After years of struggling with paperwork and inefficiencies, and months of researching the perfect product, you have finally decided to buy service scheduling software. Congrats! This is one of the best decisions you can make for your business and a step towards growing and bettering the company.
However, have you ever gone ahead and made a big purchase, only to find out the system did not cover all of your bases? This happened to me just last week actually. I purchased a gym membership from a high end facility in my neighborhood. When I went to attend a cycling class the facility was offering, I found out the package I had bought did not cover certain classes during certain times. Turns out they had many people who came and paid just for the cycling class, and since it was a highly popular class, they didn’t allow users with memberships into the class without paying for it separately from their membership. I can understand they make more money off of the pay per class people, but I still felt cheated that I was paying a membership fee, but then had to pay additional fees to attend special classes. Lesson of the day: Read the fine print and ask any and all questions before you buy.
Before you spend the money, there are four things you will want to ensure your field service software has:
- Scheduling – I know what you are thinking, “No shit, Sherlock.” When I say scheduling, however, there is more that your software should have a simple calendar with appointments on it.
Can you mass schedule with the program? If you have contracts are you able to schedule according to how the contracts are set up? Can you add techs to certain work orders scheduled?
Think of your day to day process when it comes to scheduling and even think of the rare instances. Can the system help you in any area of scheduling, or can it only show you a day’s work on a calendar? - Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – For a scheduling system to be even remotely successful, it needs some sort of customer relationship management to go with it.
You need a program that can keep track of every interaction with the customer. Things such as history, special needs or comments for the customer or their property, and just general knowledge such as phone, email and address are all crucial things to have when a customer calls in for an appointment.
You must have a way to track everything that happens with a customer from the first time they call in for an appointment, to everything that happens on their property, and on to every bill. When it comes time to schedule, your office staff will be glad to have this record. - Billing– Since billing comes at the end of the day, week or month, it is usually forgotten about when you are just trying to solve the day to day inefficiencies. However, if you can schedule a work order, your software better be able to help you bill for that work.
Plain and simple, you want to ensure the software program you download will also communicate with whatever billing system you may have so you are not stuck manually entering all of the information you just worked so hard to make paperless. Otherwise, what is the point of installing the system? - Field Compatibility – A scheduling system alone can be beneficial to any field service business, but the transferring of the information to the field electronically is invaluable to both techs and office staff alike.
When techs are able to see their schedule, a few things happen. One, they know how long a job should take, allowing for a more efficient crew and day. Two, they are able to see any changes to their schedule automatically. No more missed phone calls from the office when a schedule changes. And third, they are able to see any notes the office makes regarding the customer as well as the history of the customer. This makes available all of the information a tech will need to provide excellent customer service.
The office and field both benefit from the elimination of double entry and information “falling through the cracks”.
While it can be exciting to purchase a new solution for your business, you will want to ensure that your software has at least these four features (although we personally believe field service software should offer many more valuable features besides just these four).
Still on the fence about whether service scheduling software is a good investment for your business? Check out our Green Industry Benchmark Report, where Green industry professionals state how software helped grow their business. The report is filled with a lot of other valuable data as well and is beneficial for anyone in the Green industry.