Why Contract Lifecycle Management is Essential for Field Service Success
June 26, 2024 | Read: 7 minutes
As a maintenance business owner, mastering the contract lifecycle management process is key to diversifying your revenue streams and expanding your operations.
Securing residential and commercial contracts is a great way to increase profits, but you’ll need the right technology to help your team unlock their true potential.
From setting up detailed digital contracts to acting on SLAs and beyond, using contract automation software to streamline the contract lifecycle management process will help you win clients and build reliable monthly recurring revenue.
Three Ways Poor Contract Lifecycle Management Affects Your Organization
In any business, when processes are poorly managed, it will slow down operations and create conflict throughout each department.
To avoid that, it’s important to understand the negative impacts of poor contract management:
1. Time Consuming Office Work
Your administrative and sales teams already have their hands full when it comes to setting up new client agreements and handling customer service needs, like discussing renewal terms.
They’re likely doing a good job of handling the current volume of work, but if your business grows and processes stay the same, staff will likely get overwhelmed. This will make it more likely for otherwise avoidable mistakes occur, like failing to send an invoice on time, causing you to get paid late, amongst other delays.
While scaling the number of employees you have is one option, it’s not a cost-effective solution. Besides, hiring more staff isn’t solving the core problem, either. Instead, your employees need the right tools to help them manage their workload more efficiently.
2. Multiple Payment Issues
Between getting paid on time and having a secure way to accept payments, if you fall behind anywhere in the invoicing process, there’s a chance you may never be able to catch up.
The longer an admin team has to focus their efforts on chasing down payments, the less time they’ll have to book new jobs or provide outstanding customer service.
When dealing with large quarterly commercial payments, it may feel more reassuring to have a staff member physically handle the process.
But as you scale the residential side of your business, having an automated contract management plan to stay on top of renewals will help you maximize revenue.
3. Difficulty Renewing Contracts
If you’re not on top of reminding clients that they need to renew their contract, they might forget they have your service and seek out your competition without giving your business a second thought.
Or, when dealing with a high volume, your admin and sales teams may struggle to touch base with every customer. This means important details about their maintenance agreements may be missed and they fail to renew.
Having a contract lifecycle management software can streamline and automate the preparation, communication, and renewal process. This will not only keep your team in the loop and let them easily monitor a contract’s lifecycle, but it’s more likely to ensure your clients stay with you, too.
How Software Streamlines Contract Lifecycle Management
When evaluating why your business fell short of expectations, it’s important to ask questions that help you make impactful changes.
Questions like:
- Are we trying to balance too many projects?
- Do we have an organized system to manage contracts well?
- How much time does it take to create and send a contract to a client?
Fortunately, digital software solutions are packed with features that enable your business to solve those questions and take full control of your contract lifecycle management.
Customizable Contract Creation & Centralized Records
A software feature that allows you to customize the setup and outline all aspects of a residential or commercial contract in a centralized system is a great way to organize your records while giving clients a unique experience.
Once the contract terms are agreed upon, the details for each client can be easily recalled and reworked as their needs change or your business adapts to the current market.
For example, if you’re an HVAC company, you may need to adjust your hourly labor rates or repair costs for the residential agreements in a specific service area during the Summer or update what types of parts are included in routine AC repairs under contract.
When you have the right customer database software in place, you can quickly make the required changes instead of manually updating each contract and wasting administrative time.
Planned Preventative Maintenance (PPM) Scheduling
There’s much less burden on your administration team when you can automatically create and schedule planned preventive maintenance jobs.
Software like Commusoft gives you the ability to organize and automate scheduling during the busy and slow seasons. This will keep your field service technicians productive and help them avoid ever missing a job or task.
With even more features like real-time vehicle tracking and barcode inventory systems – you can further streamline your contract lifecycle management and never lose track of assets that need to be used for PPM jobs.
Automated Invoicing and Billing
Getting your customer base to sign up for service contracts is one of the best ways to build monthly recurring revenue. But without a reliable way to manage them and get paid, offering them too soon can result in wasting valuable resources.
Automatically sending an invoice once the job is completed and providing a customer self-service portal for clients to pay is the fastest way to eliminate delays or errors in the payment process.
A software feature that is designed to automate your billing process can free up your customer service and accounting team to focus on helping customers through the process instead of hunting them down for payments.
Commusoft and GoCardless have teamed up to make recurring payments easy!
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Tracking
As you know, breaching a commercial service level agreement can come with some serious consequences, like hefty fines. If it’s happened to you before, you’ve probably done everything in your power to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
SLAs can make or break a commercial contract and software can keep you from having to worry! With features like color-coded timers and instant notifications, every team member can get alerted if you’re in danger of a breach.
If you can confidently oversee SLAs and manage the commercial contract lifecycle, businesses will consistently choose you over the competition to service their property or warehouse.
Customer Notifications for Renewal
If everything goes well through one cycle of the contract, there’s a solid chance the client will want to renew with you for the foreseeable future.
But as your customer base grows, it can become hard to track every start and end date, especially if you offer a variety of durations. You never want to miss out on revenue due to forgetting a date.
If you use software, it won’t allow you to miss the opportunity to tell every customer it’s time to renew their contract, which also gives your sales team a chance to upsell existing clients!
Contract Lifecycle Management with Commusoft
If the features listed above sound like they could overhaul your contract lifecycle management and business for the better – Commusoft is the field service software solution you’re looking for.
We offer an all-in-one software for jobs and sales that is loaded with beneficial features to help streamline your operations and take your contract management to the next level.
If you’re ready to update your systems and implement software that scales with your business – don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
Learn more about Commusoft or get started today by clicking the banner below.
