Residential Computer Service Company Uses PacketTrap Solution to Tame Chaos of Scheduling, Billing and Service.
On a visit to Florida, Computer Medics founder Mike Peterson saw the opportunity to create a computer service in the spirit of old time doctors who made house calls. He was right about the size of the opportunity: Computer Medics added clients at a steady rate after its 1999 founding, offering computer, networking, peripheral and software services ranging from setup to diagnostics to sales — with in-house, drop-off and now, remote service options.
What he and his team did not count on was the stress of scheduling and billing the calls. While the Computer Medics team grew to five and its client base of retirees and small businesses grew to the thousands, effective scheduling and account management began slipping out of control and requiring more of Peterson’s time to manage. He would spend two to three hours per evening manually scheduling field technician calls the next day.
Even with this effort, appointments were sometimes still missed or doubled-booked. Adding remote services compounded the chaos: with no centralized scheduling, customer knowledge base and connectedness to billing, customer problems sometimes missed being ticketed, assigned and billed.
Effective Scheduling and Service Delivery for Thousands of House Calls, Remote Sessions and In-Shop Visits
Peterson’s team experimented with scheduling features offered by Yahoo, Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. But none of these could easily connect to billing or provide the account histories that Computer Medics’ techs needed to deliver effective, personalized service to a client base that had grown to nearly 7,000.
After quickly implementing PacketTrap’s SaaS solution, Peterson could easily schedule all house calls, in-shop service, and remote calls. Lee County, Florida is a large area, so Peterson appreciates being able to view addresses while in PacketTrap so that he can efficiently plan staff routes based on tagged zones stored with account information. This saves hours of driving.
Now all techs can see and be assigned all three types of customer calls, and can keep personalized details that account for the unique needs of a large client base. For example, a customer may be hard of hearing and prefer that the Computer Medics tech visit in person rather than perform a phone consultation. In other cases, the customer may not be the primary decision maker, with field notes indicating that the tech should contact a different point person for the account. PacketTrap is also used to track the details of sale and installation for all products that Computer Medics sells.
Saving on Payroll, Time and Stress
“Because our database is growing, PacketTrap becomes a stronger tool every day,” says Peterson. “Technicians can search service call notes from all accounts and drill down to a resolution in a few seconds. We’ve had other knowledge bases in the past, but none that were tied to our billing system. Not having to do double entries on billing alone saved us a whole full-time position.”
PacketTrap makes it so easy for the techs to stay on top of their work that Peterson has been able to delegate phone and route management completely to the field service team, saving him hours every day.
Peterson equates PacketTrap with other “pillars” of his business, such as accountants, sales and marketing resources. The three-column notebook formerly used to manually track technicians has been permanently relegated to a drawer as Peterson and his team use PacketTrap to successfully manage the needs of a growing enterprise.