6 ways to grow your service department

By Dataforma.

Learn how to improve your roofing company’s service offerings and foster business growth.

Word-of-mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, especially in industries like roofing. Whether it’s talking to a family member or looking online for reviews, fostering a good reputation with positive feedback from existing customers is a powerful way to bring in new clients.

A great way to foster a positive experience that will garner you good feedback and recommendations from your existing customers is through a dedicated service department. This department’s goal would be to continue the relationship with your clients beyond the initial roofing project. By establishing a strong service department, you both diversify your streams of income (no longer solely relying upon new projects) and create growth opportunities through word-of-mouth recommendations. But how do you build this kind of service department?  

The first step is to create a well-defined process to manage your service department. For this, you want something that will organize both your field and office teams. This means having a way to address incoming requests and track dispatches, invoices, orders and more. This can be overwhelming, but there are powerful digital tools, like Dataforma, that give you an easy-to-manage process that saves you both time and money. Keep reading for six key tips on implementing, managing and scaling your service department.  

1 - Invest in the right roofing software

It’s very common for some construction companies to use whiteboards and spreadsheets to keep track of all their bids, documents, work schedule, roofing leads, work orders and so on. But chasing paperwork is time-consuming, and in this day and age it’s not an efficient way to run a business. The reality is that your focus should be spent on getting more work done in a more efficient and profitable manner while also making your customers happier along the way.

Investing in a cloud-based field service software that caters to the roofing industry is a good first step. This is because generic work order management platforms don’t have the necessary features to help your unique business scale and grow to its full potential.

Our roofing software was created by roofing contractors for roofing contractors, so it has everything you need to grow your service business — and more. From a field technician uploading photos from a jobsite to a manager quickly updating an inspection report, our all-in-one field service software solution gives you all the tools to improve your roofing business.  

Here are a few core platforms or services that every modern roofing company is using to keep their service departments running lean and mean:

• Core CRM: Paperless operations, streamlined invoicing and better customer tracking are all possible.
• Service Management: You’ll have access to a completely paperless service department without a complicated setup or involved installation process.
• Customer Portal: Keeping you in control while also providing your customers the convenience, transparency and online interaction they want.
• GPS Tracker: All-in-one field roof management software with GPS tracking. Being forced to use expensive standalone programs to verify crew locations and travel times, is a thing of the past.
• Mobile App: Our field service management software helps to maximize operational efficiency and prevent profit loss from inefficient communications and operations.
• Integrations: The Dataforma for Outlook plug-in is available from Microsoft AppSource and adds functionality to web and desktop Outlook applications. Users can also set up personal email signatures within the program. Are you a Followup CRM user? You can send created data in Followup directly to your Dataforma dashboard.

You’re guaranteed to grow your service business if you invest in the right roofing software that tracks all your customers, leads and work order information while keeping you on task with your daily and weekly sales activities. What’s more, you can apply all of the next best practices below.

2 - Process and organization

With the right roofing software, you’ll have a better handle on your roofing business and the ability to define all the necessary processes to run a better, more efficient and more profitable service department.  

The ability to define and streamline the process from the moment a service request is received to setting up new customers in the work order system, dispatching/scheduling and providing detailed information on the work performed (with photos) will make a world of difference.

Successful companies also use their work order history to guide customers towards making smart and informed decisions about their annual maintenance budgets (i.e. preventative roof maintenance vs roof replacement), putting you in the driver seat to be the roofing subject matter expert for your customers.  

Additionally, you can use this data to better educate and inform your customers on the benefits of preventative roof maintenance, helping Service Managers run a more consistent schedule that’s not heavily reliant on the weather (i.e. rain) for service work opportunities (i.e. leak service requests).

In addition, you’ll gain the ability to schedule more service calls, get more guys in the field and have a better plan of where and who to send. The ability to better organize and schedule your backlog of work orders based on the geographical locations of those approved service requests & projects is priceless. Plus, by utilizing GPS features, you can easily track travel time to ensure your crews are logging their hours correctly.  

Getting real-time information from the field faster and with less effort provides means you can communicate critical information to your customers faster.  This information will help you make better decisions as a Service Manager as far as which foreman and mechanics are better suited for T&M leak service work vs high production tenant fit-out and flashing upgrades, and also which crews are best to send on which types of roofs (i.e. torch modified vs TPO repairs).  

No matter if it’s better managing your field or your sales team, you’ll have objective data to help you put the right people in the right seats, which will lead to your roofing department’s service department being successful.   

3 - Increase your business’s online presence

When someone is facing an emergency with their roof or they notice a leak, etc., they may not have a reliable commercial roofer in their Rolodex to call, or maybe their roofer can’t get to their emergency request in a reasonable amount of time. The next option that a property manager or building engineer will likely consider is asking Google (or other search engines) to find a high-quality local service solution.

In today’s digital world, people want immediate solutions, and search engines provide us with the immediate gratification we need (and want!) to answer our questions.

So, if your roofing business doesn’t appear on the first page when someone Googles commercial roofers in their area, it’s time to rethink your marketing strategy — and put more of a focus on your digital presence. You can take many ways to increase your online presence, from ads to content, to being active on social media. A strong online presence helps build & reinforce trust with customers while also attracting new business opportunities.  

You invested the effort and time into creating a perfect blueprint for your roofing service business; now it’s time to go to the market to capitalize on new and unique opportunities that are out there for the taking.  

For the most part, a majority of online opportunities lead to roof service work (i.e. leaks & minor repairs), which, if you simply do what you say you’re going to do (i.e. fix their leak, inspect their roof, etc.) in a professional manner, you’ll win a customer for life.  

It is much easier to ask a prospect for an opportunity to address their roof leak issue that may be $1,500 all-in vs asking for an opportunity to replace their roof for $500,000.  By building a long term relationship through service you’ll be in the driver’s seat when that customer’s roof inevitably needs to be replaced.  Plus, you’ll be in a better position to sell and win opportunities on value and not just price.

In order to do this and invest in increasing your business’s online presence, you’ll need time and money — that’s one of the reasons why having the right roofing software in the first place is so important, it lets you do things for growing your business, at all times.

4 - Continue to learn and improve your roofing services

The better roofing services you provide, the better your roofing business reputation becomes. When you’re delivering high quality work, exceptional customer service and going above and beyond every single time, customers are going to rave about your business, plain and simple. This will naturally motivate them to write positive online reviews and help you get more direct referrals, which will further boost help your online visibility and word-of-mouth business.

Always continue to learn, improve your business, stay up to date with the latest and greatest roofing industry innovations, attend trade shows and engage with your community to ensure you’re constantly improving and staying out in front. Learning new skills and adding more services and product lines to your offerings will also help attract more business and make your company more valuable overall.

5 - Showcase your work

Let’s say you’re a construction company that specializes in roofing services. If you’re a potential customer needing a roof replacement, there’s no way you’ll hire a roofing contractor without seeing examples of their past work.

Having a solid portfolio of your work helps build credibility and trust, increasing your chances of bringing in new business. We recommend you document your work and use this on your website, social media, email marketing, etc. Construction is a very visual business that is also highly competitive — and having great photos and videos of your work will set you apart from the competition and bring you more opportunities with more customers.

6 - Create a referral program

One of the most effective ways to gain credibility, increase trust and bring in new business is through referrals. According to Brian Cornelius of GAF: “Referral-based leads usually close somewhere between 50% to 70% of the time (compared to 10 to 30% for non-referrals).”   

After successfully completing a job, consider politely asking over the phone/in-person or sending your customers an email asking them to refer your business to a friend or provide a simple review online (i.e. Google). The best way to ensure they follow through is by offering an incentive (people are way more likely to take that extra step if there’s something in it for them) — this is also a great way to delight your customers and keep them coming back.

Dataforma would be nothing without the support of our clients, and we recognize that our largest source of new contractors each year are from word-of-mouth referrals. Take a look!

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Dataforma can make you more money

While word-of-mouth is always a great marketing tool, if you want consistent growth for your roofing company’s service department, you’re going to have to do a lot more than rely on that.  

Our field service management software speaks your language and follows the day-to-day routine you need, which saves you valuable time and money, so you can be focused on investing in your business’s growth.

Original article and photo source: Dataforma