Like it or not, the workforce is increasingly mobile and workers on the go need to be fully productive from mobile devices. Service companies need to keep up with the demand of an ever-growing digital world and should take advantage of the continued streamlined benefits that go along with a mobile solution. A recent article in The Air Conditioning/Heating/Refrigeration News speaks to this very message.

Most service companies already have cell phones distributed to improve in-the-field communications and most cell phone providers now offer bundled text/phone/internet solutions that are the same price if not cheaper than the individual plans. Adding a mobile service management solution will organize and streamline the work flow of both small and large service companies, making them more manageable and profitable.

ESC Mobile is a simple and affordable way to outfit your mobile technicians with real-time job information and time tracking. ESC Mobile is a powerful and intuitive smartphone, tablet and laptop App for Service Technicians to manage work orders in the field, Technician managers to manage technicians in the field and office personnel to monitor everything with real-time updates to and from the field.

ESC Mobile has all the tools and features growing service companies need. Benefits and advantages include:

• Increased tech productivity by arming your team with the right information in the field ensuring jobs are completed faster and more efficiently.
• Increased response time with features such as GPS tracking and mapping.
• Increased field accuracy with access to all information needed to identify and work on the right equipment and eliminate illegible hand-written field notes.
• Increased customer care and professionalism with easy access to complete customer information across your network.
• Increased sales by increasing the productivity of your technicians and in turn allowing them to complete more jobs daily as well as giving your team information needed to quickly identify up and cross sale opportunities.
• Reduced costs by identifying areas of waste and inefficiencies. (Example. Reduced fuel costs with ESC’s route optimization and mapping functions.)
• Improved internal communications by giving your employees access up-to-the-minute company and customer information, all in a single location.
• Improved external communications with appointment reminders, status updates, technician profile emails, surveys, coupons and more.  
• Reduced collections by allowing techs to process payments in the field lowering processing costs, ensuring accuracy, reducing collection issues and improving cash flow.

The benefits of implementing a mobile solution far outweigh the cost. So what are you waiting for? Contact us today for a personalized demo on our ESC mobile solution.

Here at dESCO we are always looking for ways to provide you with the resources you need to grow your business and make it more valuable to you.

We’ve discovered that one of the most effective ways to increase the value of your business is through maintenance agreements. Growing a maintenance agreement base, whether for HVAC, plumbing, or another type of service company, is critical for profitability.

With that goal in mind, Ruth King, a well-respected industry consultant and Channel Manager for HVACChannel.tv, is leading a 301-Day challenge for ESC users to grow your maintenance agreements.

You can find out more information about the 301-Day Challenge and sign up for the program by clicking the link below.

301-Day Maintenance Agreement Growth Challenge

If this program sounds like what your company needs to take its maintenance agreement program to the next level,  download and print the registration form.

The service business climate is competitive and constantly changing. That means your company need to be willing to adapt to the current business climate, plan and budget, focus on customer service, use benchmarks, and be open to new ways of doing things. The ideas below can give you some direction of what to do or reassurance that your company is on track.

Be willing to adapt to the business climate around you

Today is different from yesterday, and you may not even recognize tomorrow. Running a service business means making the best decisions with the information you have. The service business climate is always changing, so keeping abreast of the current climate is an important part of making sound decisions for your company.

That does not mean just to do what everyone else is doing. Sometimes that is the worst strategy of all.

Plan and make a budget

Even though you cannot know what tomorrow will bring, it is critical to have a plan and budget. It may only serve as a guideline, but it is better than going in blind. In running your business, you can only improvise and go off script when there is a script to begin with.

In making your company’s budget, remember all the unplanned expenses and make sure there is money available to take advantage of new opportunities for growth.

Focus first on customer service

Your customers determine the success or failure of your business. Serving their needs always has to be the top priority. Without their trust in your company’s ability to perform, they will not come back to you the next time they need service and they certainly will not recommend you to a friend.

You want your service company to come to mind first when your customers need service. The way to get there is to make sure they are the first priority in every interaction they have with your company.

Set benchmarks to measure company performance

We live in a digital age. You can measure everything your company does. With benchmarks, you can also determine if what you are doing now is better or worse than what you were doing before.

With these benchmarks and measurements, you can see what parts of your company are making you profitable and which parts are holding you back. You can see where success is happening and replicate it, and you can see where there is still work to do.

Never say, “This is how we’ve always done it.”

What worked in your business before might not be working now and certainly will not work forever. A business that makes decisions now based on what they did five years ago is looking for trouble.

Instead of saying, “This is how we’ve always done it,” try, “We tried it that way before. How can we do better?” An attitude that you can do better is self-fulfilling.

Running your business by the principles above will not only keep your company in business but will set it up for growth and development. It is not possible to do business like you used to, but new techniques and new tools mean your business can still get ahead.

Consumers now-a-days are getting smarter. They’re learning to see through tricks and gimmicks, and they are better informed and more educated than ever when making purchasing decisions. They want to get the most for their money, and that’s a good thing.

As a service contractor, it’s important to understand how and why your customers buy.

A good way to discover what they’re looking for in a service contractor is to look at what they’re learning. There is an abundance of “how to” articles on the internet that home owners are seeking out and reading before calling your business.

A few searches on Google will show what they are learning to look for. For example, if you’re an HVAC company, search, “How to hire an HVAC contractor” or if you’re a plumber, search “How to hire a plumber.” With those searches you will find the articles and information that your customers are researching and reading before they call you.

Your customers are training themselves with these how to guides so they can get the best value for their dollars. By reading these articles and becoming the company they describe, you will be making yourself into the company your customers are looking for.

Here are a few examples of the types of articles I’m referring to:

• How to Hire a Contractor
• How to Choose a Heating & Air Conditioning Contractor
• 10 Tips for Hiring a Heating and Cooling Contractor
• How to Get Your Money’s Worth When Hiring a Plumber
• How to Hire an HVAC Contractor

The articles above can offer some guidance and a starting point, but make sure to do the searches and read the articles your customers would look for when teaching themselves how to hire your company.

Almost all the sites recommend their readers to get references. Is your company ready to offer references for your work? The best sources of references are your happy customers, but after you help them, it’s important to ask if you can use them for a reference.

The articles also recommend comparing prices but to not necessarily settle for the lowest price. Are your prices competitive? Are you sacrificing quality to offer low prices or charging more and giving more? You can see where your company stands by mystery shopping your competitors to get quotes over the phone to see where you stand.

How much of the criteria in the articles you found reflect your company? Does your company reflect any of the things to avoid? What things do you have to do to match the advice your prospects are reading before they pick a company to work with? Is your company what they are teaching themselves to look for?

Customers are getting smarter and are doing the research so they know what to look for. Fortunately for your business, you can see the same things they see and make your company into the company they are looking for.

Capital budgeting is the process where a business decides if a long-term investment is worth pursuing based on its long-term benefits. These types of capital investments could be in vehicles, buildings, tools, or technological improvements.

Usually, businesses will look at the lifetime cash flows (both in and out) that will be associated with the investments to determine if the returns make sense. For instance, when purchasing a new truck for your business, you may also have to hire a technician to drive it and to go to job sites in it.

The cost of many larger capital investments can be spread out over time through financing. However, for some investments there will be a larger investment up front, but then benefits that continue indefinitely.

Capital budgeting decisions can become a key factor in the long-term profitability of a company. Therefore, owners and managers need to compare the benefits and costs of the various capital investments they can make in their companies. There are many techniques companies can use to determine the long-term value of an investment.

I won’t go into them in too much detail here, but I will list and link to places to learn more:

• Accounting rate of return
• Net present value
• Profitability index
• Internal rate of return
• Modified internal rate of return
• Equivalent annuity

Most of the methods take into account the incremental cash flows or cash savings from the potential investment or project. Using these methods can help you determine if investing in new vehicles, new equipment, new warehouses, or new technology will be a wise investment.

The most important factors to consider are the total costs that will be present, including purchase price, maintenance costs, operational costs, etc. Vehicles for your service company, for instance, are good investments, but there is also the cost of running another vehicle (including maintenance, fuel, and manpower) to consider.

The process you use to budget for your equipment or technology improvements will vary based on what you are thinking of purchasing or accomplishing. However, one of the most important parts of budgeting is determining what you need and how it will help you.

Determine what the capital improvement project will accomplish or what time-consuming task it will replace. Look at the opportunity costs that not having the equipment or technology is costing both in the short and long-term. Then look at the cost of doing nothing both in the short and long-term compared to the total cost of the investment.

Finally, remind yourself why you were considering this capital investment in the first place. What are you trying to accomplish? What pain do you expect it to ease? With the costs and benefits in mind, estimate what kind of return on investment you can expect. Are you assumptions realistic? Will the benefits outweigh the costs by enough?

Thinking through all the costs and benefits of any capital improvement project will let you make the smartest decision for your company. Sometimes inaction is more expensive in the long-term than the investment in the new equipment you’re considering. Keep that cost in mind too when doing capital budgeting.

How do you go about deciding what investments are right for your company?

Every sale you make, every dollar of revenue you earn came from a customer that chose you over a competitor. Why did they pick you?

Chances are you are not the only service provider in your city, so there must have been other factors at play. Understanding what those factors are can help you know your customer motives and how to replicate the reasons your current customers selected you to gain new customers.

Each of your customers chose you because you offered the benefit they wanted. You offered the right combination of logical and emotional components that they wanted and needed. Your offer provoked them to take action and choose your services over all the other providers and the option of doing nothing.

Your customers chose you over a competitor. Your competitor’s customers chose them over you. Do you know why? The fact that they chose you means they found something different or better. But it also means that when they pick your competitor.

Knowing what those factors are means you can promote and differentiate your company based on the real reasons your customers choose you.

Here are some reasons why your customers choose you:

• Your company can best solve their problem
• Your company is the most reliable
• They trust your company
• You offer good after sales service
• Your company offered the best price
• Your company is the closest
• Your company was available to meet their schedule
• Your company was easy to buy from
• Your company was the first they found

Which of these answers apply to your customers? What can you do to present your company as the one that represents that choice? Understanding why your customers buy from you will give you a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses and will show you how to broaden your appeal so that new customers will also choose you.

People will only buy from you when they want to. It is your responsibility to understand why the people who bought from you wanted to and to then communicate to others why they should want to buy from you. People will buy from you when they decide they want what you offer. Do you offer what they want? Do you know what they want? When you know what your customers want and offer it, they will buy from you and not from your competitors.

What other reasons do customers buy from you? What do you do the help them along the way?

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?

Your company probably already has a Google Places “Page,” but if you have not claimed it yet, you are certainly not taking full advantage of all the free benefits a Google Places listing and page provides.

Google Places is similar to the Yellow Pages in that every company with a physical address is able to be listed. However, it is very important for local service companies to have a robust Google Places Page because these pages appear near the top of Google’s organic search results when a person does a local search.

Here’s a quick overview video of what Google Places and why you should use it for your business:

To get the most out of your free listing you should claim the listing, fill it out with all of your company’s important information, get customer review, create and keep it up to date with current content and coupons, and add photos and videos.

1. Claim your Google Places Page and make it your own

To claim your Google Places Page, go to Google.com/places. If you already have a Google account you can just log in. If not, it only takes a few minutes to set up an account, which you can do from the page.

Once your account is set up you can enter your business’s main phone number to see if it’s already listed on Google Maps. If it is you can go through the process of claiming the page which will allow you to edit the existing information as well as add other details, photos and videos.

Once you have logged in and claimed your page, it is important to fill out every field available on the form. The more complete a profile, the better it will appear to your customers and prospects when they find your listing in search. There is also a place to upload your company logo so that it can appear in the Google search results.

The form will ask for basic information about your company, information about your operating hours, what payment types you accept, as well as what your business does.

You are even able to define your service area. Rather than just having a static location, you can show on your Google Places page what Zip Codes you serve or even define a mile radius around your headquarters. The video below will give an overview of how this works:

The images below show the field you can fill out on your Google Places page.

Google has a comprehensive guide that will help you claim your page and get started optimizing your Google Places page.

2. Get Customer Reviews

It’s important to make it easy on your customers to review your company on your Places page. Reviews may raise your pages rank in the search results, but even if they don’t, reviews on your page adds credibility and lets prospects know that other people have used your services and been satisfied.

On your places page there is a link that you can copy into an email and send to your best customers requesting they write a short review of your company. Google says you are not allowed to offer incentives in exchange for reviews, so you will have to request reviews from customers you already have a good relationship with.

3. Keep your page fresh with current content

You are able to leave short, 160 character posts on your Google Places page. These short Twitter-like messages can be details about the services you offer, announcements of special events, introductions of new employees, promotional offers, or any other message. When you are logged into your Places page there is a box on the right side with the heading “Post to your Place page.”

You are also able to offer coupons to your customers and potential customers for your services on your Google Places page. These coupons will be visible at the top of your Places page. With these coupons it is important to make them unique to your Google Places page so that you can easily track their effectiveness. It is a good idea to keep these coupons fresh. One way you can do that is by using them as seasonal promotions, giving you the excuse to offer various coupons throughout the year.

Keeping the messages and coupons up to date will keep your page fresh and current in the eyes of your customers.

4. Add videos and photos to your page

You are also able to add photos and videos to your places page. If you company has an ad you could upload it to YouTube so that your Places page visitors can view it on your site. You are able to have up to five videos so you could also use some of these spaces for video testimonials of your customer or videos of examples of your work.

You are also able to upload up to 10 images. These could be pictures of your service trucks, employees, job sites and work you’ve completed, or anything else that would be relevant to your customers.

For a complete check and to make sure you really get the most out of your free Google Places page, complete the Google Places Checklist.

After you are finished, share a link to your Places page in the comments so we can showcase the best examples.