How Compass Wave Works
Getting Started
Compass Wave is an easy-to-use, customizable, set-it-and-forget-it lead generator for your service industry business. We pride ourselves on getting you up and running within minutes, ready to start generating income with our proprietary estimating, invoicing, and scheduling tools. On that note, we compiled this page so you can find what you need to get started easily. To jump to a detailed description of a specific Compass Wave feature, just use the search bar at the top and click on one of the links at the leftsuggestions. If you need any help, feel free to contact support with the help button at the bottom right.
We have a whole playlist of tutorial videos available for you on YouTube. The applicable ones will be embedded here for your convenience.
Estimating
Compass Wave's signature feature is the estimate tool: a lead capturing machine crafted to drive interaction with prospects and sell them with immediate feedback. Learn more about how Compass Wave brings you paying customers.
Invoicing
Compass Wave also conveniently gives you the ability to charge customers that are already in your sales funnel by integrating with Stripe. See how easy it is to generate income with Compass Wave.
Scheduling
Gone are the days of paper calendars and endless sticky notes. Compass Wave gives customers the unique ability to block off times in your schedule and commit to regular appointments all by themselves. Discover Compass Wave's intuitive smart-scheduler.
Estimating
Compass Wave gives you the ability to collect information from your potential customers easily and provide them with immediate feedback in the form of an estimate. You start by signing up for Compass Wave and getting a unique estimate tool URL (this will just be given to you, and it'll look something like my-cleaning-service.compasswave.com
).
Putting this tool on your website or Facebook page is way easier than it sounds. Just copy the line below into your website's HTML code wherever you'd like it (feel free to ask for help with the orange button at the bottom right if this sounds scary).
<script src="https://compasswave.com/js/widget.js" data-key="my-cleaning-service"></script>
And that's it! That's all it takes to get up and running! You'll be collecting leads and generating profit in no time.
For you to maximize leads generated by Compass Wave, we've made sure that your potential customers can get an estimate easily and without any friction. Take a look at the chart below. From left to right, it explains the steps the estimate tool takes your prospects through.
Customizable Questions
Compass Wave features a unique question creation system! In the navigation at the left, under Tools, you'll see a tab named "Questions". If you're an existing user who doesn't see this, try going to Tools -> Widget Pages and turning the new widget on.
There, you can create your questions, view the ones you've already created, edit the questions and their cost drivers, and delete questions. Once you type in your question and description, select your type of question.
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Number inputs allows the user to type a number. The number they type will be multiplied by your cost driver and added to the total estimate.
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Radio questions let the user see all the options at once while only letting them choose one of them.
Have you used a cleaning service before?
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Checkbox questions let your user pick multiple choices, or none at all.
Pick which additional services you would like.
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Dropdowns questions are functionally the same as radio questions, but they're more condensed and are optimized for mobile screens.
This is what the Questions page looks like, fully expanded:
If you choose to make a number question, some of those fields will go away, since they aren't applicable. If you choose a radio, checkbox, or dropdown question, you can choose how each answer affects the total estimate. Typing an answer in the Possible Answers field and pressing Enter will put it in the Possible Answers dropdown on the left. Type your cost driver number in the next box, select from the next two dropdowns, and press Add Cost Driver. You'll see it pop up in the Answers box below like this:
Do that for every answer, and press Submit New Question. You'll be redirected to the View Questions Tab, which lets you see every question you've created as well as edit and delete them.
Widget Modules
Compass Wave uses an easy page-based system to build the estimate widget. You're given the power of small modules of functionality, allowing you to combine as many of them as you want and in almost any logical order. All you have to do is use the Tools -> Widget Pages page to organize them into your desired setup. For example, perhaps you'd like to keep your widget simple. In that case, just delete any pages that already exist, use the "Add Page" button to add two new pages, and drag these modules into them:
Note that some modules only display something, but don't have any functionality. Some other modules have only functionality, but they don't display anything to the user. Most modules are a mix of both. Just be careful, since anything that the module does (including saving information, sending emails, doing calculations) happens as the next page is loading. That means that if you have the "Send Customer Email" module on the last page, the customer will never get an email, since there is no next page to load. The takeaway: don't put any functionality on the last page.
You can create as complex of a widget as you'd like. Take, for example, this widget arrangement, which uses 18 modules:
Another important note: it may take some time to carefully assess what is necessary to put on your widget and how much friction you want to put your customers through just to get an estimate. You wouldn't want to spend all that time and lose your work, so remember to always press "Save Changes" at the top.
Invoicing
Compass Wave now supports invoicing! With very little setup, you'll be able to send invoices, take payments, and process your leads from start to sale right from Compass Wave! To get started, just head to the Integrations page and click the orange "Integrate With Stripe" button near the top. Follow through Stripe's integration process (don't worry, it's easy), which might involve creating an account with them. Once you're done, it'll send you back to Compass Wave to start invoicing.
How does your money get from the customer to you?
You create an invoice in Compass Wave with a cost breakdown of the services you performed for the customer.
In the View Invoices section, you type in the customer's payment information and press Charge.
Compass Wave will charge the customer and send the whole amount through Stripe into your account. Compass Wave doesn't charge any fees on these transactions. To find out more about Stripe's pricing plans, click here.
Stripe keeps track of your customers, payments, and subscriptions, and gives you the tools to easily create reports and withdraw your funds for easier business management.
Scheduling
Compass Wave now employs a custom-built artificial intelligence that helps your customers schedule appointments before they can even shop around. They can easily select a few days that work for them, get a few options from the scheduler AI, and lock in a time on your calendar with practically no effort. It reduces the customer's friction in their journey from curious to paid-in-full and drives more results than ever before. To get started, go to the Company tab under Settings and set your timezone:
After setting your timezone, click on the Manage Users tab at the left. Click on the New User drawer (it might be hiding at the bottom of the screen). It should look something like this:
You'll want to make sure that you add in a new user for every cleaner or cleaning team (don't worry, you won't be charged extra for them) and that you check the "Can this user accept appointments?" box when adding them. Once all of them are registered, our smart scheduler AI will be able to find slot in any of their schedules, giving your customers more flexibility.
The third step before beginning to take appointments is setting your minute multipliers. If that sounds confusing, don't worry, we can help you get it all sorted. The gist of it is: Compass Wave needs to know how long an appointment will take so it can figure out where it fits in your schedule. For each of the questions, you'll just need to define how much time their answer adds to the total.
For example, say it takes you 35 minutes to clean a 1750 sqft house, without any add-ons (so you aren't doing the windows, or cleaning the fridge, etcetera). You want to tell Compass Wave to block off those 35 minutes for a simple cleaning on an 1750 sqft house. Bear with us here, this is the tricky part. 35 divided by 1750 is 0.02. So in the Square Footage field under the Settings -> Calendar tab, we're going to put 0.02:
See, that wasn't too hard. We just gave Compass Wave a way of calculating how long an appointment will take based on square footage. Now let's define how many minutes to add for each add-on. Scroll down; you'll see all of the questions that you have on your estimate tool and all of the possible answers. Just a reminder: editing these will not affect the estimate cost. Those settings are under Tools -> Cost Drivers. Back to the calendar settings! Try adding 10 extra minutes per occupant. See if you can do it by yourself on this page, or look at the solution below.
See, it's getting simpler. To add 10 minutes per occupant, you just scroll down to the "How many occupants?" question and type in "10". Hopefully it's starting to become intuitive. Before you start taking appointments, go through each question on this page and add fill in the appropriate number (you can use up to two digits after the decimal point).
Now, scroll down to the bottom of that page and set your company's working hours. Compass Wave doesn't want to schedule appointments when you aren't working, so make sure to set the times that you'll be around and ready to clean. With the same form, you can also set exceptions to your hours. For example, maybe you typically work Monday to Friday, 9AM to 5PM, but on the last two weeks of the year, you only work Mondays and Thursdays from 10AM - 6PM. Compass Wave gives you the flexibility to create an exception like that with the form at the bottom of the Settings -> Calendar page.
We're on the last step! Just a quick note: You don't have to do this one if you'd like to do all the scheduling yourself. But if you would also like the customers to be able to schedule appointments themselves from the widget, then continue:
Go to Tools -> Widget Pages, and add the following modules to your widget somewhere:
- Select Available Days: shows the customer a calendar for them to pick which days they are available for appointments.
- Select Available Times: lets the customer pick between early morning, morning, afternoon, evening, and night appointments. If an appointment during their specified time isn't available, it'll show them all appointments that day.
- Choose Booking Recurring: lets the customer choose how often their appointment should recur.
- Get Appointment Possibilities: shows the customer some slots in your schedule based on the length calculated by the multipliers and the choices made by the customer in the previous three modules.
- Book Appointment: actually books the appointment at the slot the customer chose.
If you need help with this step, go back up to the Modules section to review how to build the widget. Experiment with each of these modules
Finished with setup? Great! Go to the Calendar page and click "Turn The Calendar On". Congratulations! You can now start scheduling appointments.
Creating Appointments
Compass Wave makes it easy to block off times in your schedule and connect those appointments with prospects you've captured with your estimate tool. While you can do all of this manually (this section will show you how), you can also add pieces to your estimate widget to let customers set up appointments by themselves with the help of our smart scheduler artificial intelligence.
To create an appointment manually, go to the Calendar page. It's in the navigation at the left. Here's what the page looks like on a smartphone when the calendar is on (if it isn't set up yet, please take a look at the previous section called First Steps):
Just open the New Appointment drawer at the bottom of the page and select an estimate to tie this appointment to. Scroll down further and choose the appointment's length and how often it should recur. Click the orange "Find Availability" button to pull a list of appointment possiblities. Click on one, and the new appointment should show up in your daily schedule above.
Integrations
Compass Wave doesn't do everything; it's not meant to. That doesn't mean you have to turn elsewhere though, since we've designed Compass Wave to work with other programs to boost your productivity and expand the possibilities of what you can do with our software. Take a look at a few of the integrations we've added:
Your business is guaranteed to grow when your customers are excited to share their positive experiences with you. NiceJob facilitates this by not only encouraging prospects from Compass Wave to leave positive reviews, but keeping track of your customers' overall responses to your services.
Send Jim is the perfect software to organize your prospects into mailing lists for physical marketing and advertising. Compass Wave will use limited-access credentials to securely send new prospects there for you to use.
Stripe is a payment platform that makes it incredibly easy to begin collecting money from your customers. It's all part of the Invoices section above.
Zapier connects Compass Wave with thousands of other programs by sending out messages when triggered. Compass Wave triggers those messages when prospects are received, and you can pass them along to all sorts of third-party services for endless possibilities.
Nice Job
Your business is guaranteed to grow when your customers are excited to share their positive experiences with you. NiceJob facilitates this by not only encouraging prospects from Compass Wave to leave positive reviews, but keeping track of your customers' overall responses to your services.
First, go to NiceJob and login. If you don't have an account yet, go to https://nicejob.grsm.io/compasswave and sign up.
Second, go to Settings -> Company.
In a new tab, in Compass Wave, log in and go to Tools -> Widget Pages. Move the Push To Nice Job module wherever you'd like it.
Copy the Company ID and Company SDK public key from NiceJob into the module in Compass Wave, then click Save Changes.
SendJim
Send Jim is the perfect software to organize your prospects into mailing lists for physical marketing and advertising. Compass Wave will use limited-access credentials to securely send new prospects there for you to use.
SendJim can easily gather all of your prospects to a single location for further processing. Under the Radius Bomb tab in SendJim, you can create a shape on the map and easily separate some prospects from others. This gives you the ability to engage only with the exact subset of your customer base that you'd like to engage with.
After getting your shape set, Send Jim can figure out how many addresses are inside that shape and give you the tools to send physical mailers to the residents, including or excluding your prospects from Compass Wave.
Zapier
Zapier connects Compass Wave with thousands of other programs by sending out a message to those other programs for every incoming prospect. Those messages can be passed along to all sorts of third-party services for endless possibilities.