One recommendation – still give the customer a paper copy of the contract ahead of time to read. First of all, if they don’t want to sign it, you want to find out before you’ve done the installation. Second, if it’s more than a page or so, some pesky customers might actually want to read it on the installer’s iPad rather than just blindly signing it. I went through that with an AT&T UVerse installer, their contract was something like 7 pages on the iPad, and I come from the school of “if it’s important enough that you need me to sign it, then it’s important enough for me to read it”. Even skimming through a lot of the boilerplate, the installer had to stand there cooling his heels for about 10 minutes while I read the electronic contract.
From: Ty Featherling Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 6:50 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Platypus + paperless The thing is, they are already writing all of this information down. Instead they could be typing it and submitting it from the field. -Ty On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 6:15 PM, Ken Hohhof <af...@kwisp.com> wrote: You can probably hire office help (part time college kid if necessary) to do paperwork for less per hour than installers. Especially since they are tying up a truck while doing it. Not worth it if they do one less install per day because they are sitting in the truck or standing in front of the customer doing “paper” work. From: Ty Featherling Sent: Monday, August 24, 2015 4:54 PM To: af@afmug.com Subject: [AFMUG] Platypus + paperless We are trying hard to reduce/eliminate all of the data entry of entering new customers after installation. Currently they fill out a paper contract form, collect payment for the installation, and turn that in at the office. We then process them individually using the customer wizard to create a new customer in Plat and then manually fill in all of the data, create invoice for installation, and set their billing rates. We would much rather have the installer fill all of that same data from the contract out in digital format that can then be imported somehow into platypus to do almost all, if not all of the customer creation steps. As we grow faster and faster the paperwork is getting to be a serious load. Has anyone else solved this problem with Platypus? If not does anyonw know of an avenue I might look into? We hope to turn this solution into a way for the customer to sign their contract digitally but that is secondary to the main task. -Ty
