Unleash the Power of AUTOMATIONS for Your Business! [Complete Guide]

Today I'm going to share with you the seven top automations that I use in my service based business to make it more profitable and more efficient. You can use these too. So let's go ahead and check it out in copilotcm.com and I'm not going to show you the entire sequence today. I just want to get the understanding and start thinking about how automations can massively improve your business, make it more efficient and reduce the amount of office staff and overhead you need to grow your business. All right, let's jump in. Let's create this one which is going to be called sms. After meeting now. Now what I want to do here is after the meeting with the customer is completed, in fact, 15 minutes after it's completed, I want to text the customer and I'm literally going to send them a text template that's going to say it was great to meet you. Keep an eye on your email because I'm going to be sending you over that quote via email. Now my next favorite automation is the ability to be able to remind someone on your team or your mechanic that you need the oil change. So I'm going to go ahead and create a recurring to do on my visits. Now it's not going to be a single one, it's going to be recurring. I'm going to do it, let's see, every single month on the first, let's do. On the first Monday of every one month I want to make sure that they remind them to do the specific oil changes on the equipment. Now I'm going to go back into my automations and I'm going to create an automation that is going to then remind them of the oil change right before that date. So the first Monday of every single month there's going to be a to do on someone's schedule. I want to make sure though that before, let's see here, before an equipment maintenance happens, before that happens, I want to run one day before the event and I'm going to do, let's do, let's assume that this is actually going to be an employee, right? You could go ahead and text an employee, you could text a customer and then make that customer into your mechanic. If you wanted to literally just say, hey, I'm going to be bringing over the trucks for example, to do oil changes. But in this case let's assume that we're going to text one of the employees that we have designated these to dos for and where. Then we can literally choose exactly which employee what the text templates going to say and remind them the day before every single month that they're responsible for the oil changes. All right. My third automation that I love is the ability to be able to text message your applicants before the interview. So you might look at their application, you might see that they're really great, give them a call, you set up the interview. But it might be three or four days from now, maybe they got an application on Friday, you reviewed it, called the references and you set up a interview for next Tuesday. We need to make sure we stay in touch with them. Emails, phone calls are great, but let's go ahead and we can do text messages and emails automatically to make sure that they are reminded of their interview time because sometimes, sometimes just getting them to the interview is half the battle. So let's go ahead and create my next favorite automation, which is the SMS Applicant before interview. Because we've seen that text messages really, really help with getting applicants to the interview process. So the trigger on this one's going to be before a meeting happens and I'm going to ensure that this happens two days before the event. And so that way when I schedule the meeting with this quote unquote customer, which is going to be, you see your action, I'm going to go ahead and do text customer. But then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that this customer is a potential employee. Because look at this. Underneath my custom customer's profile I'm going to have this Joe employee and he's going to be a potential employee. What's really cool is I can determine exactly the customer type and I'm going to make him a potential employee so that leading up to the interview process I can actually remind him via text message and email of that interview and make sure that day one, day two, day three, the days prior leading up to the interview, he's reminded of our time, what to bring and what he can expect during the interview process. Now the next one is the most simple and basic of the automations, but probably is going to pay for your software in spades. And that is your estimate follow up the ability that once an estimate has been sent that it actually follows up on the quote every day, two days, whatever you have, until the estimate is either marked one or lost. And that's extremely important. You don't want just estimates being sent out in the ether and you never get a response back. It's amazing to me how 30, 40% of people that you send an estimate to, you never even hear back from so you've got to follow up with them, send them text messages, send them emails, have a reminder sent to your office staff to give them a call. These are things that can be done inside the automation. So the next one's called my estimate. Follow up I'm going to do the trigger is going to be when a estimate is sent and then I'm going to run this, let's see one day after the trigger and then what's really cool is after I do this, this one I'm going to do, let's go ahead and text the customer. Fantastic. I'd be able to select the text template and then I can write a sequence by doing a sub action and just running another automation. So after day one I'm going to do day two, then day three, then day five, then day seven, then day ten, however many days you want to do a follow up process. And some of those could be text messaging the customer, some of them could be email the customer, some of them could be emailing your office staff so they remind them to give the customer a call on the phone. These are all things that can be done via automation so you don't have to remember or do you know what are they called? Notes. What they call sticky notes. Sticky notes all over your desk and pieces of paper scribbled here and there. Be professional and have it automated. Another important process you've got to automate and the fifth automation I love so much is your invoice and collections automations. Because once you send out your invoice if someone doesn't pay, like assuming that you're not having a credit card on file or bank card on file, which is the most ideal scenario. And absolutely I would love to be able to go into the customer profile just like this, go into their profile and have their credit card right on file. But for example, this customer does not have this on file. If I scroll down I can see here they haven't set up their client portal and they don't have an ACH or credit card. If they did, I'd see it right here. So because they don't have it already set up inside their client portal, I'm going to make sure I have automations to follow up with them. So at least they, you know, look at the invoice and pay with it via credit card from the invoice or maybe send me a check if that's what you're doing. So let's go ahead and open up the automation. Let's go ahead and click new. I'm Going to go ahead and call this one my invoice follow up and collections and this is going to be when the invoice becomes past due. Now the reason I'm going to do this is because some customers, I might have them become past due due upon receipt, which is like the day after I send it to them. Other people I might have a net 10 or net 30 for property managers. They might require that you have give them 30 days to pay so that net 30 allows them 30 days before it goes past due. But as soon as this trigger becomes present, I'm going to be immediately emailing this customer and I'm going to say that's your email the customer, boom. And I'm going to be telling them hey, you're overdue date maybe seven days after the trigger. Once I do another sub action of another automation being ran, I might wait another seven days and send them another hey look, within two weeks we're going to be stopping service and if they continue then they're going to be sent to collections. I'm going to have an automatic email coming back to my office with instructions on how to submit that to a collections agency to make sure we get our money, at least some of it back. If you have to go with collections, it's not great because you usually got to give 30, 40% of your money to the collections agency, but it's better than getting nothing. But the goal is that there's a sequence of events that's emailing the customer and letting them put a credit card on file. We want to avoid sending you to collections. It's going to hurt your credit. I know all of this can be avoided by having a credit card on file or a bank ACH card on file. But if you're taking checks or you're allowing people to pay via just one off on their invoices via credit card, you're going to need to make sure you have an invoice follow up process and if at the worst comes the worst, send them to collections. Now my sixth automation that I love so much is the ability to have a survey that if they have a good survey I give them ability to leave an online review. But if it's a bad survey, I send them to a form that's internal to just protect people from trying to air out dirty laundry before giving me the chance to go rectify and fix the problem. So how do we do that? Well, first and foremost from the client portal they're able to submit surveys. I'm going to send these out periodically via another automation to ask them how they were satisfied and if they were satisfied with their job. Now you can really easily create this login profile. They can click on client login, they'd immediately be able to log into their client portal. From the client portal they can submit work request, pay for invoices, they can see all their past billing, they can put their ACH and their credit card and file. They can do all sorts of cool stuff. But one of the other things they can do is leave a survey. Now if they leave a positive survey, I'm gonna want to make sure they also post that online on like Google and Facebook and other review sites. So what I can do is go into my marketing, go into automations, create a new automation. I'm gonna go ahead and call this one online review request. Now for the trigger. You'll see here if I scroll to the bottom here, there's a customer has left a review with a rating of 4 to 5 stars. It's safe to say that they're happy and I want to get from them. Now I'm going to create a different automation of the person that would leave a review on their client portal of 0 to 3.5. Because that email automation is going to be like, hey, submit this form so that we can become better. Tell us exactly what we didn't do. Right? Please let us know so we can rectify the problem. I want that to come internally. It's probably like a Google form or any sort of form that's internal. Whereas if I want to make them leave an online interview that's positive on Google, Facebook, et cetera, I can have the trigger being if they leave a review on their client portal of four or five stars and then I'm going to immediately send them a text message and I'm going to literally text them, text message them a link to my Google page with a review link so they can click on it and immediately leave me a positive review. That's fantastic because they're probably on their desktop version or maybe they're mobile. Actually, if they are on their client portal submitting this review, this survey and they only get the request for an online review that's public if it's four or five stars. If it's less than four stars, it's going to go directly to me internally as a form and I can and deal with the problem before it becomes public and before dirty laundry is aired. Now the last automation that I love so much is making sure that the credit card or ach, the bank information that's on the client's profile is always updated. Because really cool about Copilot is the fact that I'm able to see credit cards that are on file and ach bank cards that are on file and be able to charge them automatically. And I can manage those credit cards and make sure they're up to date all the time. But I don't want to do that manually because I have 5, 6, 700 weekly mowing customers. I don't want to deal with that. So what do you do? You create an automatic for everything in your business. You can save yourself hours just by creating really good automations. Let's go and create this new automation. It's gonna be called Update credit card and what we're going to have the trigger as if we scroll down here, you can see here if the customer removed the credit card, I don't want that they might take the credit card off their profile and then the next time the invoice goes out there's no longer credit card on file. And I hate that. I hate when someone's able to take a credit card off file or take their bank statement off file and now I can't charge them. And that was part of my agreement with them. And alth they have to have certain consumer protections and consumer rights to withdraw payment information from being on file. I want to make sure that I really press them to get this card on file. I'm going to have them this is the trigger customer remove the credit card file. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to email them immediately when they remove that credit card and ask them to put it back on file and why it's so important for us to have that credit card information on file, what I'm also going to do is I'm going to set up a second automation that is going to email my office staff and they are going to check it the day after this trigger to ensure that a card was added. Because if they took their credit card off a file and I am requiring credit cards on file, I want to not only remind them but the day after I'm going to have my office check and see manually did they add a credit card file? Because if they didn't, I'm probably giving them a call and I'm literally going to say you have to have a credit card file in order to proceed with service. These were just seven examples of an endless plethora of amount of automations that can make your business more profitable and more efficient. If you're wondering what software you need to do this. Check this video here where I compare five or six of the best software packages on on the market. And they're everything from copilot we just talked about here to jobber service. All of N and yardbook. All great options by compare and contrast, the pros and the cons of them right here.