Recover your body. Recover your life. Sounds pretty great, right? For The Body Building’s Kasey Kahl, it’s not just a life motto, it’s his business’s tagline. Kasey is a recent High Thryv Award winner. His company, located in Clovis, California, is being recognized for their use of the Thryv mobile app as an on-the-go customer relationship management (CRM) tool.
If you’re thinking, “My CRM works on mobile,” you might be right. But how much of your customer relationship management do you actually handle on your phone? Do you really use it when you’re not sitting behind a desk?
If you’re like the staff at The Body Building, they’re hardly ever sitting still at a computer. Like many service-based businesses, their success is dependent upon providing stellar, personalized customer service. That requires a lot of quality, face-to-face interactions and also that they make working with them as easy as possible.
According to Kasey, “Thryv has been a game changer for our business! We didn’t have a solid business structure until Thryv came along.”
We have to admit. The Body Building was a pretty strong (no pun intended) business before Thryv came along. What Kasey’s referring to is the lack of structure they had for managing how their clients interacted with staff members and the business.
What did having a mobile CRM like Thryv do for The Body Building? What’s so great about a mobile CRM?
Easier Access for Staff
Unless you provide business services like bookkeeping and accounting, you and your staff probably aren’t at the same place, at the same time, doing the same thing, all at once. That can make staying connected with one another pretty difficult.
But, what’s the one thing most of us have within a few feet of us at all times? Our cell phones.
The average person with a smartphone checks it around 47 times a day! Of those 47 taps and swipes, not every smartphone interaction is for personal purposes. Our phones are now an integral part of our business lives as well.
The mobile CRM system you choose should have integrated calendars that show where every staff member is, and what they’re doing, all from one screen. Best case scenario, it should even allow each staff member with a login to edit their own appointments and interact with their clients however they see fit.
Constant Connection to Clients
No-shows plague service-based small businesses at anywhere from 5 to 30% or more, down slightly from a whopping nearly 50% in past years. Aside from forgetful clients (we’ve all been there), other factors cause no-shows as well. For example, it’s nearly impossible for physical trainers and doctors to stay up to date with emails and texts throughout the day.
When your work doesn’t revolve around a computer, messages from clients and open conversations fall through the cracks. That’s where having a mobile CRM comes in handy.
For personal trainers and physical therapists like those at The Body Building, the ability to check conversations, appointment statuses, and new inquiries while they’re training (or in between sessions) is crucial to their success.
Thryv’s mobile CRM app lets each staff member manage their own client interactions from their phones. Phone in hand, they can respond more quickly to client questions and new inquiries. So they keep current clients happy and engaged, and they win new business more often.
Integration with Mobile Payment Processing
Not every CRM comes with payment processing (though Thryv definitely does). But 33% of small businesses process debit and credit cards on their phones.
Whether you choose Thryv or not, your mobile CRM should integrate with your payment processing app.
Benefits of connecting your payment processor to your CRM:
- Ability to text and email estimates and invoices to clients
- Real-time insight into who owes you what, from one device
- Automatically updating billing and balances upon payment
- Automating client communications like receipts after payment
Let’s go back to our personal trainer example, like some of the staff at The Body Building. Imagine you’re starting or ending a session with a client. It’s time for them to pay you, either for the individual session or perhaps for the entire month. Do you already know how much this particular client owes? Or do you have to spend time switching between apps?
Having a credit card processor that’s connected to your CRM would minimize the time you spend processing that payment, because you no longer have to check client details in your CRM, then change apps to view unpaid balances and actually take the payment.
So mobile CRMs aren’t just for communicating with clients, they can also help you make getting paid that much easier.