How Snake ‘n’ Rooter increased dispatch productivity by 20%.

Tell us briefly about your company and what you offer.

We’re a family owned, full service plumbing and drain cleaning company founded in 1978. We’re probably the largest commercial plumbing company in the greater Kansas City area (Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO.)
 
60% of our operations involve servicing the commercial sector, and 40% is residential.
 
We are strictly a plumbing and drain cleaning operation, no HVAC or other services offered, outside the plumbing trade. And, we have a team of 30 individuals that helps us serve our customers on a one week in, one week out basis.

Why did you choose the Praxedo solution?

Prior to Praxedo we had been using carbon copy paper invoices. Each invoice had 3 attached copies. One we’d give to the customer, one that the technician would keep, and the third for administrative purposes. This created a paper trail between us and our customers and was not the most efficient invoicing process. It was slow and cumbersome.
 
Our office would communicate with field technicians using CB radio and walkie-talkies. As for the dispatch, we would use a giant, physical map of our service area which hung on the wall where we would pinpoint jobs and technician locations. Again, this was not done in real time and realized we’d have to go digital to streamline everything.
 
We sought a digital software solution that provided us with real time answers, real time feedback, and the flexibility needed to track specific information that was important to us and our business.
 
We sat through a fair number of demonstrations from other vendors, completed several trial runs, and finally found the ideal solution in Praxedo.
 
The flexibility offered for customization, along with the value delivered for the price, convinced us to make a quick decision, and transition.
 
Other solutions seemed great at first but after a trial, the ease of use was not so obvious and the customization level was not great enough.

Who uses the Praxedo solution, and which features do they use?

We have 17 field technicians who use the solution every day. We provide all of our technicians with a tablet and have the Praxedo app integrated.
 
This allows each technician to use GPS to get to their job site, have access to information on the problem they’re facing before they even enter the property.
 
They have the ability to see if we had done previous work at that location, and what we serviced specifically.
 
Back at the office, we have another team of 8 that use the web interface. This is used for dispatching the crew from job A to job B, reviewing and distributing invoices, and for accounting purposes as well.

What are the main benefits of the Praxedo solution?

The real time information tracked on the app allows all of our team members to work smarter and not harder. It has improved our overall customer service.
 
When a customer calls and wants to know the last time we did work at their location, we can tell them the exact date, who the technician was, how much we charged, and how we fixed the problem.
 
The details it tracks and provides with a few clicks gives our administrative and dispatch teams a real advantage over what we were previously doing before Praxedo.
 
In addition, we now have accurate data that is never lost or misplaced. Work order information is entered directly in Praxedo as soon as the call comes in, and the exact same information is transmitted to the technician. We used to make plenty of mistakes, which are now a thing of the past.
 
From a quantitative standpoint, we have seen an uptick of 10% on jobs completed per technician, per month.
 
We spend so much less time completing a job. The efficiency we’ve achieved is tremendous. Our processes are so much faster now that we have tablets for each field technician, integrated with GPS functionality and accessible information on parts and labor prices.
 
Praxedo has also given us the capability to save precious time in our everyday tasks – Dispatching is a breeze and we’ve increased our productivity by almost 20% (7.5 hours per week).
 
Moreover, Praxedo helped us grow our team from 14 to 16 technicians in one year.

How do you envision the future of your partnership with Praxedo?

We hope to, and expect to continue to grow. Since the beginning of our partnership with Praxedo, we have secured some additional subscriptions, as well as added more office staff to use the web interface, and we hope that trend will continue.
 
It’s been a difficult year for so many of us due to COVID-19, but as things stabilize for all of us, we expect further growth.

If you had to summarize Praxedo in 2 words, what would they be?

Efficiency & Flexibility