After a year full of lockdowns, it’s no surprise that home renovations, fixtures, and fixings have seen a significant spike, as people spend more time in their homes than ever before.
As a result, the plumbing industry has been growing fast, adding to the importance of plumbing companies keeping up with demand. This rapid growth has prompted many of them to adopt a variety of technologies that help their plumbing business deliver greater value to customers.
Recent research by Salesforce revealed that 84% of clients believe customer experience is as important as the product or service a company provides. As such, plumbing businesses need to remain efficient and organized in their service delivery at all times.
However, they also must meet the massive demand for plumbing services amidst a rapidly shrinking workforce. This makes effective fleet management that marshals available resources a vital necessity.
This post outlines 4 specific ways fleet management software can help your plumbing company perform faster and better to efficiently meet customer needs.
1. Plan to Serve the Most Customers
Customers today have very little patience for inefficient service delivery and will quickly switch to a competitor in highly saturated markets. Businesses have reported losing as much as 75% of their customers due to long wait times. To solve this problem, plumbing companies must have the ability to pinpoint the location of their employees to assess who is closest to a client request. With Fleet Complete’s fleet management software, managers can track their fleet vehicle in real time on an online dashboard that will show each plumber’s current location and distance from any new client. By being able to identify and dispatch the closest staff member to the customer’s house, you can significantly improve your response times – and the amount of calls you can complete in a day!For a more simplified solution that doesn’t require GPS vehicle tracking, our Task Tracker app serves as a very light module for managers to allocate assignments and notes within the app to their staff members. This provides workers with immediate updates on their next task to improve efficiency and save time between jobs.
Workers can also self-assign tasks directly in the app, if the customer requires any additional jobs on the spot.
Best of all, you’ll have everything recorded automatically with time stamps for your billing and invoicing, so there will be no guessing as per who was where and for how long.
2. Protect Crucial Assets & Equipment
Plumbers rely heavily on specialized equipment to deliver their service to customers. Loss or theft of any equipment leads to missed appointments, business downtime, and high equipment replacement costs. This is all in addition to the stress of having to locate or replace the lost equipment.
Equipment loss is more common than you might expect. Insurance provider Mitchell & Whale notes that loss of equipment due to stolen goods and equipment at worksites is among the most common reasons their customers submit insurance claims. “The reality is that liability is just the tip of the iceberg as part of a myriad mix of risk exposures,” Mitchell & Whale include in their blog. “…After liability, the biggest loss risk for plumbers is lost or stolen tools and/or inventory.”Unplanned business downtime caused by lost or stolen items can add up quickly and negatively impact customer trust. In this hyper-connected age, customers are becoming increasingly intolerant of service delays and a poor customer experience.
This problem can be solved by using GPS tracking on crucial assets. This allows fleet managers to ensure quick recovery of lost or stolen items so their business keeps running smoothly.
3. Keep Your Fleet in Tip-Top Condition
If your business relies on vehicles to move your workforce around, proper fleet maintenance becomes critical. Without it, unexpected vehicle breakdowns and issues are bound to occur more often, causing your company to lose out on billable time, as your mobile staff can’t get to customers.
This is why having a proper maintenance schedule in place becomes crucial, and there are ways to digitize it with dedicated solutions like Fleet Complete’s Inspect app. The app provides an easy way for your drivers to complete daily inspections and log them via the app directly into the Mechanic Portal so that repairs are scheduled without delay.
This allows for full visibility of how many vehicles in your fleet need maintenance, which are running in top shape, and which need to be replaced.
4. Improve Employee Working Conditions
As companies become more customer-focused, fleet managers should look inward to ensure their staff is taken care of and paid on time.
Cloud-based fleet management software can aid in automating the recording of departure and arrival times of plumbers. This allows businesses to have live records of all their plumbers’ working hours. Managers can use this data to quickly verify and issue payments to their entire fleet, keeping them motivated during uncertain times.
These records also allow for timestamps of the specific time that an employee spent completing a job. This can help protect your workers against potential faulty accusations from customers in case they claim that the employee never showed up.
The Bottom Line
As people look to spruce up the living space they’ve become so acquainted with during the pandemic, home renovations are seeing a significant uptick. Consequently, the demand for plumbing services has grown, creating the opportunity for plumbing companies to better equip themselves to profit from the demand.
Focusing on achieving air-tight fleet management offers the key to getting your business ahead of the curve in servicing a larger number of clients – and boosting your company’s income. Digitizing your operational processes is a worthwhile investment, as it will allow you to increase your company’s efficiency and effective support the growing demand for plumbing services.
If you’d like to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your plumbing business while satisfying customers and maintaining quality plumbers, request our Fleet Complete demo.
