Three Ways HVAC Service Software Improves Field Visibility

If you feel that despite being heavily engaged with work, your HVAC business is not making desirable profits, then this can be because your field technicians are not putting their time into productive jobs. For increased profitability, your service team needs to attend maximum service-requests per day, and this requires improved capacity and high operational efficiency among the team members. If field technicians spend too much time to resolve a single service request then that's in a way blocking your profits. 

Are the field technicians working slowly; or are they not handy with the right kinds of tools and equipment; or for some other reasons they have low first-visit effectiveness; or is traveling taking a dig on their productive hours, it is important for you to drill down the reasons that may be undermining the operational competency of the team, and curbing the rate of their per-day successful jobs.

It is necessary to observe, recognize the reason, and realize the right solution to fix the underlying problems. In most cases, multiple reasons cause operational inefficiency and it is imperative to address all the possible reasons. 

HVAC service software is a comprehensive solution that can fix the field operations related challenges that might be causing reduced operational efficiency.

How HVAC service software  Functions?

In a field-oriented job, like that of HVAC services, lack of field visibility is the root cause from which other operational challenges stem up. Lack of field visibility keeps the back-office management team detached from the field activities, and thus workforce management becomes a complex job. Productivity monitoring, performance analysis, real-time collaboration, requirement analysis all become challenging to handle.    

HVAC service software is an apt tool that can offer adequate field visibility and thus the manager can streamline the workflow and ensure its timely execution. 

How HVAC software improves field visibility?

Real-time geo-tracking of locations: With the aid of the software, the manager can geo-track the field locations of the technicians on a real-time basis. He can have a birds-eye view of the travel routes of each technician, their check-in and check-out time into a job, their stops and halts, etc.

Thus, whenever, there is an urgent but Adhoc service request, he can promptly assign the job to the nearest available technician. This ensures a minimum turn around time. Also, to support the field technicians with prompt traveling, the software can plan the optimal route to job sites and considerably reduced the travel time by optimizing the routes, especially when multiple destinations are to be covered.  

Documented Collaboration: During the service cycle, there persists a need for seamless collaboration amongst the technicians, customers, supervisors, managers, and other stakeholders. Communication over phone calls doesn't create a trail for reference if conversions are not recorded. Moreover, not necessarily a team collaborates over a conversation only.

They collaborate through data sharing, messages, on-job queries, etc. To maintain transparency and accountability in the system, it is important to document the collaboration and interaction among the team members. The HVAC service software is ideal for keeping the collaboration documented as it facilitates automated communication in the form of updates, notifications, reminders, etc. Moreover, it stores the organizations’ data in a centralized location, so it is traceable who is accessing what information, or uploading or downloading what data.

Visibility of on-field monetary transactions: Too many monetary transactions happens on the field such as field technicians’ travel expenses, on-site payment settlement, vendor payments, etc. The practice of manually recording these on-field transaction details by the field agents and then feeding the data into the company’s accounting database is not a transparent and real-time process.

HVAC invoice software facilitates on-field invoice generation, and this digitally records all the financial transactions that happened on the field. The data gets updated on the system on a real-time basis, and thus the back-office accountant can keep track of the on-field financial activities.