How Planado Helps Home Remodeling Contractors
The home improvement industry has been steadily growing in recent years. In the United States alone, the house remodeling market is expected to increase by $20.4 billion by the end of 2022. The introduction of new materials and technologically advanced systems are facilitating home remodeling activities globally.
In this fairly mature and highly competitive market, home remodeling contractors are prompted to use every possible means to stand out and attract new customers. How can introducing field service management (FSM) software furnish your home improvement business with a competitive edge? Let’s see.
Greater visibility into field operations
One of the major concerns for home improvement contractors is the limited amount of resources, both human and material. Smart resource management is therefore crucial for efficient field operations; however, it’s usually a challenging task because of nontransparent processes. FSM platforms are designed to organize and streamline field operations, such as scheduling and assigning jobs, monitoring statuses and worker’s locations.
Planado, for instance, congregates and visualizes all appointment data so that dispatchers can assign tasks to workers more efficiently with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Moreover, the dispatcher is always aware of repairmen’s current locations thanks to GPS tracking and can alter their schedule on the fly.
More organized and reliable staff
The home remodeling industry is now facing an acute shortage of highly skilled employees. This results in a situation where companies have to hire workers with low skills or limited experience, which, in turn, downgrades the overall service quality and increases employee turnover. These issues can be especially daunting for small or medium-sized businesses with limited resources.
FSM solutions like Planado can help you better control and organize your field workers. The app ensures seamless online communication as well as time- and GPS tracking, so you can oversee their activities in real time. For example, if a repairman diverts from the itinerary or leaves the workplace, you will see it straight away on the map. There’s also an option to view the complete log of their actions later, which can be useful in case some issues arise.
Mitigating seasonal peaks
It’s fairly common for home improvement contractors to go through seasonal ups and downs in workload. For example, such services as HVAC maintenance, pool cleaning, exterior renovation or painting tend to be more in demand during the warm months of the year and are less popular in winter. Dealing with seasonality in workload requires high flexibility and readiness to upscale quickly.
FSM software enables you to handle seasonal peaks in workload and schedule an increased number of appointments and on-site visits. As a result, your field operations become more transparent and easily managed. When choosing an FSM solution, make sure you can adapt it to your changing business needs — for example, use flexible service templates and integrate the application with other software you use.
Improved communication
Unless it’s a nationwide chain enterprise, home remodeling contractors are usually bound to a certain location and, therefore, it’s in their best interest to maintain excellent relationships with their customers. Poor communication with clients and employees can result in making uninformed decisions and delivering lower-quality services.
FSM software like Planado helps you to quickly share important data with your field staff, offer your customers all the support they need and make sure they are always informed about upcoming appointments. For instance, you can send SMS reminders to your customers, inform repairmen about new jobs, provide the required tech support and collect feedback.
Enhanced service quality
Ensuring high service quality is crucial for a home remodeling business if it’s aimed at long-term relationships with customers. When quality is not a priority, this might lead to reputational risks and customer churn in the long run. Quite often, poor quality is caused by a lack of control. Sometimes repairmen might not do the job properly or leave it unfinished, show up late or even miss the job.
FSM applications are designed to tackle these issues effectively. For example, checklists make it easier for field workers to comply with the service standards and not miss any steps. To ensure that the job is done properly, technicians take photos of the completed work and attach them to their reports.
Final thoughts
Home remodeling businesses, like any field services providers, are highly contingent on efficient resource and employee management. FSM systems are specifically designed to meet the requirements of such companies and enable them to make field operations more transparent, easily manageable and cost-effective.
