It’s a historic business model that has been successful for many in the HVAC industry, and for decades HVAC organizations have profited from keeping it very simple and letting the customers pay for the service. But now this historic business model is collapsing or under duress, largely due to the increase of costs in the service delivery field, the price of products, and the lack of workforce.
So now more than ever, field service organizations are having to justify their costs and reduce them as much as they can in order to squeeze out profit from field service delivery. For many in the HVAC field service space, that means rethinking how they go about delivering service and thinking of ways they can optimize their service department. It’s the main reason why many are turning to an HVAC field service software, as it’s becoming critical in the industry to cut down costs and boost revenue in order to maintain high-profit levels.
How HVAC field service software can optimize your service delivery
HVAC field service organizations can still maintain a service model of installing and attaching a service program, but in order to maximize the profit, they have to use an HVAC field service software to optimize their delivery. Here are some quick ways a software solution can optimize how your organization delivers service.
Subcontractor management
The HVAC industry is seeing a surge of subcontractor based organizations that utilize third-party vendors to do their work. They aren’t employing full-time technicians, but rather hiring a subcontractor when work is available. That way, during downtimes or slow seasons, they don’t have full-time technicians on the books. In an HVAC field service software, they can manage the on-boarding of subcontractors, push work orders to them using a mobile field service app, and complete payments, without leaving the software.
Scheduling and dispatching
Time is money and the time technicians are driving to a job site, or waiting for service calls is revenue a field service organization is losing. To grow revenue, sometimes it simply means that technicians need to take more calls during the day, and by having better scheduling and dispatching tools, dispatchers are able to do just that, by assigning technicians calls to a geographical area, offering routing instructions through mobile apps, and arranging their service calls to fit the most amount in within a typical workday.
Cutting back on administrative work
An area many in the HVAC field service industry are targeting is the amount of administrative work their technicians, and their back-office administrators, are doing. Paper-based work orders are being replaced with mobile apps connected to the HVAC field service software, limiting the time technicians are spending inputting parts, time, notes and quotes on to paper for someone at the office to transcribe. That also takes time as well, and the back-office staff is being tasked with taking everything from the field and building legacy databases, producing invoices, and reviewing work orders. With an HVAC field service software, it’s taking a lot of those administrative duties away from back-office staff and either reducing the amount of staff needed, or allowing them to focus on other tasks.
The HVAC industry is changing and so too must the organizations evolve in delivering service to customers. It’s not just a simple method anymore or sells a product and attach service, as with plenty of service options, lower rates, and rising costs in buying products, customers are going for the cheapest price and the fastest service. By optimizing your service delivery with an HVAC field service software, you can retain those customers, open new opportunities for revenue and start to control your costs and remain competitive.
