Smart Service

Smart Service has been a God send to my company. We are now also "almost" paper free.

Comments: Efficiency - Efficiency - efficiency.
And did I mention efficiency???

Pros:

Being able to use iPads or tablets in the field. By being able to use tablets we take away the technicians penmanship errors and can have the customer sign work orders so there is no confusion of who said what later.

Cons:

Not being able to track individual extinguishers by date and have them update to when service is needed.

Smart Service for Pest Control

Comments: It's been a long and arduous process learning to work with the software and customize it to fit our needs.

Pros:

The software is very customizable. It has the features we need to apply data to ensure consistent service to our customers.

Cons:

Due to the customizable design it requires admins that are highly skilled in software use and development. Not easy to navigate, conflicting layers/windows for data.

Alternatives Considered: PestPac and GorillaDesk

Reasons for Choosing Smart Service: We needed a software that fit commercial service processes like equipment scanning and trending reports. Bookkeeper insisted that software needed to interact with Quickbooks.

Switched From: FieldRoutes

Reasons for Switching to Smart Service: Software is made and built to mesh with Quickbooks (Intuit product).

Good in theory, but impractical in implementation

Pros:

For the regular dispatching features, I was able to learn completely on my own with no instruction, becoming our in-house "expert." It is intuitive enough that I found solutions for problems that tech support thought had no work-around.

Cons:

The program as a whole is outdated and clunky, built around Microsoft Access, limiting its modern application. For example, if you have a customer with 10 locations and 15 total jobs, and they change their billing address, you have to manually go change it 26 times, in a clunky system that is not fast at all. Adding a new customer takes forever, especially if you have a location and job to enter as well. There is also no feature to have an AP email for their default QuickBooks email, while still have primary contact's email prevalent. Scheduling is nice that a job can recur indefinitely, but if a job cancels, you have to change its recurrence pattern PRIOR to inactivating the job, or it still comes up on the schedule. It also has no features for a job to occur for a certain period of time, or to recur on a seasonal basis. If your customers have multiple services per invoice, it is a huge pain. The "Batch invoices to Quickbooks" feature requires the user to post each individual batch one. at. a. time. Again, on a slow, clunky system. Many of the advanced features have not worked for us at all, or were not as advertised in the demo. Granted, the most annoying part (the scheduler does not work for us) is largely due to our painfully slow cloud system, making it inoperable. If you want to print a schedule for each employee, be prepared to pay for an upgrade (ours was $600) so they can program a custom report for you, that is iffy on how often it works on the first attempt. (Ours works on the second attempt every time.) The "Prospect" feature is useless... it doesn't transition over to "Customer" well at all. It is also impractical to use many features integrated with Quickbooks-- it requires syncing for anything useful, and with a large customer database, that is completely impractical for the frequency required. Bill your customer a flat rate each month? Forget about it, unless you cheat the system and create two jobs-- one that is the real job for your employee and charges nothing, and one that only your accountant uses. Bottom line: It's intuitive to figure out basic functions, but there is SO much room for error, and something simple like an updated address once took me 2 hours to complete for our largest customer. They need to do a complete overhaul of their programming and add some basic features before I could recommend Smart Service to anyone. We've found that to make it work, it requires constant ingenuity to come up with a work-around for design flaws.

Smart Service Makes Service Dispatch Easy

Comments: Smart service has been a pleasure to deal with and they have great tech support.

Pros:

I love that we are almost paperless with this software. This has made everything at the click of your mouse.

Cons:

I can not think of anything bad tp say about this software

Workforce management made that easy!

Comments: Overall, software is awesome I have wonderful experience and the software helped our company a lot of effective workforce management.

Pros:

What I like about the software is that aside from the fact that this is a scheduler, employees are being notified of the schedule/task update real time. Useful to us that is starting to expand our company that majority of our employees are in the field and no time to get back to the office for schedule check. Another awesome feature of this software is that after the schedule or task is complete management is notified back for the job well done.

Cons:

In my experience I can't see any problem, probably the interface make it a little bit alive.