Run Your Service Business on Your Smartphone

If you’ve got a business where you perform services at a client’s site, you know how hard it is to keep track of customers, schedule appointments, be on time, do the billing, get paid and maintain good relationships with your customers. A new app, Breezeworks, helps you and your team organize all of that and more right from your smart phone.

Are you a service provider who travels to your customers’ locations to do work? Do you walk into jobs with a smart phone in your pocket and a clipboard containing the paperwork for the job in your hand? Do you sometimes lose track of time while you’re working and arrive late to appointments? Do you hand customers paper invoices and wait weeks or months to get paid? Do you lose out on repeat business beca
use you don’t have a good way to follow up with customers?

If you answered, “Yes,” to any of those questions, there’s a new mobile app you’ll want to check out. Called Breezeworks, it brings together in one place a number of tools that will let you run your small business from your Apple iPhone or Android smart phone.

One platform for many business functions

Created specifically for 1 – 20 person on-site service professionals, Breezeworks puts scheduling, customer notifications, mapping, job management, team management, invoicing and the ability to get paid immediately via credit card all, literally, in the palm of your hand.

What makes it different from other mobile business apps is that the others are primarily piecemeal solutions. The calendar is one app, maps is another, the ability to create invoices is another, and the ability to accept credit cards in the field, is yet another. Breezeworks provides a single application for all of these tasks, making running a business easier for plumbers, electricians, landscapers, dog groomers, and any service professional who performs their services at their customers’ locations.

“Until now,” says Matthew Cowan, chief executive officer and co-founder of Breezeworks, “on-site service professionals have been left out in the cold by technology because they don’t have access to a computer for much of the day. Breezeworks gives them the same type of CRM and automated follow-up that a Fortune 500 company has – all wrapped up neatly in a smart phone. It combines the full suite of capabilities on-site service providers need so there is one place they can go to perform all of these tasks.”

How it works

Because all of the tools are part of the same app, you only have to enter customer information once with Breezeworks. When you have a new customer, you create a record containing the customer’s information. Then, that information is carried across to each customer-related task. You then use Breezeworks to schedule appointments (and keep you on-schedule), find directions to each customer’s location, show you a picture of the location, create an invoice when you’re done with each job, email it to the customer, and let you accept payment on the spot by snapping a photo of the customer’s credit card.  

When the you collect payment from the customers who didn’t pay with a credit card, you enter them in Breezeworks. A quick look at your smart phone at any time will let you know how many invoices are outstanding or past due, so you can stay on top of your receivables.

If you have to schedule a follow-up, you can pull up the customer’s information with just a few taps on the phone and schedule the next appointment. And, if you need access to past job information, it’s right there on your phone, too. You can pull up job notes and work site pictures by customer or date.

The app stores all your customer data on the phone and synchronizes it in the cloud. If you enter data from a location with no phone or wifi signal, the data will be automatically synchronized once you are in an area with connectivity. And, if you lose your phone, or drop it out of your pocket into a puddle or toilet, there’s a backup of your data stored safely on Breezeworks servers.

Helps Keep You on Time

One of the most frequent complaints customers have about service providers is that they fail to show up on time and fail to notify them that they’ll be late. Breezeworks helps minimize those complaints by monitoring traffic and your location and notifying you when it’s time to leave for your next appointment so that you’ll arrive on time. If you will be late, you can quickly let the next customer know what’s going on and when to expect you.

Build Repeat Business

Repeat business is an important way to grow a business and increase profitability in any business, and service businesses are no exception. Breezeworks helps here, too. “The service provider will be able to keep track of follow-up job opportunities in Breezeworks,” says Cowan. For example, the HVAC person might come to someone’s home and note that they will need a filter change in 6 months. “Breezeworks will keep track of all these follow up leads and prompt the provider to reach out to those customers.”  

More to Come

Available to businesses in the United States and Canada, Breezeworks already gives on-site service professionals an affordable platform with many tools to automate and manage their business. But there’s more on the way. Among the future enhancements, says Cowan, will be tie-ins to popular accounting software and email service providers.

At only $19.95 a month with a free, 30-day trial, the platform is one that’s well worth checking out for any business owner that provides services at customer locations.