By BRAD HAWKINS, Senior Vice President, ServicePower
The building technologies marketplace is evolving fast and changing how we think about property management. With a projected market value of $600 billion by 2025 and construction spending on the rise, heating, venting and air conditioning (HVAC) professionals are always on call to install, repair or replace the equipment needed to power and operate modern buildings and homes.
As demand increases for HVAC field service engineers, technology can help mitigate overbooking, save on costs and improve customer relationships. Here’s a few ways in which customer relationship management (CRM) and field service management (FSM) software can help:
Improve operational efficiency
Engineers who deliver, install, repair, replace or remove HVAC technology are always in the field servicing customer calls. The only way to optimize field service jobs is to leverage artificial intelligence-based, real-time scheduling software. By analyzing the needs of the customer and work order against technician location, inventory and skill set, HVAC providers can prevent overbooking, schedule gaps and costly downtime, and low first-time fix rates.
Intelligent optimization can also assist HVAC providers in ensuring that that equipment and systems are upgraded with newer, more efficient models before they reach the end of their lifecycle, saving future appliance and energy costs while reducing downtime between system installations. Automated AI-based scheduling can help installation and delivery but also the routine maintenance of building technologies that is necessary to fulfill safety precautions and regulatory compliance measures – all proactive services that can help lead to a better customer experience.
Engage customers
When requesting any type of service or maintenance, customers have come to expect hold lines and long processing delays. While AI-based scheduling will increase the rapid response rate to customers’ requests, this improvement is lost on the customer without clear communication. Customers are often kept in the dark when it comes to the work timelines of equipment dealers, service contractors or original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and are given broad and inconvenient service windows or various support numbers to call.
Businesses within the HVAC industry have the ability to leverage FSM software to engage customers more effectively. Integrated customer portals allow clients to request service, schedule appointments, track technicians enroute, and log photos and equipment issues from their mobile devices or computers.
Technology performance in practice
Ideal Boilers is one of the leading manufacturers of domestic and commercial central heating boilers within the United Kingdom. The company uses ServicePower’s scheduling engine to schedule and dispatch technicians, and according to Customer Services Director Chris Jessop, it has been fundamental to their service delivery.
“It allows us to give truth-based appointments to our customers and has allowed us to drive an efficiency level from when we started to now of over a 200% improvement. It’s absolutely critical and is used every single day of the year.”
Ideal Boiler’s success with their FSM software was also heavily dependent on the product's interoperability with the company’s CRM Salesforce. The scheduling module and customer service portal are agile and easy to integrate into Ideal Boiler’s systems, avoiding unnecessary backlog and learning curves that come with multiple platform usage.
About the Author
Based in McLean VA, the author is SVP of Products and Solutions at ServicePower and oversees product management and pre-sales engineering. A long-time veteran in the world of field service technology, he now has more than 20 years of experience in workforce management software.