6 min read
As a home services company, whether you’re in pest control, plumbing, landscaping, or cleaning, you may find yourself facing some communication barriers. Most notably, the majority of your employees simply aren’t in the office every day! You may end up struggling to maintain your company culture and create a sense of connection between your employees, particularly as your home services company continues to grow.
Fortunately, Pronto can help. With Pronto, you may find it easier than ever to connect with employees regardless of where they are.
Share wide-scale announcements with all of your field workers and technicians at once.
There’s a training day coming up, and you want to make sure everyone is informed and has put it in their schedule. You have a date coming up by which everyone must have their annual certifications renewed. You are changing a specific process or plan that you have always used in the past, but which no longer fits the needs of your company.
As your company grows, you’ll find that you need to make announcements to all of your employees regularly. Pronto makes it easy to send out announcements to the entire team. It also has the benefit of making feedback visible to everyone on the team. If one of your field workers has a question about an announcement you’ve just sent out, chances are, other workers will, too–and with a clear thread on the announcement, everyone can easily see and contribute to the conversation.
Don’t want to invite conversation about a particular announcement, or prefer to handle those conversations one-on-one? Pronto allows for that, too. When you send out an announcement, you can choose not to enable replies.
As part of the announcement process, Pronto also makes it easy to see who has already looked at the announcement and who may have missed it, which makes it easier to follow up with employees who may not have opened a specific communication or to show that an employee did receive and even potentially respond to communication if that later comes up in a dispute.
Unite employees in and out of the office.
With the majority of your home services employees working in the field, it can be easy to feel disconnected from anyone that isn’t a member of your specific team. You may find that your employees feel isolated, especially if they often work alone or with just one or two other members of the team.
Pronto can help change that. With its easy chat feature, it can connect and unite employees no matter where they are. Employees who only check in at the office a couple of times a week can still chat with your in-office management team and representatives. Employees on the go can also check in with one another, chat about common challenges they face, and troubleshoot solutions. Pronto makes it simple for employees to keep up with an ongoing chat whether they’re in the office or on the go–and ultimately, that chat can help improve your company culture and help employees feel like an overall more cohesive unit.
Ensure that employees have access to all the information they need.
Do the Johnsons need their HVAC serviced because it’s just that time of year again, or are they having problems? Did the Smith family hire you to take care of basic mowing and yard maintenance, or did they plan to start that bigger project this summer? As a home services company, you may provide a variety of services for your customers based on their unique needs–and those services may be dramatically different from one location to the next. Keeping up with all of that information can be a challenge, especially when you may deal with multiple job sites on any given day.
Pronto can make it easier to keep track of that information. Not only is it the ideal place to upload any information shared by the client or to send out messages concerning exactly what a given client expects from their service, but it also allows you to keep all a client’s documentation in one easy-to-access location, where employees can easily search for it. When they’re out in the field, your employees can quickly look over that content and determine what they need to get done–and make sure that they’re doing the job the client is expecting, rather than taking on something else entirely. Pronto’s search feature also means that employees can quickly pull up all of the relevant information about any client, including past work, communications from other workers who have worked with the client in the past, and even data from tests or past technicians that may help inform the current project.
Put all customer documentation in one place.
Sometimes, you may need customers to sign a contract before your employees can move forward with their jobs. Other times, you may need employees to remind customers of specific elements of those contracts–especially if they want to make changes to the current job. With Pronto, you can store all of those documents in one place–and make them easily accessible to employees who may need to access them quickly when they’re dealing with customers.
Place employees into groups so they can communicate about larger projects.
Pronto’s Groups feature is designed to help segment employees who are working on specific tasks or projects so that they can communicate without cluttering up the chat. Suppose, for example, that you have several employees working on a large landscaping project for a particularly demanding client. They may need to troubleshoot solutions, chat about weather delays, or even discuss who is available for overtime. That discussion does not necessarily need to be available to your entire team. Not only that, your team members may want to share specific information about the project: the flowers that are going in at a specific location or the specific features that the client wants you to add, for example. Since only the team members who are actually working on that project need access to that information, you can place them in a single group where they can chat about that information. Creating groups is simple, so you can assign team members to new groups each time you have a new project to work on.
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Streamline communication with the office.
While most of your employees are out in the field, you may still have team members back at the office who are dealing with the daily tasks that keep your business running, from bookkeeping to marketing. As the boss, you may spend more time in the office than you do actively in the field.
Employees should not have to come into the office to get in touch with the people who work there.
When your employees are in the field and have a question that needs a quick answer, where do they turn? Pronto helps streamline communications and make it easier for employees to connect directly back to the office. They have several options. First, they can pose a question in a general chat, which anyone can answer. This strategy might work well for a fast answer that can only be answered by someone at the office, but which multiple people might be able to answer.
Second, they can choose a video or audio chat option, which will allow them to easily bring employees from the office into the field environment. With video chat, field workers can even take the people they’re connected with on a virtual walk around the job site, allowing them to look at and weigh in on potential problems or even, in some cases, speak to a client directly.
Finally, employees in the field could choose to send a direct message to exactly the person they need an answer from, which will provide them with an easy answer promptly. Often, this is the best way for employees to handle communications that require a quick, but not necessarily immediate, response.
Hold meetings from wherever employees are.
Virtual meetings have become increasingly common across many businesses, including the home services industry. You don’t have to bring your employees to the office to talk to them about new company policies, expansions, or new job opportunities. In fact, in many cases, you may find that it’s less convenient to bring employees to the office since they’ll lose time on their job sites. Instead, consider holding virtual meetings through Pronto. Employees can dial in from their desktop devices at home or from their mobile devices wherever they are, including taking a break on a job site. Ultimately, you’ll find that those virtual meetings can save both you and your employees valuable time–and make it easier for you to stay connected even during your busiest seasons.
If you’re in the home services industry, Pronto can help streamline communications, connect your employees, and improve your efficiency. Want to learn more about how Pronto can benefit your business? Contact us today for a free demonstration.