Getting referrals from former customers is a key strategy to help boost the growth of your roofing business. Research has shown that when consumers are referred to a company by a friend, they are four times more likely to make a purchase, making referrals some of your most valuable leads. In addition, referrals allow you to expand your reach and get your name in front of homeowners who might never hear about your roofing business otherwise.
However, many roofing companies find that it’s difficult to get referrals. If you’re struggling to get as many referrals as you would like, it could be due to one of these three mistakes. Here are the top three ways that contractors lose roofing referrals—and how you can avoid them to gain more referrals and grow your business.
3 Mistakes That Keep You From Getting Roofing Referrals
Mistake #1: Letting Your Project Get Off Track
Only satisfied customers will be willing to refer you to their family and friends. And one of the biggest reasons for a lack of customer satisfaction is inefficient work. Your roofing business needs to keep your projects running smoothly and on schedule as much as possible to ensure happy customers.
One way to keep your jobs on track is to find more efficient ways to manage production and labor. Business management software like AccuLynx helps streamline the production process and make it easier to manage your labor. With the Production Scheduler in AccuLynx, you can see all your material deliveries and labor orders in a single calendar view, helping you keep track of what’s happening when. Color-coded icons make each crew’s schedule visible at a glance, reducing the danger of double-booking or overscheduling. If you need to reschedule a delivery or crew, all it takes is a few clicks, and your crews are automatically notified.
Another tool in AccuLynx that can help you efficiently manage your jobs is the mobile Crew App. With this app, you can gain greater visibility into crew performance at the job site and keep your crews on track. You can create a checklist for crews to mark off as they complete tasks and give them access to job information stored in AccuLynx that they need to do their best work. Crews can check in when they arrive to the job site, upload photos of their work, and message the office right from the app, so you’ll always be up to date on how the job is progressing. Having this increased visibility into your jobs and the ability to communicate with crews more effectively will help prevent errors and delays, as well as keep your work on track.
Downloadable Checklist: 6 Ways to Increase Productivity with Roofing Software
Mistake #2: Failing to Communicate
Great communication is key to great customer service. Your customers want to be kept in the loop, given timely updates, and provided with the opportunity to ask any questions they have. Businesses that don’t communicate well frustrate their customers and may never hear about an issue with their work until after the project is completed. When you communicate regularly with your customers using the methods they prefer, you build a stronger relationship between your roofing business and your customers, helping to prevent issues before they arise and establishing your reputation as a business committed to serving customers.
It can be difficult to keep up with communication when you and your team members have a lot of jobs on your plate. The Automation Manager in AccuLynx was designed to make regular communication easier without adding more work to an already busy schedule. In the Automation Manager, you can set up emails and text messages to automatically send based on a trigger event in the AccuLynx system—for instance, when a new appointment is scheduled. These automations keep important information from falling through the cracks and help you save time on routine communication. You can customize both the messages and the triggers in AccuLynx to meet your company’s needs.
Read: 5 Roofing Business Text Messaging Tips to Improve Your Customer Service
AccuLynx also makes it easier to use one of the most popular communication channels: texting. More and more customers would prefer to be contacted by text message, but using a personal or company phone to text a customer can lead to privacy and security issues. Within the AccuLynx interface, you can send and receive text messages right from a job file rather than relying on a phone. All your messages are sent from a local, company-specific number so your customers will always know it’s you. And you’ll receive an AccuLynx notification when a customer replies, so no messages ever slip through the cracks.
Whether you’re sending an automated message, a two-way text, or an email, all correspondence you send through AccuLynx is saved automatically to the associated job file. This gives you a record of all your conversations with customers that you can refer to whenever you need and helps you verify that a customer has received your messages. With these communication tools in AccuLynx, you can provide the strong customer service that increases the likelihood of roofing referrals.
Mistake #3: Failing to Ask for Referrals
Doing great work and delivering strong customer service will lead to satisfied homeowners who trust your roofing business. But if you never request a referral, even your happiest customers may never think of providing one. In order to take advantage of a positive customer relationship, you need to make the ask for referrals first.
Make it a point to ask for referrals after you have finished a job. You could speak to them during a conversation or send a message a few days after the job is fully completed. Setting up a follow-up message in the AccuLynx Automation Manager that is sent whenever you mark a job as complete can make the process of asking for referrals convenient and simple.
It’s also worthwhile to reach out to past customers and ask for referrals, even if it’s been a while since you did any work for them. Back when you finished your work for them, these customers might not have known anyone else who was looking for roof repairs or replacements—but they may know someone now. If they were satisfied with your work, reaching back out will remind them of the great services you provided and encourage them to pass along the names of anyone who might need similar services. AccuLynx makes it easy to look back at completed job files and find former customers who might be receptive to providing referrals.
Whether you’re asking current customers or former customers, it can be helpful to offer an incentive for providing roofing referrals, such as a gift card. While satisfied customers will be happy to refer their contacts to you, an incentive can help you get more referrals and ensure that customers remember to send those referrals along.
Get More Roofing Referrals and Grow Your Business
An increase in roofing referrals can help your business sell more jobs and grow profits. By avoiding these three mistakes and providing top-notch customer service, you can get more referrals—and more work in the future.
