Know Your Business or Grow Your Business? Here’s 4 Tools to Help You Do Both

Working on your business vs. working in it. It’s a challenge pest control companies face as they look at ways to continually and creatively build on successes.

Many businesses believe their focus should be on finding more and more customers, so they go full steam ahead on customer acquisition. While this thinking can provide big short-term business wins, bigger wins with more long-term value come from smart business management fueled by software.

While it may sound daunting, it all boils down to making sure you know exactly what's going on in your pest control business while optimizing resources and streamlining processes. This creates happy customers and employees, as well as furthers retention for both. Fortunately, pest control software tools can simplify the business management side of things to let you stay informed, focused, and productive while you grow.

Great pest control software solutions can help a business thrive and grow by offering:

1. Real-Time Reporting

This is the best place to start. If you don’t know where you are, you’ll never know where you’re headed. Real-time reporting that can shine a spotlight on successes and let you hone in on areas for improvement is necessary. A reliable software solution will not only allow you to view active, recurring and potential customers easily, but it will also give you a real-time dashboard that puts the right stats at your fingertips every time you log in. Make sure the tools you use allow you to customize reports to give you precisely what you need to improve business performance.

2. Streamlined Billing

Manual billing is a huge time killer, and let’s face it, paper is expensive. When you optimize your collection processes and streamline billing, the results are fewer mistakes, faster processing, and more productive employees who no longer have to spend hours organizing and inputting details from paperwork. As a bonus, customers will be able to easily manage their payments themselves directly through a branded customer portal.

3. Automatic Reminders

While it’s true that we all forget things every once in a while, you can make sure that paying your bill isn’t the thing your customers forget. Automating your collection reminders is an easy way to drastically increase the amount you collect every month while decreasing the time and effort you spend chasing after overdue payments. Give customers the power (and the convenience) to set up simple voice, text or email reminders through your customer portal. You may also consider automating other customer communications, such as appointment reminders, statements, and post-treatment courtesy messages.

4. Supportive, Flexible Workflows

Your employee workflows need to be agile, flexible, and ready to accommodate the needs of your customers and your employees. It's important to be able to support different customer touchpoints at all sorts of times and conditions. Every situation is unique, and your systems need to be equipped to deal with every customer's needs. That means integrating duties such as job pool functions so that when a job is missed or not finished, it is automatically prioritized the following day for completion.

Software and technology can take many of the stressors out of business management, allowing you to focus on real areas for improvement and growth.