As an insurance restoration contractor, you rely on weather services and hail apps to track storms and determine where and when to reach out to potential customers. Thanks to ever-improving radar and tracking technology, it’s possible to pinpoint and analyze hail damage with greater accuracy. Services like HailWatch and CoreLogic Hail Maps deliver weather information on demand, so no matter when a storm hits, you can prepare yourself for the work that results.

However, even the best tools can fall short without a system in place to take advantage of their information. In addition, all kinds of factors from user error to poor training to inefficient systems can prevent hail apps from being used effectively. How can you get your hail tracking tools to work better and give you more business insights?

Help Your Work Flow More Smoothly

When a big storm hits, how do you prioritize zip codes for canvassing purposes? When is a small storm worth pursuing? What are the characteristics that profitable storms tend to share? Many of these things are unique from roofing business to roofing business, and can’t be determined simply from looking at a report. In order to get the most out of your hail apps, you’ll need to have a streamlined workflow in place, with clearly defined steps to help you translate their information into business decisions. Getting input from team members, assessing the availability of your crews, and looking at information from past jobs shouldn’t happen willy-nilly—it should follow a consistent format and process that enables you to react efficiently to storm events.

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With a system like this in place, you’ll be able to easily and quickly assess the urgency of possible storm work. You’ll be able to communicate clearly to your field teams the locations where they’re canvassing and what they’re looking for. Ask yourself what information you need, besides the storm data, to move forward with selling your services to a given area. Then make it as smooth as possible to access this information, analyze it, and start the job process. When you can move from reading a hail report to getting your crews in the field with as little friction as possible, you’ll be set up to increase your sales and improve productivity.

Integrate Your Apps With Roofing Software

One common issue with many tools utilized by insurance restoration contractors is that they’re used in isolation. Instead of fostering collaboration and improving understanding of different parts of your business, tools are adopted by a single team or user and never communicate with the rest of the organization. Your process gets muddied, as not everyone has access to the same information, and a lot of time is spent on double data entry or bringing teams up to speed.

One way to prevent this happening with hail apps (and your other tools) is to integrate all your tools with roofing contractor software. Software solutions like AccuLynx provide a centralized, easily accessible database where you can store all information about a given job—including weather information and damage reports. When you start using roofing software, you have one main tool to help organize and utilize all your other tools. Your measurements, photos, hail reports, accounting reports, and everything else all funnel into one place, and you can see a complete picture of all your jobs at a glance. AccuLynx also allows you to view your reports from HailWatch and CoreLogic directly in our platform, saving you time as well. With software specifically designed for roofing contractors, your hail apps can do more than just provide you with information about weather. They can contribute to your broader understanding of how your business is performing and where you can grow.

Store Information in the Cloud

Are your salespeople having trouble accessing information when they’re out knocking on doors? Do you find yourself spending a lot of time looking for reports? The information provided by hail apps needs to be available to your entire team whenever you need it in order to be most effective for your business.

To make sure that everyone can use weather and damage reports, no matter where they are, it’s important to store information about the storm in the cloud. This way, it’s easily available whether a team member is on the road, in the office, or talking to a customer on the job site. And it’ll be easily available in the future, when you’re looking back on which storms were the most profitable and making plans for how to approach the next storm season.

Software like AccuLynx is cloud-based, so you can safely store the information from your hail app integrations in its database and find it when you need it. And if you need new information, the ability to order new reports through AccuLynx means that this information will be stored in the cloud automatically, too. In addition to keeping your hail reports in one place, you can also store other information about insurance restoration jobs in the cloud and help everyone on your team stay on the same page about a given job. This provides a way to seamlessly make the connection between weather information and the rest of your business knowledge.

Hail apps can be a powerful source of information for you and your business when they’re used correctly. Honing your interpretation skills and integrating these apps with your cloud-based roofing CRM or project management software can help you take full advantage of all the data that hail apps provide you.