Photo cliches drive sales and retention for service contractors

We’ve all heard, and likely loathe, the plethora of bad cliches about pictures. As overused and seemingly meaningless as these cliches are, they hold a literal wealth of knowledge for field service contractors. From new sales to retention, these sayings will drive growth in your field service company:

The big picture.

Why should service contractors consider photos important for day-to-day operations? Online businesses have proven the importance of imagery for customer engagement and sales. Even though you may not be engaging customers online at the moment, technology, like ServiceTrade, makes it easy to move your service activities online with rich job summaries and quotes.  With this in mind, the stats below represent a huge opportunity for every field service companies:

• Online articles with images get 94% more total views than those without imagery.
• In an ecommerce site, 67% of consumers say the quality of a product image is “very important” in selecting and purchasing a product.
• In an online store, customers think that the quality of a product’s image is more important than product-specific information (63%), a long description (54%) and ratings and reviews (53%).
• 92.6% of people say that visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision online.
• Offering multiple product views and other alternative images lead to 58% more web sales.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Imagine writing a description of the picture above in the space provided on the paperwork you provide your customers after every job. Did you have enough room to describe, in detail, the flying cats, splashing water, and mustachioed artist in a way that anyone could understand? Is your handwriting even legible? Would anyone reading your summary even believe you? Every year, your company is wasting hundreds, or even thousands, of hours attempting to summarize technical details in illegible handwriting that the customer is unlikely to understand, value, or trust. Again and again, ServiceTrade users have proven that providing pictures to customers for every job, not only speak volumes about the quality of their work and the value they provide, but also builds trust with their customers because “seeing is believing”.

Take a picture. It will last longer.

Left with the wrinkly, coffee-stained paperwork as the only remnant of the work you did, are you memorable to your customers? Does your company stand out as one your customers enjoy working with, or are you replaceable? The picture above is a time capsule for the ages.  Without referencing Wikipedia, you probably knew this was taken on V-J day, the final day of WWII.  This image will forever represent the end of the war for America and encapsulate a national memory. Similarly, you can turn every service for a customer into a memorable experience. Beyond the “wow” factor you can elicit by exceeding their expectations for information, months from now, when they have questions about what you did for them, pictures will remind them how valuable your services were. Additionally, pictures can save technicians time by converting their individual memories about a job into tribal knowledge shared in the office.  How often does someone in your office end a conversation with a tech using the phrase “just go back” due to lack of information collected on an initial visit?  Along with audio notes and videos, pictures are one of the primary forms of rich media that will ensure that everyone in the office knows what the next steps are for every job without relying on the technician’s fading memory.  Instead of wasting time calling technicians and, even worse, sending them back to collect forgotten information, have them catalogue their experience in a way that helps everyone understand not only what was done, but also what is left to be completed.

The whole picture.

As seen in the series above, one or two pictures cannot tell the whole story.  Similarly, your company should provide customers with as many pictures as necessary to explain everything they need to make an informed buying decision; whether that is to make a new purchase or retain you as the long-term vendor of choice. There is no hard and fast rule about how many pictures you should provide, however, more is better in the vast majority of situations.

Get the picture?

Take a lesson from retailers. Moving online and engaging your customers with rich content (photos), will lead to favorable outcomes including increases in sales and retention via the trust you build with photographic evidence of your value. Check Out: The Digital Wrap Statistics From: Consumer Psychology and The E commerce Checkout – Stats Behind The Clicks 6 Powerful Reasons Why you Should include Images in your Marketing