Leveraging Tech to Build Relationships

When you work in the trades, you know that it’s essential to build relationships with your customers. Your most valuable customers are those who keep coming back to your company, using your services again and again. Repeat customers are so valuable because it’s easier and less expensive to connect with people when you already know where they live, what their phone number is, what their email address is, and which kinds of equipment they have in their home.

When your company is small and just getting started, it’s simpler to form customer relationships. You have a bit more time; sometimes, you’re even building each relationship as the business owner and technician in a customer’s home. When you’re first starting out, you frequently get more jobs through word-of-mouth recommendations. However, as your company grows in customer size, and you hire on more people and technicians working on your behalf, managing many customer relationships gets more difficult.

This is where we can use new technology to assist us. AI technologies can help technicians in the field capture more customer and equipment information for the database. Automation platforms can then pull the enhanced data out of your field service management software – and then reach out and connect with customers on your behalf. The future is here, and emails, text messages, voicemail drops, and more can be automated. Even some physical pieces, like direct mail, can be automated.

The key to remember here is that you still want these marketing touchpoints to be personalized. The additional data gives you more to work with, but you still need the messaging to be relevant to a customer’s needs. You don’t maintain a multitude of relationships by treating everyone the same. If you’re doing that, you’ve stopped talking with your customers, and started talking at your customers – never a good thing!
When you begin to use technology for your connections, it’s important to make sure that the messages are still personalized enough to connect with your customers. Sending a blast to all customers about signing up for your membership program means that your current members are also getting this message, and they’ll be confused about why you’re asking them to sign up again. Impersonal connections can churn out your customers, who may feel like they’re just a number in a marketing database.

Luckily, these new tools are strong and reliable, able to set up specific journeys and communication flows that make sense to the people receiving them. Used correctly, these automation tools still offer your customers a personalized experience, where you are working and talking with customers directly. The difference is that you’re no longer required to remember everything about every one of your customers, or spend all of your time crafting individual messages.

Technology is an amazing and necessary tool for connecting with a large number of your relationships in a meaningful way. But please remember to use it properly! Make sure you’re growing your relationships with technology, not using new technology to burn the goodwill you’ve already built.

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