Empower Your Employees To Boost Collections

Sometimes we make things harder and more complicated than they need to be. Why wait an industry average of 78 days to collect money AND spend serious money on collections when you can receive a huge percentage of money either via auto pay or when you are already speaking with a customer.

There are 3 key encounters that you have with your customers which allow you to collect money or an auto-pay credit card:

• At the time of sale

• Before and after each service

• Every time a customer calls your office

There is a 29% reduction in overall invoicing and processing costs by implementing auto-pay.

At the time of sale

The absolute best time to collect credit cards from the customer is during the initial sale. Not only are customers at one of their highs in the customer lifecycle, but it is easy to set expectations upfront.

When I led and managed a sales team, we were hitting 80-90% auto-pay percentages. We did this in two ways:

1. By training and incentivizing our reps to ask not just once, but 2-3 times if a customer declined

2. By giving our reps the ability to collect a credit card securely right in front of the customer

Also, PestRoutes allows you to require a credit card when a customer signs an agreement in our online portal as well as in our industry-leading buy-it-now module on your company website.

Before and after each service

Technicians are the front lines of your business. On average, they’re in front of your customers 4-5 times each year. Your technicians become trusted partners to your customers who look to them for quality service and ways to simplify their day-to-day life. That means they are one of the best ways to collect money or a credit card from your customers. Technicians can: 

• Receive instant alerts through our mobile app about past-due payments or invalid/expired credit cards

• Charge a card from the field BEFORE they service a home

• Securely collect and update credit cards payment information

Many times, technicians do not spend much time worrying about whether the customer is up to date on their payments or not. This often has a major impact in dragging out the collections process for customers who are otherwise in good standing. Even worse, for customers who have previous balances, you waste time and money servicing homes for those who never paid for the last service (or 3…)! By putting big and bold calls-to-action in front of your tech to either update credit cards or collect payment, we help collect in a big way.

PestRoutes also features a tech collection report which allows you to track how many opportunities a tech had to collect money vs. how much they actually collected. You can use these reports to reward high-performing techs and incentivize others to improve.

Also, after every service, your customers receive a follow-up email that alerts them of their balance and gives them a simple, 3 click option to pay their bill online and enroll in autopay.

Every time a customer calls your office

It is incredible to me how many times a customer calls into the office to reschedule an appointment or request a re-service, and your CSR goes through the whole call without collecting their 120-day balance or asks to put a card on file. In PestRoutes, we proactively prompt users to collect credit cards, offer an auto-pay plan, and receive payment. We’ve seen great success in helping companies increase their collections by just doing simple things.

The absolute best way to collect money from customers is before they make it into your collections process. PestRoutes makes this easy by getting in front of your employees and reminding them to do the simple things as well as by making it easy to accept money and put customers on autopay. This can drive thousands of dollars to your bottom line each month and help you get paid faster as well as retain more customers.