How Commercial Service Contractors can Dominate with Mobile Tech

This post is the second in my discussion of how to use mobile technology to dominate your market.  If you haven’t read my first post, you can find it here. In that post, I discuss the basics in taking your customer service mobile – you’ll want to meet this milestone before jumping into milestones two and three: Marathon Training and Race Day.

Milestone 2: Marathon Training (Research and Development)

Once you achieve basic fitness, you are already in the top 10-20% in your market regarding ability to compete. Now it’s time to begin the specific marathon training in earnest. Again, this is not a quick tune-up; it’s a commitment to building up the muscle and stamina to be competitive in a marathon race. Don’t expect it to happen overnight, but instead develop a training plan that will get you there over a period of one to two years.

Marathon Training in Practice

When ServiceTrade was just starting out, we spent about five months and about $80,000 on our first mobile app design iteration. It never went to a single customer or prospect, because we threw it away and started over. We had picked the wrong combination of technologies, and the result really sucked. It worked (sort of), but it was not up to our expectations for our brand, so we literally threw it in the trash heap. We did, however, learn a lot about what we really wanted, and that was a valuable experience. We began the effort anew with a different set of partners who were true experts in the mobile space.

Even large companies need a long training period to get ready for a mobile marathon. About 18 months prior to Chick-fil-A having a mobile app, I noticed that many of the locations began sending cashiers into the drive-through line with iPads to take orders. I’m willing to bet that this was a deliberate marathon training activity to understand exactly how to achieve effective mobile order-taking. Chick-fil-A got more than a year of feedback from “friendly” users to help them get it right for the major launch of the Chick-fil-A One app to the masses.

What Marathon Training Means for You

For the best results, undertake similar training. A small subset of your best customers, or perhaps your salespeople and customer service staff acting on behalf of customers (like the Chick-fil-A cashiers in the drive-through line), are great partners for getting a truly scalable customer mobile experience to the market.

Start with a few simple things like having a basic customer service portal on your website where an existing customer can request service and browse a limited set of service history. Make yourself into a customer contact and see what your customers see by spending some significant time browsing with your mobile device and using the interface just as a customer would. Be critical. Remember, this is marathon training and not the middle of a race that you are already losing. There is no point in desperation or exasperation. Take deep breaths and carry on with the training. Expand your muscle and fitness and move ahead to make the adjustments that move toward a competitive marathon outcome.

Milestone 3: Race Day (Your Branded Mobile App)

To win the mobile marathon, you need a branded mobile app for your customers just like Starbucks and Chick-fil-A. In addition to the obvious capabilities that are simply carryovers from your website service portal (service history, equipment assets, contract details, quotes, etc.), here are additional capabilities you’ll want to include:

• Available in the app store or by scanning an equipment tag: Everyone looks for the apps they need at the app stores hosted by Apple and Google. Your app should be no different. This will mean some work to post it there, but if you have already done the training (that is, the testing discussed above), it should not be a problem. The app should also be available on demand by scanning a tag on a piece of equipment that is covered by your premium maintenance plan. This is the modern day version of leaving a “Call for Service” sticker on equipment. In this case, it is “Scan for Service.”
• Asset and location awareness: The app should be context aware. Just like the Chick-fil-A app lets me choose the location nearest me for placing my order, your app should default to (be “aware” of) the nearby location or nearby equipment for reference as the most likely candidate for review or service. After quickly navigating to the record of the nearby equipment, the customer can then annotate the record to facilitate better service (such as access-code updates for your benefit, an update from a related vendor that changes your service scope, etc.) or submit a request for service or support with perfect contextual awareness for your staff to respond quickly and accurately.
• Self-service: Any information or feature that might help the customer help themselves without contacting you is a good idea. The app should show official service manuals, recent equipment inspection or certification results, original commissioning documentation, likely faults and quick relief guidance (such as how to clear a false alarm), and “Things you should know about this equipment” videos. Self-service is not a loss of revenue for you. Instead it is a powerful customer loyalty magnet, and you should engage it whenever possible to stick the customer more tightly to your premium program.
• Real-time collaboration with multimedia engagement: This feature works like placing a FaceTime call. If the customer can initiate a callback to your experts that includes both context (which piece of equipment they are standing near) and video capability, it should be easy to walk them through a relief mechanism for a malfunction. Self-service is better, but quick relief from a malfunction is very powerful as well. Quick relief is easier if you and your customer are collaborating with the same information – that is, the equipment records and your what-you-see-is-what-I-see capability.
• Push notifications: Your app should ping your customer when you are delivering value for them. Push notifications are better than email because they simply give a quick heads-up to the user in real time without requiring a pause to check email. Your system will follow up with an email that provides more detail, but push notifications are standard operating procedure for mobile apps. The customer can always turn the notifications off if you are delivering so much value that it becomes a distraction.
• Recommended for you: This is the list of repairs, retrofits, and upgrades you have scoped for this particular customer to review and accept. When a customer is in a mood to spend money on something, it needs to be easy for them to spend that money with you. Maybe it is the end of the year and the capital budget is still full of money. Maybe they are having a great quarter and want to plow some of the revenue back into improvements. Whatever the reason, always have a set of recommendations out there for consideration when your customer accesses the mobile app.

The most successful service brands have a mobile app as a defining feature of their premium program. If you want to win, a mobile app is your future. I was very deliberate with the marathon metaphor so that you would envision a long-term plan with multiple plateaus of achievement leading up to race day. If you don’t commit soon to the fitness plan, however, it is unlikely that you will be racing with the best competitors in your market a few years from now.

When race day comes in a few years, you do not want to be an out-of-shape, flatfooted bystander watching the racers while you hand out refreshments. Start getting in shape now. Work your way toward maximum fitness. Mobile marathon training will begin shortly, and race day is going to be a ton of fun.

Winning the Mobile Marathon as a Commercial Service Contractor

There are plenty of examples of companies that have built market success because of their use of mobile technology, including Domino’s, Chick-fil-A, and Starbucks. Starbucks launched their mobile app in early 2011, and it included a mobile pay feature similar to a gift card. Mobile innovation has paid off for Starbucks. They reported that in the third quarter of 2017 approximately 30 percent of sales were transacted using the mobile app. The real win, however, is that mobile app users are spending three times more than other customers! Starbucks delivered an innovation that helps assure the loyalty of their best customers.

Starbucks and other stories of leading markets through mobile make perfect sense if you look around anytime you’re out in public. Fifty percent of the folks you see have their noses in their phones, and the other 50 percent all have their phones within arm’s reach. The phone has bridged not only the last mile to the customer but literally the last three feet.

What Market Leaders Know

If you are committed to leading in your market – if you expect to be the premium brand that is known for outstanding customer service – you must be committed to leading in mobile customer service just like Chick-fil-A and Starbucks. Fortunately it doesn’t have to happen overnight, and there is still plenty of whitespace in the market. No one owns this space or has such a lead that you are forced to follow their example. You can define your mobile future.

The race to mobile customer service in service contracting is going to be a marathon and not a sprint. Just like a marathon, competitiveness begins with a commitment to a training routine. Using the marathon metaphor, let’s lay out a basic program to get you prepared to compete for mobile dominance in your market.

First Milestone: Achieving Basic Fitness

No one serious about marathon competition just wakes up one day and decides to run a race the following day or even the following week or month. A basic level of fitness is required to even begin a serious training program; otherwise injuries plus mental and physical fatigue will seriously hamper achieving your goals. Basic fitness in this case means your current interfaces with customers are mobile-friendly.  Let’s look at the three steps to achieving this first important milestone.

Start with a mobile friendly website

Use Google’s mobile friendly analysis tool to test whether or not your current website is recognized by search engines as being easy for customers to use with a mobile device. Clearly your site needs to pass this test. Beyond that you should also be critical of the presentation of your brand value online in the mobile interface.

• Does the basic information come across in an easy-to-consume manner?
• Can the customer easily contact you by phone or email with a simple click? (They should not have to remember the number or email address to complete this task, just click.)
• If they need to come to your office for some reason, will your address information launch a maps app for navigation?
• Do the video case studies play on the device without the hassle of a separate app or, God forbid, a download?

If you are not comfortable about passing this basic fitness evaluation, and you are also not comfortable with your current digital vendor, find one or two that will give you a second and third opinion. They should happily do this for free for an opportunity to become your supplier.

Optimize your company’s information in search

Next, make certain someone searching for you online can easily find your company, regardless of the device they use. Be especially critical of how the search results are displayed on mobile. Search results on mobile and desktop should be identical, but there are unseen variations that need to be in place for the best mobile presentation. In any case, anyone searching directly for your name should get lots of options for connecting with you online via their mobile device. Test it. If you aren’t happy with the result, either hold your current vendor accountable or ask for a second and third opinion. Chapter 8 in my first book, The Digital Wrap, is a great place to start in understanding the basics for a service contractor website.

Ensure customer communications are mobile friendly

Finally, assess the mobile fitness of all of your other routine communications with your customers. This begins with a commitment to have both email and mobile contact information for all your important customer contacts. I have never once answered a call at my office landline. If someone leaves a message, it comes to my mobile phone and I decide whether or not I want to call them back by pushing a button. Any of my customers or important partners who really need me have my mobile number and my email.

You should be able to reach your customers the same way. Make collecting email addresses and mobile contact information a routine part of your customer intake process. If you are sending them any sort of email or text correspondence that requires them to download and print a document, find a way to change that pattern to a “just click here” routine that presents the information in a way that allows them to take action right away without the hassle of a download.

ServiceTrade’s Quote Link and Service Link features are great examples of engaging the customer in a manner that invites them to appreciate your work and take action to award you more work without leaving the mobile interface. Send yourself test samples of several of the important correspondences you regularly exchange with customers. Evaluate whether or not you get the value from these messages without putting down your phone. If you are not happy, rework and reformat until you are.

Beyond Basic Fitness

Once you achieve basic fitness, you are in the top 10 to 20 percent in your market regarding ability to compete. Now it’s time to begin the specific marathon training in earnest. In next week’s post, I’ll discuss ways to build beyond the basics to truly dominate your market and win the mobile marathon.

If you want to read more about the mobile marathon and how to compete in the future of commercial services contracting, check out my books Money for Nothing and The Digital Wrap.