We all forget things from time to time. As a field service pro, you have a lot on your plate. As your business grows, it becomes harder to keep track of upcoming services, and even your schedule for the week.
And your customers? They're no different, each leading their own busy life. Even if you can keep all your appointments straight, your customers might forget about a scheduled service. If they do, you may have no one to let you in the house/property when you show up. Few things are worse than a wasted trip in the middle of a workday.
Fortunately, the modern field service professional has tools and technology at their disposal to help them remember their appointments, and to make sure customers won't forget scheduled service. In this article, we'll explore some ways to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Personal Reminders
At a certain point, your business will grow too large for you to keep track of all your work in your head. Once this happens, you risk forgetting vital appointment information. To prevent this, you should write reminders for yourself or create some kind of schedule. Even if you feel like you can remember all of your appointments in your head, writing them down creates a record you can reference in the future (should you need to remember the last time you visited a particular customer).
Eventually, your reminders will start to resemble a schedule. A formal schedule will become especially important once you start to hire employees.
Technology can help you formulate a schedule. Free apps like Google Calendar can help you get started, but if you want to tie your scheduling process into work orders or billing, consider upgrading to field service software.
Multiple Appointments
Many service businesses need to visit the same customer more than once. Some companies (like septic pumping or document destruction) perform regular, recurring service, and others (like HVAC or construction) often work on multi-day projects.
Again, scheduling software can help you track and remember these special appointments, giving you a great way to see, at a glance, when a project will begin and end, and when you can safely plan on taking on more work.
Customer Reminders
Of course, none of the things we've discussed so far will help your customers remember an appointment. No one wants to take the time to travel to an address ready to work, only to find no one home. Luckily, you've got some options.
Calling Ahead
One obvious way to remind customers they've got an appointment coming up? Calling ahead to remind them. Of course, as a busy service professional, it becomes difficult to find time to do this. You can get wrapped up with a job or some detailed management consideration. Also, your day could easily take you to a location with no phone service.
Again, software can help out. You can schedule reminders to call ahead and remind customers of upcoming service.
Of course, a lot of your customers barely have time to answer their phones or check emails. Fortunately, you've still got some great tools at your disposal: texts and emails.
Email Reminders
Sending an email reminder helps you reach customers in a lower-touch way. If you have difficulty finding time to send an email (or setting reminders to remember to send one), field service management software can help out. You can set up a system like Smart Service to automatically send an email reminder at certain, set intervals before a job.
Text Message Reminders
As you've likely discovered though, not everyone checks their email. That's why you may wish to augment your email reminder system with text message reminders.
Again, the field service scheduling software Smart Service can help you out. In fact, you can set up the system to automatically send a text message whenever you start traveling to a customer's location.
What is Smart Service?
We've mentioned Smart Service a few times throughout this piece. Smart Service is an industry-leading service scheduling software system. Smart Service boasts a ton of reminder options to keep you and your customers on the same page. Best of all, you can automate these reminders, allowing you to focus on completing work with the peace of mind that your customers will remember their upcoming service. Quality communication will give you a chance to grow your business exponentially.
Other Smart Service Reminders
Smart Service has an entire section devoted to daily reminders and to-do’s. The software also has the ability to send out emails to customers that could include details about an upcoming special or a survey asking about the quality of a past service.
Additionally, Smart Service includes a waiting list where you can place jobs that still need scheduled. This ensures you'll never forget about any work. More reminders prompt you to convert awarded estimates into service calls. To learn more about all the ways Smart Service can help your business stay organized, request a free demo today.
