5 Factors to Consider While Creating a Roadmap for HVAC Professionals

HVAC Field Service Personnel Roadmap: Key Considerations 

The major strength of any HVAC field service business is the quality of its field service technicians. Hence, it’s crucial to have a roadmap to develop an efficient and productive field service team that can drive your revenue and growth. With soaring customer expectations, the demand for automating processes in the HVAC industry has also increased. This has led to a situation where people with diverse skills need to be engaged in multiple processes. To manage the people and processes in HVAC, you need a robust roadmap that takes into consideration several factors. This post takes a look at those key factors. 

Factors to consider while creating an HVAC field service roadmap

A successful field service engagement is one that establishes a robust connection between your service and your customer through the effective utilization of technology. Incorporating these five aspects into your roadmap will enable your HVAC field service professionals to serve your customers in a better way. 

1. Bridge the gap between talent demand and talent dearth

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. reveals that the HVACR mechanic and installer jobs will have a 21% growth through 2022. This indicates the rising demand for HVAC field service professionals. Additionally, several retirements take place which leads to a shortage of skilled labor in the industry. 
Hence the process of building an HVAC field service roadmap for professionals should take into account key aspects such as hiring, onboarding, workflow streamlining, administration, and overall managing of field service workers. These processes are now urging businesses to build a roadmap with a digital strategy. 
The main objective of a roadmap is to reduce the personnel’s workload as well as associated costs incurred by the business. The roadmap should enable the professionals to use the features provided by the field service software for defining their roles. For businesses, it should allow maximum resource utilization at minimal costs. 
Related Reading: Improve the Quality of Your HVAC Business using Checklists

2. Hire talents to enhance core services and customer services

Every customer touchpoint is crucial as customer experience plays a major role in the profitability of field services. With the growth of technology, the hiring process in the HVAC field has changed. A large number of HVAC field service software solutions nowadays offer access to the data of experienced technicians. Using this data, businesses can hire professionals with outstanding soft skills and experience required to offer excellent customer services.
For the field service technicians to improve their customer engagement skills, the roadmap should focus on imparting soft skill training and allow new technicians to upgrade their skills.  
HVAC enterprises can also target a group of field service professionals and build a roadmap to train them in niche technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and IoT. Training the technicians to gather insights from available data and enhancing their analytics skills can help them work effectively. They should be trained to access previous work orders and track historical data to improve their future services.

3. Set business goals to meet expectations

Workforce success is the key to financial success in any industry. An effective roadmap for field service professionals requires the workforce to be always at its peak in terms of efficiency. Hence it is important to have a metrics system set up as part of the roadmap to track and monitor the operations of the technicians.
An effective HVAC Field Service Software uses Business Intelligence to help managers monitor Key Performance Indicators of their workforce. For instance, gaining access to dashboards can give you insights into how your professionals and service teams are working. This will help in keeping your customers satisfied. This will also help you in making future decisions as well as cut-down cost overheads and delays. 
Related Reading: Field Service Software To Keep Small HVAC Business Competitive

4. Make use of subcontracts and external workforce

HVAC field service software solutions come with tools that can help your business in subcontracting redundant or tedious tasks that will allow your professionals to concentrate on their core tasks. This saves you from having to pay a full-time cost associated with hiring, servicing, as well as issuing payments.  
The workforce can be dispatched and managed using a mobile application in real-time, prompting them for a quote, accepting it if viable, pushing work orders, getting the work done, and paying the workforce- all can happen through a mobile field service software. Adding high-quality checklists can make the process simple, quick, and error-free.

5. Optimize Customer Experience

An effective HVAC Field Service software solution should be flexible enough to change with evolving customer demands. It should involve a feedback loop to get customer feedback directly so that it’s easy to address the concern and retain the customer. 
Keeping your customer feedback loop intact can drive customer satisfaction. Studies illustrate that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25 to 95%. 
Unlike traditional customer feedback options such as cold calls, survey research, and follow up calls, modern methods use digital tools like self-service portals, email surveys, social media, and most importantly, embedded mobile application experiences.
https://www.reachoutsuite.com/technology-to-transform-hvac-company/
The present field service industry, which is highly technology-driven demands disrupting the old systems, unlocking new customer touchpoints, choosing the right technology and business practices, and refining customer experiences. For the effective running of your HVAC field service business, you need a well-planned roadmap that can transform the way you work. Should you require any consultation on building a roadmap for your HVAC business or want to learn how ReachOut can be the best-fit software for your business, talk to our experts right away.