If you’re in the Plumbing business, you are most likely not bothered about technological trends in your line of work. But as everything in our life has been affected by technology – so is your business.

As a Plumbing Business owner, it is vital to stay on top of emerging trends and make sure that your business is constantly evolving to meet the market’s needs.

6 Plumbing Business Industry Trends to Keep Track of in 2021

Here are a few steps that you need to take note of to future proof your plumbing business:

• Using technology as a way of effective plumbing contract management

As you expand your plumbing business and hire more subcontractors, coordinate multiple projects, and take follow-ups from clients, managing your business is going to become tougher and tougher. But technology can become your savior here if you adapt and switch to plumbing software.

Well-designed plumbing software can help you collaborate in real-time with your management, even if they are not onsite together, and keep track of what everyone is doing.

You can easily schedule, dispatch, assign team members for plumbing jobs and monitor their time spent on the project.

• Offer clients easy online payment options

None of your clients want to pay cash anymore. Most of them would prefer the convenience of digital payments. Purchasing plumbing software will also give you the advantage of generating personalized digital invoices for clients and collecting digital payments.

You’ll also be able to keep a much more organized track of your accounts since everything will now be available electronically.

• Increase your online presence

Think about it — if people are looking for any business, even plumbers, they look for information online. Good old-fashioned word-of-mouth publicity is also great, but people also look for any business they want to hire online.

Paid digital ads might not be the need of the hour when you’re just starting out, but it is important to have a website that has its SEO and keywords in order so that you show up in search results when people are looking for plumbers in your area.

A strong social media presence and engaging with people in groups related to plumbing are also great ways to capture an audience’s attention and attract more clicks on your website.

• More customers are looking for your business on their mobile

If customers are looking for your website online, you need to make sure the website is responsive and built with some expertise.

Would you employ a plumbing business that might have good reviews, but if you try to access its website, you just can’t log in?

Not really, right?

A large percentage of clients will look for your website on their phones — so it is important to ensure that your website looks great on any screen and can be used on a web browser as well as a mobile device.

Online presence counts, but it’s the right kind of online presence you have to emphasize on.

• Online reviews can affect how customers see you

Your reputation is important for your business, and now online customer reviews matter as much as word-of-mouth reviews from your clients.

You can ask your clients who are happy with their work to leave a good review on your website, and if you do get a negative review, it’s important to respond as diplomatically as possible.

• Give attention to remote and mobile-first communication

Clients now prefer digital communication over face-to-face communication. This translates to assisting clients on a video call for the plumbing business to start diagnosing the problem and coming up with a virtual collaboration with the management. If the client can solve the problem through assistance on a video call, you only need to send a few, if any, plumbers on site.

Taking your plumbing business online may seem a little unnerving, but as the competition grows, so has the demand. The US Bureau of labor statistics estimates almost a quarter (24%) growth for the plumbing industry by 2024 from the last decade. So you need to take these vital steps to make sure your plumbing business is future-proof.

Author Bio:

 Akhil Rajan is a Customer Success Specialist at Zuper, an intelligent workforce management platform for service-oriented businesses. Working with customers on a daily basis, he has a deep understanding of their needs and pain points and so he is able to contribute to the marketing strategies for Zuper with the content he writes. He writes on topics like how to increase workforce utilization, how to reduce the service turnaround time and increase workforce efficiency, customer adoption, cost reduction strategies, etc – to name a few. He is often found buried in books or playing chess in his free time.

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