The Office Manager’s Guide To Managing The Busy Season

It happens this time—Every. Year. You’re getting ready to ramp up for yet another crazy busy season. From answering phone calls to billing and invoicing customers to scheduling and routing technicians to providing customer support to receiving payments and everything in between, the office manager’s job seems like it never ends. While we can all agree that the exact job description may vary from business to business, what stays true is the need for organization, high energy, and excellent communication skills while staying calm, cool, and collected. 

Of course, “staying calm, cool, and collected” is probably easier said than done. Don’t go into another busy season with your hair on fire. Helping the people around you stay more efficient and organized will also benefit you and keep your sanity intact.

How To Help Your Owner

Helping your owner get a good grip on exactly how your business is performing can be rough when you’re managing multiple Excel files. How do you solve that problem? Manage everything through a dashboard. Through the use of data visualizations, dashboards give you a quick, high-level view of how your business is doing at any given point throughout the day by simplifying complex data sets into small amounts of information that are easy to digest.

This one-stop shop can track all your key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics, and any other key data points that are relevant to your pest control business. Need to know how many visits were completed for the day, month, or year? Or maybe you see how many subscriptions you have? What about keeping track of your accounts receivables? Check, check, and check. It’s all right there at your fingertips. It’s customizable, and you can drill down into the nitty-gritty.

And the best part? It’s all reported in real-time. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Looking to help the company save more time and money? A fully-integrated payments solution enables your pest control business to focus on driving costs and eliminate manual processes by providing complete end-to-end software capabilities for managing your payments. With benefits such as transparent processing rates, easy online signup, and quick implementation onboarding, FieldRoutesTM Payments is the solution you need to get you up and running to start taking payments almost immediately.

Take the hassle out of manually generating invoices and submitting them for batch payments. Exclusive to FieldRoutes Payments customers only, this automation tool offers true, hands-free AutoPay capability by automatically submitting the designated invoices for payment with no review or manual interaction.

Also, don’t get stuck with missed payments from lost, stolen, or expired credit cards. Taking advantage of an Account Updater feature will keep your customers’ most up-to-date payment information on file. The payments keep flowing in without interruption, and there’s virtually no need to reach out to the cardholder to ask for their updated information. Not only does this mean faster payments for the business, but you get more time back in your day.

Lastly, with all that cash coming in, it’s going to make it that much harder to keep your account receivables up to date when you’re having to manually enter them on a spreadsheet. An unorganized invoicing system is susceptible to human error, making it difficult to do business in general and your taxes.

The benefit of using an accounting system like QuickBooks® Online is that it’s intuitive, easy to use, and integrates with Excel. It’s also Cloud-based, enabling you to run reports easily.

All these tools not only save your owner and the business time and money, but they add much needed hours back into your day to focus on bigger projects.

How To Help Your Technicians

Speaking of focusing on bigger projects...

Keeping your technicians’ day organized and efficient is challenging if you don’t have a proper scheduling and route optimization tool in place. Just imagine how much gas you’re wasting when you have a technician going out of their way to get to the next customer without a proper route in place.

Dynamic route planning provides the ability to adjust to a variety of anomalies and lastminute schedule changes. When a schedule must be added or deleted at the last minute, dynamic route planning evaluates the most cost-effective way to schedule services and re-sequence stops.

Job pools let you view all customers due for service within a given time range and allow you to easily “drag-and-drop” appointments directly into your technician’s existing route. If a job is ever left incomplete, the property goes directly back to the top of the job list so that the task can be promptly re-assigned.

Increasing complexities in route needs make it critical to have an effective and quick solution to determine the best routes for each property – based on the technician, appointment, and time of day. Route management software can take over this process with the benefits of real-time data, all while freeing up your time to tackle other critical tasks for your business.

Also, do your technicians a solid and make sure you’re messaging them about what they can expect on their next appointment. I’m sure they’ll appreciate the heads-up knowing that Mr. Jones has a rad snake collection, and Ms. Cullen’s dog loves a nice leg to chomp on.

Just imagine—the click of a button is all it takes to keep your technicians’ day organized, save time, and keep your sanity intact.

How To Help Your Sales Team

Managing your sales team is all about keeping them motivated and competitive. If they’re not performing, it directly impacts your bottom line. A mobile selling app makes the selling process way easier for them and you. First, it provides a visual knocking sheet on a map, so there’s no need for you to manually track where you’ve been. 

Second, it provides real-time payment processing, scheduling, and digital contracts so you can sign customers on the spot. And, last but not least, once the contract is signed, you’ll get an automated sales notification and reporting sent directly to you. Easy-breezy. 

Want to promote some healthy competition among the sales team? Install a sales leaderboard so they can see who’s numero uno and who needs a boost.

How are you tracking your leads? Make sure you have the ability to close deals online. There’s nothing easier than having customers purchase services right from your website, pay you online, and schedule themselves, right? 

Speaking of your website, make sure you have your search engine optimization (SEO) in place, and your Google Business Profile is accurate. Get your content marketing and online advertising set up. Lastly, you can make it easy on yourself by managing all your marketing efforts through the FieldRoutesTM Compass marketing portal. It has the power to track your return on investment (ROI) for all your marketing campaigns all in one place.

How To Help Your Customers

At the end of the day, it’s all about your customers. You’ve done your best to make things easier in the office, but if it’s complicated for your customers to work with you, they’re just going to bounce and hit up your competitor. 

The easier you make it for your customers to pay you, the sooner you’ll get paid. Most of your customers are already paying their other bills with some form of automatic payment, so it only makes sense that you offer this as well. Electronic payments are increasingly the preferred payment of choice, and most consumers enjoy the fact that they can go paperless. 

Using AutoPay is convenient for both you and your customers, and you never have to worry if you’ll get paid on time. It improves your cash flow, saves time, and it’s paperless.

Come hop on the automation train! When it comes to communicating with your customers, it’s about sending the right message at the right time to the right people using the right communication channel. Do you want to remind your customers a week before their invoice payment is due? What about notifying them that they’re going to collections for a delinquent account? These types of automation tools enable you to perform automatic actions on your customer accounts, prompting them for renewals, applying late fees, sending messages to customers with past due balances, or sending appointment reminders. You can customize the frequency for when you send them out as well.

Renewals for subscriptions can be automated to remind your customers before or after the subscription date or an appointment for the subscription is due. Appointment reminders can be customized so that your technician checks in and checks out with the customer before and after the appointment. You can set a personalized phone message reminding them of their appointment a week before, an email reminder to go out a couple of days before, and a text reminder the day of the appointment. 

Oh, and get that customer portal in place. There’s nothing more annoying than when your customers can’t view their service history, pay their bill, or upload photos of the pesky problems. 

Of course, all this is going to be next to impossible without the right software. FieldRoutes is here to help. Our fully-integrated operations and marketing suites have everything you need to impress even the pickiest member of your team. Stop the insanity and give us a call today.

Your Partner In Growth

We hope this guide has been helpful. Whether you’re looking to add efficiencies, make things easier for your employees, improve your customer experience, increase sales, or anything in between, FieldRoutes is committed to helping your business reach its full potential. 

The platform automates all aspects of field service operations for enterprise and small business customers that span office management, advanced route optimization, payment processing, digital sales, marketing, and customer acquisition solutions that accelerate growth, streamline operations, increase customer retention, and maximize revenue. Our operations and marketing suites were built with your customers and employees in mind and can help you grow quickly, scale intelligently, and serve customers relentlessly.

Call for a Demo at 972.702.7156

Join the growing number of thriving businesses, large and small, using FieldRoutes to acquire new customers, improve automation, and crush the competition.