We hoped to find out more about our customers’ motivation. How you were managing your jobs and costing Before GeoOp (BG). What features of GeoOp appealed? What problems or pain points would we be helping you solve. And in return we’ll use these insights to better serve our customers.
Your Top Three Pain Points
Not surprisingly every second customer (50%) said they were tired of ‘Needless extra admin’. This could comprise of lost jobs, checking detail and double entry, perhaps all leading to needing extra headcount.
‘Scheduling the workforce was painful’ comes in a Number 2, with 40% of you making it your second pain point catalyst to turn to GeoOp.
The third bad boy, at 38%, was ‘We had poor visibility of job progress’. Visibility of job progress can be a great management tool but not if you’re flying blind. Are they on site? Have they finished? Need to be invoiced, need to be quoted. All these queries were either unanswered or were difficult to coerce out of the business for over a third of our customers BG.
Other worthy mentions are ‘Closing a job was poor’ with 35%. With just over a third of our customers (31%) conceding they were ‘Slow to bill or would forget entirely’.
“As the wife of a busy plumber, I realised we were losing a lot of money when every time I went into town, someone would tell me that my husband had never sent them a bill”
And then there were those (33%), that were already using alternative job management software but were frustrated with it (‘We were using software that just wasn’t flexible enough’).
Inf the full report we’ll look at these responses in relation to location, company size and industry. But just to whet the appetite, here’s the top pain points per industry. As you’ll see, no one industry had the same set of symptoms BG. They all came to GeoOp with a diverse set of requirements in search of relief.
Electrical were ‘struggling with visibility of job progress’; Plumbing, Drainage and Gasfitting & Security and Safety were ‘slow to bill or forget entirely’; IT and Communications admit to ‘being poor at closing a job’; Maintenance and Repair ‘struggled to schedule their workforce effectively’, Building Construction were in a ‘needless extra admin’ hell and Cleaning with Air Conditioning and Heating had ‘growing pains’.
The Real Benefits
In this section we asked you three simple questions:
1)On average, before GeoOp, how many Jobs a MONTH did you miss?
2)Per Person, how many HOURS did you start saving a day with GeoOp?
3)On average, how many DAYS faster are you now getting paid?
Missed Jobs The overall average loss of jobs for businesses BG was nearly 5 (4.63) a month. For me this was the most surprising set of responses. All respondents are experiencing massive time savings for as little as $39 a month.
More Billable Hours The overall average across all customer respondents came in at a whacking 105 minutes per person per day! That well over an hour and a half. And if you apply our average Australian hourly rate of $38*, our customers would be saving $66.50 per field worker per day. So one of our 5 Licence customers would be channeling a value of $1662.50 per week ($332.5 per worker) into more billable hours.
Getting Paid Faster A GeoOp Customer can expect to get paid, on average, 8 days faster. Regardless of size of company this was the sweeping finding.
Conclusion
In this new world of cheaper data, smart devices and an app for everything, expectations are up. People are uneasy with their status quo. They’re questioning their processes and valuing their time more than ever. Asking themselves, ‘Could there be a better way?’ and ‘Will it hurt less to transition than the current pain points I’m experiencing?’. This will only accelerate when the likes of Generation Y (‘81-’95) and X (born after ‘95) become business owners, and their ‘technoholic’ attitude towards technology will arrive with them on the job.
Perhaps you know someone in pain. Help them out. We’d love the opportunity to show them GeoOp. Thank you for your interest and support.
*From the Biannual Employee Earnings and Hours Survey, Australia May 2014
