It’s 5:00. Do you know where your data is?
It’s difficult when project data is essentially scattered to the wind with no visibility to the information it contains. Without it, you know how difficult it is to make better decisions.
Is it possible to offer better commercial construction services when you don’t have better data to back it up?
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It’s difficult to gain insights into your construction company when the data doesn’t back it up. After all, your data should be at the heart of your strategic decision making. It provides insights on things like how to improve your customer satisfaction. When you’re providing commercial construction services, good data leads to better knowledge and visibility into your company’s performance. But how do you offer better commercial construction services when it comes to improved data?
Here are some areas to consider when you want to provide commercial construction services to clients.
As with many industries, customer relationships revolve around clients, and your commercial construction company is no different. After all, your customers are your make-it-or-break-it, especially when it comes to your success and profits. When you use a specific practice—known as customer relationship management—it supplies you with important data to drive your business ahead.
What exactly is CRM?
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a combination of practices, strategies, and technologies companies use to manage and analyze their customer interactions and data throughout their lifecycles.
The goal of CRM is to improve customer retention and increase sales growth. When working in CRM, you need to ask yourself the following questions when it comes to managing this data:
If you can answer these questions, can you stay organized with the multiple data sets of information involving these existing and potential clients? Can you offer better commercial construction services if the proper CRM tool was available?
When you have problematic cost estimating, you’re leaving yourself open to a plethora of issues that will affect project bids after all the hard work you’ve put in to win over clients.
In dealing with spreadsheets, data is scattered to the wind. Project information is all over across multiple spreadsheets, platforms, locations, and individuals. Then having so many spreadsheets can result in potential errors that can leave the data essentially useless—and loses bid wins.
Take, for example, the construction company Emerson. They came up $3.7 million short in their estimation of the total cost of a contract bid. A cell in a spreadsheet for costs for electrical work wasn’t included in the spreadsheet formula that calculated the total cost.
Because of numerous spreadsheet problems, it’s difficult for employees to stay on the same page. When there’s poor data quality, this leads to the inability to offer better commercial construction services, as well as undesirable outcomes when it comes to new and existing clients that you work so hard to obtain.
Commercial construction companies are unable to properly integrate data when there are numerous issues. Data integration is a challenge when your multiple devices, platforms, spreadsheets, and individuals come into play. As a result, this situation affects estimates that lose bids and money.
What commercial construction needs is a way to extract, filter, and synchronize their data faster and more efficiently. When data is properly integrated, this reduces the time it takes to prepare and analyze that data. When the idea of automated data is considered, it helps eliminate the need to gather all that information from multiple sources. With all your data collected and integrated from a single source along with your CRM details, you can offer better commercial construction services to your clients.
Commercial construction companies are unable to produce proper reports without accurate data. This continues the knock-on effect from poor cost estimating and data integration. Without good data, reporting can become shoddy and unprofessional, which in turn has a negative impact on clients, especially when you’ve taken so much time to develop those relationships. You need to have detailed reporting to help you gain valuable business insights and ones that work to increase profits.
With the many things to consider, there should be tools that help you achieve more control over your commercial construction services.
ProEst software is digital, cloud-based solution for every commercial construction company’s needs. Its CRM capabilities enable better client relationships, so you can keep track of those client meetings and project discussions.
ProEst’s cost estimating provides you with the ability to receive proper project data as all your teams are on the same page. Project data is no longer scattered and information is seamlessly integrated into project management platforms such as Procore.
Reporting also becomes less of a hassle with professional standard report templates and customizable reporting functionality to view your estimate detail plans. You can produce a wide variety of high-quality reports like labor reports, estimate summaries for internal use, and materials lists for vendors. By offering better commercial construction services, you have no difficulties in presenting better data to those potential or existing customers you’ve worked so hard to obtain.
You can’t make proper decision-making when data is scattered about. Without it, you’re unable to gain valuable insights to obtain new clients and keep your existing ones. You need a combination of solid customer relationship management, cost estimating, data integration, and reporting tools to offer commercial construction services. With ProEst, you leverage all the project data you need, and no longer have to worry about it being 5:00 and not knowing where your data is any longer.
ProEst is a cloud-based pre-construction estimating platform that helps you create accurate estimates and digital takeoffs directly from blueprints quickly, allowing you to determine the most favorable rates for your company within the estimation process. There’s no guesswork involved. ProEst makes quality assurance in commercial construction projects estimation effortless. You won’t have to engage your entire team to be sure your numbers are accurate.
If you would like to learn more about how your commercial construction company can increase its profits and reduce miscalculations during the estimation process, reach out today and schedule a 1-on-1 walkthrough with one of our specialists!
