HVAC & Field Service Software

How Does Field Service Software Benefit HVAC Companies?

HVAC companies face many problems in their day-to-day operations that cause unnecessary stress and difficulties for field technicians. Regardless of size, most HVAC companies have customers calling in with emergencies. These situations are often stressful, and customers demand high levels of customer service to be satisfied. HVAC companies also have workers with varying levels of skill and expertise. This can cause trouble in sending the right team of people to the right job. Finally, HVAC businesses are like any other business, they want to grow! While employees may want to work with what they are passionate about, they must also perform some tasks that will help the business grow. Let’s take a deeper look at these problems and figure out what can be done!

Customer Satisfaction

Difficult customers exist in all industries but are more common in some than others. There are many reasons why customers might be difficult. In the HVAC industry, most reasons for customer unhappiness aren’t the technician’s fault, but they must deal with the consequences. Having a customer call up in sweltering heat while their air conditioning is broken doesn’t always lead to the nicest of conversations, but they have a problem that must be fixed. Often the customer doesn’t understand how big the job is and their frustration mounts when they see the repair costs.

How should you deal with situations like these? Perhaps you can avoid the problem in the first place. Planning preventive maintenance for the systems you install will help keep your customers happy, increase the trust they have in your business and ensure they always have peace of mind. Another way to diffuse the situation with customers in strife is to keep them informed and provide rapid responses. In a Microsoft Customer Service report, ”68% of customers have a more favorable view of brands that offer or contact them with proactive customer service notifications”. Constant communication will ease the pains of your customer and keep your customers happy and loyal to your business.

Transparent HVAC Billing Increases Satisfaction

Customers appreciate clear and understandable invoices. Transparent billing helps them see where costs come from, preventing feelings of being blindsided by large invoices. This reduces complaints directed at your service technicians and service desk.

Rather than reducing prices or waiving fees, which can hurt your bottom line, the best approach is to provide detailed, itemized invoices. Tracking all time and materials used on the job and presenting this information clearly eases customer concerns. Even if the total price remains unchanged, an itemized invoice gives customers a clear breakdown of the expenses, enhancing their understanding and satisfaction.

Scheduling Complex HVAC teams

It is no secret that HVAC technicians have expertise with many different systems, but that doesn’t mean they are versed in all systems that customers have problems with. Some jobs may take one technician to solve the problem, while other jobs require a large amount of manpower to meet timeframes or specialized skills. The solution is to get the right scheduling software for your HVAC business. Having a view of who has time for a specific job will make technician scheduling a breeze and reduce the workload of the dispatchers in the office. With scheduling software, a dispatcher can quickly optimize the schedules of HVAC technicians, lowering the scheduling times and ensuring that the right person is at the right job with the right tools.

ExpandIT Resource Planning map view on computer screen

Empower Dispatchers with Dispatch Software

Dispatchers are the backbone of your operations, ensuring everything runs smoothly and quickly. Using HVAC dispatch software for better tracking of technicians will enable dispatchers to schedule and dispatch service technicians as fast as possible to increase customer satisfaction. Using excel spreadsheets or pen and paper can work up until a certain point, but the workload can quickly become overwhelming and inefficient. An integrated scheduling and dispatching software solution provides dispatchers a graphical overview of where all technicians are, where job sites are located and a quick overview of the nearby technician’s current schedules. Dispatchers will be able to optimize travel times of service technicians, send techs important documents such as model schematics and quicken the communication between service techs and dispatchers.

Mobile Field Service Software with Offline Capabilities

While out in the field, service technicians need to keep themselves updated and need to send important documents back to the office. This can be a problem when internet connectivity is lacking, like when working underground, in the basements of buildings, or in rural areas where cell service is at a minimum. A mobile field service software that works both online and offline will help any HVAC business avoid the headaches of job delays when technicians cannot reach important documents. Field service software that has offline capabilities keeps all the functions while offline, and instantly syncs with the office when the service technician comes back into connectivity - quick and simple for everyone!

Growing your HVAC business

With any business experiencing growth, the teams grow bigger, more customers are calling for services, and organizing everything becomes chaotic. That is if you are not prepared for the growth. Having field service management software prepares your HVAC business to scale quickly and easily to meet demand. It allows technicians to be scheduled easily, optimizes routes for job sites, and digitalizes processes.

Mobile field service software can also help grow your business through upselling and getting more from current customers. Often, service technicians aren’t trained to upsell. Helping your service technicians with simple tools such as access to product and price lists while on the job can empower your technicians to become great salespeople without it feeling too forced. Including some upselling tactics, with the tools to assist it will improve your work order revenue, improve your business’s growth, and increase customer satisfaction.

Tracking your growth

When tracking the growth of your HVAC business, there are some key performance indicators (KPI) that are important to monitor. Most HVAC companies look at the bigger KPIs like revenue, gross margin, and customer satisfaction; but there are some KPIs that are important to track to give a better overview of your growth. Customer satisfaction can be hard to track and can be broken down into easier metrics, such as Response time, First-time fix rates, and Service duration. Customers will have higher satisfaction if their problems are fixed quickly and correctly, and these indicators are quantifiable and much easier to track.

Summary

There are many challenges that companies in the HVAC industry face, but there are some proven solutions to fix some of the problems. Field service software fixes many issues, providing multiple avenues for higher customer satisfaction, an easy way to manage and schedule complex teams, and a way to empower technicians to sell products easier. There is even more field service software can do, especially for the HVAC industry. Investigate the other benefits it can have for your business!

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