Key Automations To Build Success This Busy Season

The summer months bring higher temperatures and a heightened focus on lawn health, creating a huge opportunity for growth for lawn care businesses. But staying on top of competing priorities during the busy season is no easy task. The good news is that technology is here to help. In this Tip Sheet, we will address five key areas where your business can harness the power of automation for optimal growth.

Work Smarter Not Harder With Intelligent Routes 

The benefits of automating your technicians’ routes are boundless. Hotter weather increases the volume of services each day and attempting to organize these manually can lead to decreased productivity and profitability. This year, rising gas prices have added an extra challenge for lawn care businesses. Overcoming these obstacles to protect your profit margin doesn’t require rocket science. Automation holds the keys to your success. 

Automating routes means having the ability to optimize technicians´ routes to empower them to complete them faster. According to our research, technicians can expect a significant boost in efficiency during windshield time using field service software. Technology like FieldRoutes will allow you to optimize your routes for hazmat and also same side of street. If you calculate the impact of this on every route, every day during the busy season you can see how field service software not only saves time but also money, helping your business to thrive this summer.

Bring Efficiency To All Communication Channels 

Having the ability to communicate efficiently and effectively with your customers is essential. This can be challenging at the best of times. During the busy season, office staff will see an increase in calls, voicemails, SMS text messages, and email communications. While the purpose of these communications may vary, the importance of providing a quick response does not. 

The first step to streamlining communication is analyzing where your staff spend most of their time. For example, appointment reminders may be eating up precious time at the office. Using an automation system to notify customers about their appointments, follow-ups, and even real-time alerts frees up time for your office staff to focus on providing excellent customer service. The ability to personalize everything from the content, timing and channel of the message means that you can achieve even more, with less time spent.

Relieve The Burden Of Billing And Collections 

End of month processing can be burdensome for lawn care businesses. Never more than during the summer months when customers may be more prone to tardy payments due to vacations and disruptions to their routines. Coupled with the increase in services performed, this can make billing and collections a heavy lift for your lawn care business office staff. When each invoice or collection letter needs to be processed individually, the end of the month can loom large during the busy season. There is one quick solution to reducing the time spent on this tiresome task while simultaneously reducing human error in the invoicing process. Automating invoicing is a surefire way to cut down on time spent on this task and ensure its accuracy. 

When it comes to collections, your office staff may be wasting hours each week chasing unpaid invoices. This task can easily be automated with lawn care software.

Market Effectively Without Added Labor 

Every lawn care business knows that marketing is important, but finding the time to market effectively can be a real challenge. As people head out to their yards, make more use of their gardens, and generally spend more time thinking about the health of their lawns, it is prime time for you to market your business. Reaching new customers is key to building growth this summer, but how do you find the time to do it well? 

Whether you use tools such as Hootsuite to automate social media marketing or mass email tools like MailChimp to automate communication with your prospects, there are key tasks that can be streamlined with technology. 

If you want to go the extra mile, you can acquire a powerful solution like FieldRoutes™ Marketing Suite that will take on all aspects of marketing your business, from website design to Local Service ads. This kind of investment will help keep your business at the forefront of the lawn care market in your area.

Keep The Personal Touch, Ditch The Manual Work 

Often, business owners worry that using technology to manage their business might mean they lose the personal touch that sets you apart from your competitors. Luckily, the opposite is true. Using technology to manage your lawn care business allows you to automate important tasks daily. 

When using a sophisticated solution you can often personalize many aspects of your automation to ensure your customers receive the exceptional service they have come to expect from you. When technology can lighten the load on your staff, this also means that your employees, office staff, and technicians alike have more time to spend with your customers. By saving them the time they would usually spend on monotonous tasks, you are giving them the opportunity to invest their time building valuable relationships with customers.

Automation has the power to bring you success this busy season. If you’re tired of manual processes and you’d like to find out how you can save time and money to build growth through automation, give us a call today.

Contact the experts at FieldRoutes™ to schedule your demo.