The core of a field service business is providing excellent customer service by having easy access to customer data from anywhere at any time. Pen and paper-based systems require manual input and are time-consuming, prone to errors and inefficient.
Upgrading to static Excel spreadsheets do not solve these issue either. It does not allow you to track customer interactions and lacks automation capabilities.
These challenges made successful businesses pivot towards CRM software to manage their business data and customer relationships. By using a field service CRM for battery business, you can easily track your customer’s journey from anywhere at any time. It aids clear communication between in-office service managers and mobile service technicians in the field.
According to a survey, 74% of businesses using CRM report their customer relationships are stronger through good customer experiences. They further add that the CRM system is a powerful marketing tool to help build their businesses.
Here is a mini guide on the benefits of CRM for small businesses in the inverter battery service industry.
What is CRM Software?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software helps you manage the relationship with your customers by recording all the interactions with your sales leads and customers.
CRM tool gathers information across all prospects’ and consumer touch-points like contact forms, social media ads, emails, etc. It neatly organizes data that gives you better insights to streamline your business workflow, keeping your business connected end-to-end.
Why is CRM important for businesses in the service industry?
An all-in-one integrated CRM for battery business can supercharge your company by adding value to your business and improving operational efficiency.
The Harvard Business Review claims customer relationships are about two times as important as brand value in determining the overall worth of a business. Customers today have multiple options. After one bad experience with your business, they switch to a competitor without a second thought.
Offering good customer experiences is the priority for field service companies to retain customers and sustain the business. To offer good experiences, know what your customer wants and where your business is falling behind in meeting their expectations. Generating valuable customer data is integral to the customer support process.
Field service CRM that records every customer interaction gives you enough insights into customer data and buyer’s journey. It helps you make better decisions and improve customer satisfaction levels.
A service CRM tool helps you
- Improve the customer satisfaction level
- Retain existing customers
- Capture more leads
- Smoothly Close the deals
- Scale your business easily
CRM improves customer retention by as much as 27%. The transparency and collaboration between all departments of your company improve the efficiency of your business. The in-office service managers and field workers have real-time access to data. This helps improve scheduling, reduce travel time, cut expenses, make better data-driven decisions and make optimum use of resources.
Research conducted by Thomson Data in 2019 found that a properly maintained CRM system can yield 245% ROI for your business.
Using a CRM to manage the service business operations gains you a competitive edge and helps you scale your business smoothly.
10 Signs Your Service Business needs a CRM
If you’re unsure whether your company needs a CRM system, here are some signs that show your business needs a CRM.
- You are having trouble tracking your sales leads.
- You fail to follow up with your leads and miss out on converting them.
- Hard to locate or access customer data in large paper records.
- Sometimes, you lose your customer data.
- Miscommunication between departments causes service delays and scheduling conflicts.
- Longer customer response times.
- You cannot track the real-time status of service jobs.
- You miss service deadlines and fail to keep track of recurring service dues for customers.
- Your field technicians cannot access customer data and history remotely.
- Finding it tough to scale your business without proper data management.
10 KEY BENEFITS OF USING CRM FOR BATTERY BUSINESS
1. Quick & Easy Data Management
No more switching between different tools, paperwork, spreadsheets, calendars and documents to record and manage your business data. Eliminate the time-consuming paperwork and erroneous data entry.
You can build a catalogue of your services inside the field sales CRM system. It makes data entry easier and quicker using a pre-defined service type, set time frame for recurring services for each product type, inventory data, etc.
The field service CRM system automatically records your customer data across all customer touchpoints and neatly organizes this data in the database. It records every customer interaction throughout the customer’s journey. The information entered is double-checked and verified by the system, reducing the chances of errors.
2. Manage all your business data in one place
With centralized database management, everyone in an organization has instant, up-to-date, and accurate information at their fingertips. It prevents chaos when employees leave or new ones join.
3. Improved Real-time Communication
A field service business usually suffers from the disparity of knowledge and communication gap between back-office teams and field service technicians. Integrating a service CRM into field service software keeps everyone on the same page with enhanced internal communication.
CRM-integrated field service scheduling software aids in better communication between in-office service managers and field service personnel. It avoids wasting time making multiple phone calls to assign jobs or make status updates. Real-time communication keeps the customers informed about the progress of their service requests at any given moment.
For example, once assigned a job, the service technician can quickly access customer data, complaints raised, customer history and routes to reach the customer location.
This empowers the technician to quickly complete the job and update the job status, service and inventory data and payment completion on the service portal. The back-office team can conveniently track the job progress and stay informed about the technician’s availability for future tasks.
4. Automate your Sales Process
Field service management is quite a dynamic-natured business that involves various variables in making a sale. The sales cycles are often lengthy and prone to communication issues and other challenges.
Typically, field service companies track every step of a sales/services cycle through telephone calls, which makes things complicated.
However, CRM-integrated field service management software lets you automate your sales process by tracking and recording real-time job progress.
For example, when a new service request arrives, the CRM-integrated FSM software automatically creates a customer record and checks for the availability of technicians. It helps the in-office service manager quickly assign the job to an available technician. Once assigned, the field engineer receives a notification about the task and the customer details.
After serving a customer, the field service automation software automatically calculates the next service due date based on the set time frame. It sends automated service reminders to customers before their service maintenance due date.
Automation frees your valuable resources for focusing on your core business operations and converting new leads into paying customers.
5. Personalized Communication Boosts Sales
According to a survey by Microsoft, 72% of consumers say that when contacting customer service, they expect the company to know who they are and have insights into their previous engagements.
Personalization is the key to business marketing as it elicits an immediate reaction from a customer. When you send SMS service reminders, personalize the text with relevant customer details and offer customized discounts to boost sales. It is cumbersome to send personalized messages manually.
However, when you use a CRM-integrated field service reminder software, it automatically pulls all customer data and previous service history and automates the process of sending notifications.
A study revealed that 62% of customers open an email due to a personalized subject line.
Thus sending personalized messages will deliver positive customer experiences and drive recurrent sales, boosting your revenue.
6. Enhanced Customer Experience
A recent study found that 64% of consumers feel their experience with a brand is more important than price when deciding to make a purchase.
This gives you a valid reason to improve customer satisfaction by providing quick solutions. Centralized data storage and ease of data access help you provide quick service responses to customers.
47% of CRM users state that CRM technology has an immense impact on their customer satisfaction rate.
Giving field technicians access to customer data helps them provide superior customer support and complete the job quickly without unnecessary delays.
The CRM-integrated field service automation software keeps the customer informed about the technician’s assignment and arrival. This keeps them satisfied with timely service. Furthermore, on-site invoices and personalized service reminders make your customers feel happy. Happy customers stick to your brand and drive their friends also to your brand, expanding your customer base.
7. Increased Business Efficiency
Manual data storage in paper or spreadsheets requires a lot of time, effort and resources get used up. Field service CRM systems automate data collection from customer touchpoints so that you don’t have to store it manually.
Sales automation and marketing automation, like automated service reminders, save time and increase customer retention. If you track your sales leads manually, there are possibilities of missing out on sales opportunities.
Automating tasks allows employees to spend their time focusing on providing better customer service rather than performing manual tasks. That time can be used for growing your battery service business.
As every customer interaction gets recorded, it gives you a clear view of where your business fell short in providing a good customer experience, providing you room to improve.
8. Track Your Employee & Business Performance Management
With all the data in one place, field sales CRM software gives you better insights into your business performance. You can quickly view reports and track your KPIs, like the number of jobs completed per day, customer acquisition cost, customer retention rate, expenses, etc.
You can also monitor the performance of field technicians by viewing individual reports. Measuring performance helps you incentivize the employees, motivating them to perform even better. It also keeps them aware that they are constantly monitored and their travel history is being tracked, hence is no room for trickery.
It also helps you track the continuity of workflow in field service operations and prevent unwanted service delays. The one-click reports and insights bring more transparency into business operations and make it easier to visualize the progress.
9. Data Security
With cloud-based CRM software, you don’t need to worry about running out of space because they offer a huge storage capacity and high processing power.
The data is not stored on a single computer but in cloud servers ie. a cluster of multiple servers. Even if one server is down, there is no loss of information. Regular data backups ensure safety. Encryption ensures that only authorized users can access your private details.
10. Reduce Costs & Carbon Footprint
Eliminating paperwork saves paper costs and also reduces the carbon footprint of your organization from paper usage. Cloud computing eliminates the need for additional computers and infrastructure, eliminating the cost associated with maintaining them.
Eliminating manual errors and providing remote access to customer records for field technicians help them complete their tasks faster. It increases first-time fix rates because field workers don’t need to drive back and forth to the office. This saves travel time and fuel costs.
CONCLUSION
Modern-day field service CRMs provide a holistic business solution by integrating everything from internal communication systems to sales automation to business report generation. It saves you time, provides better customer experiences and scales your business without any hassle.
CRM forms the core of a field service management system connecting the moving parts and the end-to-end solution for managing field service business operations.
Unoservice is an all-in-one CRM-integrated FSM software for your battery business that aligns your internal teams and mobile workforce, streamlines your business workflow and helps you scale faster.
Book a free demo of the Unoservice FSM tool, or try it for free to grow your battery field service business.
Frequently Asked Questions on CRM for Battery Business
What is field service CRM?
A field service CRM software is a customer relationship management application customized for the field service industry. It helps FSM companies automate recording customer data and interactions and neatly organize this data to gain valuable insights to make better business decisions.
Why should I switch to service CRM software from Excel spreadsheets?
Excel cannot automate tasks, record real-time customer interaction, track events, collaborate with every employee and make updates in real-time. However, switching to a service CRM tool allows you to automate, collaborate, view real-time updates, one-click report generation and make better data-based decisions.
Do all organizations need CRM?
Businesses across all industries require a CRM system to maintain customer data and manage their relationships with customers. CRM gives better insights into your customer journey that help you make better data-driven decisions and improve customer service.
How do I know if my business needs a CRM system?
CRM for battery business is a must if your battery repair service business requires maintaining a large amount of customer data in one place to be easily accessed by every employee from anywhere and you need quick access to customer data to provide recurring sales to your existing customers.
Why is CRM important in the service industry?
Field service businesses sustain themselves by offering good customer experiences. To provide good experiences, you must track every customer interaction and feedback to improve your services. With a CRM for battery business, you’ll be able to store unlimited customer data, easily retrieve any information, automate repetitive tasks, and run your business remotely.
Does FSM software come integrated with a CRM tool?
Many field service management tools are integrated with CRM software to manage the field technicians remotely and smoothly track every interaction with prospects, leads and customers. Along with service CRM, the Unoservice field force management tool offers features like GPS tracking, service reminders, technician scheduling and dispatching, etc.