Many tradespeople remember the time where communication with the office while on the road was near impossible – I’ve heard of CB radios and pagers, standing in line for public payphones and even bribing the local cafe to let you take and make calls from their phone. No way could a tradesperson running a little late let their customer know! That could very well be where the common views on bad service in the trades comes from!
Then came the fax machine, and I remember all the skeptics that said ‘well why would I want one when none of my friends have them!’ (I was one of them!). And then I remember fax machines being ubiquitous – if you wanted to communicate with a business formally, you had to have one. Then came the old mobile phones – the ‘bricks’ as they were called, and of course suddenly when you were out on the road you could call and be called – even if you didn’t want to! Gone were the days of the lone ranger in the ute going about your day in a predictable way!
The first SMS was sent in 1992, but initial growth was slow – in 1995 only 0.4 messages were sent per customer a month. But nowadays there are 2.4 billion active users around the world.
For trades and home services, where the products (ie you!) are always on the move, SMS and mobile phones revolutionised the way you worked. Some of us may even want to go back to the inefficient times where the wife couldn’t call when we were on the road – we’d definitely spend less time in the grocery stores! But positively, when before you’d have to schedule your jobs for a day well in advance, and if you were running late you’s lose business, now you can do more work more of the time, give better customer service and make more money.
But it doesn’t stop there – the world has become virtualised, and the internet facilitates business every single day. Whether customers are interacting with your site via their mobile phone or office computer, they’re always researching and communicating online. According to Internet World Stats, 79.6% of the population use the internet. Compare that to other stats that say that 80% of purchases start online with research – and you have a compelling reason to use the internet in your business.
But practically, how does it help trades and home services daily? Besides all the work that is generated through the internet, how can using the internet help your business with the practicalities of life? Mobile phones ensure that you can communicate verbally with people, and SMS’s mean you can write short messages, but what about communicating via email or in forums online? If your customers want to talk via email, should you be willing and able to give your customers what they want?
Virtualisation is a word that describes how people work outside of the traditional office. The idea is that you can work, communicate and manage your personal life from anywhere you like – with the right tools to do it. Remember when the mobile phones were ‘bricks’ or ’self-defense tools’? Well laptops used to be clunky and heavy – now they’re smaller than the old mobile phones used to be!
If you think about it, virtualisation is when office workers remove the boundaries of the office – but in trades and home services, you’ve never had those boundaries. The industry is already virtualised, but to keep up with the rest of the world the tools of the office need to become virtualised too!
