| Neil: | Marketing automation is about so much more than just generating leads. Today on the show, I have Eric Foronjy from slowater.com in California. He’s a local service business installing water systems, and Eric is going to share with us today how he is using marketing automation and just pure business automation to follow up with his customers, decrease customer complaints, increase referral rates, and just basically kick his service department into high gear. |
| Eric, tell me how your company is using email and automation not in the general sense. I mean, most people are used to using email and automation for marketing, but you wanted to talk today about using it after the sale. How is that making your company money or saving your company money? | |
| Eric: | We used to have a lot of problems with, let’s say, work not being done properly or balls being dropped. To the customer, it’s always a big let-down. A big part of what I look for are ways to eliminate fires in my business through automation, emails, and tasks. Most of what we do is we’ll do an install or two a day, and we’ll do eight to ten service calls a day. We’re a pretty small local company here, but with a small staff, you’re still managing eight service calls. How do you make sure that every one of those eight service calls was happy by tomorrow and still deal with all of your incoming calls? |
| We automated the followup procedure for all of our service calls as well as all of our installations with emails, and simply asking the customer, “Did everything go well?”, giving them a reply to let us know when there are any issues. That way, we can keep them internal with them and they don’t feel like they need to go to Facebook or anything like that to talk about their issues with our service or an installation. | |
| Neil: | They don’t go right to the public microphone and start complaining. That’s great. |
| Eric: | No, no. |
| Neil: | Let’s back up and tell people what you do. You install water filtration systems in California. That’s probably not a business that most companies think could be automated or use this kind of thing. I’ve always been impressed with how deeply you’ve integrated automation into your business, and I love this “putting out fires” thing. Walk us through. How does that work that first day? What’s the big issue you’re trying to solve? What used to happen before you started this process? |
| Eric: | What used to happen was constantly putting out fires. We’d get a call from a customer, “Hey, we’ve got this issue.” The biggest issues that I see are leaks or balls being dropped. The balls being dropped are usually something internal where somebody wrote a sticky note somewhere and they planned on calling them back but forgot to call them back, and so now the customer’s disappointed and enter lack of communication. |
| Neil: | Oh, the old sticky note. Yeah. |
| Eric: | The sticky notes, yeah. |
| Neil: | Yeah, that could be a killer especially when you’ve got service guys that are out there talking to the customer, having a conversation with them, and the office has no clue what’s going on with that conversation. I can see how those balls would get dropped. Is that what was happening? |
| Eric: | That’s exactly what was happening? |
| Neil: | Are your service guys then inputting something into your system, or are you just assuming that everyone had a conversation and you’re following up no matter what? |
| Eric: | The way that we’ve got it set up now is with task outcome automation. We’re using ONTRAPORT for that, but what we’re finding is my office manager is usually the best person to complete these tasks. She’s the one who actually enters in what was done with that job, so if a job is completed or incomplete, or if there’s some reason that we may need to go back, there’s a task outcome for each of those different things. Then the appropriate person is tasked to follow up with that. Obviously if it doesn’t get followed up within a certain time period, then it notifies their manager to make sure that that happens. That really has taken probably 95% of the fires in the service department completely out of the service department as far as something being, let’s say, our fault for dropping balls on our end, but that’s made a huge difference as far as stress levels for employees, customer satisfaction. |
| Our referrals are much higher now than they were in the past, and I attribute a lot of that to the fact that we’re just a lot more organized than we ever have been. When I talk to other water dealers, nobody’s using anything like this. Everybody is still using pieces of people. It’s ridiculous. The technology that we have available today to automate our businesses and to simplify our lives really makes a huge difference, but not everybody takes the time to figure out what they can really do with it and how it can change their business. | |
| Neil: | Yeah. When your service guy is coming back from the field then, he has some sort of form he gives to your office manager that says the outcome of that service call, and she inputs that in your system? |
| Eric: | Correct. |
| Neil: | Then it’s automated from that point depending on which outcome. How many different outcomes do you have from a service call set up in your system? |
| Eric: | Good question. I believe it’s about five. |
| Neil: | Yeah, we don’t need the specific. Just trying to get a general sense of how many different things that could happen. This is probably a completely foreign concept to a lot of people listening because you said you’re using ONTRAPORT and that has the tasks management system built into it, but so many email platforms are just marketing platforms and they don’t have this built in. A lot of people probably aren’t even familiar with this concept, so can you talk just a little bit more about what a task is and how that works? |
| Eric: | Sure. A task is something that’s generated within the software that I’m using, and it typically will send out an email and/or a text message to the recipient that I’ve predetermined needs to be notified of this task. It has a time limit set to completion of the task, and it also has set outcomes. |
| Neil: | When you say “to the recipient,” these are internal to your company? |
| Eric: | Correct. |
| Neil: | You’re not assigning a task to your customer. This is internal to your employees and who’s responsible for completing this task. |
| Eric: | Exactly. Common scenario: customer schedules an appointment. We get out there, they no-show us. The technician writes on a piece of paper, “They weren’t here.” Turns that into the office, the office puts that back into our software which in turn generates a task because of that outcome being a no-show to the service coordinator to call that customer back and to reschedule them. Otherwise with all the paper shuffling that happens, unless someone is really good at keeping organized some of those people that need to be rescheduled are just going to slip through the cracks. |
| Neil: | Right. You said you had eight service calls a day. That can generate a lot of paper in a business, and that can pile up. Pieces of paper lost in somebody’s truck. I can only imagine. Yeah, having all that organized and if that piece of paper got lost, I assume that there’s some sort of double-check as well. That if the technician left a work order in his truck, never brought it back into the office, that that would get caught. |
| Eric: | Exactly. Every service call really generates a task to my office manager to complete that service call. If a piece of paper is missing, she’s not going to be able to complete her task and it’s going to generate a phone call to a service guy to say, “Hey, what happened? Where’d it go? What can we do?” |
| Neil: | Got it. That’s great. Yeah, that’s a great system because for a lot of small businesses, I used to own one so I know. I used to own a service business, a construction company, so I know all the warranty things were always a pain in the butt and there were always little pieces of paper. I can completely picture the sticky notes because I used to have those. It existed back then, but I didn’t even know about it so this is great that you’re sharing this whole concept with everybody. After the service call, you’re following up with the customers. For you, the big thing is slow leaks, right? Check for a leak because you don’t want to pay for some huge repair to their house because somebody forgot to tighten a nut or whatever it is. |
| Eric: | Exactly. We automate this process. The day after we do a service, which would be a normal service, the customer will get an email just to say, “Want to make sure everything went well with your service. If you have any questions, please call us and do take a minute to look under your sink. Make sure your reverse osmosis system looks good and that there’s no leaks. If you do have an issue, please let us know immediately.” Oh, and then we ask them to review us on Yelp or Angie’s List. Two weeks later, they’ll get another … And to give us a call if they have any issues with the work that we did so we can make sure to get that taken care of while it’s still under warranty. |
| Neil: | Yeah. |
| Eric: | Just those two emails saves us tons of customer issues with complaints about, “Well, are you going to bill us for this? You did this work three months ago, and now we’re having this issue.” Clearly, we’ve defined what our expectation is from them and what’s billable and what’s not. For people that want to come outside of that 30-day window and say, “Hey, it’s been four months and you guys did this,” I can show them, “Hey, you opened up this email on this date and on this date, and we clearly said to look for these issues. Did you look for them?” Ultimately, the goal isn’t to push everything back onto our customer; it’s just to make sure that they understand that we’re not 100% responsible for knowing if there’s going to be a leak or something underneath the sink. They have to let us know. We’re not mind readers out here. |
| Neil: | Right. Yeah, you’re not crawling under their sink every day obviously, so- |
| Eric: | No. |
| Neil: | They’re there. I’m sure once you put it in, they’re just thinking, “Hey, I got water. Awesome.” They don’t look under their sink. They’re not going back and looking at that, so this reminder is great. You talked about one of the outcomes you could have would be a no-show, and they would go through a rescheduling process then. What might be an example of a different outcome you would have after a service call? |
| Eric: | If a service call wasn’t completed. |
| Neil: | Oh, okay. |
| Eric: | For example, we got out there, we did something. It’s an issue with a part that’s warrantied, so this was another big headache where the service guys, they don’t order the parts. They don’t deal with the warranty side of it. They just go out there and do what’s in the field, so then the office has to deal with the warranty issue. Let’s say for example, something breaks that isn’t a standard part. It may or may nor be under warranty, but the question is, “What do we do next?” All of that is automated within tasks. The outcome is there’s a part that needs to be replaced. Get warranty authorization for it, so that task the office service manager to simply make a phone call and find out is this part under warranty or not, and can we replace this under warranty. |
| There’s a separate task for special order parts, and that would essentially come to me. If somebody said, “Hey, we’ve got this instant hot underneath their sink that somehow we’ve serviced for them in the past or we installed it but it’s not something that we normally do as part of our business, they need a new one,” rather than the office calling me in the middle of my day and saying, “Hey, can you order this instant hot?”, or whatever it may be, I simply have an email task to get that done. That makes sure that again, I’m not 100% organized 100% of the time either, so that makes sure that at least I have the task. It doesn’t bother me in the middle of my day for something that’s simple like that, but then I can just catch it when I have time to look at those types of things. That just saves me the trouble and the inconvenience of getting interrupted with something that’s minor but important to the customer that needs to be handled. | |
| Neil: | Right. Just sitting here listening to you, we’ve talked just this little tiny piece of your business and I’ve already heard probably 10 different tasks that are possible just in this little tiny sliver. How many different tasks do you think you have set up in your system and in your company? |
| Eric: | Probably 30? |
| Neil: | Okay, so not as many as I was going to guess. What was the investment like for you for that? Did this take you a long time to set up? How long did it take you to put this system together? I could just see as a small business owner, you’ve got 50 different hats to wear. Trying to set this up, how much effort did that take you? |
| Eric: | Well, the way that it came about was I put myself into a role. The role that I put myself into for a while was service manager. We were having issues with the service department, things weren’t going smoothly. We were having a lot of fires coming up from the service department, so I just decided, “Well, I’m going to take over the service department and see what’s really going on here.” As I started to wear that particular hat and focus on that hat, I would notice, “All right, these fires that are coming up seem to just always come up.” Looking for permanent solutions to things that are going to just always happen in the business. Realistically, it was 10 years I’d been doing this before I realized that I could automate a lot of these fires that just seemed to happen, I thought randomly, but just consistently. We’re going to have those same issues for the next 20 years if we don’t come up with a permanent solution. The only solution that made sense to me was automation, and it just made everything work so much smoother. |
| As far as time invested, probably four hours here and five hours there. Maybe it was 40 hours to put it all together. Like you said, I’ve got one service guy, one installer, but I’ve put in the foundation that I can make this thing scalable now. If I was trying to scale out with five service guys with the problems that we were having before- | |
| Neil: | Oh yeah. Just multiply your problems by five or ten. |
| Eric: | It would be impossible, yeah. |
| Neil: | Exactly, yeah. It’s probably more than multiply by five, it’s probably multiply by ten or twenty because it’s just going to feed on itself. Yeah, I could see that being a total problem. I’m really surprised that you say that’s all the time that you invested in this. That’s great. What I’m hearing is it was just kind of a little bite here, a little bite there. You saw a problem and said, “Okay, how do I fix that?” You fix that problem and then you went onto the next one. Is that how it evolved? |
| Eric: | Exactly. I did another email campaign that I do for service which is we basically refurbish people’s equipment after five years to make sure that at ten years, the thing doesn’t leak. I’d rather recommend that we fix it before it leaks. When I started doing this process, we’d basically go get these people’s equipment. We’d take it from their home, we’d put in a loaner system, and it may take us a week for us to get back to reinstall it or even two weeks depending on our workload. I think at the time, Domino’s Pizza was starting to take orders online and they were giving the indication of what process that pizza being made was actually in. As feedback to the customer, I said, “Well, I should do that for my water system repair. Otherwise, people are just going to be worried out there wondering what the heck is going on with their water system and when are they going to expect to see it again.” |
| I just made five emails. They go out throughout that process. They tie in with the guys out in the warehouse that are doing the actual work. When the machine makes it into the shop and gets out of the guys’ truck, they hit a button and we hit a task that says, “Hey, the thing made it in.” The customer gets an email saying, “Your system made it to the shop. Next thing we’re going to do is this, this, and this.” We would just basically keep them engaged through this whole process of us doing this service and at the same time, we’re thanking them for their business and explaining to them that all of these parts that we’re replacing are all made in the US, and by doing this job we’re keeping jobs here. | |
| Neil: | Basically, what you’re doing is you’re reaffirming their smart decision to have their water serviced through you and have you do their work. |
| Eric: | Absolutely. |
| Neil: | Yeah. Have you gotten feedback from customers about that process? |
| Eric: | Not really. It’s just something that kind of happens in the background. We just keep them in the loop. I don’t send out a ton of emails to my existing clients. When we do have them in a service, when we do have them doing something like that, I figure that’s a really good time to up my level of engagement with them because it’s timely. |
| Neil: | What do you think has been the biggest benefit for automating all these things for your business? |
| Eric: | The biggest benefit is just not having as many fires in the business. I can’t say that the revenue’s gone up tremendously. Other than just a manual process of calling people and scheduling things, well maybe it has. It’s just been so many years, I haven’t looked at it that way recently. I’d say the biggest thing is just not having upset customers. The stress level in the office is generally low unless there’s a customer that’s upset, and then everybody gets kind of bent out of shape. Keeping everybody calm and connected I think is the biggest benefit, and ultimately if our customers are happy, they’re more likely to refer us and that’s really what we’re seeing as the goal at the end of the year, is that our referral rates are higher than they ever have been. |
| Neil: | Yeah, that’s something you can definitely quantify. Communication is a hard thing to quantify but there’s one place that it probably shows, is in that referral rate. That’s a very important one, I’m sure, for your business. I’m sure you get a lot of work through referrals. |
| Eric: | Absolutely. |
| Neil: | What’s one question here about all this automation and automating your back-end systems that I have not asked you today? What should I have asked you? |
| Eric: | I don’t know. I don’t have a great question for myself. The question I get from every other water dealer is, “How do I do this?” |
| Neil: | What would you say, then? How would somebody in a small business like yours, water or otherwise, get started with this? What’s the first step? |
| Eric: | The first step really is just mapping out the business flow of how things should go. Completely separate from the software and how things are going to happen in the computer. It’s just mapping it out with how the interactions should go between the office, the field people, the customers, the managers, and just really how that communication should flow in a, let’s say, a linear fashion based on particular tasks. If I’m looking at my installations, what are the things that need to happen? Well, when my sales guys make us a sale, they need to notify the office. I do that through task automation as well. Kind of off-topic, I don’t do online sales. I just run all of my systems through an online sales program. |
| When my sales guys do a demonstration out in the field, they have a task at the end of their demonstration. They use a task, and the outcome with be either they made a sale, it wasn’t a sale, they weren’t there, it needs to be rescheduled. There’s probably eight outcomes that go along with that, and everybody has followup tasks that go along from the sales side. That’s really, again, where I think in our business more money is being made, is through sales automation. Service automation just has more headaches when it becomes a problem. | |
| Neil: | Right. Yeah, you’ve automated more than just the back-end. You’ve automated the whole sales process as well, and you are in a real world sales process. You are not online virtually selling, so it becomes a little more difficult to automate that but you’ve done that with all these task systems and these reminders and things. |
| Eric: | Exactly. If a salesperson completes a task that says, “The customer didn’t buy,” then it generates automatically an email to the customer on behalf of the company saying, “Thank you, and congratulations for taking the time to look at clean water for yourselves. Would you please take a minute to give us your feedback? We’d love to hear what your thoughts are,” and we shoot them through about an eight-question survey with the promise of a $5 to Trader Joe’s which we’ll mail out to them if they complete that survey. At the completion of that survey, we task the office manager to write them a thank you card and send them out a gift card. |
| Neil: | Wow. You’ve automated everything. You have this dialed in really well, and I think you’ve given people today just a glimpse. This is just the 30,0000-foot flyover of what they can do with more automations in their business. I think a lot of small business owners don’t even know that this is out there, let alone see the full potential of this. I thank you for coming on the show today and sharing with us what you’ve done to automate your systems and your business. Thanks, eric. |
| Eric: | You’re very welcome. |
| Neil: | You might be thinking to yourself right now, “Wow, I had no idea I could do any of that with automation systems.” This stuff, it’s not cutting edge but it’s just not widely known in the small business community, especially for those local brick-and-mortar small businesses that would really benefit from this kind of thing. It’s just not that well known. Eric, he stumbled across this early. He’s been using it for years now, and he’s really built this up and maximized it in his business. You heard some of the things he did. |
| What were some of the big takeaways from today? Well, Eric talked about starting by identifying the problem. Really, that starts with knowing what the perfect system is. If we had the perfect system mapped out for our business, you know, Fantasyland. We start with the dream, right? What do we want to have happen? Once we have that figured out, the salesman goes out, he makes a sale, and then somebody needs to order the product. We should probably tell the customer when they’re going to get the product, and then we have to schedule the installation of the product, however that works for your business but just map it out, the whole customer journey from beginning to end. What needs to happen and what do they need to know. | |
| The question I like to ask a lot is, what happens next? The salesman makes a sale. What happens next? Answer that question. What potentially could happen next? It could be multiple outcomes. They make the sale. It’s a stock product. That’s different than if it’s a special order product, right? That’s what Eric was talking about with these different task outcomes. Start with the perfect fantasy system, how your business should work, and then look at what is happening in real life. Now you can start to bridge that gap. You can put out the fires, you can take the chaos out of your business by automating these things. |