The way we use technology makes us the best choice for your commercial services needs.
When you think of commercial services providers, you don’t typically think of companies that use technology in a great way. Basically, most plumbers are more about the crack than the tech stack. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.)
At Collins Commercial Services, we use technology in a lot of different ways that benefit our customers, both in commercial and residential categories. In fact, we have an entire development team that works full-time researching and implementing ways we can use tech to improve the ways we help our customers.
This helps our customers in a few ways. First, it helps us make sure that we can always offer industry leading pricing. When we find ways to save money with technology, that savings gets passed along to customers, because it helps us price aggressively. Second, it helps us make sure our logistics is running like clockwork. A strong logistics background means that assigning, dispatching, and servicing appointments is reliable. And that translates into techs on time and more projects completed.
But we don’t just use technology in the day-to-day operations. Sometimes, we find big ways to use cutting edge technology for big projects—the kind of stuff you don’t typically see from a commercial services provider.
Here are three of our favorite big projects that show why we’re a leader in our field.
1. Efficiency
We improved the efficiency of our commercial services team with a custom-built mobile app.
As part of the work we do for one of the world’s largest retailers, we track hundreds of individual technicians on hundreds of jobs. That’s critical work that typically takes hundreds and hundreds of hours from our team.
To make sure our operations stay efficient, which helps us offer affordable services to our clients, we needed a way for our techs in the field to log individual statuses of each job. We couldn’t find one, but we knew there was a better way to stay efficient. So we built one. From scratch.
The app gives techs and our back office team a way to quickly and efficiently send messages about projects. It even encodes location data, which is a critical piece of compliance with our client. Without the app, techs would have to stop what they’re doing to make a phone call, which can often cut into productivity time. With the app, they can quickly enter updates into their phone. Minimal down time. Maximum efficiency.
The app transformed the way we track and report statuses, but it also gave our client partner a huge boost to their ability to track compliance. Unlike the past, today, our techs can use their own mobile devices to communicate directly with our logistics systems, even using text messages if they are in data-limited environments. No cell signal? No problem.
When you hire us for your enterprise level service contracts, you don’t just get great plumbing, HVAC or other commercial work. You get great service too, and we’re always looking for ways to use technology to make it happen.
2. Time Savings
We saved time and cost with a custom integration for Google Maps that found the best route through 141 locations.
Recently that same national retailer hired us to service 141 locations across the entire U.S. In the past, this would have been a manual process. Dozens of legs of the trip would have been manually checked for time. Then, we would have had to guestimate a route, adding up all individual legs. Testing different routes would have been a painful process of trial and error. And for our clients, hours cost money.
Instead, to make sure we were giving our client the most efficient service, minimizing our project turnaround times, and getting the job done as quickly as possible, our tech team designed a custom integration with Google Maps that gave us the absolute minimal travel times.
With the custom Google Maps integration, we were able to feed all 141 locations into the system, which used the power of the almight Google to spit out the single best route to take. No extra miles to drive. No unnecessary fuel spent driving our teams from place to place.
It also meant no extra time spent getting our teams where they needed to be to get the job done. And nobody is happier than clients when jobs get done sooner.
It just goes to show that our commitment to providing great service doesn’t stop with our technicians in the field. It extends to our technical teams who work behind the scenes to make sure our partners get the exceptional end results we are known for. You might not expect to see a commercial services company building a custom Google Maps integration.
But that’s Collins, always exceeding expectations as your industrial strength commercial services provider. Whether you’re a small business looking for affordable, efficient service, or one of the world’s largest companies, we provide the same reliable plumbing, HVAC, and other commercial grade work.
3. Innovation
We’re developing VR (Virtual Reality) photography and GPS mapping to assist our clients and technicians when planning maintenance.
Our technology team doesn’t just help us provide great service on current projects. They’re also always looking for new opportunities to add value for our clients.
That’s why recently, we began test runs using virtual reality photography to provide full, 3D maps of job sites. This is cutting edge stuff, combining the kind of technology you typically would use to build virtual reality environments.
In this case, we combine the 3D imagery with actual GPS location data, delivering a complete picture of the potential job site. This gives our client’s engineers and our technicians the next best experience to actually being there when inspecting utility points.
More importantly, it allows the client to accurately decide when preventative maintenance should be performed. Instead of performing site visits across the country to plan out large jobs like regular servicing, personnel can access the highly technical plans that we provide.
We combined this technology with GPS overlay to make finding the utility points easy for the client or technician when visiting the site. Our implementation allows for blueprint and satellite map overlays to make finding the points in question a breeze. That means that as technicians and other job supervisors are planning out major work, they have access to the kind of real world data that can help them make decisions that have implications and differences in real dollars.
More efficient jobs means completion on time and on target. That’s the Collins way.
Partnering with Collins means you get a commercial services provider that always moves technology forward to save you, our customer, time and money. We understand that time and accuracy are critical to going above and beyond expectations and we are committed to constantly improving in order to provide our clients with state of the art service. Contact us today and you get more of the tech stack, and less of the plumber crack.
