It may be frustrating for customers to wait around all day for a carpet cleaner, pest control company or other service people to show up at their house, but it’s also a pain for the business owner to deal with those frustrated customers and keep costs in check when they don’t always know what’s going on out in the field.
These companies often rely on phone calls, texts and simple schedules to keep track of employees. ServiceBridge modernizes field management, letting home base keep an eye on where all their field agents are and keeping up with delays, paperwork and inventory from one spot.
“It's a very messy process,” said marketing specialist Barry Dyke. “A plumber has a carbon copy receipt and he's just stacking them up in the truck, then has to go back to the office, put them all into the computer and create all this drag on efficiency throughout the day. As a business owner, you're concerned if all the invoices are getting in and are we tracking inventory and employees.”
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The company lets owners customize the software-as-a-service setup just for their needs, and counts pool cleaning companies, disaster clean-up services and landscape maintenance among their clients. Dyke said those customizations help set them apart, and they even work with clients to expand their options.
“We have developers in-house and if you come to us and say 'This software gets me 90 percent to where I need to be, but I need this function,' we'll work to create that for you," he said. " We have a big roadmap and we really want to make the product better for our users.”
ServiceBridge also makes it easier consumers to deal with guy-in-a-truck businesses, letting companies set up customer portals, offer digital estimates and deliver paperwork electronically, even down to the signature.
While ServiceBridge is now a standalone company, it was originally started as a project at Chicago-based Devbridge Group. A large services company came to the development company asking them to make a mobile app for some existing software back in 2014, and the company saw the potential for a mobile-first option for field management software. It rolled out ServiceBridge, which now has about 10 employees, to take that idea to market. Since rolling it out, ServiceBridge has remained bootstrapped.
Image via ServiceBridge
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