Message a Trade – Grow your business, save time.
A favourite song in our Spotify rotation is Jumbo Breakfast Roll, a classic from Pat Shortt. The breakfast roll is the turbo charged bacon buttie of Ireland, and every bit as delicious and heart stopping. This week’s blog is a call out to all trades or as Pat says it best:
‘Well whether you're a chippie or a sparkie or a brikie or a team just tarring the road.
Or a shower of lads coming home from the razz with a crowd or on your own
If you're working up a ladder or peeling pigs bladder or find yourself digging in a hole
There's no sight better than melting butter, from a jumbo breakfast roll’
– Pat Shortt Jumbo Breakfast Roll
Breakfast rolls and bacon butties aside, trades (Plumbers, Landscapers, Carpenters, Handymen) are impacted by the trends of eCommerce like any other business, where customers want to engage, buy, and pay for services and book appointments all online. In the UK , eCommerce represents a £200B annual market and this is growing to £300bn by 2025, according to Statista. So how best can a trade or service business go online?
Engaging your customers online as a Trades Business
How do most potential customers find a trade or service? Well, if they are like me, they go to Google and search ‘Plumber, Landscaper, Carpenter [Substitute a trade] near me.’ Other’s go to social media, Facebook, Instagram, and do a similar search. So, at the very least most trades will have a Google business profile, and many may create a Facebook/Instagram page or simple website. Customers also look for positive (and negative) online reviews before deciding on who to engage.
‘88 percent of consumers say they trust online reviews over other advertising’ survey by Bright Local
With this limited online presence, and ability and time to maintain a website, most trades run their business on their mobile phone. When customers try and call their trade, if it is a small sole trade business, they typically reach a voice mail, often full. For a bigger trade business there may be a secretary or agency that handles inbound calls. Calling a trade is usually a terrible customer experience for the customer, and often the trade simply never returns the call and an opportunity to grow their business is lost. Many customers have simple queries like which services are offered, examples of previous work, some simple guidance, or a call out to look for a simple job to be done or a quote.
Trades - Message your prospective customers!
Trades are not taking advantage of their most important piece of customer information; they are not turning their access to the customer phone number into an opportunity to grow their business. When a prospective customer engages a website or a social media page, they are anonymous, and the trade doesn’t know who they are. But when a customer calls or messages a business, the trade knows who they are, as they are given the customer's name and their issue or request. This is all captured in a single business owner’s phone call registry or voicemail and never recorded by the business to use later for follow up. This information if captured efficiently can be turned into a business opportunity, a promotion of new services or requests for recommendations are just two examples.
‘Approximately £23 billion of consumer spending in the UK is influenced by online reviews’ - Competition and Markets Authority (CMA)
Trades can take advantage of messaging to engage with prospective clients and customers. Rather than calling a tradesperson, a customer would message the trade business and engage with a messaging chat bot that could take a customer through a structured journey, discover, or get the customer to describe their issue, book a call out, digitally pay any call out charges, and then be notified in near real-time of when the tradesperson will be arriving. After the job is done, the customer could pay any outstanding charges again through their phone. The message chat bot could request to rate the experience and leave any comments, which the plumber can use to get more customers. The next time the customer wants to engage a similar trade, they can simply go back to their messaging conversational history and start over again. A tradesperson can promote new jobs to their existing client base or anyone that has engaged with the messaging chat bot for their business.
‘More than half of adults (54%) say they find traditional forms of communication with businesses to be frustrating, while almost three-quarters of adults (72%) believe that waiting to speak with someone at a business is a waste of their time’ , according to a 2020 Business Messaging Research Study
How can Payemoji conversational commerce help a trade business?
Trade businesses can benefit from Payemoji conversational commerce through messaging apps in many ways from customer support to allowing customers to order and pickup.
- Local mobile number: Every business will get their own local mobile number that can be used on Google, website, social media, or business cards to engage the trade business. We also provide QR codes to provide a quick way for customers to scan and launch a message to the business.
- Structured menu: Each trade business through the Payemoji portal will setup a menu and this is presented to the customer when they engage with the trade business. Here is an example for a plumbing business.
- Customer Support: Simple chat bots can answer basic customer questions like opening hours, location, or provide simple tips or how to guides on common issues for example – stains on furniture, new paving options, what to do about leaky taps.
- Personalized service: When customers need a more individualized touch, it is possible to handover conversations from the chat bot to a human.
- Shared multi-user inbox: For businesses with more than one employee, the customer engagement through messaging can be easily viewed by different employees who can understand the history of engagement with a customer providing a better experience and saving time.
- Book a call out: Customers can book a call out from available dates and digitally pay using their Credit card, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
- Free up time and save labour: This can free up precious time by allowing automation to engage with customers on simple repetitive tasks, and this will allow the business owners to focus on a more personalized service.
- eCommerce store for supplies and services: Each business gets an eCommerce store to allow their customers to order and pay, ensuring higher revenues and higher sales closures.
- Digital payments: Customers can pay with their credit card or using their phone with Google Pay and Apple Pay. No need to handle cash or share your bank account.
- Loyalty: As every customer will engage with their phones, business owners will now have the phone number of every customer that engages with them and understand new versus repeat customers preferences.
- Receive customer feedback: Allow customers to rate their experience of the service.
- Promotions: Once the trade business owners have the phone numbers of their customers, conversational commerce can be used to send messages of exclusive deals and promotions (e.g., 20% discount on spring landscaping).
- Simple integration into existing apps: Just use the phone number provided to integrate into any app.
- No Apps to download for customers: This is critical as many consumers do not like to download Mobile Apps for small businesses and this can be an unnecessary friction. No one is ever deleting their favorite messaging app like WhatsApp from their phone.
With Payemoji you will have more time for your customers and to grow your business. You will even have more time for a breakfast roll or a bacon buttie. Oh, if you are wondering what’s in a breakfast roll. Pat says it best …
‘Two eggs two rasher two sausage two Bacon two puddins one Black and white. All placed like a tower on top of each other and then wrapped up good and Tight’ – Pat Shortt - Jumbo Breakfast Roll
