Data probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think “aircon” or “plumbing,” but there’s definitely a rationale behind this unlikely pairing! Data and data analytics now have a bearing on every industry—including HVAC and home service—and it’s become increasingly essential for businesses to be familiar with data and how to use it.
With this in mind, one of the best ways to engage with your HVAC business data is with dashboards, such as those from Plecto. Dashboards allow you to visualize your relevant data, particularly KPIs, in the interest of transparency, better analysis, and optimized decision-making—whether in marketing, pricing, customer service, or any other category.
So whether you’re interested in cutting costs, managing your workflow, or obtaining and organizing customer feedback, there’s a huge range of uses for data analytics in any HVAC company. Read on to find out how!
1. Cost Reduction
One of the best and most practical uses for data analytics, cost reduction is a direct outcome of seeing your financial data in real-time. Financial KPIs are just as relevant to home service as any other industry, as they allow you to quantify and monitor the different components of your cash inflow and outflow. Whether you want to monitor your profit margin, reduce extraneous costs, or better tailor your pricing scheme to your jobs, visualizing and tracking your financial KPIs in real-time is absolutely essential to ensuring you’re getting the best bang for your buck.
2. Greater Transparency
Displaying your data publicly, as on digital dashboards, comes with the important benefit of allowing everyone in your team to ee what’s going on. This allows your team members to monitor their own performance and that of their colleagues too—a great way to encourage self-accountability and spur friendly competition between employees. While it might not be advisable to share all data, even having some financial or sales data displayed publicly can provide a common, transparent reference point, prompting everyone to understand their stake in the company and how their work impacts the bottom line. Finally, at a broader level, keeping your team “in the loop” shows that you respect and value them as equals—a surefire way to boost morale.
3. Upgrading Your Customer Service
Customer service management is a business area with an extensive range of KPIs. You can use metrics such as Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to help determine your level of customer happiness. Tracking the resulting data will tell you how to best allocate resources, schedule visitations and jobs, handle billing and contracts, and maintain the sense of trust and responsibility toward your customers.
From another angle, AI promises to revolutionize how internal data can be used in a customer-forward direction. The recent AI revolution has prompted the customer support process to be more efficient for customers and agents alike, at a time when expectations for customer support have never been higher. With this in mind, it’s never been easier to streamline customer interaction. Delegating simple support tasks to an automated chatbot based on your current data will allow more complex questions to be addressed by human agents.
4. Increased Operational Efficiency
“Operational efficiency” refers to a company’s ability to deliver its products or services at the highest possible quality with the least amount of time and money wasted. In other words, it’s about getting the best possible results with the least possible input. Today, numerous software services can significantly help your HVAC business in doing just that.
Software solutions for HVAC have developed a wide range of exciting features that harness the power of data analytics to help your company perform its very best. Operational efficiency covers a broad range of business processes, and many of these software solutions offer benefits that cut significant time and expense in unexpected ways.
For example, QuickBooks offers taxation-related features to help your company prepare taxes in compliance with federal and state regulations, and ServiceTitan offers a GPS feature to help your technicians find the best routes to jobs. These and other platforms also offer invoicing, scheduling, and payment features to streamline your ordinary business processes.
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5. Better Time Management
Time is money, and in home service, you’ll want to spend less time on admin work and more on doing the jobs that actually matter. With that in mind, there are several KPIs ideal for time tracking and task management: Average Hours per Job, Jobs by Type, and Number of New Jobs, just to name a few. Using an automated system to track the number of customer jobs and visitations, the types of jobs that need done, and how long your technicians are in the field will reduce human error, allow you to avoid repetitive and time-consuming tasks, and unlock more of your time and energy for the things you really need to do.
The Plecto difference
Data has the potential to drive your business to the next level, and there’s little doubt that data analytics can increase your HVAC company’s profitability. With the insights you’ll glean from data analysis, you’ll be able to maximize your company’s potential, as your decisions will be based on real data and not just hunches or guesswork.
With over 150 integrations and applicability across the home services, trades, and HVAC world, Plecto remains a powerful, data-based software solution to cover your most important data analysis needs.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial and see how Plecto can harness the power of data to help improve your operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, financial reporting—and more.
