The Importance of Clean Data When Planning for Your Business’s Success

A commonly cited phrase tells us that knowledge is power, and that’s certainly true for pest control business operators. All of the knowledge in the world though, won’t do you any good if you’re not able to sort through it to gain insights into your business’s performance and make plans for a stronger future for your company.

In the grand scheme of things, data analysis falls into the categories of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive. While descriptive data presents existing figures, predictive data allows you to draw insights from trends in your descriptive data in order to make an educated guess about what might happen next. Predictive data is arguably the most important type though, as analysis allows you to draw actionable insights and make business decisions that can impact what happens next for your business.

Before you can analyze the data you have though, you need to make it digestible. This means cleaning, sorting, and visualizing information in an approachable way. With PestPac Business Analytics, you gain the power to easily view and explore your business’s data in a way that makes sense and enables you to plan for the future of your business.

The Power of PestPac Business Analytics

Each dashboard in PestPac Business Analytics gives you the ability to tailor the data in front of you so that you can focus on what matters most. The interface is designed to inform on key performance indicators (KPIs) through pre-configured dashboards with charts, graphs, and tables that give you a visual representation of key data that’s easy to absorb at a glance.

These dashboards allow you to view relevant data for whatever time frame you want to focus on, whether that’s the full range of available data or the current month-, quarter-, or year-to-date. You can then compare data to the same period of a previous year to see how you’re performing against earlier figures. Drilling down into the specifics of a particular metric is as easy as clicking on a graph or figure to open a more detailed view.

This sort of insight into your data is undeniably valuable, and PestPac Business Analytics gives you an accessible approach for exploring the data related to your financials in the office as well as your performance in the field.

Billing Reports

Enhancing your understanding of your financials empowers you to make intelligent decisions for your business, and PestPac Business Analytics’ Billing Reports make it easy for you to stay up-to-date on your business’s revenue and expenditures.

At a Glance

Whether you choose to view one of the predefined date ranges or to enter a custom date range, the At a Glance dashboard gives you a quick and easy overview of your financial data with visualizations of key information pertaining to your revenue, such as overall revenue and recurring revenue compared to those of the prior year. You can also see counts of current service locations, your current bill tos, and your current recurring orders.

This easy-to-read breakdown of your recurring revenue is among the most important elements for a pest control company to be familiar with. Loyal customers are cited as being worth up to 10 times more than customers making their first purchase, which means recurring revenue is effectively the backbone of your bottom line. Staying aware of your latest performance in terms of recurring revenue not only lets you know how you’re doing, but also gives you a very concrete look into how you can expect your numbers to be moving forward.

More importantly, tracking your recurring revenue for the current month and comparing it to past periods allows you to make plans for increasing your recurring revenue in the future. Seeing which recurring services are the most popular, both historically and in terms of new sales, can allow you to sell and promote your services appropriately. By exploring your data, you can form plans to create service packages, service contracts, or prepay discounts specifically designed to play to your pest control company’s most attractive recurring services and boost your bottom line.

If you want to view information pertaining to a particular branch, division, region, or service to draw those insights on a more localized level, you can quickly hone in on that data using selectable filters. You can also drill down or drill up to see more details on any of the overviews that catch your eye.

Billing Metrics

Billing is the source of your company’s revenue, and the Billing Metrics dashboard allows you to view your paid and open billing amounts for any time period; Open vs. paid revenue is also noted here.

Credits are tracked here as well, giving you the opportunity to monitor and better identify the reasons for credits behind the data in front of you. By labeling credits as they’re added to the system, you can note the cause for any disparities in the future and adjust accordingly.

Collections and prepayments are broken down by stage here, too. Visualizations make it easy to see how much revenue you’re waiting on from customers and what stage those collections are in, as well as how much work you still owe to your customers for any prepaid periods.

Service Insights

To better help you understand the distribution of your active service setups, the Service Insights dashboard displays individual services measured by both service count and associated revenue. You can also sort by either individual service or by service class, allowing you to quickly visualize which services are the most popular and which services are bringing in the most revenue.

The Service Insights dashboard also highlights your company’s recurring services with visuals for both renewals and cancellations. These are again broken down to show both the number of services renewed or canceled and the revenue tied to each.

This dashboard also shows the percentage of accounts that have payment cards on file, the percentage of service setups with automatic billing set up, the total number of complete service setups, and the Net Promoter Score (NPS) if you’re using NPS with the PestPac Online Reviews module.

Retention

Much like a traditional gain/loss report, the Retention dashboard highlights the value of newly added or canceled service setups for a given period, making it easy to compare your current income to a prior period and see just how much revenue you’re bringing in through your recurring customers—or just how much you’re losing by letting customers get away.

More importantly, this dashboard gives you the opportunity to glean insight into the reasons behind canceled setups. Cancellations are shown as stacked bar graphs with a simple color code for the cause tied to each cancellation. You can explore the same data in reverse, clicking on a reason to see how many cancellations are tied to it and the overall lost revenue tied to those particular cancellations. This data can also be broken down on a monthly level, allowing you to note seasonal trends in retention and cancellations.

This data is resoundingly important to helping your business improve moving forward, as 82% of companies agree that retention is significantly less costly than acquisition. Some sources estimate the cost of acquiring new customers as being as much as 5-25 times higher than that of retaining a customer. This means that tracking and understanding the reasons that your customers cite when leaving is not only crucial in protecting your existing revenue against churn, but in helping you combat the high cost of new acquisitions.

When you’re able to use that actionable data to help reduce your churn, the customers you retain become more loyal and ultimately buy more of your services and spend more than a newer customer. Once again, the insights you draw from thoroughly documented and clearly displayed data allow you to take action toward improving your bottom line and making your business more efficient.

Consider diving deeper into training your technicians in the areas where departing customers have found service to be lacking to avoid the same issues from driving other customers away in the future, and be sure to focus on providing an outstanding quality of first-time service to make a strong impression. It’s also in your best interest to request customer reviews or to distribute customer satisfaction surveys to help identify unhappy customers before they decide to leave; you can’t make changes to keep them happy if you don’t know there’s a problem, and studies show that fewer than 4% of unhappy customers actually call attention to an issue ahead of deciding to leave or cancel a service.

Operations Reports

While your financials can shed a bit of light on performance in the field, there’s no substitute for tracking your operations directly with concrete figures. With PestPac Business Analytics’ Operations Reports, you can focus on exactly what’s going on in the field and draw the insights you need to take steps toward operating more efficiently to boost your bottom line.

Service Completion

For a comprehensive view of your service orders over a given period, the Service Completion dashboard is the place to start. Select a predefined date range or define the range yourself to review a visualization of every invoice for that period. This allows you to quickly assess the balance of completed, open, not serviced, and callback invoices for that range to see how you can improve and what still needs to be done.

This dashboard also displays the reasons that orders were not serviced, helping you to visually identify where you’re missing opportunities. You can also view the Tech Breakdown to see these same orders distributed by individual technicians to note patterns or ongoing issues that you can work to resolve.

This is extremely important when diving into your data to see how you can better train your technicians to maximize the revenue your business is bringing in each day. Checking your technicians’ capacities, the percentage of your customers that are being serviced when they should be, and which of your technicians are servicing the most and the fewest customers gives you the insight you need to benchmark your business’s performance and make changes moving forward.

Just by being aware of these figures on a detailed level puts you significantly ahead of your competition; Field Service News reports that 75% of field service companies don’t measure KPIs effectively, and that 27% of those same companies aren’t tracking KPIs at all. Business Analytics gives you the insight into KPIs that you need to thrive.

Armed with this data, you can dive into the efficiency of your team, both individually and overall. You can explore how time on the clock translates to jobs completed, as well as how many jobs require unexpected follow up visits to resolve issues.

From here, you’re able to reassess how you’re approaching key elements of your business such as scheduling, dispatching, and training to improve your overall efficiency. You can’t expect to make effective, lasting changes to your processes without clear insight into what is currently working and what’s not, and Business Analytics puts those insights at the forefront.

Integrated Pest Management

The Integrated Pest Management (IPM) dashboard gives you a clear view into IPM device data for a given time period, including conditions inspected, pest sightings resolved, and the total percentage of devices inspected by technicians. You’ll also see graphics for the number of open conditions, thresholds exceeded, and open pest log items.

The Tech Score Card, which is part of the IPM dashboard, displays figures broken down for individual technicians, including orders completed, percentage of devices inspected, scanned, or serviced; the number of devices removed, replaced, or skipped; and the percentage of device activity that the technician has observed. These metrics shed light onto how thoroughly jobs are being performed by your technicians in the field, giving you the opportunity to train your team for better performance or to highlight your most successful technicians. These figures can also be toggled by branch or division, allowing you to focus on the team that’s relevant to your needs at any given time.

Tech Insights

For a deeper look into how your technicians are performing in the field, the Tech Insights dashboard provides a breakdown of individual technician performance data. You can choose to tailor this data based on a number of factors including branch, division, region, role, or service code, all while maintaining individual technician breakdowns.

This dashboard showcases completed routes, callbacks, and not serviced orders, which you can also view by division or branch. When viewing these figures for an individual branch or division, the dashboard also highlights the average across all divisions or branches, making it easy for you to see how an individual division or branch is doing compared to your company-wide average.

Viewing each technician’s figures, you can quickly see which technicians are completing the most orders or triggering the most callbacks. These figures are also shown as percentages, creating a framework that allows you to accurately see how these figures stack up across technicians who may work more hours or complete more service orders in the grand scheme of things.

Tech Production

Breaking down the dollar amount tied to each completed service order by technician, the Tech Production dashboard paints a clear picture of how much revenue your technicians are bringing in for your company. This dashboard offers insight into the revenue and hours tied to each invoice, providing you with easy-to-interpret figures like production value per hour and the percentage of revenue each technician’s jobs are providing.

You can also break these figures down by division to quickly see which divisions are contributing the most to your company’s overall revenue. This information is particularly valuable when viewing these figures compared to previous periods, allowing you to see how the distribution between divisions or technicians shifts over time.

Open Orders

The Open Orders dashboard is a visually-driven look into where your technicians are spending the most time completing service orders. Individual bubbles represent the geographical locations of each order, while the size of the bubble correlates with the duration of the order. This shows you where your teams are spending the most time, with the location and duration of both open and completed orders.

You can also drill into different order classes to see the hours completed and hours open for each type of service, gaining insight into how—and where—your company is spending its time.

Q&A

Available to help you explore both the Billings and Operations dashboards, the Q&A dashboard uses advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to allow you to input what you’re looking for and find the relevant chart or data. Unrecognized terms are highlighted, and clicking them offers suggestions. Individual terms, such a “$revenue” and “%revenue” appear throughout each dashboard, allowing you to quickly grow familiar with the terms you can use to easily slice and dice data to find exactly what you need to know.

Once you run a particular data set, you can change the way in which it’s presented to easily display the info you need and share those insights with other members of your team in the way that works best for you.Armed with the insight that comes with clean, accessible data, you can get to know your pest control business like never before and begin planning for a future in which your entire business is able to reach its full potential. Learn more about PestPac Business Analytics and how you can take control of your data to operate more efficiently and increase your revenue today.