Finch Trade Professionals Testimonial

"This software is enabling our day-to-day processes to run smoothly… we’ve been able to leap forward instead of taking one step at a time."

The Register of Tradeswomen, established in March 2021, was founded with the mission of making field service more accessible to, and safe for all tradeswomen. Founder and tradeswoman, Hattie Hasan MBE, sat down with us to discuss the impact of Commusoft’s Customer Journey plan on her rapidly-expanding organization.

The Register Before Commusoft

Hattie has always valued customer service, and set out to assure that her customers would always have a positive experience. She explains,

“Before I was a tradeswoman and I was just a customer, I was very dissatisfied with the kind of service I was getting, I couldn’t believe that people wouldn’t ring me back. I couldn’t believe that people wouldn’t turn up. I couldn’t believe the mess they left when they came into the house. So when I decided to become a tradeswoman myself, I was determined that that wouldn’t be the experience a customer would have”. 

But providing unrivaled service is a difficult task without support from a job management software.

Originally, Hattie and her team used a cluttered and disjointed system, but quickly realized it wouldn’t be enough to support the demands of her growing business. She states, “Before we had this amazing Commusoft software, we were working purely off spreadsheets that were massive and really unwieldy”. This kind of record-keeping meant that important information was falling through the cracks, impacting her team, and interrupting the register’s progress.

Since Implementing Commusoft

Quickly, the team shifted to Commusoft, where customer and company records are securely stored and are easily accessible in real-time! Hattie’s team was able to innovate their daily operations, save admin time, and forget about spreadsheets. She details,

“When we were introduced to Commusoft, it saved us hours and hours and hours of time. We’ve been able to get rid of our paper diary, our phone book, everything really paper-wise and it’s just made life so much quicker”.

Commusoft’s reporting tools and real-time updates allow admin teams and technicians to adjust whenever unexpected delays or cancellations occur. With Commusoft, technicians can be kept accountable with job leave questions, such as a requirement to clean up the work site before leaving.

Commusoft’s inclusive reporting features keep the team on track. Hattie elaborates,

“I can just log in, have a look on the reporting pane and I can see how many jobs we’ve got going on at any one time and how many have been completed. And that tells us how well our business is doing. That’s a really brilliant thing”.

With real-time information on job and technician statuses, what’s going on across your business is never a mystery.

Stress-Free Booking With Intelligent Scheduling

Commusoft’s job scheduling software is a favorite of The Register of Tradeswomen. Hattie told us,

“I love the idea of opening up the map and saying ‘actually, we know that technician A is quite close to that job, we can probably allocate that job straight away’ and she might go that afternoon, which is really brilliant for the customer. We’ll know immediately which technician to send the notification to. She taps on that notification and gets all the information she needs”.

Intelligent Scheduling, available on our Customer Journey plan, suggests appointments based on your technician’s unique schedules, skills, and drive times, saving your admin team valuable time and offering unrivaled efficiency.

With Commusoft, Hattie and her admin team can see where all of the register’s technicians are on the live map. “So you go on the map, and you zoom it out, and it’s really exciting to see our technicians here, there, wherever they are. It’s so seamless and it’s in real time. That’s a really brilliant thing. We don’t have to keep on updating it to get what’s happening in real-time”. With real-time information incorporated by Commusoft, Hattie and her team can easily stay on top of all their jobs and technicians.

Peace of Mind With Real-Time Technician Tracking

Through Commusoft, Hattie found a way to protect her tradeswomen when in the field. She elaborates,

“Each tradeswoman has the app, and as she enters the property, she can then inform the customer she’s arrived, which informs us, starting a clock”. Letting customers know that she’s informing the office where she is “immediately acts as a safeguard… if anyone was thinking of being a little bit dodgy, then maybe they would change their mind”.

Protecting employees while they’re in the field is important for any field service business. Hattie’s team always knows exactly where each tradeswoman is, and how long they’ve been at each job site thanks to the field service mobile app, keeping everyone accountable and safe.

The Register of Tradeswomen Continues to Grow With Commusoft

For anyone questioning if Commusoft’s job management software is right for their field service business, take Hattie’s word for it:

“It’s a really easy software to use…If it wasn’t easy, then I wouldn’t do it! I didn’t realize how easy it was going to be until we started using it. And as soon as we started using it, it just got easier and easier”.

The Register of Tradeswomen has big goals: “we want to build a little tradeswomen world where we can propagate our own tradeswomen…we want to build this whole ecosystem that changes the world”. With Commusoft supporting her team 24/7, Hattie can continue to further expand her game-changing organization and outreach with confidence.

Hattie Hasan MBE
Founder

"There is no way we could run our business efficiently and effectively... we just simply could not run it without Commusoft."

Lincoln Smith, a director at Custom Heat Ltd, sat down to discuss why Commusoft is essential for running their heating and plumbing business.

Custom Heat is a family-run business that started with Lincoln’s parents in 1980 and has been operating for 40 years since in and around Rugby, UK. Since implementing Commusoft in 2016, the Custom Heat team has grown from 60 in 2020, to over 100 in 2023!

How Was Your Business Run Before Commusoft?

“We had a paper-based system that we’d had for many years. The system was not internet based, so you couldn’t download a mobile app. We had technicians that would call in on a Friday afternoon to ask if they could pick another job up, or we’d have a customer that would all in at 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon and say ‘We’ve got no hot water, can you come fix the boiler?’. So we’d call the technician and say we’ve got another job. He’d then jot it down on a sticky label or something in his van – or probably not write it down at all. He’d drive there, do the job – but then we’d never get paid.”

“We were growing as a business, our customer-base was growing, the demand for our services was growing, so we needed a system that could cope with the increase in jobs.”

What Was Your Biggest Challenge Before Using Commusoft?

“Before we used Commusoft, our invoicing was done manually. A lady in the office would produce an invoice and at the end of the week she would send all those invoices out in the post. So you could complete a job on a Tuesday – by the Thursday or Friday you’re posting the invoice – by the Monday they’ve received it – and a few days later, they’re paying it. The whole process could be a week or more.”

How Has Using Commusoft Helped You Improve This?

“Now, you click a button – and send an invoice! In fact, the technicians do it from site. Not only do invoices not get missed, but the technician can go to a boiler service, complete the work, and click a button – all within a second. The office staff doesn’t have to do any of it.”

How Has Commusoft Transformed Your Operations?

“We now have customers call our office, who are ready to handle the call and can book the appointment into a live calendar. If it’s a call-out for that day, which happens very often, it will appear in real time in the technician’s schedule. The technician can then travel to that job and carry out the work. If they need a part, they communicate easily back with the office – just click to select who to communicate with. Once they hit complete, it lets the office know they need those parts. The technician can then invoice and it will automatically send off the after-care email asking for a review. It’s all made very technician friendly and very easy to use. The communication between the office and technician is instant.”

Would You Recommend Commusoft to Other People?

“The way that Commusoft tracks every part of every single job – you will not lose anything – it gives you complete confidence in the whole system. Complete confidence to grow. Complete confidence to push on with your business. There is no way that we could run our business efficiently and effectively, presenting ourselves the way we do with our customers, with our reminders the night before, with our text messages that say ‘we’re on our way’… we just simply could not run our business without Commusoft, it would be impossible.“

Lincoln Smith
Managing Director

"I can't say nice enough things about Commusoft. It made us grow up and actually think about what we really want."

Voity Electrical has operated out of Rutland, Vermont since 2017. Mary-Rachel Voity manages the office while her husband, Matt, leads the electricians in the field. This team provides world-class residential and commercial electrical services. Mary-Rachel met with us to discuss how Commusoft revived their business and helped elevate their workflows.

Before Commusoft

Hard work and passion are two trademarks of Voity Electrical; but while they were working hard, they were drowning under the stress. Mary-Rachel remembers their past workflows:

“It just wasn’t working…there was no open communication. Everything was in Matt’s head. And if we were gonna make the move of hiring someone else, we needed to be able to have a system in place where we would be able to empower the crew leader with information.”

She continues, “It’s about working smarter, not harder…My heart was breaking that my husband was working so hard. He wasn’t able to be part of the family.” Voity Electrical needed to resuscitate their daily operations. Mary-Rachel set out to find a job management solution, and found Commusoft.

She walked us through her decision-making process,

“The most important thing for the crew was having the ability for the system to be offline and still connect when it got into service and still retain all the information. So it wouldn’t stop the workflow; one less thing for them to worry about. That really weeded out what we were looking at.”

Commusoft’s powerful Mobile app works offline and syncs when a WiFi signal returns

Growth is important to Voity Electrical, and helping clients grow is important to Commusoft. Mary-Rachel elaborates; “Commusoft allowed us to grow up as a company and allowed us to be able to move forward. I can see this software growing with us, or we’re going to be growing with the software. And that was huge.”

Training With Commusoft

Mary-Rachel describes Commusoft’s training and onboarding process as “wicked easy”.

She continues,

“I’ve been in CRMs before; the logic of Commusoft was very easy for me to pick up. I was able to catch up really fast and it made me have to think about the things I should be doing. There was a great framework of being able to organize everything in a system. I don’t recall a process or procedure where I wasn’t able to have two different ways to solve it.”

Learn more about our training and onboarding process

Revamped Daily Workflows

Commusoft’s flexibility and customizations made it easy for Voity Electrical to reinvent their workflows.

Mary-Rachel states,

“Commusoft allowed us to be able to change our process and procedures, because we didn’t know what we were doing. With the flow, who’s doing estimates, and just everything. The system allowed us to do and experiment different ways to do processes and be able to change on a dime”.

Commusoft is all-inclusive and flexible; we take the guess-work out of field service. With important processes standardized and organized, our clients can handle their operations with confidence. Voity Electrical doesn’t wonder what comes next anymore; they’re in control.

Currently, Voity Electrical operates with a “one to five” ratio of office staff to technicians. Mary-Rachel’s office schedule is optimized and efficient. She explains, “I’m able to get a routine in place because I have the reports. I’m posting payments, I’m making my deposit slip all in Commusoft and then I start uploading all the vendors invoices and putting it underneath the job numbers.”

She continues,

“Before this, when it was billing time, we were searching through papers, we were trying to pull this, ‘what was the time’? Just absolute craziness. Commusoft allowed us to have processes and procedures. We know we’re not missing any money. We’re not missing and forgetting about invoices. Because everything is a report. I go into my reporting and I see the jobs that are completed that need to be billed, the ones that need attention”.

Commusoft’s reporting dashboard software offers 40+ preconfigured reports, the ability to filter data, create custom resorts, and more.

Optimized Remote Operations

Voity Electrical electricians are thriving with their new mobile workflows: “The staff was very excited about the software and finding solutions and having it being so custom. The crew loves the Office Tasks. That’s their favorite one.”

Office Tasks are available on Commusoft’s field service mobile app, empowering technicians to make requests and tasks for office staff.

Mary-Rachel elaborates,

“With the remote teams, we did get laptops for them, and they also have their clock in and clock out within the system, which eliminated our payroll service because now everything is in Commusoft…Everything is in front of them.”

Commusoft strengthens working relationships and oversight between the office and field.

Timesheets are available on Commusoft’s field service engineer app, this feature automatically logs time spent traveling and at job sites.

She explains, “I’m on top of things…I get to track what’s going on with their time and make sure there isn’t any kind of craziness going on.”

Exceptional Customer Service

Kindness and great service were always at the core of Voity Electrical. With Commusoft, they were able to focus on their customer experiences.

Mary-Rachel states,

“Our customers are amazed that people actually call them back or answer the phone. But also the confirmations, cause we know when the technicians are gonna be there. Because everything’s customizable, we’re able to do some branding within the communication. With the customer journey, we can just bring them along”.

These efforts have paid off. Mary-Rachel was excited to share “12 months ago, our Google rating was a 3.0 and now today we’re a 3.8!” Voity Electrical is continuously improving; as of May 2023, they currently boast a 4.4 rating on Google!

Voity Electrical Is Growing With Commusoft

Voity Electrical has hit the ground running and are excited to build on their success.

Mary-Rachel explains,

“We’re able to work on the business, not in the business… We’ve moved into a new warehouse space because we have the ability to track inventory. In the next five years, I would like to hire another office staff. I’ll be able to run three different crews with three different leaders, and be able to control all those things like prices and parts. We want to scan the parts when we start picking parts. And I want to have a part-time job for someone to pick parts. So then the crew can just focus on the job at hand”.

Voity Electrical found their confidence with Commusoft. Their system is organized, and they’re in full control of their growth.

Most importantly, with work details squared away, the Voitys have time to spend together as a family. Mary-Rachel was excited to share, “We get more family time. When I say ’Commusoft saved my marriage’, I’m really not kidding. We very rarely forget the details now that need to make the business run smoothly. We’re able to be proactive instead of reactive.”

She concludes, “In hindsight, we still would make our choice again. Commusoft allows us to streamline everything and make us more meaty instead of fat.”

Voity Electrical is going to electrify the Electrical Industry, and will continue to thrill more and more customers; there’s no looking back.

Mary-Rachel Voity
Office Manager