Smart Service

The ease of entering customers, service tickets, time keeping and the GPS tracking are great benefits of this system. For the most part our technicians have been easily trained on the process and it has cut down on a lot of their processing time in the field.

We have used the "Get Customer" or "Sync Customer" functions many times and since some of our office employees enter data directly into QuickBooks, we've lost a lot of email address and contact information on our customers. This information is critical to our database and it's very frustrating to try to rebuild.
We have several labor descriptions for our business and the work tickets can be set up correctly for the type of labor on a service call, the information transfers to the invoice in QB correctly, but defaults to ONE labor description on the time cards. So I end up having to revise nearly ever time card entry to correct the labor code. Also have to change the service or installation name from the sales rep's name to the actual technician that did the work. This has made the payroll processing a lot more time consuming than it used to be when it was entered directly through the time card entry in QB.

Basic scheduling is very easy to learn, it only took me a couple of days to start scheduling basic calls. The rest involved mainly learning the service business that I work for in order to discover other needs within Smart Service. There is additional support via Smart Service's monthly webinars on various topics to assist with learning. I've attended 'Service Agreements' which I didn't know was possible until the webinar. I really like the reporting feature, it can generate useful data by request. For instance, pulling reports by customer location; if I want to view which customers live in South San Francisco I can easily create filters to do so. You really don't know how valuable a program is until your without it. We experienced our internet being down for half a day and had to go back to paper scheduling; that made us all realize how important Smart Service is to our business for sure!

If you misspell a customer name after selecting 'new customer/prospect' and make it to the main customer screen, you have to go into QuickBooks to make the corrections although it is a new customer. It would be better for new customers only to keep it unlocked until save is selected. That would save some time; I don't make constant errors but it happens occasionally. Also, tracking technicians does not seem to work 100%. I've made sure that their tablets are syncing but only have three technicians showing up on the map. Sometimes it can take a long time to load a customer and that delays a call and time. Other than those three minor problems, I can't really think of anything else.

We really don't use the Software to its fullest. It We love the part we use

We would love to use the Service agreement billing but we bull a month in advance and the way it is designed we can not use it.