Make Each of Your Customer Interactions During Service Agreement Service Call a Selling Opportunity

August is almost over. That means the hot weather and the summer busy (or crazy) season is drawing to a close for much of the country.

It also means it’s time to take a look at the health of your service agreement program. Did your technicians sell more new service agreements than they did last year? Did your renewal rate improve? Do you have enough service agreements to keep your technicians busy through the winter? How has your service agreement base affected the overall value of your business? These are all good questions to ask to get ready for next summer’s busy season.

The summer busy season was a great opportunity to sell service agreements to your new or repeat customers. I hope your company had a successful year for selling service agreements. I also hope that the service agreements you sold are more than just a way to keep your technicians busy during the slow times.

Service agreements do give you revenue throughout the year and help to spread out the annual work load, but they also give you an opportunity to sell to your customers. A routine service check can uncover major problems for your customers before they become emergencies.

Those same routine checks also get your technicians face-to-face with your customers, which will beat the odds of door-hangers and direct mail any day of the year. You have a huge opportunity here. Your customers are expecting you to come. They’ve invited you in.

However, this direct interaction will be a huge waste if your techs just go into the house look at the equipment, change a filter or two and move on to the next service call.

This doesn’t mean you can invent problems or be dishonest with your customers, but your technicians should approach each service agreement call as an opportunity to find a way to help the customer through suggesting an equipment upgrade to save energy, proposing automated climate controls to make their house more comfortable, or some other way that you can benefit your customers.

You’ll want to make sure your technicians are prepared to sell during each encounter they have in the home of your service agreement customers.

Conversion Rate on a Service Agreement Call

Conversion rates on these routine calls will probably be much lower than your conversion rate of service agreements or ordinary service call, but it stands to bring in more sales dollars because you’ll be selling a more tangible product or service.

During a service agreement service call is the best time to bring up more extensive tune-ups to prepare equipment for cold weather and seeing what equipment is in need to replacement.

Conversion and sales rates are going to vary by your type of Service Company, but there are a few principals that will remain consistent.

1. Set a conversion rate goal: Every one of your technicians needs to know what the goal is and how well they are doing to reach it. Each tech should know where they stand.
2. Sales Training for Technicians: First and foremost, your technicians are technicians and the good work that they perform will have to stay priority number one. However, they are also the ones on the front line of your business. They have the most face-to-face contact with your customers, and therefore are best suited to selling to them.
3. Provide Strong Marketing Materials to Your Technicians: Your technicians can sell and talk about solutions, but many times it will not be a one call close. However, the marketing materials they leave behind after the sales conversation can help in the decision making process, as well as fill in many of the technical gaps that don’t get talked about in the sales conversation.
4. Reward the Results: The technicians that succeed in converting more sales should be rewarded generously for their efforts. Give them the incentives they need to stay motivated and focused on their goals.

You worked hard to get these service agreement customers. They trust you and count on you. Make sure that you serve them well by finding ways to make them more comfortable and making sure they’re equipment doesn’t break when they need it the most.

Matt Michel, the CEO of the Service Roundtable, has some simple tip for making sure your customers remember doing business with your company.

Some companies work really hard to ensure they are remembered. The employees in these companies are downright creative in their approach. They manage to form a lasting impression that burns the company name into the customer’s consciousness. They generate such an impact that their customers feel compelled to tell their friends and neighbors all about their experience.

These strategies are no secret. Thousands of companies manage to execute them daily.

via 15 Ways To Ensure People Remember You.

You may be surprised how easy it is for you to make a long lasting impression on your customers, and how ready and willing they will be to spread the word about your service.

How many of the tips in Matt’s article is your company guilty of?

This year’s ESC Version 10 release focused around streamlining data entry and data flow. Changes to the customer and dispatch module make it easier than ever to manage customers and contacts, schedule and dispatch technicians, and make sure they are always prepared with the right parts and equipment.

Redesigned Customer Module: The streamlined customer entry screen makes it easier to enter new customers and gives you better control of your data.

• Keeping in touch with the correct contact is easier with space for six detailed contacts per location.
• Correspond directly via mail merge by clicking the letter icon next to the contact’s name and selecting the desired template.
• A ‘date added’ field is auto-filled for all new customer accounts, so you can see when each customer was added and filter reports by date ranges of when a customer was added.
• Attach a sales person to each customer so that invoices will be auto-assigned to the designated sales person.
• ESC will automatically pick the correct city and state for new customers when you enter their zip code, after you import the zip codes for the states you service.
• The customer search field auto-fills after a few characters, and in most situations, you will not need to open up the detailed search box.
• The new customer search screen is both easier to use and more powerful, now allowing you to also search by contact names and email addresses.
• The software now catches duplicate customers before they are created, even if the address is not exactly the same.
• You can eliminate duplicate customers by merging locations—transferring all equipment, history, dispatches, service agreements, attached documents and even invoices from one location to another—making it perfect for transferring information from builder to buyer.
• Making a record inactive prevents those particular customers or locations from showing in filtered lists and on reports, effectively hiding a customer while retaining your historical records.

Expanded Dispatch Module: The redesigned dispatch entry screen makes sure that dispatched technicians are properly equipped for each job site they visit.

• The redesigned dispatch screen is easier to use and lets you browse through dispatch notes for a range of dispatches within one screen, and the improved layout and default sort option keep dispatches from appearing multiple times.
• The date and time stamp and spell checking is now available in the dispatch notes field.
• Printed dispatch tickets are customizable with the new layout designer. You can place your logo on your dispatches and include an area for your technicians to note their work. There are sample templates available to help get you started.
• Attached equipment is displayed in a separate tab, which allows equipment to be attached, added and edited all in one screen.
• A price field displays on the Parts tab, letting you put prices on parts attached to the dispatch. These parts and prices can then be transferred to the mobile clients and printed on dispatches.
• A search field now displays on the Dispatch Board, letting you easily find any dispatch by entering any part of the location name or address.

Service agreement updates: Updates to the service agreements module increase the connectivity among the agreement, the dispatch it generates, and the items in inventory.

• Parts added to service agreement tasks now flow automatically to the Parts tab on the dispatch with a zero price, and then into the related invoice. This ensures the technicians know what they need to take with them to complete the job, and so the parts will be removed from inventory.
• Now there is the ability to post agreement dispatches for a particular customer, which simplifies combining service work with planned maintenance.

Inventory enhancements: Changes to the inventory screens simplify the process of entering, adjusting, and managing inventory.

• The inventory entry screen opens in a separate window that enables you to enter parts on the fly.
• The redesigned screen also features a tabbed layout that groups similar items together and makes the screen easier to use.
• Alternate parts now are displayed as a tab on the screen.
• When searching for inventory parts, inactive parts are hidden by default.
• Import all the parts ESC perceives to be in a warehouse onto the Adjust Inventory screen. The quantities can be automatically set to zero, making this the perfect tool for entering physical inventory counts.

Enhanced reporting capabilities: Alterations to the reporting functions let users better view, compare, and edit reports.

• Users can now view an unlimited number of reports at once. This makes comparing reports a breeze.
• Closing a report now returns you to the module you were working in, but you can still change the report criteria when previewing by clicking the filters button in the toolbar.

Web Front Office overhaul: The Web Front Office received a major facelift in this version. The entire interface has been updated to look more modern, and several new features have been added.

• There is a new connections server, which has been completely redesigned to make it easier to use.
• A status light indicates if any portion of the connections server is not configured correctly.
• Run multiple reports directly from within Web Front Office.
• Expanded set up screens let you add technicians, configure dispatch boards, and add inventory items.
• Recall existing invoices and change or print them.
• Dispatch ticket printing is now supported, enabling technicians to print dispatches while in the field.

Mobile client changes: The mobile client also has many expanded features to make technicians even more efficient in the field.

• Inventory items entered on the parts tab of the dispatch entry screen flow to the invoice on the mobile client for the first technician who downloads the dispatch.
• Service agreement information is sent to the dispatch tab on the mobile client, allowing your technicians to see the agreement type and all sub-tasks.

Accounting updates: There have also been improvements to the accounting integrations, as well as expanded features and forms.

• You can now modify invoices posted to QuickBooks that no longer exist. This solved the common issue of deleting an invoice in QuickBooks that was posted there by ESC. Now you can easily recover from this mistake by making sure all the transactions that were sent to QuickBooks are deleted.
• There is now the ability to print 1099 forms.
• There is also improved compatibility of the direct deposit setup screens.

ESC Version 10 is packed with new features and product expansions designed to streamlining your company’s data entry and data flow. Changes to the customer and dispatch module make it easier than ever to manage customers and contacts, schedule and dispatch technicians, and make sure they are always prepared with the right parts and equipment.

This is the first post in a series that will highlight various features that have been added in Version 10:

Expanded Contact Management

Keeping in touch with the correct contact is easier now that ESC has space for six detailed contacts per location. Now for each of your customers ESC service software supports multiple locations as well as up to six contact per location.

Each contact at each location has space for a unique phone number, extension, name,  salutation, title & email. This makes keeping in touch with the correct contact at your customers’ sites easier than ever.

Some businesses grow and other’s stay the same size. Computer service software is one of the keys to growing a service company because it takes the pressure off the owner to be knee deep in the day to day operations and gives him or her a better perspective of the problems and opportunities the company faces.

By having a stronger perspective of how this works, owner are able to use computer service software to automate many of their business functions.

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