What is a Survey Management System?
A survey management system is designed to do just that – help you manage your surveys. However, they offer much more effective processes than traditional methods and help you to see problems before customers make you aware of them.
A survey management system automates a lot of your manual tasks and takes you through a consistent job process for every customer. And because you follow a consistent process you can simply click to view a list of jobs at every single step of the survey and valuation process. That means an ordered list of every job requiring terms to be sent, a signature received, an outstanding payment, confirmation an appointment went ahead and more. Such a simple overview allows you to update any customers that have fallen through the cracks before they make contact with you and to progress any jobs with something coming up at the right time.
A survey management system is designed to help you operate much more effectively and efficiently so you can focus on what you do best – speaking with customers and carrying out surveys. Otherwise you’re doing the opposite and focusing on updating spreadsheets, updating flags in an email inbox or creating and logging documents.
What is the benefit of a Survey Management System in surveying?
A survey management system can offer a number of benefits but ultimately it will help you to easily manage every job. It becomes your single source of truth giving any member of your team the full picture for that customer, quote or job and help you provide a consistent service no matter how busy you are. Having all information in one place, you can ensure your inspections and reports cover every question your customer asked before instructing you and they are kept up to date at every step.
Some of the key features your survey management system should offer:
- Audit compliance – view all information related to each survey such as reports, terms, correspondence and notes.
- Stage filters – see a list of jobs at every stage of the survey process with clear deadlines.
- Customer engagement – provide updates to your customers as you update the job, rather than being a separate task to carry out.
- Team management – easily show each team member what they need to do from anywhere.
- Integrate – a standalone system isn’t much help. It should link with your sales process, accounting software, report writing software and more.
- Reporting – provide insights across your business by job type, user and much more so you can make informed decisions.
- Customer overview – easily see previous work you have carried out for customers to support your customer service and advice given on future instructions.
These are just some of the things you should expect from a survey management system to help you save time, manage compliance, engage your team and understand how you are performing when operating your surveying business.
What to look out for from a Survey Management System and Surveying CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system
Manage sales
You can only provide a great service if you can easily find, at any time, every request you’ve had from your customer. A survey management system and CRM helps you to track information throughout the sales process and helps you to seamlessly make that available to the surveyor carrying out the job when they are assigned to the inspection. Availability of information from the sales process is key. Both for compliance purposes to demonstrate you’ve met your customers requirements and for customer service to ensure the final report delivers what your customer wants, not just a general report.
Manages your compliance
Compliance isn’t a small task. From sending and filing terms, to making notes of advice provided to customers to logging correspondence sent and received. This takes time and if you’re doing it manually you’re distracted from customers and could find you’ve forgotten to log something when you need it.
Survey Booker offers integrated e-signing allowing you to submit personalised terms for signing in a click. This reduces the time taken to submit terms by up to 85% and can reduce errors by 80% on average whilst providing a clear log of who signed and when.
You can also integrate your emails so messages can be logged automatically to job records meaning compliance is happening for you as you work so you can focus on having new conversations and not logging old ones.
Payments and Invoicing
If you take online payments, jobs can be automatically marked as paid by Survey Booker so that you know you can book in a job or release a report without having to check your bank regularly. Multiple payment options can be added including bank transfer to help customers choose the option that they are most comfortable with.
Keeping your accounts up to date is also an important part of running your business. Your survey management system should integrate with accounting systems so you can automatically create invoices for each of your bookings.
Integrates with report writing software
Your survey management system should integrate with your report writing software for two reasons. Firstly, it saves you having to manually create each job and copy all of your customer data into it. Manual data entry takes time but also risks introducing errors. On completion of your report, you can then publish the report straight to your customer instead of needing to download it, and upload it somewhere adding in unnecessary steps and delays.
Secondly, your customer requests can all be added to the report notes so you can see exactly what you need to be reporting on when you’re out on site or when you’re writing the report. If you use multiple systems for different report types, a survey management system should offer the flexibility to integrate the different systems you use.
Keeps your customers in the loop
Set up correctly, a survey management system can provide customer updates at every stage of their survey or valuation so they know what is happening in real-time. This removes the step of you needing to manually email an update whilst also dealing with incoming inquiries. This keeps your customer happy that things are progressing and you free to have conversations at the important times.
Keeps your team engaged and on the same page
Engagement of your team is key to a good customer and employee experience. By enabling the right team members to have access to the right jobs, at the right time, everyone can see exactly what is happening. The benefit? Reduced delays from team members trying to find out what has been communicated and what has been actioned. Everything is visible so actions can be taken straight away.
The leading Survey Management Systems for Surveyors
Survey Booker
Survey Booker is a specialist CRM and survey management system for surveying designed with the survey process at its core to help you streamline your processes and save up to 85% of the time you would normally spend on admin so you can focus on where you add value – speaking with customers and carrying out surveys.
Survey Booker is designed for surveying firms that want a CRM, sales and job management system that is dedicated to handling the specific workflows they follow and integrates with other industry systems such as Survey Hub (CoreLogic), GoReport, reallymoving, Local Surveyors Direct, Compare My Move and Local Building Surveyor as well as e-terms of engagement and payment systems and much more to help manage the full survey booking and compliance process.