How to customize your CRM for your in-home computer repair business

A potential customer recently came to us with questions about how to set up his CRM. He runs an in-home computer repair service across the pond in Europe, and needed to know how our system could be molded to fit his business' workflow. In walking through his company's typical procedures, I came to the realization that Less Annoying CRM is perfect for a small team of in-home computer repair technicians. Think "Geek Squad," but local. Local's always better!

That customer's business had their own quirks which I won't replicate here -- both for the sake of his privacy and because they probably don't apply to most businesses in the computer repair industry. A more generalized opportunity setup follows.

Pipeline Type #1: Service Call

This opportunity will track a service call from appointment booking through completion, with the following possible statuses:

1. Appointment scheduled
2. Fix in progress
3. Problem resolved
4. Customer invoiced (closed)
5. Appointment cancelled (closed)

When a customer calls with a problem, you can attach an opportunity to their contact record in the CRM and book the appointment on your calendar or the calendar of another tech at your computer repair business. There are a number of custom fields as well, including a place to record the nature of the problem, an area for the technician to record any notes from the field (including equipment used and resolution details), and fields to note billable hours and distance traveled.

All of this information is editable from the field via a smartphone, so the assigned rep can easily make sure everything is documented so the customer can be accurately billed, and a full history of the resolution will be logged permanently in the CRM.

Pipeline Type #2: Billing

This opportunity type is pretty standard -- once a repair is completed and closed, you attach a billing invoice, which will let you track the steps of receiving payment from a customer. I've included a few custom fields to track the amount of the invoice and the due date, but you could certainly add more if you have custom information you need to log, or if you want more detail logged in the CRM.

Remember, you can also upload a copy of the invoice to the contact's record in the CRM, so you'll always have that around, too!

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