I am a tradie, and from what I've seen out there in the wild, 99% of us could be doing our admin better.
What do I mean by that?
Well, we could be:
- Getting our software to do mindless tasks like entering customer details for us so our admin lady (sorry, office staff) don't have to do it.
- Have jobs move through statuses so we can see where they all are in one second.
- Having quotes automatically made for us if we upload a voice recording or phone transcript of us talking to our customer and some photos.
- Forwarding emails and already having them in our job management software.
I get it, people are hesitant to change something that's working for them. But in real life, I see that so many tradies are up late at night quoting, invoicing and basically working two jobs: one on the tools or managing their team, and one on the computer.
BUT with all that said and done, I also have seen some things you really shouldn't be using AI for in your business:
- Answering your calls. I had a customer say to me "your quote was higher, but I went with you guys because the other company had AI answering the phone." Everyone likes a human connection and your customers are literally your business. Why would you nurture your relationship with them with a bot?
- Writing emails and marketing materials for your business. Yes, I could have got AI to write this thing you're reading right now. Can you tell that I didn't though? People hate reading AI writing. Write your emails by hand, even if you get systems to send them to people. Or, you could totally take the time to train your AI to write like you.
- Training your staff. Don't get AI to write crap to train your staff. Train your staff by talking to them and building a relationship. Sure, you can have your SOPs, but build them yourself, and get AI to fix your typos, not the other way round.
AI does a great job of simple, repetitive tasks, or tasks where it's really clear what 'done' looks like, or what good output is. Anything that requires judgement, such as human interactions, is just not where it shines.
Service Ninja is your AI-enabled job management software. We are genuinely the Rolls-Royce of tradie software, and we are here to give you back your evenings and weekends. **Book a demo** with us today and we'll show you what we can do!
