As a company grows, this challenge often intensifies, particularly without service agreements to ensure steady revenue. Without these, charging past clients for services can be problematic, and some companies absorb these costs to avoid conflicts. This situation can severely impact profitability and work-life balance.
For many integration companies, servicing and maintaining your past installations is one of the most difficult aspects of operating the business. With the labor pool so tight, many integrators simply cannot afford to have a dedicated service team or even a single dedicated service technician whose job is to troubleshoot and fix problems with existing customers’ systems. That technician’s talents are most likely needed for installations.
The longer an integration company has been in business, the bigger the problem becomes as the number of past installations grows. The “service conundrum” is exacerbated by the fact that many integrators do not have service agreements in place with their clients; therefore, there is no regular revenue stream coming in from annual maintenance contracts. That adds more stress to the situation because if the integrator wants service to be a profitable endeavor, he or she must now charge those past clients to get their system back up and running.
Some integrators simply eat the cost of doing service for certain customers versus risking a confrontation. Unfortunately, service can become an epic drag on a company’s profitability and destroy your work/life balance. But there are ways to mitigate the potential pitfalls of service by establishing certain best practices that help set guardrails for your service department.
Download our guide written by Jason Knott covering 22 best practices that can help enhance your service department’s profitability.