SimpleCrew was originally created in 2012 as an accountability tool for street teams and grassroots advertising. But at its core, SimpleCrew is a sandbox. We capture and organize user, time and location information with every photo taken, and we quickly found out. A decade later, we’re still seeing new and unique ways companies leverage our software to improve their operations.
Perhaps the most popular segment lately has been home, local and commercial services. This includes lawn care and landscaping, snow removal, maid and janitorial services, heating and air conditioning (HVAC), property management, plumbing, pool cleaning, pest control – the list goes on.
After extensive research, feedback and customer interviews, we’ve developed a best practice playbook that can help you fast track SimpleCrew into your daily operations with ease!
Companies in this industry most commonly use SimpleCrew for two reasons: documenting their work and tracking field marketing. Let’s take a closer look at both below.
Job Documentation
Not much of an explanation is needed here. Photo documentation of jobs is a must in this realm. So why do businesses choose SimpleCrew?
- Photos are tied to their respective location, making it easy to organize, track and review
- Shareable links allow other team members, franchise coaches, corporate, and customers to view with ease
- Photos are also tagged with the date and time taken for foolproof accountability
Employee accountability
For companies who are completing several jobs per day (lawn care, maid service, etc.), photos are taken when they first arrive on site, then again when the job is finished. These before and after photos have other benefits (see below), but as a baseline it offers an easy way to track time to completion (TTC).
Hiring part-time workers occasionally? Export that user’s report to a CSV for a simple but effective time sheet!
Cover your butt
We’ve heard the stories of customer disputes. “You were late, the job was incomplete”. Instead of the hassle of a frustrating conversation, simply send them the shareable campaign link. Immediately they’ll see progress photos, timestamped and tied to their location. Companies have referred to this as their dispute killshot. It doesn’t get better than that.
Because of the day/timestamp, there’s no room for interpretation.
Sending to customers
Sharing photos with customers is useful for more than resolving disputes! Once the job is complete, head to the campaign page, grab the shareable link, and send it to customers.
Anyone with the campaign link can view instantly without an account. The map, photos, and timestamps are all visible, but to protect employee privacy, your team members’ information is hidden.
PRO-TIP: When you email the link, include a link to your Google/Yelp page and ask them to leave a review for your business! Online reputation is incredibly important, and what better way to ask than by first showing them a job well done!
Does your business service the same accounts (as needed, weekly, biweekly, etc.)? Your shareable link never changes, so customers have one link to view the history of work.
Field Marketing
Even in today’s digital age, the importance of field marketing cannot be overstated. While impact can vary depending on the area, we commonly hear 40-50% of new business generation comes from traditional field marketing. There is one inherent issue with field marketing, which SimpleCrew helps solve: how do I verify the work is being done, and done correctly?
By offering an easy system that ties time and location with photos, the guesswork and trust system is officially eliminated. Whether you’re paying per placement or by the hour, snapping a photo in SimpleCrew of every sign placed and every door hanger left is the easiest way to verify their work with total accuracy. And once we have that data, we’ll show you some excellent ways to use that data.
1099 accountability
A common practice we hear with businesses is when employees aren’t busy with their primary role, they’re contributing to field marketing. A great practice with one downside: when business is booming, some companies lose their field marketing team. Instead of pausing those efforts, many businesses hire part-time help so they don’t miss a beat.
Pro-tip: check out our blog post on how to effectively hire field marketers on Craigslist and other job boards – including a job post template! (https://www.simplecrew.com/ultimate-job-post-template-hiring-sign-placer/)
Popular Types of Field Marketing
Yard signs – A tried and true method. Yard signs are usually placed on the customer’s property after the job is complete, bottlenecks of dense residential areas and other high traffic areas like intersections and onramps (in accordance with state and local regulations).
Door-to-door – Another classic. The most popular forms of collateral here are door tags, trifold brochures and refrigerator magnets. Some companies hang them and move on, others like knocking and delivering directly to the homeowner. Another popular strategy is hitting 3-5 houses to the left and right of a customer once the work is completed.
Branded vehicle parking in high-traffic areas – Sometimes referred to as “parketing” or “park and wave”, many businesses have eye-catching vinyl wraps on their vehicles. When the vehicle isn’t in use, find the most popular areas in your territory and leave it for a few hours!
Create separate campaigns for each kind of field marketing for easy insights into each!
Leveraging your field marketing data
Digital marketing is trackable by nature. Google, Facebook and Instagram can tell you how well your ads are performing, how many customers clicked on it, how many went on to make a purchase, etc.
While traditional field marketing is tremendously effective, we don’t have easy access to the same insights as digital advertising. By capturing those field marketing placements in SimpleCrew, that data can now come to life in digital form, offering even greater insights to support your larger marketing strategy.
Here are some ways we can put this data to work.
Compounding points of impressions
While there’s no universal figure, most marketing efforts say that it takes between 3-7 points of impression for your message to be received by a customer. Regardless of what the actual number is, we do know one thing: the more the better.
EDDM/Mail carrier routes
The USPS gives public access to their carrier routes, showing you census data on each, including average age range, household income and more. See which routes coincide with your door-to-door efforts and create another impression with direct mail!
https://eddm.usps.com/eddm/select-routes.htm
You can also use the carrier route data to help you develop your door hanger routes!
Local digital ads (doubling up on zips)
With our Reporting Booster, you can tell easily what neighborhoods and zip codes have the most field marketing coverage for any time frame. Digital ads can be served to specific codes and neighborhoods, so use your SimpleCrew data to influence where you run your online ads, ensuring the best chance at multiple points of impression.
Hear it from a few industry professionals who have implemented SimpleCrew into their daily operations:
With 4 locations in the Western US, Key Mechanical has been a leading commercial R/HVAC contractor for nearly fifty years.
"As a commercial R/HVAC contractor, documenting photos of our jobs is a very important process. Before SimpleCrew we relied on the painful process of field technicians sending multiple emails of compressed photos to the office where the photos were then manually moved into folders for backup. With the adoption of SimpleCrew all we need to do is share the relevant campaigns to our field staff and have them upload the photos directly to the SimpleCrew platform where we know the photos are safe and secure. SimpleCrew has been a huge win for not only our field staff but for the back office as well. Both the mobile app and web app are very intuitive and easy to use which really helped get buy-in from our staff."
Branat Construction provides cellular tower construction, engineering, inspection, maintenance and modification services across the United States.
“Before SimpleCrew, we were using regular cameras and depending on our guys to get those photos to us. While this worked overall, we ran into issues with having to chase guys down for photos or them being lost altogether. Now that we have SimpleCrew, we don’t have to chase anyone down for photos and we can check and make sure that the jobs are complete before they even leave the area. So far we have saved quite a bit of money from not having to go back to a jobsite for a revisit.”
Door and Window Guard Systems (D.A.W.G.S.) is the premier provider of vacant property security, specializing in Door Guards and Window Guards for vacant and foreclosed property security.
“We’ve done thousands of properties. When we measure the property, that’s 20 pictures. When we put it up, there’s probably 40 pictures. Anytime there’s a service call there’s 30 pictures. And when we take it down there's another 20-30 pictures. And then we do probably 2,000 to 4,000 properties per year. I can tell you that some of these other vendor apps that I have to use because I’m forced to, are an absolute nightmare. I’m on the phone with the guys, we can never get them to work correctly. So the simplicity of SimpleCrew is a really big deal for us. And my partner who’s in charge of operations always says to me that he loves the app. He just raves about it because he doesn’t have to hold their hands in the field. They can just get going right away. And that for us is the number one driver. And it always has been.”
