One thing all successful rental companies have in common are their flexibility to be pro-active and reactive in their everyday life. As your customers’ needs change, assets breakdown or unforeseen circumstances occur in-house, being reactive is vital for your success. The more time you spend being proactive, the less time you will need being reactive.
Preventative Maintenance
With clear equipment records and data history, you can make sure that when your assets are due to have their scheduled maintenance, you are prepared. By being able to see this ahead of time with prompts from your software rental solution, you can ensure that none of your equipment goes out on hire when it will become overdue to have its regular checks and therefore be at a higher risk of breakdown.
Scheduled maintenance is one easy way you can make sure that your equipment is being kept in tip-top condition either. Another way is by monitoring and analysing your asset reliability, performance and profitability so that you can plan for when your assets are going to reach their natural end of life. Imagine that you can easily identify a piece of equipment that is prone to failure. Simply by comparing the reliability of different brands and models against each other, you’ll become confident to decommission any underperforming assets, retaining only the best performing equipment in your hire fleet. And then you’ll have fewer faults and customer complaints to deal with.
Analysing emerging business and industry trends
You might be having an exceptionally bad month with a high volume of credit notes being raised or a high frequency of machine breakdowns. You can instantly see where these new trends or inconsistencies are arising in your processes and what effect it is having on your bottom line by analysing your business reporting.
Having true clarity of your data helps your become proactive, making situations easier to navigate and helping you dictate the future of your business. In solving these issues and looking to the future, you’re able to better plan and understand your long term goals because you’re already thinking ahead of what you would do if X, Y or Z were to happen.
Communicating efficiently with new and existing customers
One cost effective way to develop new relationships and cherish existing ones is via email marketing which will communicate your brand messages, strengthen your relationships and remind customers you are there. All this is made far easier when your email marketing tool, like Mailchimp, integrates seamlessly with your hire system.
Emails could be used to:
- Increase your revenue with discounts and special offers
- Keep customers or prospects informed of what you can do for them
- Keep them engaged and reawaken dormant customers.
Making sure your customers are satisfied (and knowing when they’re not!)
All so often, focusing on acquiring new customers can sometimes be at the expense of neglecting your most loyal and valuable clients. When you have a large client base, it can be difficult to keep track of each and every single one of your customers and so it can go unnoticed when the relationship is starting to cool.
With a rental software solution, you can keep track of your clients and quickly see when your customers are starting to hire from you less. While a software solution is unlikely to tell you the underlying reason why a customer spend has started to decrease, it can alert you to the change giving you a chance to catch them before it’s too late. You can get early indications of any sudden downturn in customer spend gleaned from predictions of future invoice values - again so you can do something to address it.
Whilst it is important you remain reactive to things as and when they change, being proactive means that you spend your time more productively preventing issues arising instead of fixing them as they occur. That will give you more time to allow you to reach your goals, maximise new opportunities and achieve your aspirations so that nothing will hold you back.
If you want to find out more about how rental software solutions can help your hire business become more proactive, get in touch with our friendly team today.