Photo: Scherzinger Pest Control (Eric is in the foreground, and Kurt is in the background.)
ERIC: We need to start having our employees take more pictures during services. I think it can be a big selling advantage.
KURT: That sounds great, but there are a lot of issues I can see with it.
ERIC: There you go again, crushing all my good ideas. Get with the times! What issues could there possibly be?
KURT: Who is going to manage all the pictures coming in? What’s to say they are taking meaningful pictures? What happens when we miss something when taking pictures?
ERIC: Easily solved: There are apps that can help you manage the pictures and send them to the customer with action items for them to resolve. Then, like you always tell me, we will just have to develop a training protocol around it and hold employees accountable for what they give us.
KURT: What do we do when they are taking so many pictures that it clogs up the memory on their phones, and the apps we need for operating don’t work efficiently? What happens when they get in the habit of taking pictures from the same angle and the photos become meaningless?
ERIC: Did you even hear what I just said? They have apps for that, too.
KURT: Is that your only reasoning? It sounds to me like all you want to do is push off managing our information to someone else again. Besides, how do “they have apps” that let you do all that?
ERIC: There are apps that will store your pictures in the cloud, so it won’t fill up the phone memory. They also help you manage and organize the pictures with keywords so you can find them in the future. We are even able to program apps that walk the employee through taking the correct pictures and will automatically send them to the customer.
KURT: Sounds to me like you have your head in the “cloud” with all this technology talk. Besides, all this probably costs a fortune!
ERIC: Man, I knew you were older than me, but I didn’t think you were so old school. I’m implementing this and I will show you how easy it is. This time I’m proving you wrong, Old Man.
KURT: Whatever, Millennial. Always wanting to take the easy way out…
Editor’s Note: Here’s a primer on photo ID best practices.
Good points made by both Kurt and Eric. I went into this story wondering what anyone could possibly have against digital photography in the pest control industry. Kurt schooled me on that and I now see this issue as more complex than just snapping a photo of a bug.