Everything You Need to Know When Choosing Software For Contractor

A service company CRM can help you plan your time, manage your communications, and keep things in order. Here are the key considerations to think about before you buy.

Table of Contents

Good Reasons for Why You Need a CRM Software for Contractors
How Contractor Software For Small Business Will Benefit You
5 Features that Make a Service Company CRM Great
Use Cases of a Field Service Management System for Contractor Businesses
Things That May Be a Challenge When Using a Field Service CRM
Final Thoughts

Good Reasons for Why You Need a CRM Software for Contractors

As a business owner, you’ll want a customer relationship management solution to make your job easier and more efficient, which in turn, will increase the number of prospects and loyal customers attracted by your services.

Here are some of the best reasons why customer and job management software is the solution your business cannot survive without:

• You’ll be able to keep all of your contacts, deals, and communication with each customer in one place = offer personalized service
• You’ll be able to save time and hassle on repetitive tasks = gain more deals
• You’ll be able to get insights into your business performance = start investing resources in what drives your profit

How Contractor Software For Small Business Will Benefit You

The benefits of utilizing a CRM system are plenty. A contractor's time is often stretched thin between juggling customer service, sales, lead generation, scheduling, dispatching, invoicing, billing, renewals, analytics, and more. So, going digital with your work is essential to stay competitive in the modern business world.

Efficient and Productive Team

Some service business software offers great ways to organize employee tasks and their completion schedules. You can assign works to employees based on skillset, availability, and experience with the project. This will allow you to easily track the job completion and your team’s performance.

Better Planning

The next pain points for every service contractor business are appointment scheduling and customer contact workflows. In today's workplace, these activities are becoming increasingly more difficult as well as time-consuming. It is close to impossible for a human being to stay on top of all the incoming calls, emails, and messages that come into your company each day. Setting appointments and engaging with customers also takes a lot of time leaving much room for human errors. With well-built service scheduling software, your team will be able to deal with more work in less time without confusing mistakes or overlapping schedules.

Everything is Trackable

Being able to keep track of all of the details of your company is important for maintaining a framework of success. With the right contractor software, you can track everything from dispatching service to payroll, inventory, and work orders to make sure you stay compliant and accurate. Automating and tracking key metrics will allow you to figure out what works and what doesn’t from the beginning to quickly react and change your approach.

5 Features that Make a Service Company CRM Great

No matter what field you are in — plumbing, electrical, or HVAC business — automating processes and eliminating manual input will make your workflow more efficient. Look for the following valuable features when choosing a field service management system:

Integrated Calendar

To quickly make appointments for customers in your area, find an available technician, assign jobs, and keep everyone updated.

Work Order App

To provide your techs with access to work orders in real-time, manage communication, and follow all actions done.

Screenshot of the RemOnline App for work order processing

Reporting and Dashboards

To keep track of KPIs in real-time or over a particular period, customize, and generate in seconds.

Estimate and Invoice Templates

To manage documents required for work order processing on one platform, save time with auto-filling fields, quickly create professional-looking invoices. 

Automated Calculation

To let the program do all the tedious computing for you: payroll of daily and hourly wages, sales tax, pricing, work order amount.

Use Cases of a Field Service Management System for Contractor Businesses

Contractors work in a variety of industries and often need a complicated system to keep track of their projects and stay in constant contact with those projects' clients. RemOnline can help you and your team stay in touch with prospects and clientele, negotiate deals, get the most out of each project, reconcile financial data, send instant alerts to employees and customers, schedule time on calendars, manage inventory, and more. These will ease the burden of the repetitive tasks that take up so much time and energy, allowing you to get back to what really matters to your business.

Things That May Be a Challenge When Using a Field Service CRM

Although finding good software will benefit you a lot, you won’t be able to change everything in your business overnight. So, be ready to overcome some hurdles on this road. 

Not Knowing Where to Start

Choose a solution that offers as many preset templates and directories as possible right from the start. There should also be a self-serving knowledge base with quick guides and instructions on how to use each feature in the program.

Not Having Enough Time to Learn How to Use the CRM

Look for vendors that provide new customers with onboarding and account setup services. E.g., after signing up to RemOnline, you can request assistance with setting up document templates (labels, price tags, forms), importing data from files or other CRM systems, configuring workflows, and organizing a presentation and training for your employees.

The CRM Requires You to Enter a Lot of Information

To avoid lots of manual work, pay attention to the data import features. However, when dealing with new workflows, you will still need to enter some data at the beginning.

No Cloud Access

Cross-platform accessibility is a must for any field service CRM software. You and your team have to be able to use the tool on any device and from anywhere because this is how the business is done these days.

Final Thoughts

Contractors often face a lot of communication and information management on a daily basis. A strategy to organize the various contacts and customers is essential to managing your business and staying on top of the game. With a CRM, you can take care of billing, scheduling, and lead management, as well as improve workflows and oversee your workforce. When deciding on the right solution for your business, focus on the ways to help your staff to have a higher quality job and a better understanding of the customers and their needs.