The BEST WAY to Get Customer to Get a Credit Card ON-FILE!

Do it.

What's up, everyone from co pilot, Augusta Nation, pay for performance software. Christian here. I do sales and consulting for both softwares. Book a call. I'm just going to say now, book a call. If you guys want to learn a little bit more about that, we could talk about your business. I can learn a bit more about your business and then we can go forward, talk about how we can keep scaling. Right, today I'm with Mike Andes. We're here with these podcasts. I hope you guys will enjoy these podcasts. I'm calling it a podcast now. It's official and we're going to keep posting these to our YouTube channel. And today we're going to be talking about a new setting that we just put on for for all of our users to essentially credit card required to accept an estimate for. People go and tell us a little bit why we added this and what's the benefits?

Yeah, like we've always wanted it to be where when someone accepts an estimate, we know we can put them on the schedule. And the problem that we've had in the past is because we require a credit card on file is once the accepted estimate comes in, we can't really put them on the schedule yet. We've got to make sure they actually get their card on file. And that's usually been through like an automation through email or te saying hey, thank you for accepting your estimate. Part of our process is we require that you have a credit card file. Here's a link, fill out the form, blah, blah blah. Our goal now is that when you in the office, you and the owner get notified there's an accepted estimate. You know that they already have an accepted or a credit card on file that's been pre authorized by stripe. So you already know you're good to go ahead and do that job. You don't have to worry about there being any collections issues or past due invoices. And so most people it's become more and more standard to require credit cards on file. But there's that friction point of the customer thinks they've kind of accept the estimate, we're good to go. But then you have like another email or another text message that goes out and they have to fill out another something to really lock in that they can get on the schedule. And then then also you as the owner have to like triple check before you the date of service. Like did they actually get their card on file before I put them on the schedule? So that's been eliminated. So now when you get an accepted A notification that estimate has been accepted. You know, payment has been authorized and ready to go. And there isn't no more back and forth there.

And you can set that up globally for everybody and for specific. On the customer basis.

Exactly. It's like property managers, a commercial, you might not want, want to require them have a card on file. Big massive projects that they're doing a check or there's other things involved, you might not want to require them have a card on file. You just, you know, each customer, you can deactivate that on or turn on or off for the entire, your entire company. And in the future too, in the next couple of weeks, we're adding deposit thresholds, which is similar in that huge. If you have a big project and you want 50% down again, if someone accepts an estimate and it's a $10,000 job and you need $5,000, well, they click to accept the estimate. But now you got to reach out and say, okay, well we need that deposit. Do you want to send it via check? I'll send you another invoice to pay the $5,000. It's just more friction. So the goal now of doing the deposit threshold in the next couple of weeks is when they click accept, it will say thank you for accepting. In order to accept this estimate, it requires 50% down. And here's the amount that you need to pay. Really great. Click pay, put your card information, it gets paid, then you get accepted estimate notification knowing the deposit has already been taken care of. And you don't have to worry about collecting that prior to putting them on the schedule. And so it just makes the office admin and scheduling so much more simple. And you don't have to make the automation like our goal is that in this case is like you don't need the automation, you need to fix the broken process. And that's what we've always struggled with other CRMs is we are always focusing on trying to get their card information, collect the deposit. Well, now I've got to wait. I want to send a check. Okay, well, great, you're going to send a check means I'm not going to get my money, my deposit for a week and a half, which means I'm not going to put you on the schedule for three weeks. So just making all this, these processes simpler is the goal. And I'm looking forward to the deposit threshold. But having the credit card required for the estimate to get accepted is a big one.

Yeah, it's nice that we, we make some of these updates for operations, but it's also nice that we make some of these efficiency updates for admin too, as well. Right. They appreciate that. And I get a lot of that appreciation from these, from these meetings that I get.

The overall goal of copilot is, yes, make your labor more efficient out in the field, but it's also to make sure that your admin costs go down in time. And so overall, the reason we're so bullish on technology in the service industry is because our biggest cost in terms of our businesses is labor. And that's in the. In the admin side as well as for the fulfillment, the actual service side. And so our goal is obviously to make your guys more efficient with routing and things like that, the actual. The service. But on the admin side, the cost of an office person is also very high. And if you can save time for them, it's extremely valuable. And that's really the goal in this part with the credit card on file, is save your office staff time and headache. And this, I believe, truly saves probably 15 minutes of admin time for every single accepted estimate. And probably more than that if you're requiring deposits for larger projects.

Yeah. The more I've been around with copilot, the more I'm starting to see that we're not only minimalizing the time for admin workers, but those who are just starting to as well. And we've talked about our subscriptions and how well they're done in terms of what features we provide for each subscription level. But if you are a solo operator and you are working from your car and you don't have anybody, now we have some of these settings too as well at some of our solo subscription levels where you can set up some of these automatic things too as well. So, you know, it just gets the team excited for the next three months, six months, all the above to see.

What these settings, and that's why technology is so important, is because, like, ultimately it's deflationary. You save time and money with technology. Whereas the biggest cost of our business, like I said, is labor. And that is going up in cost, like inflation, like it's going up 10, 15, 20% a year. So I want to take as much away from labor, office and service and let technology take that over. Automations having a card on file so I don't have to like juggle that with the customer. These are all things that you want to automate because technology is deflationary and brings price down versus inflationary, which is more labor.

Yeah. In an industry that's already Been difficult, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Next we want to talk about just continuing on the communication side of things is Sequence Automations. We got a lot of big updates. Our development team and Stephen are pushing some really cool stuff going into September. I really want to talk about the difference between the Automations that all of our users are already have access to and then into this new. We're in a beta stage with our sequence Automation but now we're starting to get into a. Right. A nice alpha stage I guess you can say. And then we want to have it refined by the end of September if I'm. If I'm correct on that. So give me the difference between the two.

Yeah. So like the regular automations is available for everyone including for users and those are usually like if this app, if this trigger happens, take this action. Yeah.

Right.

So if a customer accepts an estimate, send this email. You know if, if there is a visit on the schedule that includes this service, text this employee. If there is a equipment maintenance needed for this piece of equipment, text this person inside the company internal and external. It's very much though trigger based and then one action with Sequence Automations you tie it in a much more complex way and that is with and if and or statements. So if this is true, do this if this is true, do that or do this if it also means this. So there's a lot more dependencies as well as like if you want to set up 21 day or 30 day automations, like long automations that have multiple steps and sequences and it checks and balances throughout, you need Sequence Automations and so it's for more of our enterprise level users and I'm excited about it because we have, it's been in beta. We had to add up, we just didn't had to have all the triggers in there. We're adding all of those in the next few months or a few weeks and hopefully by end of September it's ready to go fully and that should include just about everything that you need in terms of automations in the sequence automations. So that's really what we got. We're just building out.

Communication is never so simple too as well. Right. So once your business gets to a higher level I feel like having that complexity in which you can set up this conversation, you know, these, this communication with people makes sense and it's a necessity. It's like having a plan A but then having B, C2 as well. Those avenues of communication for if this happens or if that happens. Yeah.

And one of the things that we still have to build in the next few weeks is the ability for the sequence, for the sequence automations to have a filter at the top which only allows that automation to be triggered ever so often. So for example, the biggest reason this is needed is you don't want someone going through the automation every single time they do service and getting a request for a survey like, hey, how did we do the next week you come to their property? How did we do? Like, it gets annoying. So what we are going to build, and this is one of the things we see still haven't finished in sequence automations is on top of the automation having, hey, you can only enter the entry into the automation every 90 days. So that way, hey, I'm going to set up an automation that every time I service your property it's going to ask for a survey, but you won't even go into that sequence unless it's every 90 days. And so if it was sent out well, for 90 days you cannot go back into that automation. Yeah, so we're building that out right now and that's the last one of the last things we got to do with sequence automations over the next few weeks.

Yeah. Which will help with attrition, right? People won't leave you because you're bugging them, right? Yeah, it's simple stuff. It's funny. Yeah, no, that's really cool. And I know we also have our marketplace coming. This is something I want to touch base on too as well, is bundles, you know, automations, from regular both to sequence automation. Can people download those? Is it going to be free to the public? Kind of just talk to us about the marketplace and how that.

So the marketplace is already done, it's fully functional and what we've added to it over the past few weeks is all those additional things. Tags, custom fields, sequence automations. And this will be useful for sharing templates, documents, automations within the software. So whether it be someone that builds a really cool email template and wants to share it with other users, they can do it on the Facebook group, give everyone the password, they're good to go. For a company like Augusta that's moving in all these locations, we can just create a bundle with all of our packages, all of our automations and templates, or text and email and everything in there and then just quickly copy and paste that into a whole bunch of different accounts. And so it'll be helpful for people with multiple locations. It'll be helpful if people are using a, an advisor type of company to set up their software for them and do all their templates and everything. Those companies will be able to put their bundles inside of the software. For example, like Simple Growth with Mike Callahan, they do a lot of this for their clients and then more importantly, it'll create the community and in the Facebook group to where people that create really cool templates or cool automations can just quickly share it with everyone and everyone can download it quickly. This also eliminates what we've had in the past, which is called System automations and system templates. So in the past when someone signed up, we'd give them like 40 different templates preloaded into their software. The problem is some people don't want all of those. So our goal is to make those optional inside the marketplace. So you just quickly download them for free and get 30, 40 automations, a whole bunch of different templates and really the everything's designed and ready to go. You don't need to create your own invoice email. You don't want to create your own estimate email. It's already ready to go, but now you can get from the marketplace instead of it being in your account and kind of being annoying if you don't know need that specific document or template.

No, for sure. Efficiency, communication. I feel like Copilot's been on the forefront with all of our innovation. I know we're young, we're only five months old, but everything that we've, we've put out so far, even our last video, if you guys tapped into that KPI, that KPI veer that we made, you know, all. Every single KPI that we added kind of tied into each other and made sense and helped with efficiency. So I hope you guys are enjoying these podcasts, these short podcasts. The length of them will change depending on what we're talking about. Again, if you guys are interested in Copilot, then go and book a call with me. You're interested in P4P, book a call with me. I would love to hear about your business. We have a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipeline for support too as well. Next week, the beginning of September, we have these webinars going on too. You do not need to be a user in order to register on those webinars. You can go ahead and just check it out. Check out the university for free. You'll watch our webinars. There's a Q and A at the end of the webinar too as well. We're Stephen, our head tech support guy, the guy who does, designed and created our university will answer those questions too, as well. So very informative. And that's what we're all about.