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Making Money With myServiceForce Software During a Down Economy

Most people think buying software is a luxury reserved for the good times. Truth is, it’s really a necessity during the lean times. Read below and see how spending as little as $6 per work day per employee on automation software can result in several hundred dollars a day to you bottom line profits. It did for us in fact we saved $230,000/year. Here are a few things to think about:

• If you can do more billable work per employee every dollar goes right to the profit column.

• If you can reduce overhead costs every dollar goes to the bottom line.

• If you can improve cash flow you avoid expensive credit card and bank fees especially insufficient funds charges.

• An employee costs are more than their salary. There are also benefits, tools, and overhead. Every person you can reduce is equal to 1.4 times their salary, just for salary and benefits, to your bottom line.

Automation at myServiceForce

At myServiceForce, we’ve put our money where our mouth is and underwent a major automation program over the last 18 months. We followed 2 basic principles:

• First Principle – if there is an automated solution vs. a manpower solution, go automated.

• Cost of manpower is salary, benefits, and overhead

• Technology can be turned off and on again (especially SaaS, see next) with little or no penalties.

• Second Principle – unless there is no other solution use a SaaS (Software as a Service, like myServiceForce products) product. It reduces upfront costs and can be right sized at any time.

Here’s what we’ve automated:

• Sales Information – 90% of all sales activity is done through online presentations and interactive programs. (Reduction 1 person reduction)

• Training – 90% of all training is done in the same way. The remainder is split between group webinars and one on one tutoring.

• Billing is 98% Credit Card and ACH through automated systems. The result is instant cash flow and the elimination of an expensive line of credit and manual invoicing and collections (1 part time person).

• Support – Automatic Call Distribution and On-Line Support Center. (Reduction 2 people)

This has lowered overall operating costs by more than $230,000/year. Point is, AUTOMATION CAN AND DOES WORK!

Automation in Field Service Industry

Here are some of the things you can do with myServiceForce tools and techniques.

Cost Cutting

There are a number of ways to cut costs of operations but let’s start with those that do not involve reducing staff or staff hours:

• How do you do it? – Using myServicePro, a day, week, or more of jobs can be assigned to techs in advance and send to their field device. By evaluating the jobs in advance and coming to the office, once or twice a week to pick up any needed supplies or tools they can cut down office trips. They also do not have to get or bring in paperwork as everything resides on their devices and all job notes and parts details are sent back to the office automatically as well.

• Eliminate Trips to the Supply House: Another way to reduce costs is to limit trips to the supply center. This is done the same way. Evaluate the number and types of jobs that you have and pick up the standard supplies for all of them at once. While this will not eliminate all your trips, eliminating 2 or 3 per week is another $10 or $14.

• Administrative Employee Cost Savings: While reducing employee costs can be an emotional issue, sometimes it is the necessary thing to do. So here are some pretty quick fixes:

• Customer Self Appointment Scheduling - How much time is spent on the phone trying to make a customer appointment or confirm one (phone tag)? The answer is either a lot or you’re spending a lot to prevent it. Either way it’s expensive and nearly unnecessary, myServiceScheduler allows your customers to work for you and themselves by going on line to your web site (don’t have one, we’ll create a simple one for you for a couple hundred dollars) and clicking a button set up their own appointment in less than 3 minutes. You get email and desktop notification, confirmations are automatically sent to the customer, and changes can be handled electronically via email. Easy! Oh and it’s available as a free feature of myServicePro, or as a standalone product.

• Electronic Work Order Creation (EWOC) - For those of you that do work for Home Warranty companies or other firms that send you work orders in a standard format, you can have them automatically created in a format that goes right into myServicePro and other standard commercial software (and we can even customize it for your “home gown” software). At a savings of 3-5 minutes and order and a cost of about 10 cents and order, the savings can add up fast. Example: at 100 orders per month the time to enter the orders into your software would be about 400 minutes or nearly 7 hours. At a cost of $15/hour that’s $105 vs. $25 (minimum monthly fee for EWOC). Multiply that by 10 for a 1000 orders and you are looking at $1050 vs $100.

• AHS Work Order Processing - For our American Home Shield contractors we have automated the entire work order process from creation to invoicing, including status reporting. This makes a currently time consuming business into a simple and efficient one saving on average 20 minutes per order in administrative time. That’s a potential cost savings of $5/AHS work order, and with an automated AHS invoicing module about to be released that number can only go higher.

• QuickBooks Accounting – For companies using QuickBooks, myServicePro integrates directly with most versions of QuickBooks transferring important data back and forth between systems including customer, employee, and job data. This eliminates costly double data entry and insures quick invoicing.

• Invoicing – Work orders can be turned into invoices right in myServicePro and emailed or printed right on the spot. Saving hours of data entry and work duplication. If you think about the amount of time it takes from completion of work to collections, and the amount of effort, you may want to seriously consider on site invoicing and collections.

• On-Site Invoicing and Collections – Invoicing at the time and the place the job is done and then collecting has several benefits. Of course it saves administrative time and effort in producing the invoices and then collecting from the customers. Beyond the time savings, it also provides instant cash flow which helps to eliminate the need for using bank credit to run your business. myServicePro provides all of the tools, including instant invoice creation, credit card processing, electronic customer signature capture, and providing paper or electronic records to the customer and the office.

Increasing Revenue per Technician

In addition to cost cutting, myServiceForce tools are also helpful in increasing revenue, specifically increasing the billable hours of your technicians. While this may seem to be a more valuable commodity in a growth mode, it also plays an important role in a down economy. The fact is, anytime you can increase the billable hours of a technician it means the opportunity to earn more money at the same cost and that’s a good thing. How do we capture time?

• Decreased paperwork and more rapid data capture.

• Eliminating unnecessary drive time (see above).

• More efficiency on the job site due to previous job and systems histories.

The net result is an average savings of 20% or more per technician. That means if your tech works 5 jobs a day now, then if you fully implement myServicePro he can work 6. If the average revenue per job is $300 then that’s $300 per day potential improvement. Obviously each industry is different, but you can use our ROI calculator in the On Line Business Center to figure your return.

Increase Parts Billing

One of the biggest areas where you can increase revenue is in billable parts. Unfortunately, when companies rely in technicians’ memory to add parts to their jobs, sometimes days after the job itself, there is a substantial loss in parts revenue. The answer is in the simplicity and convenience of myServiceForce field devices which has all of your parts and pricing in convenient categories and pull down lists that encourages techs to capture each part as they pull it from their stock. In a study of companies like yours, that cost was as much as $5,000 per technician per year.

Conclusion

Everyone will not benefit from all of these, but everyone can benefit from some if not most. In addition, if you look around, you’ll see that automation is not a luxury or something that is going away. In fact it is a necessity if you intend to stay competitive. While it requires learning some new ways of doing business, it does not require you to become a computer expert or a Harvard business school graduate It does require an open mind, and 3 or 4 weeks for the new habits to take hold.

Oh, and one more thing. This program works as well for the one man shop as it does for a company with 40 trucks on the road. We have them both. For the one man shop you can run your entire business right from your truck. No need for an office, office support, etc. Do it all from a laptop and a cellular connection.

If you add all of the savings and revenue potential from the opportunities we’ve reviewed the number is get’s real big real fast. So, the next question is what’s the cost? Well as an example for a company with 3 technicians it costs about $6 a work day, per person, including cellular data service and even a myServicePad. Heck the gas savings alone pays for that. So, cost is NO ISSUE as long as you use the software to make your business more profitable. Your choice is simple, spend a little bit of money, make some necessary changes, and you will be a more profitable, successful business.

We hope you will join us and become the most profitable successful company that you can!