Retail and food service businesses probably don’t have this problem but service companies that are growing know exactly what I am talking about.  After identifying a customer, engaging in a protracted sales process, and wrangling over the fine details of the contract you are ready to begin providing services to your new customer, and better yet, start invoicing them.  But when you talk to the various parts of your company you realize it is all a lot harder than you thought.  Why is that and why does it take so long?

To answer that let’s look at a typical set-up a medium-sized company might have:

• Your customer is hopefully already set up in your CRM system, at least as far as your sales folks are concerned.  You will want to make sure your customer service folks have them set up for their needs too.
• You will want the new customer set up in your accounting system…
• And your billing system..
• And in whatever operational system(s) you use (consulting firms might have project management systems, shipping companies might have logistics systems, wireless carriers will have network systems).

Even if you don’t have individual applications for these functions, you still have people who have to know about the new customer and to adapt their internal processes to accommodate them.

So why would doing this take a long time?  If you are a smallish company it might not be too bad – you may have to update your various applications, spreadsheets or lists yourself or holler over to the guy in the next chair.  As your company gets bigger, however, you’ll likely start dividing the work functionally – you may have an accounting group or department, another for billing, another for sales, one for customer service and another one for the operational aspects.  Suddenly getting everyone on the same page, and better yet, with the same information, becomes a challenge.  As you become more successful and grow you may find that your automation has become fractured – some groups have grownup applications, some use spreadsheets or their own databases.  This uneven growth and lack of integration across the organization becomes more and more difficult to manage.  Which leads to increases in your cost to onboard a customer.  And, because every group updated their processes and systems manually you may have played “telephone” with important information like customer name, addresses, contact info, etc.  This in turn will lead to issues down the road doing analytical reporting about things like the profitability of a customer.

The good news is this not a new problem – millions of companies face this all the time.  Think of it as a good sign, a growing pain for a successful company.  It is a legitimate problem though and if left to get out of hand can bog a company down, making your organization a modern day Tower of Babel.  Here are some of the symptoms:

• You have  ”bad data” – which is, generally in this situation, inconsistent data.
• You miss key dates – for example your contact stipulates an SLA period for follow up on issues that never made it to customer service.
• You notice frequent miscommunications with customers.  Or about customers.
• You experience more the than usual instances of over or under billing.
• Or your numbers aren’t what you expect but you don’t know why.

What can you do?  Here are some thoughts:

• When you start to see these symptoms force yourself to take the time to stop and take a look around.  If you are still small you may be able to institute some policies and procedures that govern how new customers are set up.  Something as simple as a check sheet can go a long way to staving off problems.  Collaborating with lists and spreadsheets in the cloud might help as well.  Look at Google Docs, Zoho, Dropbox or the like.
• Listen to your employees carefully for statements that indicate the symptoms such as “We’re doing business with ABC in two different offices and it is so hard to keep it straight.  Sure would help if they were set up the same in both places!”.  When you hear this ask probing questions to figure out why.
• Take the time to document your processes.  Then review them and look for inefficiencies and opportunities to automate processes or integrate processes for which you already have applications.  As a bonus you’ll have training material for onboarding new employees!
• Review the processes regularly, at least annually, as input into your technology plan and budget for next year.

Like I said earlier, this isn’t the sign of a “bad” company, just one that has grown by focusing on getting the job done and not “how” the job gets done.  And as you can see, taking a look at the “how” now and again can help you continue to grow.

Has your company experienced this growing pain?

Last week I wrote about the iPad and some applications it has for businesses.  This week I’d like to both broaden and narrow that discussion and talk about using mobile devices to enable your field service employees.

It wasn’t that long ago that any time an employee had to call on customers remotely they showed up with their clipboard and pen.  To enable these employees to do anything in an automated fashion was expensive because it required specialized hardware and software that was generally custom built for the purpose.  This cost created quite a barrier to entry for small and medium sized businesses.  Not so today.

With any smart phone or device (iPad, tablets, net books, etc.)  that has internet access you can provide your field employees with a wide variety of tools for use at the customer site.  You can cobble together a collection of free applications and some business processes to allow these employees to remotely access and complete work orders, create sales orders and provide estimates.  The results of these can be uploaded either directly to your office (if you have the appropriate connectivity) or to a place you designate (like Google Docs, DropBox, or Box.net).  Following is an example of what you can do for the price of an everyday device and a data plan.

Joe repairs appliances.  Each day he can go online and download a list of the service calls he has for the day.  Each will include a description of the problem and an address that he can use to get a map to where he is going.  When he gets to a home with, let’s say, a bum dishwasher, he can go to where his company stores their service manuals for each make and model online.  He can use these to determine the problem.  If he happens to have the parts on his truck he can fix the dishwasher and then create an order from the form he gets online.  He can list his time and the cost associated with the parts (which he again found online).  He can email the invoice to his customer and upload to the office at the same time.  In an alternate scenario, if he doesn’t have the parts he can send a requisition into the office.  When the parts are ready his follow up call can be scheduled and he can go back to the customer for the repairs.  At the end of the day he can upload a list of what he did.

I realize this is an oversimplified example and it doesn’t meet every situation.  For example, what if he doesn’t have internet connectivity at this customer?  This is a real situation that has to be managed.  My point is that technology is advanced enough that this example is very real as long as the obvious situations are thought thru and the appropriate procedures are put in place.  For example, Joe could download the manuals he will need and put likely parts on his truck before he leaves.

There are a million variations on this and what I want you to think about it is “What part of our process can we enable with smartphones and other compact devices?”.  The answer may not be everything but it may be enough to shorten your sales call-to-cash cycle, increase the number of calls an employee can make in a day or reduce the number of times he has to go out to handle a given service call.  Any or all of these can  have a positive affect on the bottom line.

As you begin to the see the benefits you may then want to start looking at specialized paid applications, specialized devices or even custom software.  The bottom line is though there is a lot you can do before you get to that point.

What mobile applications can you apply in YOUR business?