What are the biggest drains on time when it comes to having your own business or working as a part of a small business? Why the customers of course! We all know that we wouldn't have a business if it weren't for our customers, so we want to create a company ethos demonstrating the fact that our customers always do come first by firstly ensuring the service we provide is of the highest quality as well as all communication being both timely and professional.

The result?

In order to achieve this level of service in small businesses wishing to grow quickly, owners and staff end up working pretty much around the clock replying to messages and keeping response times down to a minimum. Whilst this seems achievable at first, as the business grows it quickly becomes impossible to keep up meaning your once excellent reputation for customer support starts to slip.

The answer?

AUTOMATION This word can be feared in the cleaning industry as it can be misinterpreted to mean technology that is used to replace people losing the human touch of a company. On the contrary, automation reduces the need for people to spend time performing slow and arduous administrative tasks, meaning that companies can further enable staff to do what they do best: engage with customers whilst delivering the very best service. The extra time created can also further the sustainability of companies in terms of ensuring that their workforce can enjoy working more flexibly whilst still meeting the demands of the 21st century client where 24-7 communication is increasingly expected, and also provide excellent opportunities for business growth.

Like hundreds of thousands of businesses in the industry across the globe, Trad-man uses automation to help with the admin side of his business including:

• automated scheduling
• automated invoice generation
• automated notifications of jobs being completed with attached invoice
• automated payments
• automated acceptance flow for quotes

See the latest Trad-Man video here showing the ultimate portal embedded on his own business website:

With the Ultimate Portal added onto his business, he had two options to choose from to further reduce time spent on quoting:

1. An information gathering flow in order to manually quote with all the information (including the option to add photos)
2. A fully automated quote flow where the customer receives the quote at the end of the list of questions with a price for services selected. On accepting it's just down to the business to book this in and again there is automation to send the booking confirmation from there with links to sign up to auto-payment methods etc.

With either option, all new customer details are automatically added from the portal to the Squeegee account so owners and admins can view see in their prospective customers list as well as this coming through as an alert in the alerts section (and push notification on activated devices). From here the customer can be contacted directly, even if they didn't complete their quote request. This in itself saves time asking for all the relevant details and adding them manually.

Here's what the gathered information looks like on the quote request opened directly from the alert. All that need doing is a review of the information and either a price adding or a new job adding with the price (and a simplified service) and the quote request job removing. Either of which takes around 30 seconds to complete!