From Proposal to Service to Payment: Empowering Technicians to Drive Value in the Field

Why Encourage Sales in the Field?

In fire protection, different trades—alarms, sprinklers, extinguishers, suppression, and other fire protection systems—were segmented and handled by trade-specific contractors. Over the last 10 to 15 years, we’ve started to see an increase in crossover. As businesses expand, they add a new trade or system to their service offerings. That means businesses either need to hire new, trade-specific technicians or train their existing technicians to service multiple trades. Either way, business expansion increases the demands on your team, whether in a training or hiring capacity, and can lead to customer service problems if you’re not careful.

But maybe you’re not currently expanding your business. There’s still something to be said about providing better, more efficient service to your customers. The fewer times your technicians have to return to a customer’s building or facility, the better it is for them. The more your employees can tackle each visit, the safer and more compliant your customers are. Isn’t that better for everyone: the customer, the AHJ, and you as the service provider?

Addressing the Labor Shortage

Labor is one significant area of concern in fire and life safety. With the skilled trades gap growing, finding qualified and effective technicians is more difficult than ever. Maximizing technicians’ time—as well as the service provided at each visit—helps you meet customers needs without burning out your employees.

When technicians can quote and correct small deficiencies on-site, it’s easier for the customer, easier for your team, and better for your business. If an inspection technician can quote, resolve, and collect payment for a simple deficiency (that they are qualified to repair, of course) all while on-site, you won’t have to send a service technician back to the same customer later.  Creating a contract that allows you to complete small repairs at the time of inspection can be a nice addition to your workflow. You’re maximizing labor time, minimizing travel costs, and streamlining service for the most effective processes from start to finish. But you have to empower your technicians with the right tools and set appropriate guidelines for when they should and shouldn’t quote and complete service work on-site.

Equipping & Preparing Your Technicians

First, you need to consider whether your techs can even complete the necessary administrative work on-site. Your techs are trained to do in-the-field work, not create quotes and invoices or accept payment. You need to equip your staff with the tools to help them quote and resolve minor deficiencies in the field efficiently. If they can’t do it efficiently, it doesn’t really solve the problems at hand. The right tools, training, and infrastructure are essential to prepare your technicians to know when and how to quote for the best results.

Giving your technicians the right tools and training makes their work more efficient while streamlining the customer experience—and your business will see the benefits.

How Inspect Point Helps

Within Inspect Point, you can enable technicians to create quotes and invoices in the field by simply selecting the materials and services used or provided on-site. (By default, technicians cannot complete these actions in Inspect Point. Once you enable the setting, technicians have the ability to create proposals and invoices and accept payments on-site.)

All you need to do is ensure your pricebook is up-to-date ahead of time and that your technicians know the requirements and limitations of their ability to quote and complete service work in the field.

Best practices include:

• Setting parameters around what type of deficiencies can be quoted and serviced by inspection technicians while on-site;
• Determining a maximum dollar amount inspection technicians can quote and service in the field;
• And creating impactful incentive programs that encourage appropriate quoting and servicing by inspection technicians without promoting improper or excessive quoting. In a sense, you want to “gamify” the process for field technicians.

To Quote or Not to Quote?

This type of workflow isn’t necessarily for every company. It’s important to understand whether you want or need inspection technicians to quote and complete service work in the field. What are your business’s goals? Are you looking to expand? How are you currently servicing your customers? Do you find that deficiencies are all too often falling through the cracks, leaving your customers at risk?

Whether you should implement this workflow for your business depends on your needs and your customers’ needs. If, within your existing processes, small deficiencies aren’t always getting fixed in a timely manner, a shift toward in-the-field quoting and servicing may be a fit.

Collecting Payment

Finally, it’s worth taking a moment to consider whether you want your techs to collect payment in the field. Especially when inspection technicians are quoting and completing service work all while on-site, it may make sense to allow them to finish the job cycle by collecting payment. Again, this is something that may or may not work for your business: It depends on how you collect payments, the size of the payments, and whether your techs are trained to collect payment.

Not only does collecting in the field ensure you get paid for the work completed by your employees, but it also helps you get paid faster. Rather than having to chase down and follow up with customers on unpaid invoices, payment is collected before your tech leaves the site. Just like with quoting and servicing in the field, you’ll want to set parameters around when and how techs collect payments. Proper processes and training make all the difference.

Helping You Grow Your Business

Empowering technicians to do more than ever in the field—from quoting to servicing to invoicing and collecting payments—helps address some of the key problems facing our industry today. It can also play a critical role in helping you grow your business. What matters most is knowing what your business needs to improve service and protect your customers. Giving your technicians the right tools and training makes their work more efficient while streamlining the customer experience—and your business will see the benefits.