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.

Also read:

• What’s your MIPS number? Try 9.
• Stop selling parts and labor! Sell a program.
• 6 key metrics that boost revenue