A family run company, Nirvana originally operated in and around London offering electrical services to residential property managers. However, founder and CEO Darren Waitson, soon realised that his clients needed more. They were tired of trying to manage multiple suppliers across multiple sites yet knew they needed to maintain high standards to keep residents happy, stay on budget to satisfy the site owners, and be legally compliant to reduce liability for landlords. Darren quickly began to grow his operation and expand Nirvana's service offering so that they could satisfy customer needs effectively, it was at the point, the need for BigChange Field Service Management Software was identified.
“We quickly identified a gap in the market, not only could we fix small problems before they became big crises, but because we are on-site, regularly, we could identify issues before they even became problems taking away many of the daily challenges property managers face.
“BigChange is a lot like us. Because it does what it does very well it means that small issues don’t get the chance to become big headaches.” Darren Waitson, Founder & CEO, Nirvana Maintenance.
Before selecting BigChange Nirvana managed its mobile operation using printed worksheets with checklists stapled to them. Sorting out which engineer was best suited for which job in which location was largely hit and miss and customer reports had to be transcribed from paper, matched to the correct customer details, and invoiced with proof of work completed which, at the time, may or may not have included photos and customer signatures.
“Our biggest pain point was our customers were growing in number, and in their demands for in-depth and detailed reports,” Waitson continued “We knew the manual systems in place weren’t up to the job and we needed a solution to help us capture, record, and articulate all relevant information.”
Nirvana explored several options including the development of a bespoke solution. However, following a recommendation from another BigChange user they adopted the system five years ago and haven’t looked back.
“Since implementing BigChange we have grown the number of field staff and vehicles fivefold.” Waitson continued “Without the system, we would have had to do the same with our back-office resources and this simply would not have been sustainable.”
It automatically schedules routine jobs up to a year in advance while reactive call-outs can be intelligently matched to a team member by skill set, current location, and availability. All information is shared with the field engineer via the BigChange App and this is also used to record job completion evidence including time, date, and location stamped photographs, before and after, and customer signatures.
“BigChange has taken the fear out of expansion helping us grow organically, and sustainably, whilst maintaining the highest-quality service delivery and support,” Waitson concluded.
Nirvana has also recently integrated BigChange within its finance department automating 75 percent of all processes. With each customer agreeing on a set of protocols, invoices can be issued as either proforma or works completed with accurate records of time on site and parts used.
