Your customers are changing. The first generation of kids who grew up texting, buying music on iTunes, purchasing items on eBay and coding their own MySpace pages are now graduating from college. Many have purchased homes of their own, and some are now working as property managers, facility managers, multihousing community managers and homeowners association managers. In other words, the first generation of children who only know how to purchase something by clicking a button are now making decisions about roofing. What this means is the industry as a whole needs to adapt to them.
In the next five years, these kids are going to completely change the way services are bought because they want convenience and simplicity. If your roofing company isn’t “push-of-a-button” easy to work with, one day these consumers will stop calling or simply send you a text message informing you they no longer need your services.
Enabling the immediate transfer of information has tremendous benefit to roofing contractors. Increased speed, improved accuracy and significant reduction of manual tasks create an obvious case for reduced costs of labor, inventory and operating costs, as well as significantly improved employee and customer satisfaction.
Real-time data processing would allow you to achieve cost reductions and productivity gains by building an inspection report and proposal while you conduct the inspection. Customers could have the report in hand, sign-off on the recommendations and actually remit the down payment before your technician is off the roof.
In addition, requests for service or leak repair work could be automatically routed to your scheduling system, which would alert your technicians through their cell phones, giving them all the information they need, including GPS-guided directions to the facility. All work can be tracked and reported back to your office and to the customer as it is happening. While on the roof, your technicians could access all the roofing history for the building with a few clicks and update the records with pictures, videos, drawings and notes based on the work performed. Invoices would be automatically generated and sent to the homeowner or the building owners’ Accounts Payable representative instantaneously, significantly reducing the actual cash-flow cycle time.
There are several software companies that specifically cater to the roofing industry. AccuLynx, Dataforma, Facility Control Systems, RoofLogic and dozens others offer solutions that range in functionality, usability and price. With real-time data processing, everything is updated in the system as it happens. What now takes up to a week manually can be done in a couple hours.
THE BOTTOM LINE
It’s time for the roofing industry to evolve. Our processes are manual, complicated, costly and, frankly, take too long. If they haven’t already, your customers will soon demand you become “click-of-a-button” easy to work with. They want information and they want it now. As an industry we can no longer do things the way we’ve always done them. Real-time information isn’t the flavor of the month. It is 2012, and it is time we embrace the information age before we are left behind.
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