The question posed above is one that you may have mulled over a lot recently, especially if you are a pest control company always looking to push things and achieve great things. Even just keeping things rolling along as they always have, involves keeping up with your rivals. The broad answer to the question is yes, but that does not mean it will be any time soon that we have pest control companies that do not rely on human staff.
Let’s look at some of the tech already being used by London pest control teams, including drones and forms of AI or Artificial Intelligence.
Drones
Drones are becoming more popular and elevating above their expensive toy and airline disrupting descriptors. It is still early days but several companies have started to use drones or at the very least testing out drones for use in professional home pest inspections. Obviously, the biggest hurdles to the use of drones is the expensive upfront investment required and learning how to fly the drone and is legally permitted to fly commercially.
However, thanks to their ability to provide incredibly clear views and footage of the harder-to-reach places in homes, such as concealed roof entry points and the roof. This can help to save a lot of time and effort when more traditional methods are used. A London based pest control firm, Diamond’s pest inspection advice is that you need one, whether you choose a company that has a drone or not, is up to you.
Optimising Routes
In the past, the process of manually planning out the best routes has been a bugbear for pest removal companies. In recent years, though, many of these companies have appreciated the value of using automated route planning engines. It’s worth noting that these route optimisation tools are not a complete replacement for humans.
Humans after all have useful local expertise and knowledge of the area. However, what they are designed to do is reduce the more complicated and time-consuming aspects of routing, so that pest control technicians can make more productive use of their time.
Lead Management and Marketing Automation
Pest control firms, like other businesses, often find it difficult to identify cost-effective lead generation techniques. Further to this, the process of efficiently and effectively converting those leads into actual customers can be an even more difficult process. This is particularly true for SMEs that do not have their own fully focused sales team.
This is where marketing and sales automation comes in handy. These can trigger emails designed to nurture undecided prospects, avoid losing any valuable leads and improve the rate of conversion through the automation of the workflow.
For many businesses, the thought of employing the use of AI is a daunting one, because it offers with it the theory that many of these bots could replace humans. Fortunately, it seems for the moment in that in the pest control industry, a service-orientated sector, the very notion that artificial intelligence could steal jobs from humans is not going to happen any time soon.
Rather than being afraid of these emerging technologies, it is more productive for London companies to embrace them because they are a great way for companies to stand out from the crowd.