2011 was an exciting year for the Services Industry and according to the experts it seems 2012 will be even more action-packed. But, before we look into the future, let’s take a quick look at 2011 and the memorable moments. So in honor of the SportsCenter Top Ten List, I give you the top ten ESC version 12 highlights of 2011 in NO particular order.

#10 More Features Added to the ESC Mobile App
Although the ESC Mobile App was not new in 2011, the screen navigation was redesigned to make it easier to find the information you need. Additional new features include a new mobile management feature allowing managers/supervisors to modify and assign dispatches, promised dates and times of dispatches while in the field. Equipment can now be attached and edited through the mobile apps to help keep more accurate customer records. Credit cards can be processed in the field using ESC’s new Merchant Warehouse integration.

#9 Increase Customer Communications Automatically Through ESC
ESC users can automatically send an email to customers to inform them of the status of their dispatch. This can be configured for each status code so you can remind the customer of their appointment, tell them when you’re on the way, send a technician profile and picture and even send them a survey or a coupon after the dispatch is complete.

#8 Managing Service Agreements Becomes Easier with Added ESC Features
The Service Agreement screen was revised to include a robust new scheduling system; enhanced invoicing options allow you to include renewal amounts on particular dispatches to ensure the customer renews; additional options on the qualification screen allow you to easily combine service work with scheduled maintenance to decrease the number of trips you make and increase your profitability; and the ability to automatically order all parts required for service agreement dispatches, ensuring that you will always have the parts you need to complete your agreements.

#7 ESC Adds the Ability to Color Code the Dispatch Board
For increased visibility and priority associations, the ability to add colors to dispatches on the dispatch board was added.  These colors can be assigned directly to dispatches or to customers for all future dispatches.

#6 Encourage Your Sales Staff with ESC Spiff and Commission Tracking
ESC now includes spiff and commission tools. A spiff can be attached to any billing code or inventory item to track these bonuses by salesperson and can be set to a flat rate or a percentage of the sale price. The new three tiered commission system allows you to increase the commission percentage to those who exceed their sales goals and gives you the flexibility to set different goals for your technicians and sales people.

#5 Comparing Vendor Prices Made Possible with ESC
When ordering parts on a dispatch, invoice or quote, view a list of all the vendors that carry that part, their part number, last price from that vendor and the date the price was last obtained. This information will be updated automatically as you receive items and can be manually updated as well to ensure you are always getting the best deal possible.

#4 ESC Adds Revolutionary New List Views
This new feature allows you to quickly view lists of your customers, jobs, dispatches, equipment, agreements, invoices, quotes, vendors, inventory items and purchase orders. These lists can be customized to show just the information you want to see in the order you want to see it as well as saved and recalled easily. Use these lists to quickly find records, print custom reports, export data to Excel, and send emails or letters.

#3 ESC Allows You to Track and Bill Travel Time
Travel time can now be added to the working time when creating an invoice based on a dispatch in ESC. These times will be combined on the Technicians tab of the Sales Invoicing screen to increase the cost of the invoice. The time will also be shown immediately above the invoice body so you will know what quantity to use when adding a labor billing code to the invoice.

#2 ESC Credit Card Transactions Become PCI Compliant with Merchant Warehouse
Through a recent partnership with Merchant Warehouse card services, ESC credit card transactions can become PCI compliant in adhering to security and liabilities. Merchant Warehouse uses strong encryption technology ensuring the safe handling of cardholder information, which tremendously reduces your liability.

#1 Service Roundtable selects ESC as the Preferred Service Management Software
The Service Roundtable is a revolutionary organization founded by a collaboration of leading contractors to share information and help other contractors improve their sales, marketing, operations and profitability. ESC was chosen as the recommended service management software solution for its complete solution to manage customers, work, and finances in an intuitive, easy-to-use environment with the tools and features growing service companies need.

There an old adage that goes, “You waste half your advertising budget. The problem is you don’t know which half.” However, technology makes tracking each of your sales back to the ad that inspired it possible. And when you can attribute sales to advertisements and marketing programs you use, you can know which programs to expand and which to cut.

By paying attention to how your customers find you, you can track the revenue, profitability, and return on investment of your marketing and advertising efforts. By doing this, it is possible to get a strong understanding of the comparative effectiveness of all your marketing programs.

To start figuring out what ads are producing the most sales, you need to tag each person that calls you with how they found out about you. Sometimes the way they hear about you will be obvious, like when they bring in your newspaper ad or door hanger coupon. Most time, however, this will require you to ask how they heard about you. It should be part of the regular routine for each new person that calls.

Tagging your prospects and customers

Most customer managements systems have a place to mark a customer’s lead source.

These codes can track the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns if they are associated with the customer’s record or the dispatch. With that kind of association, the code of the way the customer found you can be applied to their dispatch or invoices so you can see how much revenue and profit came from each of your ad programs in a given time period.

It’s important to come up with specific codes with meaningful descriptions for your various marketing programs so that you can clearly identify which campaign to attribute revenue.

For example, if you had a monthly door hanger campaign, you could code the January campaign as DOOR1.

These codes should not just be used and then discarded. Deleting codes will make it impossible to see how much revenue (or lack thereof) could be attributed to that marketing program.

Analyze the results

Another important component of identifying how customers found you is to analyze how much each lead source contributes in revenue for a given period of time. This information is vital to discovering opportunities to expand in certain areas of your marketing and advertising mix and what areas you should cut.

You should report on and compare the volume of sales attached to each of your marketing campaigns or advertisements. This is the only way to know which ones are effective and which are now.

With a detailed analysis you will be able to see the number of invoices attached to each code for the time period, and also shows the total sales dollars and percentage of total dollar sales for each code, allowing you to identify your most profitable types of sales.

Click on the image to see a larger version:

This is one effective way to make decisions about which advertising programs to expand or retract.

How do you decide what advertising and marketing programs are working? What measurements do you use?

If managing your companies files has always been an issue there’s just a few steps needed to completely destroy your file cabinets once and for all:

1. Scan your paper files and customer documents into your computer
2. Attach each file to the appropriate customer in ESC
3. Take your file cabinent to the edge of a cliff
4. Push

Now that you have no file cabinent, continue to manage your company documents and paper work by attaching files to your customer’s records.

ESC gives users the ability to manage documents and images by attaching them to specific customers, dispatches, invoices, etc.

Rather thank bulky customer files ESC lets your office go paper free as well as have better access to documents, images, and files when you need them.

Imagine, when a customer calls, you pull up his record and all the files, photos, and documents associated with that customer’s account is at your finger tips immediately. You will not need to put your customer on hold while you dig through files.

This helps you to create a very professional image for your company. During each customer interaction, you and your dispatchers appear organized and prepared by having at hand all the documents and information you need to help your customers when they call.

The ESC document management also lets you create new document for your customers with the built in word processor. Its functions are similar to Microsoft Word giving it a very low learning curve.

This practice is also very secure. Regular on and off site back ups mean your data and documents are protected.

There are many examples of how this could be put into practice.

First you could have your technicians take before and after pictures of jobs or installations they complete. This is good documentation for handling any disputes. It also provides you with a good record and proof of the quality of work your technicians do.

Another example would be to attach warranty information to your customers’ equipment. Rather than having a bulky file cabinet filled with old warranty cards or instructions, you can have PDFs attached to the equipment in ESC that contains everything you need for that equipment. Then it’s there available for you when and where you need it.

You can also attach PDFs of signed invoices. If your technicians get signed work orders in the field, those can be scanned and attached to the dispatch in the service software, rather than being buried in a file cabinet.

Also, any email correspondence you have with customers can be attached to provide a permanent record of your communications.

By putting this into practice, your company can be incredibly organized, present a professional image, have secure on and off site backups of your company’s documents, and help the environment by going paperless.

Have you ever wanted to store vital information about a piece of equipment only to find that ESC does not have a field for it?  How about grouping equipment by a piece of information?  Or finding all customers that have equipment in poor condition?  If so, ESC has the perfect solution for this: custom fields.

Not only can custom fields help you do all these things it also gives you the following abilities:

• Custom fields can be easily viewed from the Qualification screen in ESC.
• Equipment reports can be filtered by custom fields.
• Custom fields can be configured to print on dispatch tickets.
• Custom fields can be seen on all mobile devices.

To set up a custom field go to the File pull-down menu and selectSetup Custom Fields followed by Equipment. You can then define up to eight custom equipment fields.  To create one, enter the name of the custom field in the Field Label column. Use the fields to the right to populate a drop down list that can be selected when this field is used.

In this example I have setup a custom field called Condition that we will use to track the shape of our customer’s equipment.  We have added 5 items to the pull-down menu: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Bad.

Note that any setups and changes to these fields on this screen will affect all equipment for all customers.  The fields that are set up here, and the List Items that are defined for each of those Field Labels, will appear on ALL customers’ equipment screens.

The custom fields you define will now appear on the Enter/Modify Equipment screen.  To use custom fields, simply recall a piece of equipment and select the value from the drop down list in the field you created. If the value you want to use doesn’t exist in the list you can manually enter the information directly into this field instead. For ease of searching and consistency, we suggest using the defined list items whenever possible.

As noted earlier, custom fields can be viewed from the Customer Qualification screen.  This is extremely useful as the Customer Qualification screen is the crux of ESC and provides useful information for whatever Customer/Location you choose.  The Equipment section can be found starting halfway down the screen and has a series of columns that help you organize information about customer equipment.  Custom fields are located on the far right of this list, but can be moved to a more prominent location by dragging the title of the chosen Custom Equipment Field to wherever you would like it to be.  This change will be reflected on every screen where equipment is displayed.

By Justin Egan