™Technologie pour entreprises locales · Local service business
Scheduling and enquiry capture for a recurring service business
A local business losing evening enquiries and driving an inefficient route. Neither problem needed an expensive system.
Cette étude de cas n'est disponible qu'en anglais pour le moment.
Le problème
A recurring service business covering a wide, partly rural area was booking jobs in the order they arrived, which meant crews crossing the same territory several times a day.
Separately, enquiries arriving after hours were sometimes not seen until two days later, by which time the customer had often booked elsewhere.
Démarche
We spent a day with the owner going through how work was actually scheduled, rather than how it was supposed to be. Most of the logic lived in the owner's head and had never been written down.
We deliberately looked for the smallest change that would help. For a business of this size, a large platform would have been abandoned within a month.
Ce qui a été construit
A simple intake form and after-hours acknowledgement so every enquiry lands in one place and the customer knows it was received.
Geographic grouping in the booking process, jobs in the same area are offered adjacent slots by default, with the ability to override.
Automated reminders to customers the day before, which reduced missed appointments.
Technologie et processus
- A lightweight booking and intake flow designed for use on a phone, in the field, on a poor connection.
- Address grouping rather than full route optimisation, sufficient for the problem and far simpler to operate.
- Consent-respecting reminder messages with a clear opt-out.
Résultat
Enquiries stopped being missed overnight, and the owner reported noticeably less backtracking across the service area. We did not have baseline measurements from before the change, so we do not publish figures.
The business chose not to adopt two other features we had considered, which we regard as the correct outcome.
Ce que nous avons appris
- Approximate geographic grouping captured most of the available benefit at a fraction of the complexity of true route optimisation.
- For owner-operated businesses, the constraint is attention, not budget. Anything requiring daily upkeep does not survive.
- Acknowledging an enquiry immediately mattered more than replying quickly to it.
L'identité des clients et les détails commercialement sensibles ont été retirés. Les résultats sont décrits qualitativement lorsque des chiffres mesurés ne peuvent être publiés.