Good communication is crucial to keep your roofing business productive, profitable and efficient.

Many roofers find that their business challenges can be traced back to poor communication. Keeping your teams on the same page, your crews up-to-date, and your customers well-informed can be tricky—and getting it wrong can make a big impact on your business. What communication mistakes are holding you back? And how can you keep from making them?

One way to avoid costly miscommunications is to have the right tools. Customer relationship management (CRM) software for roofers can help you improve communication throughout your roofing business and avoid some of the worst errors. Here are some of the biggest communication mistakes that roofers make—and how a roofing contractor CRM can help you solve them.

Roofing Communication Mistake #1: Not Keeping Track of Job Updates

Roofing jobs aren’t static—they can change from day to day. Whether it’s new customer instructions, a change to the delivery schedule, or an addition to the work being done, roofers frequently find themselves in need of updating their teams on new information about the jobs they’re working on. If this information doesn’t get communicated to everyone who needs to hear it, it can lead to delays, errors, and frustration. It’s essential to keep this information in one place, update it in a timely manner, and pass it along to your teams so they’ll know what to do.

Roofing CRM software like AccuLynx lets you keep all your job information in a single, easily accessible place, change it as needed, and communicate it quickly. In AccuLynx, you can create an electronic job file with all the important information about the work. Since this file lives in the cloud, it can easily be updated from anywhere, even in the field. The software can notify specific people when you make a change to the job file, so your teams are always up to date as soon as new information comes in.

AccuLynx also offers production management tools to give you greater control over updating deliveries and labor orders. With our Production Calendar, you can see schedules at a glance and easily make changes if you need to. And when you make these changes, it alerts the rest of your team, so no one is ever left wondering why the delivery that was supposed to happen on Friday happened on Monday instead.

Roofing Communication Mistake #2: Leaving Customers in the Dark

Winning customer trust requires high-quality work, attention to detail, and responsiveness to customer needs. Achieving this for each and every one of your many customers is no small feat. Although no business is perfect, what can bring a roofing business down is neglect in their communication with customers. Whether it’s failing to accurately convey the work that needs to be done, changing plans without informing the customer, or being unresponsive to messages, you can damage your relationship with your customer, as well as your reputation, by leaving customers in the dark.

AccuLynx and other roofing software platforms help you stay in touch with customers in a variety of ways. One way is by creating accurate estimates, contracts, and other documents electronically that your customer can review. Document templates are stored in AccuLynx and ready to use whenever you have a new job. With the SmartDocs feature, customer information can be input directly from the job file into these documents. Within minutes, you can have an estimate, contract, proposal or other document ready to send to your customer—and you can send it via email, so your customer can look at it on their own time. These documents give you the power to share detailed information about the work that you’re doing for a customer, and allows them to review it, ask for changes, and understand what you plan to do to help them.

Learn more about SmartDocs here.

Another way to keep your roofing business from leaving customers in the dark is to implement automations. The new Automation Manager in AccuLynx lets you send automated transaction emails and text messages to your customers when certain events are triggered. For instance, when you create an appointment in AccuLynx, you can automate an email to be sent to the customer confirming that appointment. With Automation Manager, your customers will be more informed if something changes with their jobs—without you have to update them manually.

Roofing Communication Mistake #3: Taking Crews and Salespeople Out of the Loop

It’s easy to stay on the same page if you’re all in one office. But when you have salespeople who spend the bulk of their time in the field and crews who are subcontracted to install roofing, it gets a little more complicated. If your communication strategies depend on tools that are housed in-office, you’re keeping your salespeople and crews out of the loop—and that can lead to everything from wasted time to errors with the work. It’s important to find ways to easily and seamlessly inform your crews and salespeople of changes, updates, and protocols.

Some roofing software, including AccuLynx, also includes apps that make it easier for teams in the field to stay connected to the rest of the business. The AccuLynx Field App, designed for roofers on the go, lets salespeople take the power of the AccuLynx platform into the field with them. This means they don’t have to call back to the office for updates—they can get new information right from the platform. It also means that they can put leads and other information directly into AccuLynx as they go, instead of having to wait until they’re at a computer.

The mobile Crew App gives you a seamless way to collaborate with subcontractors and crews. In the app, you can create job checklists, share directions and update instructions, so your crews always understand the work they need to do. Crews can send messages and share photos, so you’re always well informed about what’s happening on the job site. And all that information stays in AccuLynx, so you don’t have to spend time entering new details twice. Using these mobile apps to keep everyone connected will help all your teams work smarter, more efficiently, and more smoothly.

Communication is one of the hardest parts of a roofer’s day. But if you stay on top of it with tools like roofing CRM software, you don’t have to accept miscommunications as the cost of doing business. Using roofing software, you can reduce or eliminate some of the biggest communication mistakes that both new and experienced roofers make.