People are busier than ever, and they’re looking for someone they can trust to take care of their property. As a result, the landscaping industry alone is worth $105 billion, and that number continues to grow each year.

Ultimately, a business can only take on as many customers as its processes allow before the customer experience suffers.

Often, the answer to overcoming inefficient operations is updating the tools you use to manage your projects and service providers. Here, we look at Zuper’s approach to field service management.

Perfect the Customer Experience

When it comes to our homes, we want the best. So, if you want to win more jobs or get more referrals, your customer experience better be impressive. After all, customers talk to one another — whether in person or virtually.

In 2021, 77% of customers at least regularly read reviews when evaluating a local business. This figure is up 17% from 2020, demonstrating the increasing need to protect your customer experience.

One way to improve your customer experience is to establish routine workflows for each service you offer.

Zuper lets you create drag-and-drop workflows and job checklists without hiring a developer. With the right workflows, even temporary or seasonal employees can get up to speed quickly and maintain your high standards.

Stick to a Schedule

Schedules change as often as the weather in the property and home services industry. And service providers know that a “slow” period can be met with a flood of new customers with one shift in the forecast, making scheduling a potential nightmare.

If you’re still relying on text, calls, or constantly updated spreadsheets to notify your service providers of scheduling changes, it’s too complicated.

Instead, Zuper features a sleek calendar view scheduling tool that eliminates the confusion. The calendar layout removes issues of double-booking and scheduling conflicts so that every service provider knows exactly where they need to be — even if that changes by the day.

Plus, dispatching the best person for the job is a breeze for urgent projects. With Zuper, you can dispatch based on availability, location, or skill set.

When you improve your scheduling and dispatching hiccups, you’ll find availability for new customers that you may have overlooked previously.

Collect One-Time and Ongoing Payments

Whether you’re handling an occasional snow removal or a weekly landscaping maintenance service for your customers, collecting payment is a part of the process.

However, a recent Quickbooks survey found that 81% of businesses don’t have an integrated payment system and that 65% of those same businesses spend 14 hours per week on payment collecting activities.

That’s 35% of an average 40-hour workweek that could instead be used to generate new revenue.

Fortunately, the days of mailing a paper invoice and waiting for a check to return are gone — along with the wasted reminders and weeks-long back and forth.

Creating an invoice has never been simpler with Zuper. All your service provider needs to do is generate an invoice based on the details already entered on the estimate. Then, they can collect payment on the spot with a payment processing integration.

And if you collect recurring payments for ongoing services, the customer’s preferred payment method can remain on file and be auto-billed through Stripe.

What’s more, every payment collected is automatically updated through the Quickbooks integration, so there’s no missing information and a lengthy reconciliation process at the end of the month.

Connect Anywhere, Anytime

What happens when a customer calls the office? How do you communicate the customer’s needs with your service providers in the field?

Ideally, you’d send a quick, automated alert your provider can check whenever it’s convenient — like with the Zuper app.

The Zuper app gives your service providers an efficient way to communicate with the office, check their schedule, get notified of job changes, and manage customer accounts from their phones while in between projects.

Scale Your Services

You can’t scale property management services without set-in-stone procedures in place. Otherwise, every service provider will develop their own way of handling a project, resulting in a mismatched customer experience.

If you’re ready to scale, you must make each step from customer acquisition to collecting recurring payments consistent and efficient — and integrations make that possible.

Zuper powers over 50 integrations, including the best CRM and helpdesk software available, to serve you. While other field service management software tries to include a little bit of everything with limited functionality, we understand that partnering with other industry-best tools provides you with a more comprehensive, customizable solution.

All of our integrations take just a few clicks to set up. Then, your service providers can access job and customer information in one place with no more wasted time jumping from app to app just to complete a job.

In short, only you know what workflows work best for your service providers. Zuper’s goal is to provide you with the features and integrations you need to keep your customer happy and grow your business while keeping you in control of the overall experience.

Want to test Zuper for your business? Schedule a demo today.