McMillan’s Cleaning and Restoration are a family owned business which offers carpet, rug, tile, upholstery and leather furniture cleaning as well as restoration services. After their success with Digitool’s lead generation and local SEO services, they asked us to help them with automating their business. Ewan and Vicky wanted McMillan’s Cleaning and Restoration to grow and communicate with their new and existing customers better. However, they didn’t know how to tackle this as their staff was already overwhelmed with the amount of paperwork they had to complete and the communication they had to maintain with customers.
We started by looking at the rug cleaning business to see how we could make it smarter through automation. This led to getting a new CRM and developing an email automation system that worked alongside their new processes, whilst continually updating all their software.
The Solution
Since the end of 2020, Digitool has been working with the McMillan’s to understand their customer’s journey and what they wanted to achieve with an automated system. We started by looking at a new CRM to help streamline their process, which ended up being the cloud based software Jobber. During this transition we helped Ewan and Vicky’s staff learn and understand Jobber, so they were fully comfortable with using the new software before we started automating.
We then looked at automating parts of their daily admin to help save time whilst setting up a communication process with their clients. With the new system, we synchronised their Xero, NiceJob, Asana and BarTender accounts.
The Results
It’s now been eight months since we first turned on their automation, and we’ve had some fantastic results. 86% of their customers open their emails and a further 17% interact with the links shared in the emails. These links directed their customers to their quotes and additional services. In fact from those who didn’t initially accept their quote, after being sent our chase up emails, 7.7% converted to accepting the quote.
Grant, the Business Development Manager, had this to say about the project:
I honestly don’t know how we did it before without the automation… It’s amazing how quickly you forget how painful certain activities were once you have the new systems up and running.
“We were moving from a largely paper based operation to completely automated, utilising over 5 different systems and our business has had zero interruption.
I would say that on average by working smarter we are saving at least 20% across each job which is massive, allowing us to spend more time on activities that add value.
Its been so good we are keeping Digitool on a constant retainer as we don’t know how (or why) we would work without them moving forward”.
With the automation in place, the McMillan’s saved time, communicated with their customers better, upsold more additions to their services and got customers coming back! The McMillan’s were so thrilled with the results on the rug cleaning side of their business we are currently developing automation systems for the restoration and carpet cleaning sides of their business. Watch this space for updates on how it goes.
