Many businesses cobble together things like whiteboards or shared online calendars. But those solutions have their own problems, leaving most businesses struggling to schedule efficiently.
Enter irrigation scheduling software. At its core, irrigation scheduling software delivers an electronic interface to your scheduling woes, essentially a calendar on steroids. If you’re in the market for irrigation scheduling software, here are five features to look for to ensure an optimal experience.
Drag and Drop Scheduling
Electronic scheduling is great, but what if a customer calls and you need to move their appointment to a different time?
Drag and drop scheduling simplifies the entire process so you can quickly move a customer if the need arises. It saves time, improves efficiency and makes your entire team more productive. If your solution doesn’t have intuitive drag-and-drop scheduling, it’s time to look at other solutions.
Mass Scheduling
As an irrigation business, you know you’re busiest in the spring during startups, and in the fall during winterizations. Smart irrigation businesses schedule everyone, gaining routing efficiencies along the way (more on that later), instead of letting the customer choose the date and time. Then, they manage exceptions, those customers who your proposed date and time doesn’t work.
Given that workflow, it’s important that you look for a solution that enables you to drop customers into a “pending” bucket, and then schedule them in a mass fashion in the most efficient manner possible. There’s a lot of field service scheduling software solutions out there, but if it doesn’t fit into the way you operate your irrigation business, it may not make you more efficient.
Smart Routing
Our owner always relates a story about his irrigation service business that illustrates the point of routing techs intelligently. He had a technician whose territory was near his house, which happened to be 30 miles from the office. Every day he would drive the 30 miles to the office, and then 30 miles back to his territory to do the work. Once David implemented HindSite, he was able to get a couple more service calls per day out of his tech.
You can do the same if you route your technicians intelligently. Scheduling and routing go hand in hand. As an example, imagine a customer calls your office for an irrigation service call. With irrigation scheduling software like HindSite, you can quickly see when you have a technician within a mile or two of that customer, and schedule them much more efficiently than you could with a whiteboard.
Integrated Contact Database
A lot of businesses think they can run a business on free calendar apps like Google’s Calendar. Perhaps you can schedule electronically, but you can’t run a business on it.
Why? Because the key to scheduling quickly and efficiently is having a tightly integrated contact database. Also called a field service CRM, that contact database simplifies scheduling because you can quickly lookup customers, records, etc. And most field service CRMs also enable you to add custom fields - like the number of zones on a customer’s property or the type of irrigation controller they own.
All of that information is great to have when a customer calls asking for service. You can even access a complete customer history so you know precisely what you’ve done on a customer’s property.
A Field App
I mentioned earlier that HindSite’s owner, David, was able to gain a couple of service calls per day out of one of his techs by routing him more intelligently. Instead of making him come into the office, he armed him with a field device (in this case a Palm Pilot) and sent his schedule to him on the device.
Technology has changed a lot since those days, with smartphones making everything more efficient and easy to use. Many business owners don’t realize it, but a field app is the key to eliminating paperwork and making your entire operation more efficient.
Why? Because all that paperwork is created to send information between the office and the field. If you can do that electronically with mobile field service software like HindSite’s field app, you can eliminate paperwork and improve office-field communication at the same time.
Want to learn more about what to look for in irrigation business software? Then download our free eBook, Irrigation Software Buyer’s Guide, today!
