Make the Most out of PestRoutes in 2021

There's no question that technology makes our lives easier.

It seems like every day there's something new on the market to improve our personal experience and the way we conduct business, and the pest management industry is taking full advantage of it. The reality is, it's no longer acceptable to manage your pest control business with a pencil and paper. Whether your goal is to be in the PCT Top 100 in the next three years, or you want to maintain your lifestyle, pest control software will enable you to operate your business smoothly and efficiently and save you time and money. If you're new to the PestRoutes® platform, here are a few tips and tricks that our customers have found helpful.

Trigger Rules 

What are Trigger Rules? Trigger Rules allow you to personalize the delivery of important information to customers and employees. If you're asking yourself if personalization really matters, then take a look at the results from this survey on the top five benefits of personalization. Of those surveyed:

• 55% saw an increase in visitor engagement

• 55% had improved customer experience

• 39% had improved brand perception

• 51% saw an increase in conversion rates and lead generation

(You can read more about the importance of personalized communication in this blog, )

Trigger Rules can be used in a variety of ways. For example, you can send a custom message to each customer whose subscription is expiring and prompt them for renewal. Trigger Rules also save you time by automating your communication process:

• Want to automatically notify your customers when the technician checks into their appointment? Done!

• Want to send your brand new customer a "Thank you!" text or email a few days after signing up? Done!

• What about automatically sending an alert to your technician when a customer cancels their appointment? Done!

Most important, Trigger Rules help you personalize your communications so you can call the customer by name and refer to things like specific appointment dates and times. The more personalization you can include, the better for SMS text messages as it keeps you from being marked as spam and risking your ability to continue to send SMS text messages.

Billing and Collections

According to this blog, 3 Ways to Drastically Improve Collections, "Every year, pest control companies lose millions and millions of dollars in past-due account balances that they either collect late, fail to collect, or pay expensive commissions to agencies to recover. Failure to collect on these outstanding debts impacts your growth and your bottom line. Collecting money from an old customer is five to ten times more efficient than signing up a new customer."

That said, when you take advantage of Trigger Rules, you can automate your communication to your customers to follow up on outstanding invoices. You can also filter for property type, customer flags, and collection stages. The average PestRoutes customer (who staffs two to three technicians) saves $1,021 per week by sending automated voicemails, SMS text messages, and email communications using the PestRoutes software for their services.

AutoPay

If you don't make the process easy for your customers to pay you, then chances are they are going to pay late, or they won't pay at all. Using the AutoPay feature helps you streamline your customers' payment process, and it makes the billing process easier for you. The more customers you have on AutoPay, the more money you will collect and the faster you'll collect it. PestRoutes makes it easy for you to see which customers are not enrolled in AutoPay by putting a bold, red flag in the Customer Card Overview tab. In order to increase your AutoPay enrollment, utilize your customer communication, and ensure every email that goes to your customers has a link to their customer portal where it alerts them to add an AutoPay method.  

Route Planning

As a pest control business owner, you face a multitude of challenges every day – a high volume of customer appointments to organize, rising fuel costs, technicians and vehicles to manage, and tight timelines. Intelligent routing software takes all of these challenges into account and works to find the best possible route to help technicians service their customers faster. Technicians with optimized routes often save time and money while providing better customer service.

With the PestRoutes platform®, technicians can expect a 12% increase in efficiency during their windshield time. That's about 1-2 more stops per day. The Intelligent Routing feature can be used to bulk schedule your customers. It allows you to assign an area of customers by a preferred technician or region, then creates pre-built routes that are efficiently optimized. PestRoutes' Intelligent Routing includes the following:

1. Visual Grouping – Assign an area of customers to a preferred technician or region.

2. Intelligent Routing – Create the most efficient routes based on the maximum number of stops or a maximum number of minutes per route.

3. Assign Planned Routes – Assign these routes to the technicians.  

Additionally, Fill Routes is one of the most powerful ways to schedule your customers in the PestRoutes platform. Like Intelligent Routing, Fill Routes creates optimized routes for you. It is unique in that it also schedules the routes and considers both existing appointments and jobs that are due when finding the most optimal routes, all in one step. Simply set your parameters and then hit the Fill Routes button. Fill Routes also offers the ability to force a preferred technician for your customers. 

Lastly, scheduling your technicians is as easy as drawing a circle around your customers that are due for service. Our latest feature, the Map View Schedule, is designed to create, optimize, and view routes easily. The tool combines the powerful job pool with the map, which gives the scheduler the ability to see and plan the routes they are managing with precision and ease. Within the Map View Schedule feature, you can schedule by individually selecting appoints, using the drawing tool feature, or using the drag and drop feature. 

In conclusion, these are just a few of the ways PestRoutes can help you better manage your time and save you money. If you are looking for more detailed information, check out our Guides section, or join our PestRoutes Customer Community on Facebook.