So, you’re looking for ways to increase your sales, and you’re interested in finding the best plumbing software. You clicked on this headline, so there’s a small part of you wondering just how much easier, faster, and accurately you could satisfy your clients. The good news is that you’re about to find out!
In this article, you’ll find out how the best software:
- Saves your field staff time for completing more jobs every day
- Increases payment flexibility
- Gives your plumbers instant access to your client’s account
- Makes service agreements easier to sell and manage
- Takes the guesswork out of multi-option quoting for a more streamlined client presentation experience
Use this article to discover how the best plumbing software can help grow your company’s bottom line.
1. Efficiency
Streamlining operations doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s possible to become more efficient without adding a mountain of work to your plate. Adding the best plumbing software to your business is a way to better serve your clients and give your staff the modern tools necessary to compete with the best.
Boost Team Communication
Team communication is an art form. It’s important to dispatch the right plumber for the right job.
Knowledge is power, and knowing who, when, and where to send your plumbers can differentiate you from your competition. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of resource allocation. Plumbing software can give you a leg up with a dispatch board that can help your dispatcher decide which plumber is best to send to which job.
Make your customers happy with on-time dispatch and plumbers who are knowledgeable of that client’s specific issues.
GPS tracking is also available within FieldEdge’s smart dispatch board. Know where your team is at all times and save yourself from hunting down people via frantic phone calls!
Routine-Task Automation
Letting plumbing software ease your burdens by automating constant or repeated tasks is a vital reason to adopt plumbing software into your operation.
Once you have the right software integrated into your plumbing business, you can automate various elements of your daily tasks regarding:
- Customer Notifications and Reminders
- Maintenance Service Agreements
- Cloud-Based Mobile Access
- Invoicing and Payments
- QuickBooks Integration
Let us show you just how much FieldEdge can do for your plumbing business! Book your FREE personalized demo today!
Performance Dashboards
A feature-rich plumbing software offers you great insight into the inner workings of your own company. For example, FieldEdge’s performance dashboards focus on the following areas:
Plumber and Office Staff Performance
With at-a-glance comparisons on key metrics, you can see which plumbers are performing well, and which might need additional coaching.
This includes metrics like:
- Customer Satisfaction
- Jobs Completed (Day/Week/Month)
- Rework Percentage (Work Needing Revisits)
- Field-Generated Quotes and Revenue
- Work Time vs Billed Time
Plus, office staff or dedicated customer-service representatives can benefit from call recording, so you can see how each employee performs on the phone with your clients. All available through an easy-to-navigate performance dashboard!
Overall Company Performance
As you grow your plumbing business, it becomes harder and harder to keep a constant eye on the health of your overall company performance.
Using the best plumbing software, you can keep an eye on the up-to-date health of your business. Monitor metrics like:
- Revenue
- Signed Maintenance Agreements
- Upcoming Agreement Expirations
This information is available to you in real-time, at all hours of the day and night, and you don’t even have to bug anyone to pull any reports for you!
Marketing Profitability
The effectiveness of each marketing campaign is another difficult metric to quantify without the help of software.
Digital marketing offers plenty of metrics and feedback, but you still need to know where to look. Use plumbing software to l keep your finger on the pulse of your marketing efforts. This will allow you to tweak and optimize your marketing plans as you go.
Using software, you’re able to track marketing metrics like:
- Marketing spend and ROI
- Conversion rates over time (Week/Month/Year)
- Reporting on which marketing channels are bringing in the most business
Be sure to read our fantastic ultimate plumber’s marketing guide for the best tips and tricks to supercharge your marketing plan.
2. Accuracy
Humans are amazing creatures. Our ability to comprehend meaning and understand complex concepts is second to none.
We do, however, often make simple mistakes.
The best plumbing software can be your knight in shining armor when it comes to catching these costly little errors. Let your staff do what they do best, and let your software handle the monotonous task of fact-checking and scrutinizing your data line-by-line for accuracy.
Instant Data Syncing
Entering, sorting and saving data is hard enough when there’s just one person managing all your data entry, but as soon as you have two or more people adding information, things get tricky.
Data overlap and lost revisions are among those things you might not consider early on. But as you grow, you can easily run into overlapping work, or worse, overwriting each other’s work.
Using plumbing software means everyone is working on the same set of data – no one is overwriting or confusing data entered by one person or another. You’ll have all your ducks in a row, and your data where everyone can see it – all updated in real time.
Save yourself the headache of weeding through duplicated entries and lost customer notes. Let software be your ticket to fewer headaches and easier data entry experience for your company.
Billing and Payments
Billing is a chore for any size of business. Without plumbing software, you need to remember to invoice your clients, send their bills, and track if they’ve paid.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on the tricky aspect of receiving various methods of payments and making trips to the bank.
But with solid software, you can handle all that on the spot. With your plumber standing in front of your client, you can receive payment then and there. Plus, with software integrated into your operation, you can instantly see if the payment cleared.
You can also use software to send invoices to clients later using our customer invoice portal. This allows them to pay in a way that fits their schedule – all happening paperless in the cloud.
If you are operating without an accounting solution that has real-time sync, you might find that more than one person working on your books can create costly errors and miscommunication that might just prevent you from growing your business.
Real-time QuickBooks sync means anyone looking at your figures is seeing the most up-to-date information.
3. Availability
The days of logging in to an access terminal to retrieve information are long gone. Now in our on-the-go culture, we demand access to all our company’s information from anywhere at any time.
Mobile CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The best cloud-based plumbing software provides you the benefit of having your company’s files available to you and your field staff anywhere and at all times.
As a result, mobile CRMs become the most useful tool in your plumber’s arsenal. For example, anyone on your staff can create custom notes for each client, upload and access photos, update work orders, and view the customer’s entire equipment history. Plus, all of this can be accessed from their phone or tablet while on the job.
This creates a powerful nexus of information for each client. This means your employees are more equipped and prepared to handle any of your client’s needs faster and more efficiently.
Customer Profiles
Do away with your rows of filing cabinets. Say goodbye to the papercuts you get while frantically flipping through a client’s file. No longer will your office staff embark on wild scavenger hunts to find that one piece of information your plumber is requesting.
Great software makes all of your client files and equipment documentation available to everyone with a cell signal. Your office staff and employees will love having everything available, searchable, and saved to the cloud.
This empowers your staff with these enhanced client-serving abilities:
When you implement the right software into your business operations, everyone on your team will be on the same page and ready to grow the business.
See how FieldEdge can supercharge your customer service. Schedule your FREE personalized demo today!
4. Client Satisfaction
Automated Arrival Notifications
In the plumbing business, getting too specific about arrival times is a recipe for disaster.
Given the nature of your work, you might get held up at one job or another, and you want to give your full attention to the task at hand. Each client deserves that. However, this also means you might need to keep those arrival windows pretty wide open – four hours or more.
Sure, you could train your staff to remember to call each client as they head that direction, or you could use the best plumbing software, like FieldEdge, to automate that notification process for you.
Increase Client Choices
Clients love to be in the driver’s seat on their repair journey.
Give your clients multi-option quoting to help them decide what plumbing services are right for them at that moment, and what could be put off for another time.
Plus, with a good plumbing software, plumbers are empowered with data-backed recommendations. This makes it far easier selling with customer-tailored suggestions. Using plumbing software means you’ve got an edge when upselling.
You can also let your clients choose if they want to pay for their services while you are on the job or if they would like to use an online payment portal after the fact.
Upload Before and After Photos
When you use a good plumbing software solution, plumbers can access client profiles, which includes viewing and uploading before and after photos.
This can help speed up diagnostics work on each subsequent job. For example, you can have your plumber arrive with the understanding of what exactly they’ll be looking at before they even step foot in your client’s home.
5. Support to Scale Your Plumbing Business
Part of adding the best plumbing software to your business means clearing the runway for your company’s growth.
But it’s also important to have a software-support system in place. One that helps you understand the latest updates, and offers you help if something goes wrong or is confusing.
When you decide to add FieldEdge to your operations, you’re assigned a dedicated customer success specialist. One who will guide you through the onboarding and training process. This individual will make sure everyone on your team is capable and skilled with all the facets of FieldEdge.
We’re so dedicated to your success that we earned the 2020 Stevie Award for customer service excellence!
Also, make sure your software of choice offers ongoing training opportunities in order to help drive your business growth. FieldEdge Academy is one great example of easy-to-follow ongoing training for members of your staff. Here you can access a series of self-guided tutorials, videos, and lessons on the basics and advanced tools available to you on our software platform.
We also cover topics that will help you grow your plumbing business beyond software. When you’re part of the FieldEdge family, we’re committed to your success.
The Best Plumbing Software Has the Power to TRANSFORM Your Business Growth
You might be doing great on your own, and you might see no problem with a pen-and-paper operation or your current software solution.
But if you’ve read this far, there’s a part of you that wonders how much the best plumbing software could help your business.
And so, whether you’re dissatisfied with your current software solution, or you want to try implementing software for the first time, we’re here to help you grow.
Remember, it’s not just about what you’ll gain with the best plumbing software. Here’s a few things you can expect less of:
- Fewer headaches tracking down duplicated data
- Less misplaced paper copies of customer information
- Fewer calls from the field asking office staff to dig up client notes
- Less confusion figuring out what hardware a client has on site
We know just how much adding the best plumbing software to your operation can supercharge your business growth. Book a free demo to find out more!
Let us show you just how much FieldEdge can help your plumbing business. Book your FREE personalized demo today!