PCL Heating and Gas Engineers Testimonial

"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

"Commusoft gives customers a quicker response time and enables us to not feel so stressed whilst giving that response."

You’d expect that a field service business would want a job management system to, well, get more jobs. But that’s not what it  was about for Heating South West Limited. This 25-employee gas and plumbing company in Liskeard, Cornwall, was instead looking to remove stress from their customers and their staff—and they turned to Commusoft to help.

Gun Shy After a Sub-Par Software Experience

Heating South West manufactures and services its own range cookers, sells wood-burning stoves, and offers many other services. Part of the business’s M.O. is to provide service in a way that makes their customers feel confident and relaxed; in fact, the tagline on one page of Heating South West’s website is “Choice, Customer Care & A Relaxed Atmosphere”.

The business does two to four jobs per engineer per day. “We cover pretty much the whole of the UK, which involves a lot of travelling and a lot of time”, says Brian Hardy, son of the company’s owner. “We’re not trying to increase the amount of jobs that we can do, we’re just trying to make ourselves more efficient with it”. Brian laughs that from 1975 until now, Heating South West’s way of doing organising and invoicing was “Hard work and a lot of paperwork”. He wanted to implement field service management software, but his father, the company founder, had a bad experience years ago with a software system that overpromised and underdelivered.

So Brian carefully examined several different field service management solutions before finally choosing Commusoft. “It was partially due to a recommendation from an electrician friend of mine, but mostly it was just down to homework and comparing the different types of software”, he says. “Commusoft seemed the most user-friendly, and I also liked the fact that it appeared to be constantly updating, constantly evolving, with more features always being added. That put my mind at rest that Commusoft was ahead of the game”.

The Customer Journey: Before and After Commusoft

Let’s get back to that ideal of the relaxed, confident customer. Heating South West has been testing Commusoft among a group of several employees, and experiencing how the software is helping to smooth out every part of the customer journey—from the first call to the final invoice.

Scheduling Service: Before

In the past, when a customer phoned to schedule a job the service coordinator, Steve, booked it into a paper diary and decided which engineer would be the best to send based on their experience. He then wrote out a job sheet and gave it to the engineer, who headed out to the job. At the end of the week, Steve received a load of job sheets that he then had to process through the company’s accounting system.

Scheduling Service: After

With Commusoft’s job scheduling software, Steve will be able to easily send the closest engineer who also has the right experience for the job. The GPS feature also lets Steve know where the engineers are at any time. “Having the software say, ‘They’re at this job’, or ‘They’ve finished this job and now are on the way to the next job’ gives you an understanding as to how well they’re doing during the day”, says Brian.

These Commusoft features help the customer as well: ‘The situation we have at the minute is that, being countrywide, we could be doing a batch of jobs and then a new job will come in and you’ll think, ‘I was up there only two days ago!'”, Brian says. “Whereas if we’d known at the time we could’ve planned it better. Commusoft gives customers a quicker response time and enables us to not feel so stressed whilst giving that response”.

Handling Schedule Changes: Before

When an emergency job pops up or a customer cancels a service appointment, it can throw a schedule into chaos—leading to missed appointments and late engineers. “We’ve had paper diaries up until now”, explains Brian. “If we had to change something, which happens quite frequently, then we have to either tippex it out or put sticky notes over it and then rebook it, which is confusing and very, very time-consuming”. The more time office staff spend on managing the diary, the less time they have to focus on their customers.

Handling Schedule Changes: After

Commusoft makes it easy to make changes to the schedule. “Being able to just drag and drop diary events in Commusoft is far, far easier,” says Brian. “It will help us to put jobs in further ahead and plan them better”. Not only that, but Commusoft syncs the schedule to the diary on field service engineers’ app, so the engineers know immediately when there’s been a change. Right now Heating South West is using a ‘prehistoric’ accounting system that’s embedded in the company’s accounting structure.

The company also use Commusoft’s Sage accounting integration. “We were just doing accounting in the accounting package itself”, Brian explains. “Then we manually exported all the details into our current accounting package. Nisha [Commusoft’s Training Manager] came up with a solution for the easiest way to do that”.

Sending the Invoice: After

Once Heating South West moved away from its homegrown system to one of Commusoft’s accounting integrations, when they raise an invoice Commusoft will now automatically send the information to the accounting package. The system will automatically generate invoices, payments, and credit notes. Sending invoices immediately after a job means Heating South West will get paid faster—and, believe it or not, customers want to receive invoices quickly and not have to chase them down, meaning this feature will boost Heating South West’s customer satisfaction rates as well. Discover more about Commusoft’s invoicing software.

Service Reminders: Before

Reminding customers of when their equipment or appliances are due for a service is a great way to increase customer happiness and generate recurring revenue. However, it can also be a time-consuming, laborious project. “Steve basically had a book, where every four weeks he’d log in the jobs that we’d done”, explains Brian. “Then that went into a book that’s a year behind, and he’d look at that book a year down the line and say, ‘we did a service for these customers last year, so we’ll send them a reminder letter.”‘ Finally, Steve would personalise a template letter and send it via post.

Service Reminders: After

Commusoft’s service reminder software takes all the stress off of Heating South West’s service coordinator and other staff. Two weeks before the service is due, Commusoft automatically sends service reminders to customers via SMS or email. Each day when Steve logs in, he gets a notification telling him how many reminders were sent. For print reminders, there are PDF letters attached to the notification; which Steve can print and send manually.

While Commusoft’s features are helping to perfect the customer journey, we can’t ignore how the solution also helps everyone in the business, from the office staff to the owners. Says Brian, “We’re trying to keep the stress down off the engineers as well as our service coordinator and, ultimately, us. Yes, we’re trying to give a better service, but we’re also trying to make sure that, as an employer, our employees are happy”. Commusoft’s service reminder, accounting, and scheduling features are helping Heating South West’s customers—and their employees—enjoy streamlined, stress-free jobs.

Feel like you’re facing the same problems Brian had? Book a call with our team find out how Commusoft’s job management software can help you go paperless and optimise all your day-to-day processes.

Brian Hardy

"Commusoft has only gotten better since we started 10 years ago. And we’ve never looked back."

After celebrating 10 years with Commusoft, we sat down with Daniel Brough, owner and manager of Furness Heating Engineers, to discuss how Commusoft has been pivotal in their growth and success over the past decade. 

Furness Heating Engineers have served the Furness Peninsula, Cumbria, for over 20 years, specialising in everything related to heating, bathrooms, cookers and fires; from servicing to installation.

Back in 2014, Daniel managed a team of 5 gas engineers and 1 office staff. Today, Furness Heating Engineers is close to trebling in size, consisting of 10 engineers and 5 office staff. “Without a doubt Commusoft has helped us expand”, Daniel says, owing the progress to their transition away from paper:

“It was hard work, really, really hard work. We were using Outlook for diaries and we’d print out job sheets and pick them up every day. Once we realised we could be doing this from our phones and how much easier it was, all the lads took that up straightaway.”

A Decade of Streamlined Operations and Scheduling

It’s the details that make a difference for Daniel’s team, from required questions when arriving or leaving jobs, to attached site photos, and custom forms. But the instant syncing between office and field is the real game changer, explains Daniel:

“It makes a huge difference rather than being sent through a message trail in WhatsApp or Messenger which can get lost or confused. It’s all tied to the job, which makes life a lot easier. Once the job is complete, office staff can work on ordering the parts for the boiler same day, rather than waiting for the job sheets to come back.”

Job scheduling has improved dramatically thanks to Commusoft, allowing the team to keep certain engineers in certain locations, reducing driving time between jobs and improving overall efficiency. “We try and keep an engineer in that location for the full day, to make sure he’s not coming back and wasting an hour driving back to another area”, Daniel explains.

This has an additional bonus on work-life balance for the team too, adds Daniel, “For engineers that live out of the town, we give them their last job on the route home, so they can go straight home and save driving out just to go back. It’s much better.”

Driving Customer Satisfaction for 10 Years

When it comes to Furness Heating Engineers’ customers, they too benefit from the fast and organised CRM that Commusoft offers, according to Daniel:

“Customers are amazed at how much information we keep, especially on their boiler. If they call up a couple months after a job and say it’s still having the same problem, we don’t even need to go back out. All the boiler details and work history are saved, so we can review, order the part, and get it booked back in.”

The other benefit Furness Heating Engineers’ customers really find useful is the ease of accessing their old certificates with gas certificate software, “they just call up and we send it to them straight away via email.” Commusoft’s customer database software saves every job, service, and certificate indefinitely. With 10 years of data at their fingertips, Daniel can be confident that his team can always see the big picture and answer any customer queries – no matter how far they date back.

Continuous Growth; Adopting Vehicle Tracking

“Commusoft has only gotten better since we started. And we’ve never looked back.” With updates and new features being added regularly, Daniel and his team have continually had new areas to explore.

Six months ago they started using real-time vehicle tracking as part of Commusoft, Daniel details:

“Just recently we started using the trackers and it’s amazing how much more helpful that makes it when a customer calls and you can know exactly where the engineer is. Our office staff just click on the maps and can follow along and see where they’ve been.”

After trialling it with a couple vans, they’ve now moved away from their prior tracking software and have installed Commusoft trackers in all 10 vans, Daniel elaborates: “the tracking software we had before wasn’t linked to Commusoft and was just much harder for the team to use.”

Beyond improved operations, Daniel’s found a creative way to utilise the safe driving data offered from Commusoft:

“Whoever tops the best driving leaderboard that month wins the ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ award. It’s a little bit of fun, but it does get the engineers to think about how they are driving their vans and it has worked. It gets quite competitive at times…”.

The Next 10 Years with Commusoft

Powered by Commusoft’s job management software, continued growth and expansion is definitely on the horizon for Furness Heating Engineers, Daniel is confident: “with Commusoft, it doesn’t scare us moving and expanding further.” Even after 10 years, there’s still new functionality and benefits to explore in the software.

For Daniel and his team Commusoft is central to both their daily operations and the level of service they can offer customers. Daniel reflects, “when I open my computer, Commusoft opens automatically, because it’s always the first place I’m going.”

Daniel Brough
Managing Director