Capturing and maintaining your customers’ loyalty is harder than ever. Prove your trustworthiness by capturing pictures in the field to illustrate your points and propel your customers to act.
With more competition and greater demands than ever before, service companies today often find themselves at a loss when it comes to gaining customer loyalty, selling future service, and renewing preventive maintenance contracts. Even if you have a steady stream of new customers, it’s still difficult to maintain those customers, sign them up for recurring service contracts, and propel them to act as advocates for your organization.
In today’s market, the only true way to keep your customers coming back for more is to provide exceptional service. There’s no way around it. But how you attempt to provide exceptional service is often dependent on the type of mobile field service strategy you’ve put in place.
Turns out, if your field workforce is using a mobile field service app and devices, one of the easiest ways to impress your customers can also be one of the most effective. Picture taking in the field can save your team tons of time explaining a problem and provide trustworthy evidence to get your customers to renew service and build loyalty with your company.
Here are the top six ways field service mobile picture taking will build trust with your customers and establish a loyal and lasting relationship:
1. When you tell your customers something is broken, they’ll believe you.
You know your technicians would never exaggerate to make a sale, but your customers are wary and they don’t always trust when a technician tells them they need to replace a part or their air condition might not work next month. If the tech can take a picture of the broken part, illustrate what will happen when it stops working, and give the customer options for future service, the customer is much more likely to believe there is a problem and hire your company to fix it.
2. It’s faster than trying to explain every detail to your customer.
Explaining technical problems in non-technical terms so your customers can understand can be frustrating and time-consuming. Pictures really do speak 1000 words, so use them to speed the process when you’re explaining tough problems to customers.
3. Improve awareness of new sales opportunities.
Technicians are often in the best position to sell customers on upgrades, new products or extended warranties because of the face-to-face interaction they have with customers. More than anyone else in the company, customers look to technicians to give them trustworthy advice. Mobile picture taking capabilities make it easier for techs to document necessary services or repairs and then show customers exactly what needs to be fixed.
4. Renew preventive maintenance contracts by demonstrating the benefits of regular service.
Proof is key to demonstrating the value of your service. Customers want to know they’re not throwing their money away with regularly scheduled preventive maintenance contracts. Use pictures taken in the field to visually demonstrate how their equipment is working when it receives regular service and what could happen if they don’t stay on top of it with preventive maintenance.
5. Show off your field techs’ great work (before/after shots).
One way to build credibility with your customers is to show what an asset looked like before and after the service took place. The before/after shots can serve as testaments to your technicians’ quality work. And it demonstrates your ability to provide consistent, quality service.
6. Encourage internal knowledge sharing
In addition to pictures taken in real time while in the field, technicians can also save pictures for future use. When they save them to the field service management system through their mobile app, other people in the company have access to the images and can make strategic plans based on what the techs provide them in the field.
Important Features for an Integrated Mobile Field Service Picture Taking Strategy
In order to take advantage of the above benefits, companies can equip technicians with the following, to achieve picture-taking success in the field:
- A mobile device with quality picture-taking capabilities.
- An integrated mobile field service app that shares information across the organization.
- A native mobile app that allows technicians to capture and upload photos when they don’t have cell service.
- A cross-platform field service app so the companies don’t have a limited device or provider selection.
Empowering Your Team to Take Action
Field service is a process spanning from marketing to sales to service. As service organizations try to become more profit-centric, it is important to focus on the revenue building, or sales, side of the process.
With this profit-centric model in mind, integrating a picture-taking solution to back up service claims and renew service contracts will help technicians build trust with customers, which can translate into concrete revenue once techs start making new sales and renewals in the field.
A Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Field Service Software: 9 Tips for Choosing a Mobile Solution that’s Right for You
In the market for a cross-platform or cloud-based mobile app for your field service organization? Learn important tips, guiding questions, and to-dos in our free, educational whitepaper: “A Buyer’s Guide to Mobile Field Service Software.”
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