What are the stages of a lead in a home service business?
In practice: inquiry, contacted, qualified, booked, ran, sold, completed, paid. What matters is not the labels but the transitions, because each one is a …
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CRM & Customer Data
Customer records, lifecycle, follow-up and reactivation.
How do we tell a customer we lost from one who simply is not due yet?
Compare time since last job against that customer's own expected interval rather than against the calendar. A maintenance member is late at thirteen month…
Should a CRM record be a person or a household?
For residential service work, the account should be the property and the people should attach to it. A husband books the appointment, a wife signs the est…
How similar do two records have to be before we let the system merge them automatically?
Use two thresholds, not one. Above the high threshold the system merges automatically, below the low threshold it does nothing, and everything between goe…
Why can't we report on the fields we have been filling in for two years?
Free text and unmanaged picklists. A field that accepts anything will collect fifty spellings of six things, and a picklist anyone can extend grows option…
Why does our CRM keep creating duplicate customers?
Because records get created at different moments, by different people, through channels that cannot see each other. The web form does not know about this …
How do we test a deduplication rule before running it on the whole database?
Run it in report-only mode first. Have it output every merge it would perform without writing anything, then hand-check a random sample of proposed merges…
Someone asked us to stop texting them. How do we make sure it actually stops everywhere?
Opt-out has to be a customer-level fact stored once and read by every system that sends, with the most restrictive value winning any conflict. In practice…
How do you measure churn when customers do not subscribe to anything?
You define it by silence. Pick a window based on your natural purchase cycle — often eighteen to twenty-four months for a household trade — and count cust…
How do we tell a dead lead from one that is just slow?
Build the conversion curve from your own history instead of guessing. Take leads from a period old enough to have fully matured, then plot what share of t…
What is the difference between a CRM and field service management software?
A CRM is organized around the relationship: people, conversations, pipeline stages, follow-up. Field service software is organized around the work: jobs, …
What goes wrong when we move from one CRM to another?
The data usually moves. The meaning does not. Custom fields collide, stage names do not line up, notes lose their author and timestamp, and attachments qu…
How do we actually measure whether our CRM data is any good?
Score the fields your decisions depend on, not every field. For each one, measure fill rate, validity, consistency with the same fact in another system, a…
How do we get our team to actually use the CRM?
Reduce what they have to type and make the system give something back. Adoption collapses when data entry is unpaid work that benefits someone else’s repo…
What is the difference between a contact and an opportunity in a CRM?
A contact is a person or household. It is created once and should persist for the life of the relationship. An opportunity is a single instance of demand …
How do I choose a CRM for a service business?
Start by deciding what the system must be the source of truth for. If the answer is jobs, dispatch and invoices, you need field service software, not a CR…
How do you measure churn when customers never formally cancel?
You define it with an explicit window and admit it is a modeling choice. Two definitions are workable and they should be reported separately. Contract chu…
How many times should we try to reach a new lead before giving up?
More than once, and across more than one channel. A single unanswered call is not a dead lead; it is an unanswered call. A workable default is several att…
Our CRM and field service system keep overwriting each other. Why?
You have a two-way sync with no conflict rule. System A writes to B, B treats the update as a genuine change and syncs it back to A, and each side sees th…
Our calls, texts and emails are all in different places. Does that really matter?
It matters most at the moment of contact. When a customer calls, whoever answers should see the estimate texted last week and the voicemail from yesterday…
Why do the same customers keep getting created twice at the same address?
Almost always address formatting. "1420 N Main St Apt 3", "1420 North Main Street #3" and "1420 Main St 3" are one place written three ways, and a matcher…
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