Every job has a follow-up visit, a report and a compliance record, and in July the phone does not stop. Follow-ups were booked when the technician remembered, reports for restaurant and warehouse clients were typed up on Sunday, and calls went to voicemail at exactly the time of year they mattered most. The company wanted the follow-ups automatic, the reports written on site and the phone answered all summer.
Three things kept going wrong, and each cost the business time, money or a customer.
Three agents built on the company's job system and its report templates, with the technicians signing off every report and the agents doing the booking, scheduling and writing up.
The job system had every customer, site and visit; the report templates were Word documents with a decade of refinement, and those became the compliance agent's structure. The technicians spent an hour agreeing what the booking agent should ask for each pest, and a rule that anything involving a food business or a child's bedroom is booked as urgent. For the first two weeks technicians corrected the draft reports on their phones; the corrections were wording, then rare. The booking agent took July's calls with the office reading transcripts for the first week.
Every follow-up is booked the day the first visit is done, so treatments finish and customers stop ringing to ask when someone is coming back. Reports are signed and sent from the van, and the restaurant and warehouse clients have their compliance file before they ask. The phone was answered every time through the summer, and the company took on more work in July than in any previous year without adding a person.
'I used to spend Sunday writing up what I'd already done on Tuesday. Now the report's on my phone before I've left the site, and I just check it and sign.'
Senior technician
A cancellation on Tuesday night meant a cleaner with nothing to do on Wednesday morning and an owner on the phone at 10pm trying to fill it. Cleaners forgot shifts they had not been reminded of, and quotes for new regulars waited until the weekend. The company wanted the schedule full, the rota confirmed and the owner's evenings back.
The first warm weekend in March brought a hundred enquiries in a fortnight and the owner answered them from the van between jobs, so half were still waiting a week later. Meanwhile the maintenance rounds needed scheduling around weather and staff, and the autumn work nobody had booked was the winter nobody was paid for. The firm wanted every enquiry answered the same day, quoted from its rates, and the rounds and seasonal work filled without the owner.
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