By David Crary 
An office manager’s job may look simple from the outside, but the complexity of what they handle on a daily basis is actually a lot of work. I think most people often think an office manager is kind of like a secretary: they sit at a front desk, answer phones and relay messages, and mix in some paper shuffling from time to time.
In reality, an office manager’s role contains so many more parts, especially if they are the entire office staff. When I owned my irrigation business, we only had one person in the office. She took on many different roles and basically helped to keep us running in an efficient manner. I can honestly say we wouldn’t have survived without our office manager.
It is true the office answers the phones, but that also means they are in some ways in customer support. They deal with the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to phone calls. Usually the office person is the first to encounter an upset customer and therefore must help to ease the situation. Besides filtering calls all day long, they are also handling scheduling and routing, calls from technicians with questions ranging from the property to what number they need to call once on site. An office manager is a complete CRM in one person. Chances are they answered the call the first time a customer called in and they continue to pick up the phone, learning the ins and outs of each individual customer.
Whether you are a business owner or working in the office yourself, there are ways to make an office manager’s life easier. The solution is irrigation scheduling software.
- Elimination of paperwork
One of the biggest struggles that comes along with running an office is the paperwork that goes along with it. There are work orders, invoices, customer contact records, along with any post-its stuck on the computer screen as a reminder for something in the future. That is a lot of paper shuffling when it comes time to find answers.
With irrigation scheduling software, paperwork can be completely eliminated from an office manager’s daily tasks. Everything is done electronically from the time a customer calls in until the work order comes back to the office to be invoiced. Think of the time it takes to search through piles of paper to find the one piece you want. Customers want immediate answers, not a call back or a “Hold please.” - Complete CRM
Think of how many times a day a customer calls in with a quick question or a tech calls in with a question about the customer. Besides calls for appointments, we can guess most are from these two sources. Customers are the life source of a company. Without them, the company fails. So gathering, organizing, and accessing data in an efficient and effective matter is crucial to the success of a field service business.
Field service software gives the office staff complete coverage of customer relationships. They can access history and notes from the customer’s site with a few clicks, allowing for quick and efficient responses. Irrigation scheduling software allows the office staff to monitor exactly where a technician is based on mapping and the schedule given to the technician. This gives the customer a realistic time frame if they call in wondering where the tech is. - Simple Scheduling
Most of an office manager’s time can be spent setting up an efficient schedule that will appease the customer, the technician, and the company’s bank account. In reality, scheduling a customer should take minutes at most.
Using field service scheduling software, such as HindSite, allows the office to pull up a customer’s information, see which tech is available for the job, and set the correct amount of time needed to complete the job. It eliminates the paper-shuffling and allows for almost automatic scheduling.
Irrigation scheduling software can do more than these three things, but we know that those of you still using paper work to manage an office don’t have tons of free time on your hands to read a long blog post. The best recommendation is to do your research and once you select a system, to start small. Don’t rush into understanding the entire system, just take it one day at a time. In the beginning, it may take some of the company’s time to implement the system, but the elimination of stress and headaches for a more efficient office manager – and business - is a huge pay off.
Once you have your office manager all set up, it’s time to move on to the field. Not sure where to start? No problem! Check out the 6 Rules for an Awesome Service Department.