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document through their fax machine (bless their heart), you can use the FaxFile app to send your digital files to their outdated hardware.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.
Angie’s in Your Wallet Again – Take Advantage of It
Earlier this year, Angie’s List announced that they were blowing away the paywall for its members. The goal is to gain more users and recoup the lost revenue by charging more to service providers.
These changes became a reality in the past few weeks, and the last part — about service providers paying more — made a lot of service companies very sad.
The changes mean that service companies pay for an advertising program in order for their reviews to appear to potential customers. Paying the customer toll for advertising on Angie’s List is a reasonable program, so long as you use it as a resource for new leads that you convert to your customer, where you maintain the relationship with them forever — not Angie.
Don’t mistake their mission, Angie’s List is a publicly traded company with new investors and senior leadership whose mission is the profitability of their company. And they’ve done a good job of inserting themselves in a valuable spot between service companies and their customers. Google and Yelp have done the same, and it’s reasonable to expect that all of them will work to own customer relationships and reach deeper into your pockets when you want the privilege of doing business with their customers.
In the press this week before the company’s earnings announcement, Angie’s List CEO Scott Durchslag said, “Where I really want to go is where we become the first dedicated, purpose-built home services marketplace that just automatically knows what needs to be done around your home and schedules that and dispatches that. It keeps track of it entirely for you.”
Where do you think you fit in that scenario? How much will you have to pay to be the provider that Angie’s List chooses to dispatch? How much negotiation power do you expect to have in setting your labor rate or gross margin on parts? Using Angie’s List as a medium to collect new customers is one thing, but being dispatched by them for hourly labor is another.
If you don’t like these changes today, then you need a strategy for how to use Angie’s List before bigger, more painful changes come in the future.
Your BFF Angie
Search Engine Land is a good resource for explaining how to respond to changes from the internet giants. In this SEL article, they break down what the changes mean:
Angie’s List ranks high for company names. This is an area where you can’t beat them, so you might as well join them. Think about how you can use Angie’s List winning search results as part of your online reputation. You can do that by ensuring that your profile is complete and contains good reviews. And now, by carefully investing in advertising to ensure that your ranking shows for all users.
Angie’s List reviews are kept exclusive. Angie’s List hasn’t opened their APIs so that you can post Angie’s List reviews to your company website the way that you can with ServiceTrade’s Service Review feature. In order to take advantage of the SEO power of having reviews on your company’s site, collect reviews through review services from Google or Service Review.
Don’t Become a Puppet
A service company retains its control over its profitability, and long-term customer relationships when it uses Angie’s List and Google on its own terms. Invest wisely on these sites to ensure visibility of your company, but make sure that you’re getting a strong ROI.
Regardless of any investment you make with Angie’s List or Google to use their platforms, don’t let any entity become a middleman between you and your customer. Keep the giants out when you:
Earn new customers on your own. Build and maintain a modern, mobile-friendly website that explains the services you provide and the areas you serve.
Provide customers with a great online experience for doing business with you. Make it easy for them to find you, engage with you, and see the value of the work you do at their facility.
Manage your online reputation. Collect and share online reviews from your happy customers on your website. They influence prospective customers and help with your SEO.
Be visible and accessible through self-service account features on your website that makes it hard for customers to consider leaving you for another provider.
Guest author Bob Misita of LeadsNearby talked about Angie’s List in the Digital Wrap. Here are a couple of excerpts from the book that are even more relevant in today’s landscape.
An Excerpt from The Digital Wrap: Get Out of the Truck and Go Online to Own Your Customers
Chapter 5: Digital Tolls: The Only Rule Is There Are No Rules
As a service contractor, what do you own? Your trucks? Equipment? Maybe your building? You likely own or control most of those pieces, but who owns your customer relationships? What about your online brand and reputation? Do you own and control these?
Your online brand and reputation, as well as your customer relationships, are very real and important elements of your business value that you can manage and optimize. Fortunately, there are many things you can do to maximize the value of your online brand and reputation if you understand the game. Play the game correctly and you will increase your Internet traffic without large expenses from Internet advertising tolls.
You’ve probably driven on a toll road or bridge. That’s a helpful metaphor for understanding the business model of online advertisers like Porch, Yelp, Angie’s List, and others. These sites collect Internet user traffic through the creation and curation of Internet content. Then they charge you, the business owner, tolls to direct some of that traffic to your website or phone number. As the quote at the beginning of this chapter indicates, the user traffic on these sites is the product that is being sold to you, the advertiser.
However, this toll road metaphor is actually backward, because it is usually the traveler who pays a toll to use a road instead of the road owner paying a toll to receive the traveler. On the Internet, you, the business owner, pay the toll to the website that directs the traffic to your company. The important part to remember is that the toll collector needs both traffic and destinations for the model to work. Understanding how they generate traffic and how to make your destination (that is, your website) attractive helps you minimize the tolls you pay for receiving travelers. The most attractive websites pay the smallest tolls for traffic. Make sense?
Let’s review the rules that these digital advertising properties follow. But wait… there are no rules! Each of these websites has total control over how information is displayed on their site and apps. The only real rule they have is to maximize the size and quantity of the tolls that you, the advertiser, pay to them. To do this they focus on increasing traffic and maintaining trust with consumers who visit their sites. High traffic and high trust yield higher toll volume and higher toll prices for you to pay.
These toll collectors use business profiles along with customer reviews for those profiles to attract Internet travelers. Business profiles are descriptions of businesses like yours. The profile reviews provide helpful information that potential customers use to make purchasing decisions. A profile for your business, along with reviews and other information, can exist on each of these online platforms WHETHER OR NOT YOU CREATED IT OR MANAGE IT. This is an important point because you want to at least be certain your profile is accurate and you want to be responsive to bad reviews. Just because you are ignoring your profile and reviews on these sites doesn’t mean that your customers and prospects are ignoring them.
[…]
Angie’s List
Just like Yelp, you are likely to have an Angie’s List profile regardless of whether you create and maintain it. Be proactive, claim your profile, and make it consistent with all others. But even owning your Angie’s List profile may not be enough to get Angie’s List users to your profile page. Angie’s List’s big claim is that no contractor can pay to be on Angie’s List; you simply set up a free profile for your business and people will find you. For a few select categories of service providers that might be true, because there are so few that all must be displayed for Angie’s List to have any value whatsoever to the Internet traveler. For less populated areas of the country where there are very few service providers, this statement also holds true. But what if you are an air conditioning repair company in Atlanta, Georgia? It’s a safe bet that you will be paying Angie if you expect her to display your profile to potential customers.
It may be a wise move to advertise your business on Angie’s List so long as the advertising provides value – meaning paying customers – and you can afford the cost. But it’s important to know the terms. The bottom line is that when you sign a contract with Angie’s List, make sure you can afford the expense, especially if the faucet of leads that they promise never turns on.
[…]
Get your copy of the Digital Wrap at amazon.com for Kindle or in paperback.
Southwest Airlines Figured Out How to Deploy 14,000 Devices So You Don’t Have To
I had not thought about how much our service contracting customers have in common with Southwest Airlines until I read an article about the airline issuing iPad Minis to flight attendants to streamline operations. Ok, so their territory is pretty big. And they have quite a fleet to manage. But they offer recurring services, and their scheduling is pretty important! I’m mostly joking here, but the article is definitely worth reading.
Southwest is deploying 14,000 iPad Minis for customer service and to trim costs. Their first change is going paperless with its 700-page flight attendant manual. They frequently print updated pages and distribute them to every flight attendant to update their manual. The FAA is regulating the process of going paperless, so they haven’t completely abandoned paper yet. This move will decrease their paper costs, ensure that the latest version of the manual is deployed to each device and employee, and save flight attendants from carrying around and replacing pages in a 700-page binder.
Customer service gains will come in the second part of the phased rollout, when they replace their current aging point-of-sale (POS) terminal for in-flight alcohol sales. The POS features aren’t expected until early 2017. Instead of maintaining a fleet of secondary devices for this specific purpose, iPads will become the POS device that’s centrally maintained by the airline.
How do you deploy 14,000 devices to people who are constantly in flight? Very carefully?? The article gives an interesting summary of the process they underwent with their partner Stratix to manage the deployment and ongoing device management.
What can service contractors take away from SWA’s deployment, even if they don’t have Southwest’s resources?
Find your ROI Mobile devices and applications enable a number of operational efficiencies and a great customer experience. If you find that going mobile or paperless solves one problem, look for others that you can tackle at the same time to improve your ROI. Southwest explains how this worked for them in the Field Technologies Online article.
Ensure adoption and sense of ownership Southwest had a modern, progressive, and I think the right attitude about sending 14,000 devices to its employees. They want flight attendants to feel like the device is theirs, and welcomes their personal use. Instead of requiring employees to have separate personal devices, this policy makes their work device a perk that they will appreciate it and care for.
Finally, acknowledge that a big change is a big change and accept that sometimes a rollout is best to happen in stages. I’m sure it’ll be frustrating for flight attendants to deal with carrying the iPad, binder, and a separate POS system for alcohol sales for a while, but it’s a first step that sets up future efficiencies and savings.
Team 360 Services was featured in a case study by the author of the Southwest Airlines article Brian Albright. Read “Dousing Field Service Inefficiency” from the March 2016 issue of Field Technologies Online to learn how Team 360 Services is using ServiceTrade to save time and lower costs across their service organization. A free account is required to read the full article.
Three things that turn your customer marketing into customer retention
When Billy’s Digital Wrap book came out, it didn’t take long for me to realize that I needed to buy highlighters. At this point, my book probably has more highlighted passages than not. My favorite paragraph is from chapter 7:
The digital wrap delivers impressions to the customer (and prospects, too, in some cases) before, during and after service appointments. A digital wrap, like a truck wrap, is simply a set of service activities that places your logo, brand promise, value proposition, and contact information in front of the customers throughout the service cycle.
There’s a lot of good stuff there, but I want to focus on the word “customer.”
When you think about your marketing programs, and the audience for your marketing impressions, how much do you focus on reaching prospects and how much on customers? Maybe 100% on new business, and 0% on existing customers? Maybe 80% / 20%?
But we all know that keeping a current customer is much more cost efficient than adding a new one. Customer service surveys have shown that the service experience is the most important factor that influences retention. Customers get frustrated when businesses are difficult to work with, and they say that they want more digital interaction. With a digital wrap, you engage customers online with service artifacts that leave lasting marketing impressions for your brand.
So it’s time to beef up your customer marketing program. The good news is that it’s the most effective and cost-effective marketing. And if you do it right, your customers will appreciate hearing from you.
The three characteristics of a successful customer marketing outreach program are:
Each touch is personalized with content that is created naturally in service operations.
Your messages reach customers at a time when they’re receptive to interacting with you.
It’s not about you!
Use Personalized, Organically-created Content
You’ve heard that “content is king?” Content marketing is thought to be effective because it shows a company’s breadth of knowledge in their area expertise, and it’s an element of SEO best practices. Maybe you can even earn the coveted title of a “thought leader” in your industry.
The trouble with content marketing for busy service contracting companies is twofold: First, creating the content on a regular cadence; and second, getting it in front of your customers or prospects. Finding the right channels to reach your customers, engaging them, and getting them to take action takes a lot of dedicated time, effort and money.
Instead, create direct marketing impressions where the content is personalized to that individual customer’s facility, equipment, and the work you will do or have done for them.
Some examples:
Between service calls: Alert customers to actions they may need to take as the weather changes, or even more personalized, as their equipment reaches a certain age.
During service: Use photos on a tablet to show the customer before and after photos to bring them into the experience and prove the importance of your partnership.
After service: Share all the photos, videos, paperwork and notes with the customer in an online report that they can revisit whenever they need.
Time Outreach Around Service Activities
Take advantage of the instances when customers want to engage with you instead of adding disruptive impressions that require an effort to get the customer’s attention. It’s cheaper, easier, more effective, and it incorporates marketing impressions into your service delivery.
Some examples:
Before service: Send a reminder email when a service appointment or inspection is approaching.
During service: Email the customer when the service team is on its way.
After service: Direct the customer to your website to get their after-service report.
Focus on the Customer
Have you ever tricked a young child into eating healthy foods by sneaking them into something they actually want to eat? I think about incorporating your brand into your customer engagement the same way.
Your online customer engagement gives the customer what they want: An easy way to do business with you that helps them want to keep doing business with you. Online customer engagement also gives you what you want for your marketing program: A positive brand perception by your customers, brand visibility, ways to showcase the value you provide, regular two-way communication, and an easy way to convert new service opportunities.
Impressions like these are extremely affordable and efficient for you to create and send to your most important marketing audience. Thoughtful, targeted, personalized customer marketing strengthens your relationships, ensures retention, and increases your revenue-per-customer.
You can read the chapter of the Digital Wrap book that I mentioned for free. Head over to digitalwrapbook.com.
Technology Separates You From the Liars and Thieves
We have several honest, high-quality air duct cleaning companies as customers, so it pains me to watch videos that have gone viral of unscrupulous contractors. The investigative TV programs Inside Edition and Dateline have both aired segments that show air duct cleaners ripping off their customers.
These two reports made me cringe and laugh:
Residential companies set the customer service expectation for all contractors, even those that work exclusively in commercial facilities. Regardless of your service specialty or your location, dishonest companies like these are a big problem, and I’m sure you know who they are in your area. So how do you stand out from the crooks?
Technology can help you show that you’re a reputable company when you:
Set the right expectations during the sale
Make it easy for the customer to see and understand the services you provide
Let your existing customers speak for you
Use Before and After Photos to Build Trust
Customers shouldn’t feel like they have to follow you around their home or facility to know that you’ve done what you said you would do. So take photos of what you see and do every step along the way, and review them with the customer as you go along (if it makes sense to do so), and at the end of the service call. This is especially important if your services are invisible (hidden in the walls) or you provide them outside of your customer’s business hours.
Our mobile application and Service Link feature make it easy to collect that evidence and share it in a useful, online report after the job.
Sell with Customer Service
Knowing how you’ll prove your trustworthiness and backup your services with evidence of a job well done are compelling during the sale. Consider using your technology as a sales tool with your customers so they will experience before the sale what they’ll experience once they’re your customer.
For example, we’ve heard from a few ServiceTrade customers that they set up a prospect’s location and assets in the application, and use that in the sales presentation to show them exactly what they can expect by choosing them as their service contractor. When you’re striving to build a long-term relationship, giving the customer an experience that shows how you’ll ensure that they’re getting a good value, and how you are a good steward of their facility places you far above the competition that doesn’t.
Own Your Online Reputation
How many positive online reviews do you think the companies in these stories had? Your online reputation tremendously impacts your sales win rate. Your online reputation consists of:
Your website content – make your brand promises and show how you back them up
Happy customer stories – a third party that praises your brand is more powerful than anything you say about yourself
Positive online reviews – ask as many happy customers as possible to review their experience working with you online. These reviews can go onto your website, and they also help with your local search ranking! (Check out our Service Review feature.)
And one bonus tip: Don’t lie. Just don’t lie.
Do business as though Chris Hansen is going to pop out of a dark corner at any moment. Ok, maybe he won’t, but it’s becoming increasingly true that cameras are everywhere.
A friend was recently at the ServiceTrade office to help with a project. He picked up his phone when it vibrated, then showed us a live stream of the contractors who were working at his house taking a smoke break on the front porch. We had a chuckle, and went back to work. But what if they’d been doing something less innocent?
We know that we do not need to tell our customers to be honest. The increasing affordability and accessibility of cameras and monitoring systems in businesses and homes is putting us all under a microscope that makes every minute of your customer engagement matter.
Make your Business more Valuable by Being more Valuable to your Customers
Billy Marshall often speaks to industry association groups on topics that help service companies be more valuable, successful, productive and more important to their customers. This past May, he spoke in Indianapolis to fire protection companies about The Digital Wrap.
What is Billy talking about? Watch the video to see!
This 15-minute recording is crash course on what a digital wrap is, and how it helps commercial service contracting companies become more important to their customers – and in turn – increase the value of their business.
Billy uses funny and interesting stories to relate how service companies should:
ps. Don’t have 15 minutes? You can watch short segments from this presentation at digitalwrapbook.com.
Technology Tip: Move Photos from your Devices to Google Photos
How many photos are stored on your smartphone right now? I have 1,438 photos that take up 4.8 GB of storage space — but this is pretty low compared to some of the folks around ServiceTrade.
Carrying around more than 1,400 images is pretty painless — until it isn’t. Have you ever hit the storage wall where your device refuses to take one more photo or download one more app until you free up storage space? When that happens, you’re faced with deleting photos until you have the free space you need.
Google Photos is a great free solution for automatically syncing your photos to the cloud where they can be easily viewed, organized, and shared so you don’t have to keep them all on your smartphone.
Take Lots of Pictures
Service photos are one of your best customer engagement tools. Before and after pictures show that you did what you said you were going to do. Sharing before and after photos help customers see the value that you bring to their business. They also C.Y.A. in case there’s ever a question about that service call.
Also ask techs to take pictures of issues or items that need to be repaired. Online eQuotes that include photos of the issue, that are provided within 24 hours of the service call, and have an online approve button are approved 3-times the rate of emailed PDF quotes. Encourage your techs to take lots of pictures through every step of the job — then use them!
Benefits of Cloud Photo Storage
Google Photos will help you manage all those pictures by storing them in the cloud, and making them available to your office staff in an online interface. The ServiceTrade application will take care of this for you by automatically storing photos on the job record, in the app, in the cloud where your customers and the rest of your company can use them. If you aren’t using ServiceTrade, Google Photos will help.
With centralized photo backup, service companies can:
Securely store photos, and give you a choice to keep or delete the originals from techs’ devices
Automatically share photos across the team, without requiring any extra work after initial Google Photos setup
Easily organize service pictures in the web-based interface
Free up storage space on your devices, but retain control of what is deleted, and what is kept locally
To use Google Photos:
Download the Google Photos mobile app for iOS or Android, and choose either the free storage option for compressed images, or a paid option that allows for higher image quality.
Allow the Google Photos app to begin uploading your images. This could take a while depending on the number of photos you have and your wifi speed. My upload of 1,438 photos took about 4 hours on a slow wifi network.
Login to Google Photos at photos.google.com to see your photos and manage them through the web interface.
Choose who you might want to share photos with, like your family for personal photos or your office admin for work photos. You can set up special albums for sharing and choose who sees what.
Delete photos and videos that you no longer need to store on your device.
Once setup, photos and videos will continue to automatically sync to Google Photos.
Why Google Photos?
They’ve built in some fun and time-saving features. This blog post from Google will give you more detail than I’ll share here. Some of my favorites:
Searchable facial recognition. When I search for photos of mom, there she is!
Automatic albums. Google Photos is smart enough to scan your photos and group those that were taken in the same span of time, or at the same location together in an album. It’s not perfect. It had a hard time telling the difference between dogs and sheep and has them all in one album labeled “dogs,” but at least I know where my farm animal photos are – and that’s an improvement from them being mixed in with everything else.
Photo management is easier when you can view them on a larger screen and make better choices about which images to keep and which blurry photos can be deleted.
Google Photos isn’t the only option. Apple devices will sync to iCloud. All device types can sync to Dropbox. The strength of Google Photos’ features at its free price makes it a winner.
If you are a ServiceTrade customer, photos technicians take in the ServiceTrade mobile application are automatically stored in the ServiceTrade platform as part of the service record. When you create an after-service Service Link to send to the customer, you can click a button next to each photo to decide if it’s shown to the customer or hidden. Those photos are stored permanently, in the cloud, and can be recalled any time you or the customer need them. But even ServiceTrade users need help managing and storing their non-job photos, and Google Photos is good for that.
Who hoards the most images?
I did a quick survey around the office and found that my 1,438 photos is pretty modest by comparison.
What started as an idea evolved into a book, and is now a two-day conference. Today we are happy to announce that we are hosting the first Digital Wrap Conference in October.
Sunday, October 16 – Tuesday, October 18 Wild Dunes Resort Isle of Palms, SC digitalwrapconference.com
Who will attend the Digital Wrap Conference
Anyone from a commercial service contracting company that is responsible for customer service, revenue growth, or brand development. Owners, executive management, and directors are all welcome to join the conversation and participate at the conference. Additionally, management consultants that specialize in helping commercial service contractors build their customer service capabilities and brand image are welcome to attend.
What you get from attending the Digital Wrap Conference
Are you ready to build a Digital Wrap for your service company? Come to the Digital Wrap Conference to learn how to:
Create an engaging and dynamic online experience for your customers
Add customer service capabilities that create pricing power
Build your online presence through your service activities
Attract and retain the most attractive customers in your market
Increase the value of your business through technology enabled customer service
Additionally, you will be able to connect and share with other service companies that are facing the same competitive pressures and opportunities for change that you are experiencing. The second day of the conference is dedicated to an Attendee Forum for companies to share their successes, ideas, and challenges with each other.
We’re also inviting vendor companies who can help you with the elements of your Digital Wrap to join us at the conference. These are companies that you’ll want to know.
The conference agenda
We start on Sunday, October 16 with a fun, outdoor dinner and reception facing the ocean, weather permitting.
Monday, October 17 opens with breakfast, a general session, then you will choose from several sessions that fall under the broad categories of business and service operations, sales, marketing and human resources for the rest of the day. We’ll end Monday with another relaxing dinner that is included in your registration.
On Tuesday, October 18 we turn the microphone over to our guests for the Attendee Forum where you’ll hear from some of the most successful service contractors about how they’ve grown, increased the value of their business, and improved their customer service because of their Digital Wrap. These folks will share their stories, and answer your questions about what it takes to make meaningful changes in your business. We wrap up midday Tuesday with lunch before you travel or shift to a little relaxing downtime before you return home.
Throughout the conference, ServiceTrade will be providing our version of a Genius Bar staffed with experts that can answer your questions about products and technology that you are embracing to build your Digital Wrap. It’s a great way to get a few minutes of expert attention away from the chaos of everyday operations in the office.
The conference and hotel are on the property of the Wild Dunes Resort on Isle of Palms, SC. Isle of Palms is an island off the coast of Charleston. You can fly to Charleston, then it’s about a 40-minute drive to the resort. Visit the resort website.
Our guests will get a special rate of $209 + fees and taxes per room, per night rate at the hotel on Wild Dunes. Visit the accommodations page on the conference website for info about how to book at this rate.
If you haven’t visited Charleston before, we can’t recommend enough that you book some extra time to explore this beautiful, historic city.
Cost
The full conference pass is $500. It includes everything on the conference agenda, including meals and drinks. It does not include travel or hotel.
Early bird offer! Register by August 1 and save $150. $350 early bird rate offer ends on July 31st.
Conference contact
Let me know if I can answer any questions for you, or if you’re interested in joining as an exhibitor or sponsor.
I consider it an indicator of how my weekend has gone if I have my weekend to do list accomplished, and dinner prepared by the time that 60 Minutes begins at 7pm on Sunday. I pulled it off this weekend.
The May 1 show had a segment about financial technology revolution (FinTech for short) – the supplanting of some traditional bank services and their arcane processes with new apps and websites. FinTech has received $20 Billion in investments since the financial crisis of 2008.
The two men featured in Lesley Stahl’s story are brothers who founded the company Stripe, Patrick and John Collison. They created a business around an ecommerce tool that allows online stores to process credit card transactions.
60 Minutes suddenly had my rapt attention. I had just used Stripe a couple of days before to setup an online store for the Digital Wrap Conference (more about that to come). Patrick Collison walked Lesley Stahl through how to use the platform. What she discovered is that in 5 minutes of setup, and after copying-and-pasting some code on a website, that she was now ready to start taking online orders. Which was exactly my experience using Stripe the week before. I was thrilled with how easy it was (for someone who lies on the technical spectrum somewhere in the middle between Mom and Brian Smithwick) to set up a secure online store.
“One sector of our economy after the next is being disrupted by new apps and websites”
— Lesley Stahl, 60 Minutes, May 1, 2016
Stripe was started four years ago because the traditional process to get a credit card processing account required visiting a bank, filling out forms, submitting an application, awaiting a review and approval, then further waiting for account setup. It was completely out of line with the way that business was happening online. Furthermore, the banking crisis demonstrated that the system and its processes didn’t work. The Collisons found a problem in need of an online solution.
What Stripe did, and what my experience with Stripe proved, is that they put control in the customer’s hands. They created a convenient, efficient, online experience. They integrated with other online technologies through their open APIs… this sounds a lot like a Digital Wrap.
A Digital Wrap in BANKING?
Banking! Think about that. If you had to name sectors where you’re likely to hear “that’s just how we do it,” banking, medical and real estate have to top the list. So learning that thousands of companies in FinTech are peeling off one profitable service after another, and typically offering them for less than the banks, tells us that every sector of the economy will eventually be going through its own revolution. It has already happened in retail, hotel and taxi services. Please don’t think that your services will be any different.
Where Service Companies and Banks Share Challenges
• Stop with the inefficiencies.
I like what Patrick Collison said about this: “It will take a while to adjust, but when you think about the creativity of people, and what they’re capable of, and the aspirations and dreams that they have, the idea that they’re not capable of anything more than performing more than these sort of clerical tasks, I don’t believe that for a second.”
The inefficiencies that techs and admins battle are what brings most companies to ServiceTrade. It’s the biggest pain they see in their daily operations. Solving these inefficiencies frees your staff from clerical tasks to focus on customer service.
• Tear down the barriers in your service delivery.
The 60 Minutes story quoted a survey factoid that millennials would rather go to the dentist than to the bank. They become frustrated with the time it takes to get to the brick and mortar location, and the inefficient processes once they get there.
These millennials will be your customers in the next 5-10 years. As the Collisons did to create their own ecommerce system to circumvent the bank, people will find the path of least resistance to solve their problems. It seems wise for you to build that into your business, instead of forcing them to find it from another. Where can you make it easier for your customers to do business with you?
• Move more customer service online.
Give customers a website where they can learn if you can do what they need. Make it easy for them to request your services online. And give them a good place to validate the value of your services after the job.
Find the Chips and Salsa in Your Customer Service Data
Before I joined ServiceTrade, I was part of the marketing department at a big data company. While proofreading a 29-page whitepaper about big data analytics, I burst into laughter over the phrase “salsa and chips are highly collaborative items.” No kidding? The data analyst who wrote the paper found that grocery store sales data indicated that the two products are often purchased together, and that stores might want to place them side by side. Never mind that everyone knows that one is a delicious delivery mechanism for the other.
It was interesting to work in big data analytics and learn how companies in various industries are taking advantage of customer service data. But you don’t have to work in a data company to pull three examples off the top of your head:
Search for a flight on a travel website, and watch your inbox and web browser fill with ads for hotel and car rentals in that destination.
The auto shop knows when you’re approaching 60,000 miles and mails a coupon for a tune up.
The grocery store spits out a coupon for products you buy at a regular cadence, when they predict that you’re due to restock.
Smart, successful businesses are using data to strengthen their customer relationships and convert more sales by showing up when they can be insightful and helpful to their customers.
Sound familiar? If you’ve been reading our blog for a while, you know that’s at the heart of what we call the Digital Wrap. The Digital Wrap is powered by data: Services that have been provided, equipment repair history, photos and audio notes that show the customer what you did and what you discovered when you were on site.
The future of the digital wrap will be powered by another type of data: Sensor data coming directly from equipment, or by its buzzy name, the Internet of Things.
Buzzword Bingo: The Internet of Things
Service contracting companies can once again stand on the shoulders of giants and learn lessons from companies in travel, automotive and retail that are figuring it out today.
The Internet of Things will eventually move into your customers’ locations, you may be seeing early signs of it today. Manufacturers are building smart equipment that will collect data that you can use to become more predictive and proactive in your service delivery. We have some time before wifi sensors are ubiquitous on HVAC, kitchen or fire suppression systems. Let’s use that time to prepare for what some are calling the fourth industrial revolution. This article from Forbes is relatable to service companies today. The author says “My concern, however, is that decision makers are too often caught in traditional, linear (and non-disruptive) thinking or too absorbed by immediate concerns to think strategically about the forces of disruption and innovation shaping our future.” To his point, it’s time to start some forward thinking to prepare for the fourth industrial revolution that’s driven by data.
Plan for Tomorrow’s Big Data with Today’s Customer Data
Start building a net today to catch the data that you’re collecting during service delivery. And build a net that will scale up as you start collecting that Internet of Things data, too.
Avoid IT headaches. You do not want to run a data farm, you want to run a service business. Leave storage and security concerns to companies where that’s their expertise and choose cloud-based software as a service data storage and data collection applications.
Look for open APIs. You want one version of the truth in a single data set. The only way to achieve that is to run your front office and back office on applications that can work together, building from and enhancing a single data set. Open APIs will allow for the open flow of data across all of your business operations applications.
Actively collect data, starting now. Even if you don’t have a structure in place that will allow you to analyze and act on your customer service data, start collecting email addresses, service history and store photos so that when you do move to an integrated service application, you’ll have useful information on hand that you can leverage on day one.
Begin acting on your data with a Digital Wrap. The more you know about your customers, the more relevant and timely your recommendations will be before, during and after the service call. Download Billy Marshall’s new book The Digital Wrap: Get out of the truck and go online to own your customers to learn how.
The Digital Wrap is a system for using data and communication applications to convey the value of your services to your customers, be always available online for helpful service reference information, convey your expertise through educational and helpful info that will help your customers better manage their facilities.
Data Mining for Less Obvious Gems
One day in the not so distant future, you’ll find the data that shows which of your services are your “highly collaborative” chips and salsa, even if they are a less obvious pairing. Our favorite example is what ServiceTrade customer data shows us about online eQuotes. By doing three simple things, online eQuotes earn a 3x approval rate over traditional quotes.
Turn them around within 24 hours
Include photos of the issue
Deliver them electronically, with an obvious approve button
The only way to know what your data can tell you is to start collecting it and learning from it. Let us know how we can help you find your way.
