With a recent string of hackers breaching security, stealing sensitive customer credit card information and stealing money from customer bank accounts, it makes me wonder why service companies would not want to protect themselves further with simple painless measures. 

One important step is becoming PCI compliant with credit card transactions.  But you are probably wondering why … what’s the big deal? At first glance, especially if you are a smaller service company, it may seem like a confusing topic and a daunting task.  But let me break it down for you.

PCI Compliance Benefits Versus Consequences
Compliance with data security standards can bring major benefits to businesses of all sizes, while failure to comply can have serious and long-term negative consequences. Here are some reasons why.

• Compliance with the PCI DSS means that your systems are secure, and customers can trust you with their sensitive payment card information. Trust means your customers have confidence in doing business with you and confident customers are more likely to be repeat customers, and to recommend you to others.
• Compliance improves your reputation with acquirers and payment brands — the partners you need in order to do business.
• Compliance is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. It helps prevent security breaches and theft of payment card data, not just today, but in the future. As data compromise becomes ever more sophisticated, it becomes ever more difficult for an individual merchant to stay ahead of the threats. The PCI Security Standards Council is constantly working to monitor threats and improve the industry’s means of dealing with them, through enhancements to PCI Security Standards and by the training of security professionals. When you stay compliant, you are part of the solution – a united, global response to fighting payment card data compromise.

But if you are not compliant, it could be disastrous. Compromised data negatively affects consumers, merchants, and financial institutions. Just one incident can severely damage your reputation and your ability to conduct business effectively, far into the future. Account data breaches can lead to catastrophic loss of sales, relationships and standing in your community, and depressed share price if yours is a public company. Possible negative consequences also include lawsuits, insurance claims, cancelled accounts, payment card issuer fines and government fines.

Achieving PCI Compliance is EASY
Through a recent partnership with Merchant Warehouse, ESC has become PCI compliant, in adherence to security and liabilities, when handling customers’ credit card information. Merchant Warehouse uses strong encryption technology ensuring the safe handling of cardholder information, which tremendously reduces your liability. Plus ESC Version 12 customers using Merchant Warehouse services have also seen lower rates and improved efficiency.

You’ve worked hard to build your business – make sure you secure your success by securing your customers’ payment card data. Your customers depend on you to keep their information safe – repay their trust with compliance to the PCI Security Standards. Contact dESCO or register for more information with Merchant Warehouse to take the first step toware PCI compliance today.

 [Via PCI Security Standards Council: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/why_comply.php]

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?

Below is a collection of quick tips for your service agreement program. These are from the end of a longer article from Contracting Business Magazine by Robert Wikos of Peaden Air Conditioning. The rest of the article goes into depth about how a strong service agreement program will lead to better customer loyalty, revenue, and company value. The full article provides lots of stats to argue for a strong service agreement program, but for those of you who are already believers, the following list will give you some food for thought of what parts of your service agreement program you can work to improve:

1. Display a total commitment
2. Offer priority service
3. Honor your word
4. Be flexible
5. Provide reasonably-priced service with good value and benefits. It’s the beginning of a long-term relationship and not just a quick sale
6. Monitor your growth
7. Refine and duplicate procedures
8. Track technician performance

How has your company benefited from your service agreement program? Share your service agreement tips in the comments.

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.

ESC simplifies the management and operations of service companies.

ESC will simplify and organize the work flow of both small and large service companies, making them more manageable and profitable.

It’s easy to collect information from customers; easy to store it. Just write it down on a slip of paper and add it to the pile. Then try to find it when you need it.

Retrieving it:  that’s where ESC comes into play. Rather than the pen, paper, treasure hunt approach, we provide a way for you to enter information once, easily find it again, and have it show up in the other relevant and logical places throughout the software.

Pull everything from your desk and put it into your computer: service scheduling, managing your customers, routing your technicians, and seeing where they are via GPS, invoicing, and collecting payments. These are just a few of the functions, but you can see how it will take everything that is scattered around the office and put it all into one place.

You’ll be able to do more in a day. Enter information once. Access it quickly when you need it. Reduce errors and inconsistent information.

We can also make sure your service technicians in the field are on the same page with access to all the information on the customers they’ll visit, including what equipment they have, repair history, details on what the problem is, and an over view of what they need to do when they arrive. The mobile solution will also make sure your techs know what tools and equipment they’ll need to complete the job, so they’re not scrambling back and forth between the office, warehouse, and job site. They’ll also have detailed directions so they can arrive and start working quickly.

This lets the technicians arrive on the job site and finish the work quicker. And when they’re done, they can go directly to the next job, without having to stop back in the office. This will mean more jobs done per day, which will translate into bigger profits.

With ESC you’ll always be prepared when your customers call. With caller ID, the customers’ information can be pulled up automatically when they call, or you can easily search for them in the system. Once their information is up, you’ll have quick snapshot of the job sites, service history, service contracts, recent dispatches, as well as any outstanding balances. It’s all there so that you’ll be ready when they call.

You’re also able to manage a lot of the software from the web using the ESC Web Front Office, letting you view reports or schedule technicians from anywhere. Also, any changes you make online will show up immediately for users in the office and in the field.

ESC integrates directly with QuickBooks, allowing you to easily post invoices and received payments without any double entry.

By simplifying and organizing the way your company manages its dispatches, customers, and billing, you’ll finally have the time to grow your business by focusing on finding new customers and expanding your relationships with old ones.