Service calls to fix broken equipment are part of life for commercial contractors, and research by Service Council indicates organizations are increasingly prioritizing their ability to predict their maintenance needs and be proactive in addressing them.
For Alex Kablanian, ServiceTitan’s general manager for commercial and construction markets, preventative maintenance agreements (PMAs) are the solution every company should pursue.
“If something breaks, a customer will call and say, ‘Hey, my HVAC unit is broken … floor 15 is not getting the airflow that it needs,’” he said. “How do you stop that call from ever happening in the first place? The best way is signing a single-year or multi-year agreement with your own customers to regularly, routinely have high-quality service of all equipment that is on-site.”
Service Council is a trusted community of 75,000 nationally recognized business executives overseeing functions of service and customer management. ServiceTitan has partnered with Service Council to share insights with service leaders and executives in the trades — focused on how technology and best practices can help commercial contractors grow and run more efficiently.
During a recent edition of the inService Podcast Series with Gerardo Pelayo, Service Council’s vice president of research and advisory, Kablanian outlined how the benefits of PMAs reach far beyond averting the occasional service call.
When properly executed by contractors who embrace technology, tailor agreements to meet the needs of customers, and push for improved efficiency, Kablanian said PMAs boost customer retention and ultimately unlock growth potential.
“This is one of the cornerstones of any commercial contractor's business — a well-oiled PMA team and process,” he said.
The benefits of embracing technology
Utilizing technology is a huge component of successful PMAs, and Kablanian acknowledges the level of technology adoption in the trades is not ideal.
“It's the reason ServiceTitan exists,” he said. “Technology has left this industry behind in a lot of ways, how can we help bridge that gap?”
As the next wave of game-changing tech – Artificial Intelligence – embeds itself in seemingly every industry, Kablanian said ServiceTitan’s approach is to find ways to help AI deliver better outcomes for its customers.
He knows the first step is helping technicians adjust to new tools as their roles continue to evolve.
“Your technicians are your product,” he said. “That is what you're putting out there. They're the ones who are doing the hard work. They're ensuring uptime (for equipment), so being able to have them trust in their employer is huge.”
One of Service Council’s annual research efforts showed technicians spend 52% of their work time dealing with data capture. And 41% of techs polled said the amount of data they're receiving on their mobile devices is too much, making it their top source of friction.
Kablanian understands the concerns, but knows the days of clipboards and paperwork are vanishing. He outlined steps companies can take to ease technicians into a new era of maintenance, including:
Tailor their workflows: “Don't overwhelm them with the 50 different things that they have access to do,” he said. “If you only care about three things on a job, only give them access to those three things.”
Incentivize them: “Specifically, if there's a big sale or quoted job that comes out of an opportunity a technician flagged, giving them a percentage of whatever the job value ended up being. They'll be spotting opportunities more and more.”
Have a few technicians become early adopters: “Once they start using certain functionality before others, it can create a positive feedback loop” with their peers.
Kablanian sees technology helping companies execute PMAs in four areas:
1. Optimizing the sale of the agreement
How tech helps: Prospecting tools can arm companies with the data to understand the types of agreements that are most profitable for them, and to find the right contractors.
2. Optimizing the work being done on site by the technician
How tech helps: Sending the right tech to the right place at the right time with the right materials is easier said than done. Having targeted information is the key.
3. Optimizing the information sharing between the customer, technician, and back office
How tech helps: One example: A ServiceTitan mobile application for technicians has a new functionality called Field Assist, an interface that allows them to ask questions about specific assets and get information about work that's been performed there historically, in seconds, without calling the back office or sifting through paperwork. Other streamlined processes like scanning nameplates of assets that auto-populate information, having voice-to-text updates on tasks being done, and templating forms can minimize a tech’s administrative workload.
4. Optimizing the retention of the agreement.
How tech helps: It allows technicians to present a clear picture to the customer – here's what we did, here's what we found – and deliver it in a timely way.
“I think if you do all those things, then what happens is at the time of renewal (of the PMA), you have a really great track record of delivering an A-plus experience,” Kablanian said.
Customer retention and growth
When companies have everything clicking – they have PMAs in place, get their preventative work done in the agreed timeframes, have technicians utilizing new technology to its potential, build year-end reports – the real benefits come into focus.
“The most sophisticated organizations think about (PMAs) as their main responsibility,” Kablanian said. “They build trust and deliver quality.”
Those contractors are able to point to 100% uptime, point out issues they discovered on a specific property, make service recommendations, and find areas that help the customer become more efficient.
That level of service can elevate a company’s relationship with a customer from contractor to trusted partner.
“Those organizations think about that life cycle as a multi-year, sometimes even multi-decade relationship,” Kablanian said. “Retention becomes one of the most important things they care about, because that impacts their reputation in their market to be able to go and win more work.”
