FM companies are critical for clients, ensuring facilities are safe and functional for core business. In paying out for building maintenance, clients don’t just expect a positive outcome; they expect transparency too. For FM companies, this means regular client reporting, detailing worker compliance, timesheets, invoices, and POs, to name just a few.
When gaps in data emerge, trust can quickly disappear, severely compromising the business relationship. Guesstimates on budget, timelines, or compliance simply won’t cut it with clients. Maintaining transparency in all areas of your service is vital to keeping clients long-term, industry reputation, and protecting profitability.
Here are some key mistakes to avoid and ensure success:
1) Making Clients Chase YOU for Updates
Clients are busy enough engaging in core business activities. After all, that’s why they outsource building maintenance! Without regular reporting, they’re left in the dark about a service they rely on. This will lead them to spend time and resources chasing you for updates.
Having to do this, means time taken away from running their business. This can quickly cause them to lose trust and confidence in you. Allowing this to become a regular occurrence will simply erode your industry reputation, preventing you from attracting new clients.
Solution: Take on a cloud-based tech solution allowing real-time and on-demand data sharing. This removes barriers to data access, meaning you can share immediate updates with clients from any location or device.
2) Manual Data Entry
Manual data entry is simply bad news for business. It opens the door to human error, consumes timelines and demands additional resources. This also slows down response times to clients and compromises data accuracy.
Ultimately, manual admin means more money spent for you, and less frequent, less accurate reporting for clients: a lose-lose situation.
Solution: An automated platform means less manual admin, reducing both human error and lengthy processes. With direct data extraction you are only a click away from more accurate and up-to-date reports.
3) Going Long Periods without Reviewing Data and Updating Clients
Without regular reporting, issues can go unchecked and cause further damage. This means having to eventually report back to clients with damage control, far worse, and more expensive than preventative measures.
This often means having to exceed your clients’ budget and timeline—disastrous for business relationships and industry reputation. However, this also takes a huge toll on your internal workflow, requiring processes to be dismantled and rebuilt.
Solution: With a cloud-based platform, you can receive and communicate data in real time, both internally and with clients. With automatic notifications, you can take immediate action when issues arise, allowing you to quickly update clients and avoid expensive damage control.
4) Relying on Guesses and Estimates
Insufficient data tracking and storage leads to guesses, estimates and, ultimately—errors. Clients expect clear and detailed insight into how their money is being spent, and generalisations within reports can miss critical details.
Inevitably, this will mean having to retract statements, correct errors, and add previously missing details. This is, of course, another easy way to lose trust, and can lead to issues, again going unidentified only to remerge later needing damage control.
Solution: DaaS allows you to maintain all your data and access it in human-readable form. Combine this with cloud-based storage, and you can maintain all the data you need in one place, eliminating the need to fill in gaps with guesswork.
5) Storing Data on Multiple Systems
This is another critical error which compromises data accuracy. In using a collective of siloed systems for data storage, visibility and access are limited. In using this method for reporting, manual entry and communication (mostly email and telephone) are required. This is a ripe environment for missing details and human error.
This is also incredibly time inefficient and again leaves your clients with longer wait times and less accurate results.
Solution: Cloud computing and storage means you can keep high volumes of data on a centralised platform. This allows on-demand access and automated communications.
Keeping Up Accuracy and Efficiency for Better Business Relationships
Keeping up regular, accurate and efficient client reporting is key to business success. This not only allows you regular opportunities to review your processes, but keeps you accountable to clients, thus building trust.
Whilst internal strategy is vital, a tech solution in the current industry climate is a must. With manual operations prone to inevitable error and time inefficiency, a tailored tech solution can take on the heavy lifting and make reporting easier and more efficient for both you and your clients.