitors’ keyword search terms also tell you what people were looking for when they came to your site. Unfortunately, the keyword list is partially obscured in Google Analytics. Instead, search traffic and keyword performance data is shown in Google Search Console.
3. If your conversion goals are being met.
Analytics makes it easy to establish multiple goals for user behavior. You can get a total number of conversions for all of your traffic, and also segment it by any number of factors like network, geography, source, etc.
Set up a goal for your web forms and monitor what sources they come from. If you find a strong goal conversion through your listing on the local trade association website, you know that it’s a good place to invest your time and your money. On the other hand, if you’re investing in a program but not seeing goal conversions, you have a red flag.
4. What’s working to drive high-value visitors to your site.
Which of your programs, online profiles, emails or whatever else you do is working? You can come at this information two ways:
Look at where you are having success, i.e. goal conversions, and back track those visitors to their source
Look at your traffic sources, then rank them by key performance indicators, i.e. goal conversions, time on site, new visitors, etc.
5. How your content is performing.
Did you see our post that ranked our top 10 blog posts of 2016? That ranking came directly from Analytics when we organized blog posts by the most visitors.
The Behavior section of Analytics measures how people engage with the different parts of your site. Valuable points to observe are your most visited pages, pages with the longest time on site metrics, top landing pages, top exit pages, and how visitors flow through your site. Once you’ve crunched this data, where are you surprised? Where are visitors spending more or less time than you expect? Does your site’s user experience make it easy for them to get to the most valuable information?
Schedule a Weekly Date with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is absolutely worth your time to study and uncover insights that aren’t just about your website, but about your audience that you can use to:
Learn if your site is optimized for the right content and geography.
Make decisions about where to invest your marketing dollars.
Find those golden needles in the haystack that inform sales about which prospects and customers are actively engaged with your content.
Monitor trends over time.
Your competition and Google’s ever-evolving algorithms make SEO a dynamic environment littered with factors that you can’t control. Analytics reporting is one way to see when things might be changing – whether it’s a temporary blip in the quiet weeks around the holidays – or the sign of trouble that needs to be researched and resolved.
My final parting advice is to have Evernote or your project management application open as soon as you delve into Analytics. You’ll think of a ton of data-driven ideas you’ll want to record and act on.
Best of 2016
As 2017 kicks 2016 to the curb, take a minute to revisit our most-loved blog posts of the year.
Whether they’re new to you, or you need a review, check out these blog posts for inspiration to start the new year.
Everybody sends upcoming appointment reminders: Your doctor, your hair stylist, the vet. Are you sending them to your customers? If so, is it a phone call or an email? How informational is it? Is it boosting your brand image?
Why Service Contractors Should Send Appointment Reminders
Whether for your business or for your vet, lost appointments are lost money. Confusion happens, appointments fall off of schedules, and people get flakey and forget. So it makes a ton of sense to remind customers about appointments. In case you need convincing:
You don’t want to show up when the customer isn’t expecting you and not be able to do the work. Even if you can do the work, they won’t be happy about the surprise.
You’ll remind people of what you plan to do, and give them time to think about what else they might need your help with while you’re on-site.
You’ll keep your brand at the top of their minds as a helpful, responsible partner.
You’ll be seen as easy to work with. Email is a great way to deliver a reminder because they are not an interruption, they can be referred back to, easily shared, and contain more info than you can share in a brief phone call.
You’ll save labor from not sending techs on wild goose chases.
There is a good back-story about how ServiceTrade appointment reminders came to be.
The Story
When Service Link was created, we only thought of it as an after-service online report. A few months after it launched, we started to hear from customers who were sending Service Link before the appointment, too.
It was a brilliant idea! Service Link included the list of services that were scheduled. It arrived in their customer’s inbox in a nice, mobile-friendly, branded email. So we supported their innovation with a few small changes to make it explicitly clear that what the customer received was about an upcoming appointment.
Using Service Link in this way was one of the most eye-opening ideas that was shared at the Digital Wrap Conference. More than half of attendees surveyed said they’ll start using Service Link in new ways.
How it Works in ServiceTrade
My quick Google search today returned dozens of appointment reminder software vendors. Lucky for ServiceTrade users, they don’t need to integrate with another solution, they can use what’s already built into the application.
James Jordan covered Service Link appointment reminders in the last Bearded Briefing. Here’s how it works.
Innovation is Part of a Digital Wrap
Innovation was a big message at the Digital Wrap Conference. Shawn Mims explained that innovations come at all sizes to fix small to large problems. It’s hard to imagine a more simple innovation than using an existing feature in a new way.
An appointment reminder is one of the MIPS (Marketing Impressions per Service (read post)) that are part of your Digital Wrap. This simple alert:
Is a branded marketing impression, so you look professional
Makes customer happy about working with you
Keeps you from wasting your limited skilled labor resources
ServiceTrade customers are innovators who use technology in unexpected ways. Those customers solved a problem by looking to the software they were already using. There’s a good lesson here that if you find yourself with a problem, take a look at what you already have in place for how it might be part of a solution.
And if you’re using ServiceTrade to solve a problem, let us know about it! Our customers constantly surprise us with their innovative problem solving.
The Digital Wrap Conference was just a week ago, but we already have an update to one of the stories we shared: Domino’s is dominating even more than we reported at the conference. But first, let me set the stage for anyone who wasn’t there.
Domino’s and their MIPS
At the Digital Wrap Conference, Shawn Mims discussed the ways that service companies can maximize their MIPS – Marketing Impressions Per Service. It’s a way of using technology to get low-cost, low-effort, high-impact marketing impressions with your customers and prospects just by providing your services.
The example that Shawn used came from a very unexpected source: Domino’s. Yeah, the pizza company. The one responsible for that crazy Avoid the Noid advertising campaign in the 80s. Well, they put all that annoying Noid business behind them and created a mobile application in 2009. It would take a while to see the results, but that app changed the national pizza chain game.
Domino’s Mobile Customer Experience
Domino’s mobile app makes it easy to place an order, make your payment, save your preferences and payment options. But the best part is the pizza tracker. Live updates in the app and through notifications keep you updated as your pizza is made and delivered. Domino’s earns a marketing impression at each step of the process:
Pizza is being made
Baking
Quality control
Boxed
Out for Delivery
Delivery Confirmation
Each of those impressions, whether shown on the pizza tracker or in text or app notifications are helpful to the customer by taking away the risk and aggravation of ordering a pizza then waiting around with the hope that maybe it will eventually show up.
While Domino’s was investing in an online self-serve, transparent customer experience, Papa John’s invested heavily in advertising and sponsorships. Which national pizza chain do you perceive as being more successful, Domino’s or Papa John’s? Here are their two stock trajectories that make it pretty clear that Domino’s is leading. Does this surprise you like it does me?
Domino’s Keeps Moving Upward
Domino’s announced their Q3 earnings right after the Digital Wrap Conference. The company reported:
55% of their orders are digital – placed from smartphones, tablets, watches. The restaurant industry average is 20%.
Domino’s stock has gained 54% in the past year when the overall restaurant industry is in decline to the tune of about 15% over the same period.
Sales in Q3 2016 were 13% higher than Q3 of last year.
So does all of this now make Domino’s a technology company who provides pizza, or a pizza company with an awesome app? Some Wall Street analysts have started to assign Domino’s tech-like stock-price targets based on the rapid growth of its digital sales.
Domino’s Brand Value
Last week, Shawn showed this slide in his presentation
Since then, Domino’s market cap has blown up to $9.48B. The multiple now sits at 4.1x revenue.
But you don’t sell pizza.
For those of you who didn’t hear the whole story at the Digital Wrap Conference, it may be hard to find how this is relevant to you. Two things.
First, come to a free webinar on Wednesday, November 9, 2016, at 1pm ET to hear Shawn Mims deliver the presentation. He’ll guide you through the 8 MIPS that you can get from every service appointment that are part of a great experience for your customers.
Second, Domino’s example shows us all how the value reducing the risk and aggravation for customers – even (and especially!) customers who are owners or managers of commercial or industrial facilities – creates more value for your brand.
Give the Domino’s app a try. Count the MIPS as you go through the process. Count the offers they send you afterward, and think about how each impression shapes your perception of the Domino’s brand. After you do, it’s not so hard to think of the ways that you can earn the same good will with your own service-related marketing impressions.
Allow Only the Best Drivers on Your Customer Service Bus
I keep finding ways to use the phrase “When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” This week, it’s pointed at those of us at ServiceTrade. See, we’re a technology company, so we love using technology to help service companies meet the online customer engagement bar that Amazon has raised.
We don’t cover as often as we should the human side of customer service. We both know that it takes the right employees in the right role to use those customer service tools. If you put an employee who does not embody your brand in charge of the best-engineered customer service platform in the world, you’re still likely to give crummy customer service.
Zoho has written a blog post about some of those softer-side elements of customer service that uses examples from companies that ServiceTrade references often: Chick-fil-A, Nordstrom, Southwest, and Amazon.
So it’s truly my pleasure (shout to Chick-fil-A) to share this blog post from Zoho that is a good reminder for all of our technology and process geeks that good customer service is always multi-faceted and that we have to manage each part.
My favorite tip is #3: Give your employees the freedom to soar. It says that we should encourage employees to make connections by being genuine and not stifling their personality. You’ve hired people that you want to be around every day, let them show your customers that they’re also the type of people that they want to be in business with.
A Tribute to Dying Technologies
James mentioned to me the other day that the VCR (for the kids, that stands for video cassette recorder) is no longer being produced. This brought on a wave of nostalgia. I remember my sister and I being so excited those times that our parents rented this new thing called a VCR and a stack of VHS movies to get us through another frigid Illinois winter weekend. We were staycationers long before it was cool.
But there’s another technology that I’m less sorry to see go – one in particular that just REFUSES TO DIE: The fax machine. The first time I remember saying it was 2013, it went something like this: “It’s 2013, I’m not faxing anything to anybody.”
Flash forward three years and I’m still getting instructions to fax paperwork to some companies and organizations. I wonder if those companies ever stop to think about the impact that relying on old, aggravating technology like a fax machine has on people’s perception of their brand?
What relics of the past could your service company be holding on to that are doing more harm than good? Is it the fax machine? Scheduling on a whiteboard? The telephone? Word template quotes? The dreaded triplicate invoice form?
5 Dated Technologies to Usher to Their Grave to Liberate (and Modernize) Your Service Business
1. Free yourself from the fax.
The replacement for your fax machine is a few rungs up on the new technology ladder. I use the Office Lens smartphone app to snap photos of each page of my document and compile them into a single PDF that can be emailed. The scanner feature on the office printer works for longer contracts. If your recipient insists on receiving your document through their fax machine (bless their heart), you can use the FaxFile app to send your digital files to their outdated hardware. Please kill your fax machine this year if it’s still hanging around.
2. Get off the phone for things that are better done online.
Shawn recently explained how he and other millennials tick. One of the things he mentioned is that they hate talking on the phone. I don’t think that’s exclusive to Millennials because this Gen-Xer feels the same. Telephone calls are seen more and more as an annoying interruption in people’s workdays. If you’ve caught the person at a bad time, they may not be paying attention to the information you’re sharing and not write down the appointment time you’ve just agreed to, or understood all the services you’ll be providing while you’re there. Online communication, whether through email, mobile apps or web tools are less disruptive, more informative, and create a better customer service experience. Phone calls won’t and shouldn’t go away, but they should fade away as one of the primary communication tools for your standard service operations.
3. Stop buying paper.
We’ve talked a lot on this blog and in The Digital Wrap about how companies should go digital with their customer service and send all of their service reports, quotes and invoices in digital formats. Have you gone paperless?
More than just replacing a paper version of a form or a file with a digital version, truly reap the benefits of going digital by streamlining each step of your processes that led to the point of the paper being produced. The paper is often the endpoint of a number of steps that can be done more efficiently and cost effectively by using digital solutions along the way.
4. Bust your scheduling system out of isolation.
Does a schedule change result in a ripple effect of using all the outdated technologies on this list? Phone calls to techs, printing new schedules, printing new work orders, faxing new quotes to the customer? If it takes that much effort to communicate schedule changes, then your schedule is living in isolation. Instead, it should be in an application that has a built-in megaphone that broadcasts updates to all interested parties (management, techs, and customers) when new jobs have been added to the schedule.
5. Retire that outdated website.
Take a quick look — is the copyright date in the footer of your website from the VCR era? An outdated website that obviously hasn’t been updated in years – or never completed in the first place – is a red flag to potential customers. It says that you don’t use your website as a customer service tool. That you don’t have a modern back-end to your website that your team can use. That maintaining your reputation isn’t a priority.
Creating a new WordPress site doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, and maintaining a WordPress site is easy. I’ve taught both my sister and my best friend who have zero website experience how to log in and update their websites anytime they need. They would agree – if they can, you can!
If I am to believe what I’m reading, email will be the next tool to face extinction for its lousy signal-to-noise ratio, its time consumption, and its disruptiveness. Start thinking next about how you rely on email for your business operations and what web- or app-based replacements you can put in its place.
These tools and technologies are being replaced with better, online, mobile systems. Before they are completely dead, they rattle around hurting the reputation of brands that use these aging technologies to run their business. So make sure that when customers interact with your service company, it’s through efficient, helpful, branded, online mediums that show them that your company is of this century and one that is easy to do business with.
