Let’s be honest, the pandemic has made life easier for some of us. If you are an antisocial knowledge worker with no kids, Covid has been pretty dope. It has saved you thousands in commuting costs. Not to mention all those awkward water-cooler chats you always hated that you no longer have to endure. Those are gone. For good.
But not everyone is a childless, introverted, content marketer. For many if not most people, Covid has made working more difficult. If not more dangerous.
Imagine you are a field rep for a home services company. Pre-Covid it was hit or miss if homeowners would answer the door to listen to your pitch for a radical new way to clean gutters without climbing any more ladders.
Today, the hits are few and far between. Even homeowners that really aren’t that worried about getting Covid are more than happy to use it as an excuse to stay in the kitchen sipping coffee when the doorbell rings. Covid has made this tough job much, much tougher.
QR Code to the Rescue
Well, beleaguered field service reps, Utah-based software company FreshLime has your back. Or, really, your boss’s back. After all, if you don’t get in front of homeowners, they can’t stay in business.
FreshLime provides customer interaction tools for SMBs. For example, it offers AI-driven chatbots and other tools for asynchronous communication. That’s a fancy way of saying, communicating with customers on their terms, not yours.
Spotting an opportunity to fix a broken fiend sales model, FreshLime has just rolled out something called RepConnect. The company claims this tool will increase field sales reps’ engagement with homeowners by up to 60%.
“In today’s world, homeowners want to interact with businesses and their field reps how and when they want. And that’s not always by answering the door in the moment,” FreshLime CEO Jay Bean explained. “Traditional field sales methods aren’t cutting it anymore. We knew there was a need in the marketplace for a more efficient tool for both reps and the homeowners they are trying to sell. So we built RepConnect.”
How Does It Work?
RepConnect is pretty dead simple in concept. But as with most simple executions, there is some complexity going on behind the scenes.
The field rep knocks on the door. Of course, no one answers. Remember, they’re hiding in the kitchen drinking coffee. So the rep leaves a door hanger (or a flyer) with a QR code. The homeowner later scans the QR code. This connects the homeowner to FreshLimes’ Automated Virtual Assistant (AVA).
The AVA then collects information from the homeowner and sends it to the Message Center within the FreshLime app. Then the Field Rep can then follow up with the highest value opportunities based on the pre-qualifying information collected from the homeowner.
Covid aside, this approach gibes with the longer-term trend of asynchronous communication. We tend not to want to communicate in real-time with sales reps or others. Unless we have an urgent need. Or when we do want to communicate, it’s often outside normal business hours. Covid may have added a layer to this. But we stopped wanting to talk to people a long time ago.
According to FreshLime, during trials, “60% of SmartConnect QR Codes left behind were scanned, and once collected delivered 2-3 times more sales per Field Rep per week.”
This makes sense to us. We all want to make decisions on our own terms. And today that often means we’d rather sit on our coach and interact with an app than stand at our door and interact with a stranger in a polo shirt.
