Customer List Management for Field Service Businesses
By My Service Depot on Thursday, August 20, 2020Find out how to keep accurate, easily-accessible customer records in the field service industry.
Maintaining an accurate list of customers in the field service industry can be truly headache inducing. At first, it seems like an easy enough task. A customer calls your office and expresses the desire to use your services. Whether you work in the HVAC industry, chimney installation, pool service, or somewhere in between, this means you have to start filling and filing paperwork in some capacity.
In a pre-software world, this meant that you had a couple of filing cabinets filled with folders running from A-Z. If an existing customer renews service or starts some kind of contract with you each month that requires recurring filing, that cabinet quickly fills up, becoming unwieldy. In no time, your filing process has increased in time and complexity, as the simple act of changing someone’s billing address involves wading through a sea of paperwork.
Fortunately, with the advent of field service management apps and technology, you now have better ways to maintain a customer list. In fact, field service software like Smart Service can help you eliminate the need for paper records entirely. Smart Service gives you the ability to maintain and comb through your entire list of customers with a click of a button or a stroke of a key.
As you can see above, Smart Service has a comprehensive customer list screen. With it, you can easily and readily scroll through a list of customers via the search function or various filters. You can also simply view your entire customer list at once. Customizable columns along the top of the screen allow you to refine your search results.
With this tool at your disposal, you can further hone in on the information that gets displayed. If you need to find a particular job/work order/service ticket, you can use Smart Service to quickly sort through your data and find only the exact record you want to locate. With this customer management software, you won’t waste another moment sifting through old paperwork.
Let’s say a customer wants to update the email address that you have on file. Instead of quickly writing down the email on a post-it note to search for their paper record later, you will have the ability to instead search for that specific customer via their email address, which you can update in seconds, while the customer is still on the phone with you.
In the screenshot above, the user searched for the email address [email protected] and got a result for the customer MSD. From here, we would be able to enter the customer page itself, and correct any of the information that needs changed. We can do this for the customer’s phone number, main contact, service address, billing address, payment method, etc. A plethora of information can be accessed from this customer page list.
In a perfect world, there would be no misspellings on any of your customer records or job records. However, we all know that typos and misspellings can plague even the best of us. Smart Service allows you to go through your entire list of records and check for misspellings. One of the more common places this occurs is in the names of cities:
With this filter option, you have the ability to pull your entire list of customer cities and check and see if any of them have misspellings. If they do, you can click on that specific city, and then correct it in much the same way you would change an e-mail. The beauty of Smart Service is that it integrates with Quickbooks, so all of your corrections/changes get duplicated in Quickbooks, ensuring that all your records remain matched up.
Managing your customer list doesn’t have to be a chore. Using customer management software like Smart Service will help you along the way. With Smart Service, you have your entire customer list at your fingertips. You can quickly search, manage, and edit any customer that you need to. Smart Service has a powerful built-in search engine that allows users to easily comb through their entire list of customers and quickly edit their records. Not only does that level of organization help your office staff, it also makes you look very organized and professional to your customers. If you’d like to learn about more ways Smart Service can improve your business, request a demo today!