Mike’s Plumbing has been providing Residential and Commercial Plumbing Repair & Drain Cleaning since the last 25 years. Nicole Marinez spearheaded a new initiative. Transitioning them from their outdated Microsoft Outlook onto a very easy to use SmartServ Mobile. Making it easy to manage the business in the office and out in the field. Since this change, Mike’s Plumbing benefits from a high volume transactional sales and a much happier operational team.
About Mike’s Plumbing & Drain Cleaning
Mike’s Plumbing & Drain Cleaning is a small family-owned and operated business. Mike Marinez, a licensed and bonded journeyman plumber with over 25 years of experience in all facets of plumbing repair and drain cleaning for both residential and commercial properties started the business. He has experience working in the plumbing industry with other leading companies. It has given him a strong and diversified range of plumbing solutions which he brings to the team located in Edmonds, WA.
How SmartServ Added Value
Prior to using SmartServ Mobile, Mike’s Plumbing was using Microsoft Outlook in addition to clipboards. To book appointments, make invoices, and dispatch technicians out to perform maintenances. When Nicole started running the office operations in Mike’s absence. She was first tasked with taking a deep examination into their existing toolset to identify any weaknesses or opportunities. Her goal was to develop a fast operational servicing model. A model that would accelerate the company’s sales pipeline and grow their bottom line.
Nicole soon discovered several roadblocks to those growth and revenue aspirations. First, they were using a combination of several different tools, making it difficult for reps to conduct simple tasks like invoicing & collecting equipment records for Preventative, general and SOS visits.
Second, feedback from the team revealed that their techs did not have any visibility before heading out for the job. It took a lot of time to find out. And it was not intuitive for field reps to navigate for all different types of jobs throughout the day. “We felt like the tools were really designed for our in-house managers. As a rep on the front line, it took forever to enter and find the information I needed during a site visit or machine checkup on a piece of paper.” To Nicole it became clear that their operations model, was not designed for field reps, rather it was built for seasoned service managers on new construction projects. Nicole recalls, “It was really a pain, my team needed additional training every week and ultimately it was overkill for what we needed.”
With constant frustration from the field reps and need for ongoing training for boosting sales, Nicole quickly realized the costs outweighed the benefits so she began searching for a better solution.
“Once I found out about SmartServ Mobile, I just knew I had to have access. Then, once I started to use it, I thought it was really a game-changer, plus our technicians really liked their mobile app”
Nicole Martinez
Importance of Speed and Simplicity
As soon as Nicole made the decision that her team was going to adopt SmartServ, it was easy to get the rest of the company on -board. Where the other systems are made up of dozens of tools and complicated features to learn and customize, SmartServ is designed to small-mid sized teams. Mike’s Plumbing started quickly and kept them focused without changing the way they already do things.
Another immediate benefit they saw was the amount of time saved by technicians using offline saving & Time Cards features. Using the office Dashboard, Nicole is able to easily track technicians, their activities, monitor every interaction with homeowners. And access impact – all in the same place. In servicing, for any business, there is typically a lot of data going back and forth. Nicole shares, “the ability to create a quick form, checklist or Quote in SmartServ for our multiple site visits are really valuable and frankly, very well thought out for our needs.
Another immediate benefit they saw was the amount of time saved by technicians using offline & Time Cards features. Using the office Dashboard. Nicole is able to easily track technicians, their activities, monitor every interaction with homeowners. And access impact – all in the same place. In servicing, for any business, there is typically a lot of data going back and forth. Nicole shares, “the ability to create a quick form, Checklist or Quote in SmartServ for our multiple site visits are really valuable and frankly, very well thought out for our needs
SmartServ Saves Time.
SmartServ is built around the way how service companies function today. Core to its foundation is the fact that the way people interact with data has changed. Today’s process happens across dozens of channels and hundreds of touchpoints – from your website and social media to your emails and phone calls. We track and organize everything automatically. Using SmartServ, Mike’s Plumbing is able to access homeowners’ machine health, service requests, performance metrics, and track maintenances plus more. Office manager like Nicole, now have access to this information on a daily basis and can better forecast failures right at their fingertips.
Mike shares, “Servicing is science, not magic. Science is “how does the process work”. What is the scope for optimization? Now with SmartServ, knowing what is going on tells you the health of a machine and also a field rep. Having a view into what’s working and where bottlenecks are – helps us guide reps to skill development and overall improvements. We have gone all hands on deck with SmartServ Mobile starting August 2017 and made it mandatory for all our site visits”
