C.P. Jefferies Ltd Testimonial

"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 field service engineer 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 on-boarding 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 organise 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 customisation 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 quotes, 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 guesswork out of field service. With important processes standardised and organised, 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 optimised 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 supplier’s 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 software offers 40+ preconfigured reports, the ability to filter data, create custom resorts, and more.

Optimised 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 favourite one.”

Commusoft’s Office Tasks feature empowers engineers 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.

Commusoft’s timesheets 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 was 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 customisable, 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 organised, 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 clearly going to electrify the industry, and will continue to thrill more and more customers; there’s no looking back.

Mary-Rachel Voity
Office Manager

"Commusoft is a completely scalable solution... We’ve quadrupled our workload, but we’ve only doubled our workforce."

Premier Heating Solutions Ltd has been in business since 2015, operating out of Reading, Berkshire. Phil Mulvenna, the company’s Managing Director, sat down with us to highlight his company’s growth since utilising Commusoft in 2017, and recently upgrading to our Customer Journey Plan in 2020.

Customer service has been the backbone of the business from the very beginning. Phil explains,

“We believe in putting the customer at the forefront of everything that we do, and customer service being absolutely key. Working with Commusoft has allowed us to refocus on that, and being part of their Customer Journey package allows us to embody everything we preach”.

Before Commusoft

Before switching to Commusoft, the company was booking and completing “approximately 100 jobs a month”. They relied on a combination of T Cards and Microsoft Office to organise their workflow.

However, with a growth mindset, desire to expand, and need to better serve their customers, Phil and his team knew that these archaic systems were stunting their progress. He explains, “using Microsoft Office was obviously going to be a problem for us in the long term. It wasn’t a scalable solution and it was causing us headaches because we couldn’t do any reporting at all”.

Moving to a new field service software wasn’t a decision they took lightly; after all, the future of the business depended on the software they selected. Phil and his team weighed many other field services software before deciding to proceed with Commusoft.

But Why Commusoft?

Phil describes, “our industry, historically, has always been a couple of steps behind other industries that use software as a service…Commusoft is at the forefront of that growth and allows us to have access to the most up-to-date software solutions available. So, that really, really, helps us grow our business”.

The training process, and ongoing relationship maintained by Commusoft’s client services team, is another merit according to Phil.

He expands, “the training is great, and the help desk and ongoing support that you get from Commusoft is great. We deal with a lot of software companies for various different parts of our business and often it’s an email, and a couple days response, but these guys are really on top of it and that makes it a lot easier to do business”.

Intelligent Scheduling Boosts Productivity

Commusoft’s job scheduling software analyses driving timing and distance for engineers against newly booked appointments, making suggestions to office staff for the most efficient routing and scheduling. Phil states,

“We can pop in a postcode, and it tells us where our nearest engineer is on a specific day…we can get our travel time down to 10 or 15 minutes in between jobs. And that really helps us in a reactive sense, making sure we’ve got the person closest to that job who’s being booked to carry out the work”.

Automated Invoicing Smooths the Billing Process

Phil was concerned about streamlining the invoicing process when searching for field service software. His customers used to wait days while his office staff scrambled to assemble an invoice with the correct services and parts allocation. “Even though we were only doing 100 jobs a month, it was a time-consuming exercise”, he asserts.

Commusoft’s automated invoicing software was able to slash their invoicing time from days to “less than 30 seconds”; Phil continues, “now we’re able to automate the whole process, generate an invoice based on the settings we put into Commusoft, it allocates the parts to the job… and sends it out to the customer.”

Office staff can quickly send accurate invoices and concentrate on growing their business, and not the admin work that slows progress. 

Stock Control Cuts Costs and Processing Time

Commusoft’s stock control software has impacted the business’ revenue by cutting unnecessary time and costs. Phil was happy to tell us that his company has “made some fairly significant savings. It’s allowed us to start buying our parts wholesale and we now carry a significant amount of product within our building. That has allowed us to save approximately 12% on our parts cost, which is touching on six figures”.

Functioning to maintain organisation, Commusoft “allows us to stay on top of stock management, so we don’t have to have a warehouse person managing that. We just have the auto-ordering system…and we receive those parts the following day. It’s a really, really, powerful tool, and you could argue it does the job of a warehouse manager”.

SLAs Support Customer Service

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a pillar of a commitment to offering quality customer service. Phil explains, “as we’ve grown, SLAs have become far more important to our business”. Premier Heating Solutions uses SLAs in two capacities. The first is through a Tiered Membership program in which customers are offered same-day service. The other is for a time limit on return appointments.

Phil details how Commusoft aids this process: “SLAs are really important for our business; they help us track the service we offer. If the SLA isn’t met, I will get a notification, or my manager will get a notification, and we can look at why that happened, and be on top of the situation before it escalates”.

Ultimately, dedication to customers and following through on promises has contributed to the company’s growth: “If you’re able to deliver a service, and meet the promises that you’re making to your customers, it helps you scale up further.”

Looking forward With Commusoft 

Company growth while maintaining optimal customer service are non-negotiables for Premier Heating Solutions.

Rather than being stressful and disjointed, Phil and his team were able to seamlessly navigate the leap from 100 to 400 jobs with Commusoft’s support. Phil elaborates,

“That’s 400 jobs managed well, where there aren’t mistakes, or a lot of callbacks. Before, it was 100 jobs, all over the place, with a few mistakes a day…we’re able to make sure any follow up queries are dealt with in the moment, whereas before, all of those things may take two or three days to put together; we were constantly chasing our tail. It’s been a real gear-shift for us to have something like Commusoft.”

This growth has saved the company on hiring costs, thus increasing overall revenue. Phil explains, “although we’ve had to double our workforce, we haven’t had to quadruple it. So the features Commusoft offers us has allowed us to significantly grow and take our business to the next level”.

It wasn’t just the Premier Heating Solutions team who noticed the improvement; their customers reacted with staggering positivity to the change in services since switching to Commusoft. Phil shared that they have received “over 1000 five-star reviews online”. He attributes a portion of this accomplishment to Commusoft saying, “we wouldn’t be able to offer the service as efficiently as we are, or, as effectively as we are” without it.

Phil was excited to tell us that Premier Heating Solutions is “anticipating having very significant growth over the next 12 months. We’re looking to add around a million in revenue to the business. That’s completely doable with the systems and processes that we have in place. And the beauty of Commusoft is that it’s a completely scalable solution”.

Phil Mulvenna
Managing Director

"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 the past 40 years 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 engineers 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 engineer 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 engineers do it from site. Not only do invoices not get missed, but the engineer 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 diary. If it’s a call-out for that day, which happens very often, it will appear in real time in the engineer’s diary. The engineer 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 engineer can then invoice and it will automatically send off the after-care email asking for a review. It’s all made very engineer friendly and very easy to use. The communication between the office and engineer is instant.”

Would You Recommend Commusoft to Other Tradespeople?

“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