SES Home Services, who supply plumbing, heating, drainage and electrical services, has transformed its business with a 5 in 1 system to manage its field service operation.
As part of the same group as the local water company, SES Water, SES Home Services currently provides services to around 20,000 properties, covering Surrey and the surrounding counties.
The high-tech system from BigChange combines CRM, job scheduling and management reporting, with live tracking and mobile apps running on Samsung rugged tablets replacing paper job sheets and a raft of reports. Called JobWatch, SES Home Services believe the cloud-based system will provide the ideal platform for expansion of their business, potentially nationwide.
Peter Holmwood, Head of Operations at SES Home Services commented:“BigChange has been a real revelation. We had previously tried to implement a system to replace our paper job sheets but it was too inflexible and costly. JobWatch is a completely different proposition and does everything we originally wanted plus a lot more. It’s not only more extensive, more adaptable and easier to use, but it is also much more affordable.”Peter continued:“The evidence is in the numbers. Previously we had one support person for three engineers. Now we have one support person for ten engineers. And the ratio of office personnel to engineers used to be one to one but it’s half that now. In fact we are probably doing 50 percent more work for the same amount of resource.”SES Home Services provides home owners with insurance based annual maintenance contracts, as well as commercial landlords and social housing providers. With 35 mainly Gas Safe accredited engineers, SES provide routine servicing and emergency call out with a 2 to 4 hour response, 24/7 and 365 days a year.
Agents log incoming calls into the BigChange CRM with automated scheduling and resource allocation based on variables such as nearest location and engineer skill set. Jobs are then despatched to the engineers’ tablets that provide navigation, worksheets and apps for a variety of tasks such as daily vehicle inspections, landlord safety certificates and boiler commissioning checklists. With real-time vehicle tracking and work status reporting, customer services and management have around the clock visibility of the complete mobile operations.
Peter added:“BigChange has not only eliminated paperwork and improved the accuracy of our records, we are now doing a lot of valuable data harvesting and analysis.”He continued:“This means we can look in detail at our performance and make continuous improvements, being able to accurately measure outputs before adapting. For example, the average time taken to complete jobs by type and by engineer and the failure rate of a particular part.The engineers are really engaged with the system and provide valuable insight into how it can be applied to their working environment, better serving them and our customers. JobWatch has helped everyone across the business raise their standards and created a culture where people take responsibility for more than what it says on a job sheet”.Peter explained:“With JobWatch we have seen significant improvement in efficiency and productivity. It proved invaluable during the Arctic conditions that recently hit the country. We had six times the normal number of call outs and we could only cope because of JobWatch and its tracking system reducing the impact of travel time between sites.”With the introduction of JobWatch as an always on, always available anywhere solution, the company realised that the business could be expanded freely, without the limitations of traditional IT systems.“We are very excited about the prospects for the business now we have JobWatch. It’s like a blank canvas that provides absolutely no restrictions when we look at how we can develop the business. It offers the scope to freely expand geographically or by service,”says Peter.“And we are already looking at the web booking portal for landlords and the customer smartphone booking apps to offer all sorts of potential for the future.”
