Recently LMN made the news when the company announced the launch of its Estimating Marketplace. The company is back at it again with the introduction of its Customer Portal. LM caught up with LMN co-founder and CEO Mark Bradley to explain the new service.
“The Customer Portal is a product for landscapers to do business with their customers in a little bit different way, and meet the consumer’s needs in this day and age,” Bradley says. “People are used to making payments and making service requests, seeing their statements and checking the schedule, all these things — people are used to doing that from an app, or from the comfort of their own home where they don’t need to call service providers. What we’ve created is a product that landscapers can add to their own websites that allows their customers to do all those things.”
The Customer Portal can be added to the existing websites of LMN customers. Bradley stresses that it was important that the portal looks like it belongs there, like it was created specifically for the already existing website, and it’s a look the company has achieved.
Bradley says the Customer Portal, as well as the Estimating Marketplace, were created based on customer feedback. They both became even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic and were pushed out sooner than previously anticipated to assist LMN customers in reducing face-to-face contact with customers.
“We did expedite the launch by about two months,” Bradley says. “Our customers can price jobs, send contracts, receive contracts, change orders … and issue invoicing, collect deposits, provide service verification, all through the system, so they can avoid face-to-face interactions. That’s a big reason why we pushed the development and launched the product.”
Along with reducing face-to-face interaction, the Customer Portal also allows landscapers to “manage their customers” by reducing emails and phone calls, Bradley says. He is enthusiastic about the Customer Portal as well as the Estimating Marketplace.
“We’ve gone back-to-back on the Customer Portal and the Estimating Marketplace,” Bradley says. “(These are) two big product launches. They were both high on the list for our customers.”
Bradley says the Estimating Marketplace is a key to contractors reducing the “flow interruption” of finding material costs when bidding on jobs. The Estimating Marketplace tells the contractor what the real-time price is of the necessary materials, reporting prices from the contractor’s local suppliers.
“It’s all built into one platform, it eliminates the need for all the emails and phone calls, and it automates the workflow,” Bradley says. “So the customer gets a better experience, and the contractor gains a lot of efficiencies, in that they don’t have people driving around, delivering estimates, meeting with people for basic requests. The best is it allows contractors to collect credit card payments automatically once approved. That’s bogged contractors down, to issue invoices in a timely way… now it’s done automatically.”
It also might encourage suppliers to give the contractor a good price on materials, Bradley says.
“We have a very large base of contractors,” Bradley says. “I think it is appealing to the suppliers to capture that business. I think it does force them to put their best foot forward when they’re pricing materials.”
