Do you struggle to keep rental revenue high while reducing costs? For many rental companies, it’s becoming more difficult to keep up with the competition while maintaining happy customers.
What specific issues do we see businesses like yours facing? And how can you address these challenges to increase your margins and build customer loyalty? Our rentals management experts created an infographic with some great tips to get started: 10 Ways to Boost Rental Profits & Performance with Dynamics 365 and Western Computer.
At a high level, these are the top 5 barriers to growth most common for rental businesses:
1. Messy billing processes
There’s no doubt about it, invoicing for rentals is inherently complex. You have to determine your billing based on contracts, customer preferences, minimum charges, overtime charges, damage waivers, different billing policies for different equipment types, and numerous other variables.
Many rental businesses handle this complexity with manual processes that tend to be error-prone and slow. This often leads to customer confusion, late payments, and frustration among your employees. In the age of instant access to information, both your workers and your customers expect an invoicing system that’s understandable, accurate, and timely.
2. Lack of financial visibility
You might have a fairly good idea of the financial state of your business, but does your knowledge include real-time insight into daily operations and finances? To keep your margins from shrinking, it’s essential to have visibility into details such as utilization and profit for every asset, accurate forecasting and budgeting, and performance of multiple entities.
3. Difficulty up-selling
The essence of successful up-selling and cross-selling is knowing what your customers need, when they’ll need it, and making recommendations on the spot. Unfortunately, without an integrated rentals management system or an easy way to share customer information, many sales teams don’t know what to offer or if it’s even available.
4. Inefficient scheduling
From managing equipment and parts to scheduling field service, many rental businesses find scheduling to be a continuous jumble with too many moving parts. Poor management and ineffective scheduling can lead to long waits for service visits, too much or too little inventory, and unhappy customers. For effective scheduling, you need to be able to track variables in real time such as equipment downtime, technician location, and inventory.
5. Poor customer communication
Informed customers are happy customers, but when it comes to rentals, timely communication can be difficult. Many businesses that don’t have effective inventory management or an integrated CRM solution struggle to provide quick, accurate quotes. Field service visits can go awry when the customer forgets or is kept waiting without knowing when the technician will arrive. Customers can be understandably frustrated by hard-to-read invoices, especially if they’re slow to arrive or contain errors.
It’s Time for a Real Rentals Management Solution
These challenges are all too common for rental companies, and they are quite easy to solve. The right technology solution and partner will help your organization automate daily processes, improve asset management, find opportunities to increase revenue and decrease costs, and boost customer loyalty. Check out our infographic and schedule your personal demonstration today to learn how Western Computer transforms rentals management.
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More Content by Amanda Sherry
