When you are going to be out of the office and unavailable, set up your voicemail to say “Hi, I’m out of the office until Tuesday afternoon and while out there will be delays in my ability to respond. If this is urgent, please call the office at (123) 456-9875 and they will help you.” That is a communication that will keep “whatever” moving. 

Likewise, set up the vacation responder on your email with “Hi, I’m out of the office until Tuesday afternoon and…” give them whatever direction you wish. Now all pressure to respond is off you and your customer has a clear understanding of what to expect. This is so easy to do, you appreciate it when you are on the receiving end. Do it too! You can do this with any phone or any email system.

Let’s turn to service. For instance, RT3 Member Jobba’s service software has automated communication capability built into the software. If you and your customer wish (it can be turned on or off on a customer-by-customer basis), after your customer makes a service request and you enter it into the schedule, they get an email. Do you need to shift the schedule? Change it and your customer gets an email. You don’t send it. The software does it for you. Work order completed? They get an email. What did your staff have to do to “communicate” with the customer? Nothing! No panic to get the calls made when you are swamped by a big rain event. No shuffling priorities in the office to make sure all customer notifications are handled. It is all automatic. Ditto with inspections. (Just think, no more calls about “when is the inspection going to be completed?” No more, “Have they been there yet?”)

Zapier is a program designed to automate workflow, including communications. There are over 3,000 programs and apps that it works with. Somebody fills out a form? Have it sent to the team automatically. Set up the new account in QuickBooks, automatically. Not yet using something like RT3 Members’ Jobba? Have the roof techs take their photos with their phone and have Zapier upload them into your cloud storage (correctly!) Too many of us are still trying to take pencil and paper processes and automate them instead of taking advantage of the flexibility and features offered by new technologies to build processes that are better, quicker, simpler and easier than anything you could ever do with paper and pencil. You can do this too!