“Do I have any of this product left in stock? Did the order arrive on time? What are our customers saying? How do I track down the one specific product I need amongst the rest of my products in my inventory?”
While many growing businesses find themselves seeking a simple solution to the questions above, what sets the average business apart from the exceptional one is choosing the right inventory tracking software solution for their business. Inventory tracking software is an all-encompassing system integral to ensuring that your customers receive the product they desire and that you, the business owner, can efficiently restock, distribute, and follow up as to the location your product has been received.
To assist in selling physical goods, some form of inventory tracking technology is used by most types of businesses including retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers. This technology can range from free tools to expansive (and *expensive*) systems. While there are businesses already utilizing the best inventory tracking software for their business, many fail to recognize the importance of implementing this kind of solution.
Inventory Tracking in Optimizing Business Efficiency
Inventory tracking software allows you always to know which SKUs you currently possess, where they are physically, and what quantity is available at each location. According to Gene Tyndall, a well-known supply chain thought leader, “If a product is in your inventory, you should know where it is in your system—in China, on a ship, in a distribution center, or with a retailer waiting to be sold.”
An inventory tracking system allows for improved fulfillment accuracy, increased warehouse productivity, faster shopping and deliveries, more savings, and better customer satisfaction.
Inventory tracking helps to alleviate typical business woes of disorganized inventory, poor picking and packing processes, and lack of stock control. Additionally, inventory tracking software can help in detecting theft and administrative errors that would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to deal with. Your warehouse inventory management software will help your employees always to be able to know the levels of all existing stock items and their specific locations.
Inventory Tracking Methods and Applications
Inventory management software covers the acquisition, tracking, and shipping of products, can serve as a forecasting tool for customer demand, and it’s able to offer alerts and notifications to improve operational processes such as cycle counts. It effectively organizes inventory to make the picking and packing process more efficient, automates the order-picking process, and also helps you to determine the operational performance for each item in your catalog while offering inventory reports.
Inventory tracking is useful not only to producers of physical commodities but to a wide variety of other industries as well. For example, a restaurant owner needs to be able to accurately track their store’s inventory to ensure that they are able to sell their customers the food they would like to order.
Inventory Tracking Software Helps Your Bottom Line
A solution for inventory tracking means your business reaps monetary benefits due to your operations being efficient and organized. Optimizing your warehouse or facility means you can accurately estimate the space you’ll need in the not-so-distant future. Additionally, labor costs are mitigated as staff becomes more efficient and able to help get your orders out in a more timely and accurate manner. It helps to save staff from going through the trouble of carrying out inventory recounts and prevents stockouts. Also, implementing an inventory tracking solution will make it easier to retain a large base of loyal customers, as your business will be able to happily boast about having both a great product and a great track record for customer service.
Takeaway
Inventory tracking software allows businesses to stay ahead of their competition and meet the increasing demands of their customer base. With the right system, a business can efficiently restock their supplies right when they are in need of them, ensure accurate and timely deliveries, and even protect themselves from theft and errors. All in all, inventory tracking software allows for time to be spent on other crucial aspects of your business as well as Helping you make better decisions for the company in the future.
To stay competitive, companies today have to adjust to today’s consumer expectations and embrace digital business management tools and all the accompanying advantages they provide. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by using effective business management software to provide quotes and proposals digitally via email or text. Some tech-savvy companies provide memorable customer proposals via interactive video proposal reviews.
In the 2020s digital decade, positive evolution in business operations technology has increased the necessity of updating business processes—or risk going the way of the dodo.
So, what exactly is “quoting software?” Quoting software works from a regularly updated, detailed transcript of the services that your business provides and clearly outlines your prices for various services and product configurations. The best quotation software systems guarantee that customers are receiving exactly what they are looking for, allowing businesses to build a reputation of trust and transparency with their customers. Over time, this leads to converting more sales leads and referrals, generating more business, and maximizing profits. Automating the proposal process is an essential part of helping a business grow.
Online Quoting Software: The Ins and Outs
Using online quoting software helps businesses be prepared for the demanding challenges that—if handled properly—allow them to maximize the profit of their services and enable them to grow faster.
Some of these challenges include not only accurately pricing your products and services at the outset of any engagement, but also managing dynamic price changes in the products and services themselves as market conditions change over time.
Tweaking these cost changes manually every time your salespeople prepare a quote or customer proposal is tedious and time-consuming at the expense of your business’s overall efficiency. Moreover, a manual process leads to errors, further reducing information accuracy and wasting sales time that should be spent developing new opportunities.
To reduce the risks of errors and increase operational productivity, the process by which your business provides quotations and proposals to your customers and prospects benefits from optimization. Quotation software centralizes the quotation process and automates it, safeguarding the data from potential human error to a much higher degree than by utilizing disconnected, manual processes.
Process automation simplifies everything—it saves time for sales staff who no longer have to manually research, copy, paste, then confirm price changes (with a manager?) before finally presenting the quote to the customer.
With employees having more time for other tasks, companies should be able to increase productivity by identifying additional manual business processes to automate—new projects or initiatives that, perhaps, had previously lacked sufficient manpower and focus to get underway.
Maximizing Profits For Small Businesses Using Quoting Software
Quoting software helps small businesses deepen customer relationships by responding quickly to their individual needs and demonstrating attention to detail. One of the main issues that arise for small businesses is when customers ask for minor changes, but the information they requested has already become outdated.
Information automatically generated by quoting software enables businesses to tailor the output of information always to match specific customer preferences. Manually, it is difficult to manage personalized configurations and custom quotes for each order. Quoting software manages and adjusts the price of an order, product, or service by using automated customizing tools.
As a result, quoting software for small businesses helps cultivate repeat and loyal customers and allows for-profit businesses to meet their end goal: maximizing profits.
In addition to developing relationships with customers, clients, and vendors, quoting software maximizes the efficiency and effectiveness of overall job performance.
Speed is an important factor to consider, especially for B2C service businesses that provide services to homeowners. Getting quotes to clients faster than competitors increases the likelihood of impressing prospective customers and closing business quickly. Since it can be difficult to manage lots of configurations, especially those centered around complex purchases, quoting software becomes indispensable, giving businesses complete control over the process.
Quotation software gives your business a strategic competitive advantage. The speed at which you’ll be able to get proposals into the hands of both new leads and existing customers translates into dollars.
Also, given that a price quote is one of the first things your customer sees, it’s important that proposals are presented to the customer in the most professionally appealing way possible. Quoting software comes preloaded with branded templates that improve the readability and design of quotes, making them more intuitive, and easier to say “Yes” to.
Choosing the Right Quotation Software
Quoting software, especially as part of an all-in-one business management ERP solution, is essential for any business that seeks long-term growth by streamlining its workflows, data management, and CRM capabilities. Since there are a multitude of different software solutions on the market, the question becomes which would best fit your business.
Some types of businesses have customers, some have clients, and some have both. Maybe your business refers to its clientele as something else entirely. However you refer to the humans handing you a form of payment in return for your goods or services, it’s always crucial to build, maintain, and—when necessary—repair the relationships you have with them.
One of the best ways to do that in our modern, largely-online world? Utilize business management software to enhance the overall sales pipeline, from lead generation to point of sale and beyond.
It’s not just CRM capabilities that play a role in this process. One of the advantages that business management software brings to the table in the world of cultivating customer relationships is that there is the opportunity to gather data beyond simple contact information and buyer intent.
By utilizing prior accounting metrics, productivity reports, and other types of data gathered both from customers and employees. You’ll be able to make more informed decisions throughout the entire lead generation, sales, and retention pipeline.
How To Enhance The Sales Process
Centralized Information
The key to attracting customers is all about having the right information at hand. It’s not just about having one lead’s email address and a record of what specific form they filled out, it’s about everything else.
Beyond this individual’s basic information, what data is available to you? Are you able to quickly see if this person had a prior interest? Are their interests in line with the current trends you’re seeing within your products/services? Are you able to take advantage of quote-to-order functionality to keep everyone in the loop about the status of the sales process?
Each company in every industry handles its sales processes differently, but regardless of the specifics, it pays to have accurate, timely information on hand.
In 2022, overall customer relationship technology usage increased from 56% to 74%. As businesses shifted to an online-first approach more rapidly than ever, having enhanced access to customer data was one key contributor to success.
Automated Email Campaigns
Small business owners are always pressed for time. There are never enough hours in the day to get everything done. (Spoiler alert: there never will be.)
On top of that, wasted time and inefficient planning are among the biggest issues plaguing the average small business owner. According to one study conducted by Inc. Magazine, small business owners waste an average of 21.8 hours per week. In addition, 49% of working professionals have never conducted a “time audit” to fully analyze, understand, and improve how they spend their time.
Though there are a vast number of ways that business owners and employees can increase their overall productivity and efficiency, automation stands front and center as the most helpful piece of the puzzle. In this case, automation is utilized to effectively reach prospects and customers while you are able to dedicate your time and energy elsewhere.
Easily crafting emails in a code-free interface, utilizing lead scoring capabilities, and creating drip campaigns for each specific revenue stream that your business manages will help alleviate the stress of manually tracking prospects and sending individual marketing emails.
Built-In Accounting Data
Data is at the heart of every good decision. When it comes to the value of managing customer relationships via an integrated business management system, it pays to have the best data available at all times. In this case, the most important data is often the financial data.
Not every fast decision is a great decision, but great decisions that are able to be made fast are always the best decisions.
Being able to provide customers with accelerated invoicing and payment channels, accurate price forecasts that are derived from up-to-date inventory and work orders, and a better understanding of overall buying trends will help empower your sales force to increase their closing rate and leave customers satisfied.
How To Stay Connected To Your Customers
Customer Portals
Yes, the initial sales process is important. However, customer retention, if managed properly, can be even more financially rewarding than any individual sale.
The probability of selling to a new customer usually falls between 5 and 20%, depending on the specific nature of the industry and the products or services offered. However, when it comes to existing customers, this number dramatically increases—selling to an existing customer usually carries a success rate of 60 to 70%.
Combined with the fact that 55% of millennials claim to be more brand loyal today than 39% of consumers aged 35 and up, a focus on customer retention has to be a long-term priority for every business.
One thing that the modern customer desires is a personalized experience with the ability to retrieve information anytime, anywhere, on any device. With advanced customer portal technology that’s built into the best business management software platforms, you’ll be able to achieve both of these goals.
Customer portals provide up-to-the-minute service updates, open up a line of communication for questions or concerns, show a detailed payment/shipping/order history, and provide an opportunity for customers to know their needs are being personally attended to.
Chat And Discussion Boards
Staying connected to others is important in all aspects of life. It helps us learn, grow, and achieve goals that we would have not been able to accomplish individually. It’s easy for a coffee shop to flourish as a catalyst for connection and community—it naturally brings people together, bonding over the sweet tastes and aromas of their favorite drink and acts as a natural societal meeting point for people that want to bond, vent, and commiserate.
Well, not every business has the luxury of having a product that is so universally ingrained into the cultural fabric of society. For other businesses, it takes a little more work, creativity, and technology to bring people together.
Self-service help is often the first choice of the modern customer. 91% of customers surveyed would use an online knowledge base if customized and tailored to their needs.
Though it can’t replace the coffee shop, the internet and its countless mediums of communication are effective at creating conversation around a central topic. Your customers will always have questions, and there will be some that have already found answers to these questions. While your business will always be prepared to field questions, it provides a benefit to establish a community chat board where people with common goals and inquiries can talk amongst each other. Two heads are always better than one.
Feedback And Surveys
We know that customer complaints run rampant in today’s digital age. Some lack context, some are unfair, some are simply vulgar, and some are brutally honest. (Yes, positive feedback exists on the internet, too.)
As much as positive feedback is appreciated, it’s equally—if not more—important that customers be able to give direct feedback on the negative experiences they have. It can help your business continue to learn and improve after each and every sale, shoring up the areas where service, quality, or communication may have been lacking.
Customer engagement tools both let the customer know that their relationship is valued and provide an opportunity for them to give you invaluable feedback. Your business should be able to automate surveys to be delivered at specific times (i.e. after a sale, after a refund, etc), and provide customizable form fields where customers can choose “1-10” style ratings or just enter their own text.
Wrapping Up
If it seems like customers are more demanding than ever, you wouldn’t be wrong. Nearly 59% of consumers worldwide say that they have higher demands and expectations in regard to customer service than they did just a year ago.
In an increasingly competitive environment, it’s important to utilize the tools that give you the biggest competitive advantage. By maximizing the capabilities of business management software, you’ll be able to attract more customers, retain more customers, and overall improve the products and experiences that help you maintain a healthy bottom line.
Technology—namely business management technology—has a unique impact on every small business. Drilling down one layer deeper, technology has a unique impact on every employee and customer. Drilling down yet another layer, technology has a unique impact on every single action (and non-action) taken by every employee and customer.
Technology plays a vital role in shaping and defining the way a small business operates, at levels big and small.
Just as technology has a unique impact on every small business, every business is also unique in where it stands in terms of its respective technology life cycle. At some level, every business is at a different stage of digital transformation.
A study conducted by Deloitte found that nearly 80% of small businesses are not taking full advantage of the digital business management tools at their disposal.
Some businesses make the most out of using the bare minimum level of technology (i.e. Microsoft Office, Google Drive, basic shared calendars, etc.) while others have adopted various ERP, CRM, and marketing technologies. Chances are, you find yourself somewhere in between. Even if you’ve only begun to scratch the surface in researching integrated business technologies (kind of like what you’re doing right now) you’re well on your way to the top of the small business technological adoption curve.
Before you arrive at the moment of “Yes, that’s the technology I want and need. Let’s put it to work,” there are a few things to consider. It starts with taking a step backward and performing some holistic analysis of your business as it is, and your business as you want it to be in the future.
Assess The Status Quo
Before you can start assessing the future of your business and the way that technology will have an impact on that future, you need to take account of your business as it stands currently.
Not just the technology used in your operations, but the logistical processes, financial decisions, employee roles and responsibilities, and anything else that has a meaningful impact.
Take note of every detail. Not just your inventory and related physical components of your business, but the intangible ways you go about your day, the ways your employees go about theirs, and everything in between. Analyze what’s being done on a daily basis, and what isn’t.
You’ll most likely find that the insights you uncover will range from good to bad and everything in between. Let’s go over how you should handle each:
For any positive findings about your business’ status quo that you uncover, you want to leave those mostly untouched. However, it’s still important to keep in mind the ways that technology could improve upon them. Just because these findings are positive in the current moment doesn’t ensure that they will stay that way forever as your business grows.
For any negative findings, it’s important to launch a full-scale revamp. Why and how are these findings hindering the overall health of your business? Is it a human, logistical, or technological problem? Is it a combination of these factors? This is where it becomes critically important to take a step back and figure out exactly what can be done at every level big and small.
Aside from sitting down with everything involved in the aspect of your business that you’ve found to be a hindrance, one additional decision you could make would be to contact a professional business technology consultant. They will be able to provide you with an objective perspective of your business while at the same time providing you with expertise in terms of how technology can help alleviate the problems at hand.
Create Goals
The changes you make within your small business—technological or otherwise—are only as good as the reasons why you’re making those changes. Change for the sake of change doesn’t cut it. Meaningful changes that serve a bigger purpose with an easily quantifiable end result will prove to be changes worth making.
That being said, what are the goals that indicate success for your business? If and when you achieve them, what are some other goals you will outline each and every day in order to maintain that success? At what point will you be devising new goals to accomplish?
Obviously, generating a higher revenue is the end objective for every small business. The goals involved in getting to that final destination are what will vary. Selling more products, hiring additional/specialized staff, and acquiring better leads are some of the typical means to this end.
A major component of goal setting isn’t just about defining the objective you wish to achieve—it’s about setting smaller, more granular goals on how those overarching goals will be accomplished.
For example, if your large, overarching goal is to acquire more customers, your granular goals should look something like this:
Develop valuable, gated content on your site that contains relevant search intent
Use project management tools to define your budget and medium(s) for marketing the aforementioned content
Utilize automation technology to send automated emails and drip campaigns to prospect information collected from the gated content
Ensure that a system is in place where all sales staff have access to up-to-the-minute information on leads
Ask for and analyze customer feedback on sales staff/process/experience in order to figure out what’s working and what can be improved upon
Be able to quickly view daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly sales figures at a glance
Not every list of goals that your business puts forth will look like this. Some may include many more steps, some fewer. However, using this framework of focusing on the process minutiae in order to accomplish the larger objective, you’ll be able to hone the best technologies and processes to accomplish your goals.
Data Flow Between Systems and People
Even the most basic small businesses have several departments. Executive-level management, accounting, field employees, mid-level management—the list goes on.
Every department needs to communicate and collaborate with one another. Interdepartmental communication has always had its challenges, but given the drastic increase in some employees working from home while others are not, these challenges have been exacerbated.
The flow of time-sensitive information not only depends on the people involved, it now further depends on the technology used to effect that communication. Think about your own business. If tasked with retrieving information from another department, how long would you anticipate it to take to receive that information? Minutes? Hours? Complete uncertainty?
If the answer is anything above “just a few minutes” your department may find itself working in an information silo. Odds are, if one department finds itself here, they all do.
Data silos aren’t some malevolent concoction drawn up by a disgruntled executive looking to inflict stress on his employees. They are simply a natural result of business process development. People primarily work and share information and collaborate with people in their immediate cluster of co-workers. While it’s not anyone’s fault that data silos exist within your organization, it doesn’t mean that they don’t cause problems.
Areas Negatively Impacted By Data Silos
Productivity
Even in the most segmented businesses with the most specialized, sequestered employees that don’t share many commonalities among the tasks they perform (think accountants vs crane operators) there will be data that must be shared across departments.
The longer it takes to find information, the longer it will take to complete tasks. Simple as that. Over time, this will cause backlogs, delays, and other inefficiencies that will have a negative trickle-down effect across your entire business.
Data Accuracy and Analysis
When you were younger (or as an adult, we don’t judge) have you ever played the game “whisper down the lane?” Sometimes, the game is also called “telephone.”
If you’re unfamiliar, the objective is for the first person in line to privately repeat a phrase to the next person in line, with every person in line privately repeating it to the next person, eventually making its way to the final person in line. Nearly every single time, the phrase is slowly—yet unintentionally—manipulated and altered so much so that it barely resembles the original phrase uttered by the first person in line who conceived it.
When small businesses don’t have a single, centralized, data storage and communication hub that contains a single, accurate version of the truth, this same phenomenon occurs. Disconnected email chains, handwritten notes, and duplicate files are just some of the many ways that data can be misinterpreted as it passes from one person to another.
Culture
Beyond the technological component, communication between departments is also largely dependent on the interpersonal relationships developed between employees.
Working from home, this has become a challenge, but a far from impossible one to meet.
Regardless of geographical circumstances, members of departments often cling to their data out of fear that it will be altered by someone lacking appropriate skills or context. While taking ownership and pride in work is important, it’s just as important to have trust in members of other departments when handling data.
When projects, documents, or other relevant information needs to be handed off to a different department, it’s important for employees to recognize that that data is safeguarded and that a proper history of edits and alterations can be recorded. A little healthy competition and chest-puffing between departments isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s important that constructive collaboration is always the top priority.
Wrapping Up
Digital transformation sounds complicated because, well, sometimes it is. Taking a step back to take a holistic look at everything going on within your business will certainly shed some light on things you were unaware of before. That’s a good thing—albeit sometimes painful if not all of those things you find are “good things.”
Technology impacts everything. From the little things people do when they clock in each day to the year-over-year goals and strategies you put forth, technology can be a catalyst to make sure your business is operating as efficiently as possible.
The great thing about integrated business management software technology at the core of your business is that it has a cyclical, reverberating effect—it allows your business to run more efficiently which streamlines your workflow, therefore creating more productivity among your employees, which allows your business to run more efficiently, which streamlines your workflow…you get the idea.
In any relationship, communication is key and your customers are no exception.
Before communication technology made targeted advertising easy, trying to attract and speak to customers followed a fairly straightforward strategy, albeit with inconsistent results. For instance, field service companies would bombard prospects with generic fliers, billboards, Yellow Pages ads, etc, and all in the hopes that somewhere in the midst of it all would emerge someone who, not only needed a plumber or an electrician, but who’d then take the time to engage, and hopefully transition into a customer.
There’s little need to point out why this strategy wasn’t the most efficient.
Of course, things are completely different these days. Service companies now have the option to speak to customers more directly, and send them highly personalized offers, and, as a result, many have seen an increase in sales by 10% or more. Thanks to effective digital technologies and the ability to map customer communication journeys, hundreds of thousands of companies have found success and reached their audience, even if they run a niche service business.
There are still challenges to overcome, but to help you get a grasp of your own communication strategy, we’re going to look at it from the customer journey point of view. We’ll break it down into a few touchpoints, and explore how you can improve your own journey. Let’s get started!
Define The New Communication Customer Journey
Customer journeys have become more and more complex, especially in the field service industry. Buying a service isn’t simply a matter of a person walking into a store and picking up a product from a shelf.
Between local Google search results, 3rd-party review websites, paid ads, personalized emails, review requests, and all the other interactions now available to business owners and managers, it’s no wonder businesses can feel overwhelmed.
The new communication journey is a reciprocal process, where the customer gets to have a say throughout, rather than simply voting with their wallet during an exchange of services for money. Nurturing a customer is an essential part of an ideal relationship, one that leads to higher-value jobs and repeat business. And like nurturing anything else, the customer wants 3 things, to be:
Valued as an individual, through personalized communication
Taken seriously, by using a suitable and consistent tone of voice in all your communications
Feel in control, which is where customer self-service comes into place
At the same time, keep in mind that communication doesn’t refer just to actual messages and emails; everything you do in order to convey information about your business to the customer is a form of contact, from your brand identity, company logo, to your website, to your invoices.
Why Do Field Service Businesses Need To Look At Their Communication Journey?
Have you ever tried hiring another field service business? Or, even better, have you tried hiring yourself? How did the experience compare to other services you use in your day-to-day life, like booking a vacation or ordering a meal? Is there anything they do that you don’t?
It’s tempting to think this exercise is silly because you’re not selling vacation packages or meals. But the fact of the matter is that the average customer won’t compare you to other plumbing or HVAC companies; they’ll compare the booking experience you provide to those they know: Booking.com, JustEat, Amazon, and other big companies.
If you do a deep dive into field service reviews, you’ll notice a trend with many customers saying something along the lines of:
“They did a good job installing my ventilation unit, but I never got a booking confirmation so I had no idea when they’d arrive. Then the installer wouldn’t take card payment on the spot so I had to wait for weeks to get an invoice letter. And no one asked for my feedback at the end of it all.” – 3 / 5 stars
It’s hardly what field service owners and managers want to hear, but the cold hard truth is that if you deliver 5-star work with 1-star customer service experiences, the average review score won’t be in your favor. And are you really a 3-star company? Of course not!
Understanding where your customer communication strategy is lacking is what will push you to go from good to great.
How To Map The Communication Customer Journey
Mapping the communication journey goes back to the scenario where you try to hire yourself. List every individual touchpoint, then award yourself a rating based on how satisfied you’d be if, as a customer, a service provider treated you the same.
1. Company persona
You might be familiar with building a customer persona, but having a detailed understanding of your own company is just as important. It could be that you’re the owner and you identify the company with yourself, but even then, writing it down and turning it into a fleshed-out character will help you understand what your customer expects from you.
For example, if your company persona was called Gary, the friendly neighborhood plumber who’s always there to fix a leak or put in a new sink, that would mean the rest of your communications have to stay consistent: a bright and cheerful website, technicians who wear short sleeve t-shirts, and budget or mid-level prices. On the other hand, you could also be a Gaspard, the artisanal plumber who’s a specialist in visible drain welding & soldering and often works with museums and installation artists.
The expectations would be completely different, so the final question is: would your customer hire Gary or Gaspard?
2. Visual Communication
Once you’ve decided on the kind of field service personality you want to relay, it’s time to make it visual. Visual communication includes:
Company logo
Company colors
Employee attire (either uniform or dress code)
Website graphics
Website videos
Once you’ve decided on the first two, the rest need to stay consistent, otherwise, you risk confusing the customer in regard to the message you’re trying to transmit.
If you’re targeting premium customers and have tailored your logo and website colors to match (e.g. by using more elegant colors like navy and silver), but your employees show up either sans uniform or in bright yellow t-shirts and muddy boots, the customer won’t feel like they’re getting the premium experience they paid for. The same goes for your website and other visuals you might want to create (or commission), the expectation you set should be met by reality.
3. Written Communication
The final step in your communication customer journey is to highlight the smaller touchpoints and ensure they also have a cohesive feel and, especially, carry the same tone of voice. Written communication includes but is not limited to:
Similar to the situation we’ve described above, your written communication style should also fit your company persona.
If we go back to the Gary/Gaspard comparison, imagine that Gary would open his emails with: “Hey, Matt! How’s your week been?”, while Gaspard would be more of a “Dear Madam Spencer, I sincerely hope you’ve been well.” Mixing them up would leave Matt scratching his head and Madam Spencer tasking her butler with firing someone. Written communication is all about delivering on your brand promise.
The Value Of Having Everything On One Screen
If all this sounds like a lot more than you expected, we don’t blame you. Customer communication journeys are complex relationships that require time and effort, at least, they are if you want to do them well.
A lot of this complexity is due to communication technology advancing so rapidly and creating more and more avenues to interact with people. However, this should be seen as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle. That’s because field service management technology also allows you to harness more efficient strategies that come at a lower cost than, say, traditional advertising and branding.
Keeping track of your communications starts with recording customer information in a centralized database. The more you learn about them, the better you will be able to personalize your messaging and expand your brand. The next step is to combine your database with a message/email automation tool so that you can send out personalized communication as efficiently as possible.
Finally, an all-in-one field service management software will keep all this, along with calendar appointments, employee shifts, quotes, and more, all on a single screen. From there your business is in a better position to grow sustainably and it’ll help you implement more and more complex customer communication strategies down the line.
The Takeaway
All in all, customer communication journeys are all about knowing who you’re targeting and having a good grasp of the tools you have access to in order to reach this person. Technology has made things more complex, but, at the same time, it has also made amazing strategies widely available to companies of every size and budget. Make sure you’re not missing out and start investing in your communication strategy today!
What are professional services? The answer to this question is far-reaching—a wide variety of service types and business models fall under the professional services umbrella. Sometimes it’s hard to encapsulate exactly what defines a professional services organization—oftentimes it has a subjective, “I know it when I see it” feel to it.
While the definition of what professional services are is always shifting as our economy evolves, it’s much easier to define what professional services organizations do:
Professional service organizations provide support in the form of contracted advice and/or performing tertiary tasks and duties.
Regardless of the specific product or service rendered, it’s common to see both B2C and B2B practices within the professional services industry. Some organizations focus on exclusively one or the other, but many practice in both.
Clients come in all shapes and sizes, but the majority of clients that professional service organizations assist share a common perspective: it’s often savvy and efficient to hire an outside expert.
Small business owners ranked “time management” as the third largest challenge they face. The first and second biggest challenges? Cash flow (obviously) and marketing/advertising (a professional service in its own right).
Spending additional time, energy, and resources on tasks that could be masterfully—and cost-effectively—tackled by a third-party professional is not a wise management strategy.
Types Of Professional Services
Products and services vary drastically by company and industry. However, the common ground among professional services providers lies within the logistics of how business is conducted.
Communication, data management, scheduling, financial reporting, and payment processing are some of the processes universally shared by all professional services providers.
Ideally, professional services providers use one system to manage their entire business to ensure work is profitable and delivered in a timely fashion. Sure, lawyers will have different needs than IT professionals, but the core pillars and processes of the professional services industry remain the same.
Below we’ll cover four of the core professional services and how each type of service provider can stay ahead of the competition in their respective lanes.
Accounting
Breakdown: Accounting agencies and service providers exist for a reason—assigning a manager within your organization to handle your finances by way of using spreadsheets typically isn’t a prudent business practice.
Tax management, expense tracking, and payroll considerations are just a few examples of what makes up the 9 to 5 of an accounting firm.
How They Can Stay Ahead: Putting aside the day-to-day duties that accountants are bonafide experts at, accounting firms that want to stay a step ahead of the competition need to place an additional emphasis on a different aspect of their business: customer and vendor communications.
For accounting firms to act as premier professional servicers, they need to be equipped with the right tools. In this case, utilizing software equipped with customer and vendor management portals will benefit all parties involved. Streamlined communication channels, virtual invoice payments, and the ability to remotely view billing and transaction histories at any time will create satisfied clients—it may even prevent those dreaded 10:00 pm “ask” emails.
After all, accountants in particular have a special appreciation for accuracy, consistency, and transparency—it’s quite literally the foundation of what they do for a living.
Consulting
Breakdown: Excluding the aberration of 2020, the global consulting industry has steadily increased in size every year for the last 10 years. Data collected by Glassdoor indicates that US-based consultants make (on average) around $89,000 annually—well higher than the overall US compensation average.
Perhaps that’s in part to the diversity of specializations within the consulting industry. Strategy consultants, management consultants, operations consultants—the list goes on. I’m sure at least a few more will be added to the list before this blog is published.
How They Can Stay Ahead: While the methodologies and specializations for consultants may vary, their goals remain uniform—to provide a premier, professional, and profitable experience for their clients.
The best way to do that? Be at the forefront of addressing the main challenges that businesses will be facing in the next 3 to 5 years. According to a survey of 1300 professional services consulting firms, the top five main challenges businesses will face, all have one thing in common: technology and its rapid rate of adoption within the industry.
Unpredictability in the marketplace
Changes in how buyers buy your services
Increased competition from new firms/competitors
The need for new skills
Automation/artificial intelligence
Challenges 2, 4, and 5 correlate directly with technological advancements—e-commerce is more prominent than ever, development-centric skill sets are dominating the global workforce, and technologies with a focus on automation and machine learning are continuing to grow in popularity and practicality.
Challenges 1 and 3 may be age-old challenges, but they certainly have a new, technological twist to them. Moore’s Law would suggest that technological progress is advancing at a higher rate than ever before, leading to increased levels of uncertainty in how (and, in a lot of instances, when) technology will impact any given industry. As more and more businesses in all industries adopt more efficient and profitable technologies, competition will naturally increase. After all, technology tends to level the playing field.
IT Services
Breakdown: IT services encompass a wide variety of skills and disciplines. Web design, cybersecurity, software development, and database management—are all distinct from one another, yet fall under the same umbrella of “IT.”
The diversity of what falls under the umbrella of “IT services” is part of the challenge businesses face. If an organization offers a single service (for example, web design) it may not generate enough of a client base to continuously extract revenue. Conversely, if an organization offers a staggering collection of services, it may fall into a “quantity over quality” conundrum which could eventually lead to revenue woes.
Many businesses have found a sweet spot. For example, some companies may offer web design services while also managing digital marketing campaigns and social media efforts. And, low and behold, some companies are still intent on doing it all. And that’s ok—but with such a varied array of services, how can companies efficiently keep track of it all?
How They Can Stay Ahead: No matter the type of IT service a business offers, some things never change. Having real-time information available is always crucial, as is the ability to smartly manage projects.
Most of all, in an extremely skill-intensive industry like IT services, having the ability to quickly assess the skill sets, qualifications, and certifications of both existing team members and prospects in the pipeline will pay dividends down the road.
The importance of cultural fit within an organization has not been understated as of late—hiring the right cultural fit within a company leads to less employee turnover, more productivity (especially in regard to remote work), and overall higher satisfaction.
“Cultural fit” isn’t just an organizational-wide consideration—it’s important that every team and cluster of employees within an organization is able to mesh well together.
Before worrying about the projects and tasks themselves, it’s important to consider how employees are placed together. By utilizing all of the tools available to accurately assess candidates and current employees alike, IT services teams will be able to tackle any task in front of them.
Legal and Law Firms
Breakdown: Of all of the professional services that we’ve discussed so far, I think it’s a fair assumption to say that legal services should be the last type of service that any business attempts to solve unaided. (Disclaimer: not legal advice.)
In America, everyone has their own opinion on certain laws, legal practices, and even lawyers themselves. The beautiful part about our legal system and its practice is that we have the unalienable right to maintain and voice opinions of all flavors and varieties.
Though our nation’s legal practices and procedures don’t come without scrutiny, one thing is for certain—many of the societal advancements that we’ve benefitted from have come after tireless, tedious, and often thankless hours of legal work.
How They Can Stay Ahead: If there is a criticism to be made about the legal profession in America, it mainly revolves around its “pay-to-play” model. Yes, the 6th Amendment guarantees every citizen the right to counsel. However, every American knows the reality in which we live: the more you pay, the more you get.
This isn’t an issue that can be solved overnight, nor can it be solved by any single person or law firm. Most lawyers aren’t Cochrans and Shapiros—they’re public defenders, paralegals, and employees of smaller firms that don’t have the luxury of attracting clients with 8-figure net worths.
Providing legal services is about doing right by your clients. One way to do that without a Hollywood-esqe budget is to utilize technology to its fullest.
Document management, time and expense tracking, and client communication channels don’t have to be disconnected and burdensome to maintain. They can be managed in a single, easy-to-use platform. Technology should work for you—not the other way around.
Ensuring Professional Services Success
On the surface, it may seem that lawyers and software developers don’t have much in common. If you ask them, they might even agree.
But, what they share is their ability to provide a service that they’ve trained for—training that, in many cases, has encompassed the vast majority of their adult lives. Success comes in all shapes and sizes, especially when you’re talking about the professional services industry.
Servicing customers is never an easy task. There are a million tips and tricks out there on what to say, do, and act like in order to deliver the best results. Many of those pieces of advice are worthwhile.
At the end of the day, it all boils down to the same thing—leveraging the tools and technology at your disposal in order to provide the best service possible.
