Accepting Tips from Customers: How and Why Employee Tip Collection Works
When you go above and beyond for your clients, you deserve to be recognized and rewarded. So does your team.
You probably have clients who want to show their appreciation by tipping your employees. If you’re not making it easy for clients to tip, you could be losing out on opportunities to motivate your employees, delight more clients, and build a stronger business.
In this article, we’ll explain how collecting tips can give your business a competitive advantage, and how to start collecting tips easily with Jobber.
Which service industries accept tips from clients?
It’s not just hospitality workers who receive tips. Many other industries get extra compensation for exceptional work, including:
- Handyman services
- Junk removal
- Landscaping
- Lawn care and lawn maintenance
- Pressure washing
- Window washing
- Residential cleaning
- Pool and spa service
No matter the industry, you’ll have clients who want to show appreciation when you go the extra mile for them.
Skip ahead to: How to accept employee credit card tips
The benefits of offering employee tips
1. Attract and retain top performers
People want to work for a business where their efforts are rewarded. When workers can get tips for delivering exceptional service, they’re getting the recognition they deserve.
Collecting tips creates a workplace culture where workers feel valued and fairly compensated. This kind of business is able to attract and hire more top performers.
Consider your current employees, too. If they can’t reap the benefits of tips when working for you, they might look elsewhere—especially in today’s job market where there are more job opportunities than people to fill them.
2. Motivate your team (and yourself)
As a team member, every little bit counts towards supporting your livelihood. But beyond that, receiving employee bonuses for doing outstanding work motivates people to continue that hard work.
By collecting tips for your team, you’re incentivizing employees to do their best work on every job.
As a business owner, you also benefit directly from tipping—the extra cash you can earn from an existing client’s invoice will go towards your bottom line.
READ MORE: How to write an invoice: 7 easy tips to look professional and get paid faster
3. Keep your business running and growing
Tips can be vital for new businesses and those that are struggling to stay afloat financially.
Even if tipping isn’t as crucial for your business’s survival, you might struggle with unpaid invoices, slow payments, or other issues managing accounts receivable. Extra revenue from tips can provide a security cushion in those times.
You might also need that revenue to support new business initiatives, pay for new equipment, or grow your team.
All those initiatives can help you deliver better service to your clients. Clients who tip reap benefits for themselves!
4. Improve customer service and grow your business
When your team is motivated to deliver higher quality work, your clients will notice—and they’ll be more likely to come back for repeat business.
Those repeat clients will probably tip again, which will fuel your team with even more motivation to provide better customer service. It’s a cycle where everybody wins.
When it’s time to ask for online reviews, you’ll have more happy clients willing to give positive feedback, which is great for your reputation and sales.
The same goes for referrals: if a client loves your service enough to tip, there’s a good chance they’ll spread the word about your business to friends and family.
How can service businesses accept employee credit card tips?
It can feel uncomfortable asking for a tip, even if it’s essential to keep your business running. Tip collection using Jobber’s credit card processing feature makes it easy.
When you collect online payments with Jobber Payments, you can give your clients the option of adding a tip without having to ask for one in person.
It’s simple: clients can add 10%, 15%, 20% or a custom tip amount when paying invoices online through Jobber’s client hub.
Adding a tip (as a percentage or amount) is an optional step that clients see when selecting their preferred online payment method. It’s completely up to them.
This option makes the experience as easy as possible for clients without making them feel pressured, obligated, or burdened.
As a business owner, you have options, too. In Jobber, it’s easy to turn the tipping feature on when you’re ready to start collecting tips—and turn it off if you ever decide to pause tip collection.
Tipping should be a seamless part of the invoice payment experience. By letting your clients easily add a tip when paying invoices online, Jobber helps you provide an easy and pressure-free client experience for tipping.
READ MORE: Learn more about Jobber’s invoicing software
Properly track and distribute tips
When a client leaves a tip with their payment, you’ll see a record of it in your client’s billing history in Jobber.
You’ll also be able to track which team members are receiving tips, and how much they’re getting. For example, the Invoices Report shows you the team members who performed the work on the visits linked to each invoice as well as the value of the tips they received:
With this reporting, you’ll know who is delivering service that warrants a tip. Then you can distribute the right tip amount to the right team member.
You can also find tip records when you report on payments, transactions, and taxation in Jobber.
READ MORE: 30 small business tax deductions to save money when filing
Make the switch to easy, online tip collection
Collecting tips is a simple but powerful way for your business to benefit from doing fantastic work.
To gain all the benefits that tips can provide, your tip collection process needs to be seamless and stress-free for your clients and team.
Using Jobber Payments, you can grow your business by attracting, retaining, motivating, and rewarding yourself and your team with easy tip collection.