For an agent, nonbillable hours are an important thing to deal with. However, if you do not take nonbillable hours under your consideration, your agency may fail to develop.
In this article, we will see the way on how you can reduce nonbillable hours with a CRM tool.
Before we move any further let’s get acquainted with billable hours and non-billable agency hours summed up in a few words.
Billable agency hours refer to the process of creating invoices for the customers and completing a project that requires a lot of efforts by the agents. Whereas, non-billable agency hours refers to the support activities coupled with various tasks like calls, e-mails, scheduled meetings, tuning up miscommunication, bug fixing and so on by the agents.
Areas of nonbillable hours
A systemic way of managing non-billable hours indicates to how you serve your customers and the quality of your growth rate. You can consider the following 5 areas to be improved for the reduction of nonbillable hours:
1. Book recording: Just like accounting processes, keep recordings of every bit of financial data so that you can meet deadlines of essential bills, get rid of fraud losses and so on. In this case, an effective accounting solution can boost the flow of your book recording.
Read More: Characteristics of Good Small Business Accounting Tools
2. Human resource: This is one of the most notable areas where you can apply some tricks to avoid legal issues and so optimize the required time for managing your human resources. A full-fledged human resource management software can allow you to carry out tasks such as recruiting, payroll, attendance management etc.
Read More: Importance of HRM Communication and Real-time Feedback in Workplace
3. Projects: When you are working with your team and striving for meeting a demanded deadline required by your customers, it is quite normal losing your natural workflow. To make your workflow more smooth and uninterrupted you can use a project management solution.
Read more: How Project Management Tools Help You Reach Milestones
4. Inbound marketing: This is another significant area of nonbillable hours. Forget about the notion of pushing your customers to buy your products but rather try to give away free informative contents to educate them.
This process can be called creating inbound marketing for your agent which is really important for long-term customer relationship. When your customers need information and they first remember your website then you will understand that you have achieved brand recognition.
5. Customer resource: This is such an area which demands your attention most. If your agent fails to deliver goods or services on time or fails to meet their expectation it affects your whole enterprise adversely. One way to manage your customer resources more efficiently is to use a CRM tool.
Benefits of reducing non-billable agency hours with a CRM tool
In this section, we will take you through all the possible and comprehensive benefits of scaling down the non-billable hours that can be performed with a CRM solution. Of the numerous benefits, the followings are the featured benefits when you use a CRM tool to minimize non-billable hours:
Fewer meetings and improved client retention
The more meetings are held regarding a problem of a customer the more time is needed to give the solution to the customer which takes up unnecessary time. Being capable of providing with bulk information about the customers at your disposal, a CRM tool can reduce the number of meetings. Your promptness of customer service plays a vital role to retain existing customers.
Supporting agency growth
The more people join your agency team the more difficult it becomes to manage the workflow due to the dilly dally of red tape. Retrieving any information from the database with a CRM tool for multiple users is generally very easy. It helps the supporting agency to be more productive and grow their value for the business.
Keep full records of your contacts to build a sound relationship with your clients
Aside from recording common information such as client names, email ids, phone numbers and mailing addresses you can also record special days of them like which day of the week/month/year he does go out for hiking, trekking, camping, praying etc. Depending on his/her personal holidays, you can stop scheduling a meeting on those special days of your customers which is necessary to get along with your customers.
Project status
With the help of a CRM tool, you can link certain customer’s email to a certain project so that the customers can stay apprised of the status of the project. On completion of a segment of a concerned project, the concerned customers will get to know the overall progress of the project through the automation of communication system.
Final Thoughts
The secret of reducing non-billable agency hours lies in the promptness and accuracy of storing, processing and retrieving data, an effective method of a communication system and last but not the least, tracking the billable hours and non-billable agency hours. The satisfying news is that a CRM system can be streamlined in order to do these things in an easy and efficient manner.
As this purpose of agency efficiency can be easily achieved with the application of a CRM system, why will you stop yourself employing it?
To cut non-billable agency hours and to soar to a new height you can flat out think about a CRM solution. Anyway, note that for the automation of some basic tasks, you can try out the following free CRM tool!
