How many HVAC service engineers do you see on the beach in summer?
Zero.
Seasonality is the bane of most HVAC service engineers’ lives – From summer feast to winter famine.
If you take on extra team members in a heatwave, then come winter, you won’t have the work for them. This seasonality makes it well-nigh impossible to grow your HVAC service company by increasing your payroll.
Working more hours is one way to grow. After all, sleep is such a waste of your day. But how do you cram 24 hours of HVAC servicing into a 16-hour summer working day?
Increasing efficiency is the only way. Apps for HVAC service companies can help.
Improve Communications
In our business urgent calls and changes to plans are inescapable. Load your chosen HVAC app onto every employee’s phone. When you make changes, just upload them to the app, and everyone gets updates simultaneously.
If crews update the app when they have finished a job, the app can calculate and send an invoice by email in a few seconds. Some customers will pay there and then, while your people are still on the premises.
Win More Jobs
An app will allow you to email a quote to a customer while you are with her. She can print it out, and you can answer any questions and close the sale while you are there.
Compare that process to one where you go home at the end of a long day, calculate the price for the work and email it to the customer, who might not print it off until the next day. Your sale’s momentum has gone.
An instant ‘quote-email-print’ process will capture more sales.
Improve Cash-Flow
Do you ever forget about outstanding invoices? HVAC software can help you there, too. It can send you a reminder whenever a payment is overdue so you can make a quick phone call to make sure there are no problems and gently remind the customer about payment.
Reduce Time Spent on Paper Work
Shuffling screens and A4 sheets of accounts, invoices, cheques, bank statements and time-sheets means you need a desk the size of a pasting table to do your paperwork.
Getting the right app can eliminate all this, syncing automatically, so all you have to do is your HMRC filing. (You also get your pasting table back so you can hang wallpaper with all the spare time you have.)
Improve Your Reputation
What do you do with unhappy customers? Fix the problems, of course. But you need to know there’s a problem before hit the local Mums’ Facebook group to complain about you.
When your team uses the app to log out of a job, you should ing the householder within a few minutes. “Are you happy with everything? Did the guys clean up? Is it all working?” If the customer expresses the slightest doubt, then drop everything and go round to sort it out.
This only works if everyone in your company has the same app.
GDPR is a big headache for us all. Automating your business with apps means all your customer data is secure in the Cloud rather than vulnerable on employees’ phone.
Other Ways to Recapture Time
Sadly, no HVAC app can do everything, but there are ways around that, too.
Stop Answering the Phone
Ask a family member to answer inquiry calls: This will stop all the interruptions when you are halfway through fitting a new unit, so you can get the paying work done faster.
Give your telephone receptionist a list of prices you charge for standard jobs, and that can take care of estimates, too. After all, you only give estimates to get you an appointment to quote for a job, so it doesn’t require your level of expertise.
Hire a Virtual Assistant
A virtual assistant (VA) usually costs less than a real-world office assistant and your VA can do most of the real-world tasks. Answering the phone in an easily-understood accent means you should hire a local person who can work from home. A VA from another part of the UK could be difficult to understand let alone someone from the land of Far-Far-Away-Where-People-Work for-12p/hour.
Hire a Helicopter
No more traffic jams would mean your guys are spending less time between jobs, but they would need to learn zip-lining, and helicopter hire isn’t cheap.
In Summary
Apps for HVAC service companies can give you back hours every day. You and your team can more time with your tools rather than your phones and pens.
