Automating the time-consuming administrative tasks of your business allows you to focus on growing your all-important customer base.
It’s not easy to maintain good old-fashioned customer service while trying to improve the productivity of your business. As a result, focusing on one can cause the other to suffer.
There is a lot of talk about smart automation but what is it, and can it really be applied to a pest control business? Formitize, the company behind the Pest Control App have been looking at the industry from the small operator’s point of view and have developed some powerful business automation solutions that can really help small businesses outshine their bigger competitors.
We love the benefits that smart automation can bring to small business. It can level the playing field by enabling small businesses to be smart and automate so many of the time-consuming and mundane activities that can take up so much time. Even better, the same automation tools can actually improve the level of customer service and client satisfaction.
Recent developments by Formitize have been focused on exactly this, giving rise to a number of new features.
Automated Job Status Updates are designed to trigger automated communications to the customer or your internal team as a job moves through its different stages. It is a really powerful way to keep everyone updated in a professional way and is fully automated. You can create as many different job status updates as you like for each job type and you can customise the wording and timing for each update that you create. The updates can be triggered when the job is created, assigned, accepted, completed or is overdue and can be sent by email, SMS, letter or notification.
When a job is accepted by the technician, an automated email can be sent to the customer thanking them for the appointment and providing a photo of the person that will be visiting them. When a job becomes overdue, a task is sent to the office alerting them to the fact that the job is now overdue, as this may affect later appointments in the day. If the technician is running late for an appointment, they simply click ‘Late’ and provide the customer with an SMS of their expected arrival time.
Automated Post Job Communication can be triggered when the job is completed and again can be sent by email, SMS or notification. This is the perfect tool to say thank you, to request referrals or to offer loyalty rewards.
Automated Future Reminders are vital for any regular work such as annual inspections, both for the customer and the internal team. The Formitize reminders can be automated and fully customised for each type of job completed, combining perfectly timed letters, emails and SMS sequences to ensure no future business is ever missed.
Automated Quote Follow Ups avoid the loss of business due to not having the time to efficiently follow up quotations and estimates. Again, the Formitize solution solves this problem with automated follow-ups based on either quote status or days.
Automated Overdue Invoice Chasing helps avoid the negative, time-consuming process of chasing overdue invoices, which for small businesses can be a major distraction. Formitize enables outstanding invoice chasing to be triggered within defined timeframes, with fully customised wording for each stage of the follow-up process.
Customers love to be communicated with and kept up to date, and now all of these items can be delivered professionally and automatically while the business owner can focus on making money, knowing that smart automation is improving their customer relationships and ongoing business value.
Matt Burge, CEO, Formitize
