7 Easy Tips to Grow Your Inverter Battery Service Business in 2022

The field service business market has been witnessing steady growth over the years and is expected to reach $6.51 billion in 2026 at a CAGR of 15.7%. This shows a lot of scope for UPS and inverter battery service business to grow in recent times. Scaling up your service business becomes easier when you follow a proper growth framework. So here are a few tips that grow your inverter battery field service business.  

1. BUILD A NETWORK 

You can only contact a person for an inverter battery servicing when you know that the person has an inverter at his/her place. Contrarily, it would be pointless trying to advertise your services to someone who doesn’t own any products that you provide maintenance services.

In the initial stage of your UPS battery servicing business, establish contacts with the local inverter dealers, get customer data from them and collaborate with them to provide battery maintenance service to their customers. 

Once you have a customer base, deliver unmatched experiences to win their trust and open the doors for referrals, expanding your customer base.   

2. ADOPT TECHNOLOGY

In this digital era, customers are more inclined toward digital experiences as digitalization removes barriers and offers better experiences. Hence businesses in every industry are shifting towards a digital counterpart. 

A recent study by ReachOut in 2020 revealed that 89% of customers want to see modern, on-demand technology scheduling, and nearly as many customers would be willing to pay a premium for it. 

A tech-enabled service business is not a passing trend but a sustainable business model. Technology not only simplifies work but rewards better customer experiences. 

GPS-based Technician Tracking & Mileage Tracking Software

For example, by integrating GPS-based technician tracking software into your business model, you can keep track of the live location of your field service technicians. You can keep track not just of where your battery technicians are but when they’re going to be there too. 

Your customers can view how long it will take for the service technician to arrive. You can also monitor the time the technician takes to complete a job, and track the mileage to reimburse the travel expenses. 

Tracking software helps eliminate the manual labour of taking updates from field service engineers and customers on the progress of jobs. Using tech products also eliminates discrepancies in expense reports, data entry errors and miscommunication. It saves time, money, and resources and maintains business integrity for a field service business. 

3. MAINTAIN CUSTOMER DATABASE TO GAIN USEFUL BUSINESS INSIGHTS  

In-field service businesses like inverter battery servicing maintain their customer records, job details, expense reports and every other business data in a manual paper-based system. Multiple books of customer records make it hard to quickly access any particular piece of information. 

Also, storing multiple copies of these important documents costs more money and increases the risk of data duplication, data leakage and data loss.

Quicker Access to Customer Information

For example, if a customer named Rahul raises a complaint against his inverter, you enter all his information into your system. Then, you assign a technician to look at the problem.

Now when your technician comes to visit Rahul’s place for an inspection, he informs about a similar type of problem that happened six months ago and another technician from the same company had fixed it.

Now had you maintained CRM software for your service business, you could have easily traced Rahul’s data in your customer database. It could have prevented data duplication, giving insights into the issue with Rahul’s inverter and the solution provided during the last service visit. Using those insights, you could have quickly solved the issue, saving technicians’ and customers’ time and winning customers’ trust.

Keeping track of your customers’ data using CRM software helps you easily locate any specific piece of data, avoid duplicating it, and create useful reports that help you make better decisions.

Going paperless reduces mess, saves money, cuts down on the company’s carbon footprint, increases business efficiency and eliminates the chances of losing documents.

4. DELIVER BETTER CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES

Customer satisfaction is the soul of a field service business like battery maintenance service. It is difficult to acquire a customer. However, if you deliver a great customer experience, you retain the customer and also win more customers through word-of-mouth marketing. 

“Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” 

Deliver hassle-free customer service by quickly responding to their service requests. Using smart field service scheduling software reduces the turnaround time by quickly allocating and dispatching a technician to the customer’s job location.

Communicate technician assignments to the customer via SMS and always have a channel open for customers to interact, raise queries and provide feedback. Customers trust businesses that are available 24*7 to listen to them.

Field Service Management Software

The cloud-based task service management software helps streamline the entire workflow of your business. It allows the service manager to quickly view the technicians’ schedule on the dashboard and easily schedule tasks for the technicians. 

On scheduling a task, technicians receive real-time alerts for new tasks. They can respond to job assignments on time, and resolve customer issues before they escalate. On completion of a job, they can update the status of the job on the dashboard along with the details of the job done and the spares installed.

The customer can digitally update his/her signature on the portal confirming the completion of the job along with feedback. A digital invoice is generated on-site based on the service provided and the invoice is sent to the customer via email. The payment completed status is also updated on the software for the in-office service manager to monitor and further schedule tasks.  

All of this makes service jobs faster and more convenient for the customers providing them with a convenient experience. If your customer is satisfied with your services, they will recommend your company to their friends and families for the regular maintenance of the inverters’ battery packs. This will bring you more customers without having to spend on marketing.

5. AUTOMATE YOUR BUSINESS PROCESSES 

In the previous example, imagine if Rahul had contacted someone else for the service. You would have lost your existing customer to your competitor. 

“It takes months to find a customer…. seconds to lose one.” 

True to the above saying by Vince Lombardi, it is very difficult to find a new customer and a whole lot easier to lose one. 

By using field job management software, you can track every job request received, and the service rendered and send automated reminders for the next service cycle to the customer. This keeps your business on top of customers’ minds when they need a service, and you succeed in retaining your customer and maintaining a steady cash inflow for your business.

Automated service reminders and job status updates keep all the stakeholders informed and prevent missing out on deadlines or job requests.  

Like service reminders you can automate other tasks such as mileage tracking for reimbursement of travel expenses, calculating income, wages, etc.

Automating mundane tasks frees valuable human resources to focus on the core competency of the business and scale your service business.

6. INCREASE THE PRODUCTIVITY OF THE TECHNICIANS

Equip your field service technicians with the right knowledge that can be accessed remotely from anywhere. Give them access to 

• Work orders
• Route directions
• Customer case history
• Communication tools
• Digital invoice generator

Many times it happens that the technician does not have the correct address of a customer or the customer’s location is difficult to trace. The time wasted searching for the site and reaching the customer could be used to complete an additional service request. The delays caused by miscommunications lower technicians’ productivity and business efficiency.  

Using the right tech can help your battery service business to tackle such challenges. For instance, the battery service management software quickly shows the shortest route to reach the customer’s location so that the technician can head straight there instead of wasting time and fuel driving around.

When your battery service technicians receive complete customer insight, real-time guidance and cross-team collaboration, they solve issues faster and provide good quality service with optimum operational efficiency. This increases their overall productivity.

You can also bulk schedule job appointments from your battery service reminder software for multiple upcoming service requests in a particular location in a similar time frame. This again saves you time and travel expenses.

Increased productivity of the workforce means more scope for business scalability and higher revenue.

7. USE BIG DATA INSIGHTS TO MAKE BETTER BUSINESS DECISIONS

With all your data stored in one place on field service management software, you get easy access to useful business insights. You can very well see your cost per acquisition, cost per lead and other business metrics from the dashboard. 

By using these key performance indicators (KPIs), you can make better business decisions. You can explore new markets, expand your business, and boost your revenues.

Technology acts as a catalyst to help businesses grow. Tech is not a fancy add-on but a vital mandate for your battery service business to sustain and scale. 

It’s finally time to embrace technology to improve your customer experience, streamline your operations, automate your services, track results, and increase productivity with one integrated field service management solution, Unoservice!

Contact us today to avail a free trial of our service management software with a mobile app. We will partner with you and scale your inverter battery service business to greater heights.

Frequently Asked Questions on Battery Service Business