Want More Service Call Leads?  Deliver More Service Calls!

There is an old saying in sales “Activity yields Activity”.  The more outbound calls you make, the more inbound calls you receive.  The more conversations you have, the more clients you will gain through the insights those conversations yield. The same holds true for service calls.  If you can get the service call flywheel spinning, then it will continue to spin under its own momentum, and speeding it up gets easier the faster it is moving.  This trick only works, however, if you really understand the concept of perpetual service and embrace technology that automates your ”service call” marketing engine.

Why do you “wrap” your trucks in your logo, brand promise, and phone number?  So when it is parked at the jobsite,  others can see that their neighbor (residential or commercial) trusts your company.  The “wrap” doesn’t do much good when your truck remains idle in your parking lot. The same can be true for your service activities.  These activities can become your “digital wrap” when you capture them electronically and forward them to your customer via the Internet.  If your customer service management application knows where you are and what you are doing, then both your customers and others in the “digital neighborhood” should be able to easily see and share that information.  An email in their inbox is easily searchable, and your client can forward this to their friends and family as evidence of your good work.  This doesn’t happen when your customer service approach is limited to accounting information on a multi-part paper ticket that likely gets trashed by the customer.

Another way that service generates leads is the opportunity for discovery that occurs at the customer site.  If it is easy to share that discovery with others in your company and also back with the customer in the form of photos, audio memos, online quotes, and service reviews, then you have created potential service call leads for the future.   Now the online customer can see and reflect on what you’ve found when it is convenient for them.  During the initial service call, when you are trying to get them back to work by fixing their equipment, the timing is typically not right to review and discuss other service opportunities.  However, if you create a digital catalog of those opportunities for sharing, your initial service will almost certainly yield future services.  Future service calls will not happen if you expect the tech to remember it and write it down for the office to type it into some note field in an antiquated PC application and “maybe” have that delivered to the client.  That new revenue opportunity is lost forever.

Marketing for service contractors is increasingly moving from the physical space to the digital space.  Your truck “wrap”, your local radio commercials, and your billboards need to be augmented by digital calling cards that gain impressions because they are so easy to move around in the online “neighborhood”.  If these digital impressions require “extra activity” above and apart from your typical customer service routine, it will never get done.  If it is built in to the way you execute customer service, it will add speed to the service call flywheel.  If you want more service call leads, then deliver more service calls after you embrace perpetual service and get aboard the ServiceTrade bandwagon.