Homeserve: Five Full Years Of Successful Scheduling With VISITOUR
Reading, UK, 26 June 2023 – HomeServe is one of the UK’s most recognised and highly-rated boiler companies. For more than five years, it has used the VISITOUR dynamic scheduling tool to achieve top-tier field service efficiency.
This presents a complex planning mix of sales surveyors who attend many jobs in one day, and field engineers with one job that could require one day or several days for installations. When searching for new scheduling and route optimisation software, HomeServe required a tool that could do both.
The true test for any relationship is how it fairs over the long term. Reaching their milestone, Richard Shepherd, Managing Director at HomeServe Installations and HomeServe Repairs, comments;
The technology has proven flexible to changing needs and they have listened and delivered on our suggestions for product development. We have regularly scored Solvares 10/10 in their annual survey and I expect that to continue long into the future."
Intelligent automation replaces manual white-space filling
The solution was first deployed in 2018 Read the case study ↗. Richard Wilson, then IT Director for HomeServe boiler installations, explained, “Previously we had always relied on the personal knowledge of our planning team to know which sales surveyors and engineers would be best suited for a job in terms of geography, availability, and skills. We wanted software that could make smarter, faster decisions than our planners were equipped to.”
It was on speaking with other field service and scheduling solution providers that HomeServe first heard of Solvares;
The providers we talked to said, 'We can't really do that, but we know a solution that can: VISITOUR'."
Linked field appointments in real time
Richard and his project team investigated Solvares, and discovered the real-time scheduler and embedded route optimiser VISITOUR was the solution it was looking for.
An intelligent tool that evaluates a company’s entire resource pool and effectively ‘thinks on its feet’, VISITOUR makes smarter, quicker, and more efficient decisions than humans and other scheduling technologies. It works in conjunction with Solvares’ platform-independent mobility solution, MOBILE FLOW, to ensure that field-based staff get to where they need to be and have the information they need when they get there. Together they cut the administrative burden considerably, and automate processes.
The company proceeded with the proof-of-concept pilot project that Solvares offers all new customers. This demonstrates the value of VISITOUR in terms of functionality and versatility, in particular its ability to integrate with existing back-office systems.
They're not just demos where you have to guess and imagine how it's going to work in the context of your unique business. With a pilot, they wire it all in and prove it to you. We saw immediately that VISITOUR lends itself to integration.
We were also able to see first-hand how feature-rich and multi-faceted VISITOUR really is."
Richard goes on to refer to a feature that has proved particularly useful for HomeServe: Linking jobs. When HomeServe installs a boiler, it must schedule a field engineer to do the installation and an electrician to do the wiring and potentially another to remove the old boiler.
VISITOUR will link the jobs, even if they take place on different days. This means that if the installation appointment must be changed, VISITOUR will move the electrician appointment simultaneously. “Most software will do about 80% of what you need or really want it to do,” says Richard. “The ability to link jobs is a great example of the fact that VISITOUR will do a lot more.”
The company proceeded with the proof-of-concept pilot project that Solvares offers all new customers. This demonstrates the value of VISITOUR in terms of functionality and versatility, in particular its ability to integrate with existing back-office systems.
Faster-than-usual implementation
Implementation happened in a much shorter timescale than normal. Thanks to strong teamwork between Solvares and HomeServe’s in-house developers and back-office teams, VISITOUR was live, integrated and scheduling hundreds of multi-disciplined field resources within just weeks.
Richard points out one reason why Solvares is generally a quicker-to-implement programme than many other scheduling software packages:
"Solvares is very good on configuration without the need for customisation. We didn't have the appetite, time, or the resources to develop our own boutique functionality. We needed a solution that was already fully functional, which we could tweak to fit our requirements without writing code. That solution was VISITOUR."