By David Crary
I love browsing the forums over at LawnSite.com. There’s a wealth of knowledge that’s shared, lots of strong opinions and healthy debate. If you’re a green industry business owner, it’s a great way to connect and electronically network with other business owners.
Recently, a forum regular posted an interesting question: Why do my guys need tablets or smartphones in the field to do their work? He went on to say that he’d been running his grounds maintenance business profitably since 1990 without ever needing a device in the field. He’d recently fired three employees because they spent too much time on their personal cell phones when they should have been working. He saw mobile devices and mobile field service software as unnecessary for his business.
He’s not alone. We talk to a lot of lawn care and grounds maintenance business owners with the same mentality. Why should they complicate their work by forcing their guys to track activity on a cell phone? Here are five reasons:
It’s easier to schedule. If you have hundreds or thousands of customers under grounds maintenance contracts, it takes a long time to schedule a year’s worth of activity manually. But not if you couple mobile field service software with work order software. You can quickly schedule all your activity. Plus, if your software allows it, you can schedule an entire season’s worth of fertilization, for example, just by scheduling the first instance and then having the software auto-populate your schedule based on the recommended times between follow-up applications. Then, you can automatically send a day’s schedule to your guys in the field with complete information about what work should be performed.
You can better manage your contracts – in the office and in the field. We talked about how work order software makes it easier to schedule your contracts, but it also helps you better manage your contracts. You can setup renewal dates and terms, track electronically what services are to be performed and how much will be charged for ad hoc services. Plus, you can store a complete customer history so you know precisely what work was done and when. That’s invaluable when your guys are in the field and wondering how long it had been since you fertilized.
You can deliver better customer service. The aforementioned customer history can really help you answer customer questions quickly and accurately. But that’s not the only way you can deliver customer service. One of our biggest grounds maintenance customers has what’s called an assessment that their crew leader completes after every visit to a customer’s property. The assessment, which is delivered electronically to the customer using the service business marketing solution, HindSite Connect the day of the property visit, informs the customer about what work was performed and what additional work could be performed in the future to improve the look of the property. Because the assessment is completed in the field using mobile field service software, it’s more accurate and timely than using paper processes to accomplish the same thing. Especially for commercial properties, this type of advanced job reporting really impresses a customer.
You can track your budget vs. actual results in real-time and react faster. Ever wonder where each of your contracts stand compared to your budgeted numbers? Wonder if you’re ahead or behind on the number of visits to a property? Software can help you see that information instantly, so you can adjust on the fly instead of at the end of the year when the customer calls to complain that you missed 4 visits. Plus, you can see which contracts are profitable and which aren’t, helping you adjust at contract renewal to make sure you are as profitable as possible.
You can better manage your guys in the field. With mobile field service software, you can have your field team time in and out of very specific jobs that they’re performing – say mowing or blowing – and see over time how long each activity takes on average. If you see an unusual increase in the amount of time a particular part of a job took, you can talk to your crew to see why it took so long and possibly correct bad work habits immediately. Aside from being on every site to supervise the activity, there’s no way to do so without mobile field service software.
There are a number of other reasons why grounds maintenance companies are investing in mobile field service software. Ultimately, it makes for a more efficient and more profitable company.
Want more tips on how to improve your business? Check out our free eBook, 33 Stupid Things Contractors Do (And How To Fix Them), today!
