The Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) industry is a seasonal business and thus faces lots of challenges in managing demand and supply for its range of services. Constant context switching may result in errors while delivering service, resulting in loss of time, money, and customer trust.
To reduce human error in managing HVAC businesses, one should automate repetitive tasks using HVAC software. Read more to learn how adopting HVAC software for your field service management operations helps improve business outcomes.
What is HVAC Software?
HVAC software is a specialized field service management software that helps automate, manage, and streamline various operational tasks involved in delivering HVAC services.
For example – HVAC software helps forecast demand for heating, air conditioning, and ventilation systems to help manage inventory levels of equipment, materials, and tools accordingly. Doing so helps save costs and ensures your equipment is not always on the bench.
5 Features of HVAC Software that are Relevant to the HVAC Industry
Here are five key features your HVAC software should have to streamline FSM operations:
- Tracking equipment usage history: your inventory may involve equipment or chemicals whose maintenance and expiry dates must be tracked. HVAC software, using IoT, can help track equipment usage, ensure preventive maintenance schedules are followed, and handle work orders to manage inventory amounts as per demand.
- Mobile app access: helps coordinate with field service technicians and know their location in real-time. Also, workers can manage their timesheets remotely, share proof of work, and contact managers in emergencies.
- Handle contracts: from contract creation, making edits, approvals, negotiations, and signing, to execution and payments – HVAC software should help with complete contract lifecycle management.
- Integration with other software: helps with data migration from previous software you may have used or benefit from other specialized software by sharing data.
- Remote monitoring: HVAC software should include GPS capabilities to help with remote monitoring of workers, assets, and job sites.
4 Key role of HVAC Software to Improve Field Service Delivery
HVAC software helps with four key aspects of handling an HVAC services business as follows:
Automated Scheduling and Dispatching
Based on available field service technicians, their skills versus required job skill sets, proximity to the job site, and customer feedback – the HVAC software will assign the job to the most relevant worker. These scheduling of jobs happen automatically, thus removing any human error while assigning them.
Real-time Communication and Monitoring
Once a field service technician is assigned to a scheduled job, the worker is immediately shared with the job details. On acceptance, the assigned worker’s information is shared with the customer. HVAC software that is enabled with GPS also helps share the real-time location of the workers and their estimated arrival time so that the customer can prepare accordingly.
On arrival at the job site, the worker can inform their arrival time, report to the supervisor about services required, or raise any emergency request immediately.
Regulatory and Compliance Review
The HVAC industry must adhere to environmental norms as per the location of the job site. By using software, you stay up to date with regulatory changes. For the executed jobs, it helps track if your installed equipment works properly per the regulations. It also tracks data and analyzes it for compliance review purposes.
Providing reports about your installed HVAC equipment helps share maintenance schedules and repair alerts. It also helps measure the ROI of your service and share it with your customers to ensure retention.
Handle Complete Customer Lifecycle
HVAC software provides dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) features that help handle lead generation, sales, creation of contracts, and digital payments. It also helps handle customer support during and after the service delivery. Having a portal for customers makes your HVAC service business look professional, automated, and easy to engage with.
For example, a customer can simply use your HVAC software customer portal or mobile app to reschedule their appointments. It will automatically re-align the calendars of assigned workers, supervisors, and customers according to the updated schedule. This reduces any support call requests and back-and-forth communication with assigned workers.
Get Started with HVAC Software to Experience its Benefits Today
Zuper’s field service management software provides a centralized dashboard, GPS technology, AI-enabled scheduling features, CRM, and much more for your HVAC service business expansion – book a demo to know more.