Roofing technology is constantly evolving and changing, and so is the roofing industry. How can contractors use the latest in roofing technology to improve their business performance?
The key to optimizing your business with roofing technology is understanding how it can serve your needs and using it to simplify your processes. The right technology will help you save time, improve the way you work, and ultimately lead to more revenue and greater business growth. Here are a few trends that can help you strengthen your roofing business.
Roofing Technology Trends to Optimize Your Business
Electronic Payment Processing
If your roofing business primarily accepts cash or checks for payment, you may have experienced payment delays, lost payments or cash flow problems. Electronic payment processing helps your roofing business get paid on time, lets you access your funds faster, and reduces lost payments. Accepting credit, debit, and ACH transactions electronically increases your efficiency and streamlines the payment process. Instead of spending time chasing down outstanding payments, you can focus on growing your business.
More and more roofing companies are adopting this trend, and customers are used to making electronic payments for other business transactions. Offering the option to pay by card and pay on the spot will help you meet customer expectations and provide better service.
In addition, electronic payment processing simplifies bookkeeping. When payment information is stored in a secure electronic platform, it’s easy to cross-reference for accounting purposes and verify that a customer has paid in full. When combined with a roofing software system like AccuLynx, electronic payment processing can increase the efficiency of your accounting process by allowing you to apply payments directly to job records and transfer information seamlessly to QuickBooks. Not only will you get paid on time more frequently, you’ll also reduce the number of repetitive tasks involved in the accounting process.
Automated Communication
Good communication is key to providing great customer service and ensuring that all your team members are on the same page. However, managing communication for a busy roofing business can quickly become complicated, and it’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.
Read: How Roofing Software Can Help Grow Small to Medium Roofing Businesses
Automation is a powerful technology that many roofing businesses use to ensure they stay in touch with customers and team members. With automation, you can create emails, texts, and tasks that send automatically based on an event or other action. In the AccuLynx Automation Manager, these automated messages trigger based on job events, milestone changes, or order-related events. For instance, you can set up an appointment confirmation email that is sent automatically whenever a new customer appointment is created in AccuLynx. Or you can create a task to pull a permit that automatically adds to a team member’s to-do list whenever a job is moved to the “Approved” milestone.
However you use automation, it can simplify the process of communicating with customers and employees, so you can stay in touch easily without adding more work to your plate. Automations keep your business from dropping the ball on important reminders or updates, helping you serve customers more effectively and empower team members to do their best work. Using automations will help you build a reputation as a responsive business that cares about your customers.
Texting for Business
69% of all customers would like to contact a business via text. In response to this demand, roofing businesses are increasingly implementing texting as part of their business communication strategy. While some companies only use automated texting for things like appointment reminders, customers increasingly prefer two-way communication over text as well.
AccuLynx recently added two-way texting capabilities to our software. With these capabilities, you can message a contact directly from the AccuLynx platform and see their responses. All messages are sent from a unique local number, and AccuLynx stores a complete record of all conversations in the associated job file.
Two-way texting will help you optimize your business in a variety of ways. First, it allows you to offer a communication method that your customers prefer, showing that you can adapt to meet their needs. Texts are read more frequently and answered more quickly than emails or phone calls, so you can ensure that important information gets in front of your customer or employee in a timely manner. And when you use two-way texting in a platform like AccuLynx, you can easily refer back to old messages when needed instead of scrolling through a phone. Two-way texting enables speedy communication, takes customer preferences into account, and helps you keep a record of past conversations.
Putting Roofing Technology Trends Into Action
The latest innovations in roofing technology can help your business save time, grow profits, and improve customer service. By taking a look at your current processes and seeing where trends like these could help your roofing business, you can optimize your business and set yourself on a path for greater growth.
AccuLynx recently hosted a webinar discussing these and other roofing technology trends, as well as more strategies to optimize your roofing business. If you want to learn more, you can view the on-demand recording here.
See how software can help you incorporate these roofing technology trends into your business. Schedule a demo here.
