Don’t Limit your Techs to Just One Tool – or Just One Mobile Application
If you’ve been reading our blog for a while (thank you, by the way), you’ve heard ServiceTrade advocate a connected IT ecosystem of business operations applications for your customer service, accounting, inventory, CRM, payroll, email marketing and online reviews. There are modern, mobile solutions for all of these needs that work within an integrated system. […]
Don’t bring an operations knife to a customer service gunfight: Customer engagement must be the first priority in a connected world
“Why yes, I regularly purchase products from mail order catalogs” said no one in the last 20 years. Yet 20 years ago, most catalog retailers were thinking to themselves “If only we could improve our operations and reduce our cost of delivery, print, and call centers, we will outprice the competition and really rake it […]
Stop Texting. Start Messaging!
On several occasions, I’ve walked into a meeting with dispatchers, schedulers, and service managers who were glued to their phone texting with their technicians in the field. Why should the office staff use a tiny keyboard on a phone to update and respond to the techs when they have a full size keyboard and monitor at […]
Password Headaches? Some Simple Advice to Ease the Pain
Cloud applications are like banks: Your money is much safer under lock and key at the bank than it is under your mattress because anyone can “hack your house.” Bank security is as good as it gets, but like a bank, your data is only as secure as the keys to the vault; your password(s). […]
Automate Collections With InvoiceSherpa
In today’s connected world, new online services are popping up each day to improve the connections between you and your customers. One connection that is critical is the payment connection, and we found a cool app called InvoiceSherpa to help you. This fantastic product helps service contractors better manage their invoices and boosts cash flow by […]
Looking for Software Innovations? Look for Loosely Coupled Integration
ServiceTrade integrates with any other application you might find necessary to run your business through what we call “loosely coupled integration.” What this basically means is that the two (or 3 or 4 or more) applications DO NOT SHARE the same database. Instead, data is synchronized across the applications in a manner that is based […]
The Rich Get Richer: Why Smart Service Contractors Make Smart Software Decisions
I have noticed an interesting trend with ServiceTrade customers: the large majority are already in the top 10% of the industry regarding both systems capability and typical service contractor metrics – growth, gross margin, net margin – when they first engage with us, yet they readily buy ServiceTrade (typically with only about 2 weeks of […]
Talk is Cheap, and a Picture is Worth 1600 Words
I get lots of comments from prospective customers about “going paperless” using tablets and smartphones. In many cases, however, they are talking about simply making the technicians in the field type character information into digital forms that otherwise would have been paper. Maybe if you are going to go “paperless” you should reconsider how you […]
Never Miss a Service – Managing Recurring Services
There are two keys to profitable service operations – job service density and job route density. I discussed job route density in a previous post entitled “Field Service Scheduling – Kill the “Where-wolf” that’s eating your profits.” Using a mapping tool simultaneously with a job scheduling calendar helps minimize drive time relative to work time. […]
Track the Truck? Track the Tech!
Fleet tracking has become very popular due to low cost GPS and software as a service (SaaS) solutions. I believe the same trends that are driving fleet tracking adoption – low cost/low hassle SaaS and real time feedback – will drive a new wave of technician tracking via the smartphone. Fleet tracking is an important […]