TowingBossPro Blog — Accounts & Customers

Tags for Tow Accounts: Sorting Customers So You Can Act on the List

A customer list with five hundred names is not very useful on its own. You cannot call all of them, you cannot treat them all the same and you cannot learn much by scrolling through it. What you need is to pull the right slice at the right time: every body shop, every fleet you have not heard from, every account in the north end of town.

Impound and Storage Customers: Handling Vehicle Owners With Care covered vehicle owners in storage. This article covers the simplest tool for organizing every kind of customer: tags.

What Tags Are For

A tag is a label you attach to a customer. TowingBossPro supports tags, and a customer can have several. The point of a tag is to let you find and act on a group of customers later.

Tags are different from custom fields. A tag answers a yes-or-no question — is this a body shop? — and is built for grouping. A custom field holds a specific value, like a purchase order format or unit number. Most tow companies need a small set of each.

If you cannot imagine pulling a list by a tag and doing something with it, you probably do not need that tag.

Tag by Account Type

The most useful tags for a tow company start with account type. Tag each customer as one of the types you serve:

• Motor club
• Police or municipal
• Body shop
• Dealership
• Property manager
• Fleet
• Retail

A customer can carry more than one type tag when it genuinely does two things — a dealer with its own body shop, for example. But be careful: if half your customers have three type tags, the type tags stop telling you anything.

With those tags in place, you can see how many of each type you serve, pull every body shop for a holiday thank-you, or compare work by type in reports.

Tag by Service Area and Priority

If you cover a large area, tag customers by zone or town. When you add a truck in a new area or want to visit accounts on a specific route, the tag pulls the list.

Equipment tags can be useful for some companies: accounts that regularly need a rollback, heavy-duty work or a particular kind of truck. When a dispatcher sees the tag, they know what to send without asking.

Priority tags help too. Mark your most important accounts so dispatchers know to treat their calls with extra care, and so you remember to check in with them regularly. Keep the definition clear — "top account" should mean something specific, like the accounts that send the most work.

Tag by Status

Status tags track where a relationship stands:

• New account — first few months
• Quiet — has not called in a while
• Slow payer — invoices tend to run late
• Lead — not yet a customer

Set a reminder to review status tags monthly. It takes a few minutes, and the act of reviewing often prompts the right action: a call to a quiet account, a conversation with a slow payer, a thank-you to a new account that has been sending steady work.

Status tags change over time, so review them. A "new account" tag that is still there two years later is just clutter.

Keep the Tag List Short

The fastest way to make tags useless is to have too many. If every dispatcher invents their own, you end up with "body shop," "Body Shops," "collision" and "BS" all meaning the same thing. Decide on your tag list, write it down and stick to it.

Give one person ownership of the tag list. When someone wants a new tag, they ask that person, who decides whether it is needed or whether an existing tag already covers it. That one habit prevents most tag clutter.

A good rule: if a tag has fewer than a handful of customers and no plan to use it, remove it. Tags should make the list easier to use, not harder.

Tags Feed Reports and Outreach

Tags become really valuable when combined with reports. Reports by account show what each customer sends and pays; tags let you roll those numbers up by type, area or status. You may find that fleets send less work than you thought, or that a particular area is growing.

Tags also drive outreach. Pull every quiet account and give each one a call. Pull every body shop before the busy season and drop off cards. Tags are a small feature with a big effect on towing account management software. Next, we look at their partner: custom fields.