C.P. Jefferies Ltd is a family-run company based in the Cotswolds. With approximately eight office staff and twenty field engineers, they offer plumbing, heating, electrical, and renewable services to the domestic market.
We caught up with Rob Williams, owner director of C.P. Jefferies Ltd, to hear how Commusoft has been essential in transforming their well-established plumbing and heating business.
How Was Your Business Run Before Commusoft?
“Prior to using Commusoft, the operations were more or less wholly run on a paper-based system. There was some use of Outlook diaries for service engineers. However, every engineer had a paper diary that they would fill out each day. It became clear that this was not a viable process for us going forward with the company growing.”
What was your biggest challenge before using Commusoft?
“One of the main problems with the system that we previously ran was the clunkiness of relying on a paper-based system. Trying to get real-time information e.g. knowing how many customers we’d visited in a week or a month was very hard. Knowing how many jobs we’d completed or how many jobs were still outstanding and hadn’t been completed was also very difficult. Boiler and Aga servicing is a huge part of our revenue stream and contributes a lot to what we do as a business. Trying to maintain a comprehensive service record of all of our customers on a paper-based system was not straightforward.”
How Has Using Commusoft Helped Solve This?
“C.P. Jefferies pride ourselves on offering a quality service – Commusoft has helped us do that to the best of our ability. Now, with each engineer having their own device, they can see which engineers previously attended the customer and works that have been carried out. With each of our engineers having their own individual diaries, our office staff are now able to manage their time much more efficiently. I’d estimate we’ve reduced our office admin time to roughly 30%, now that we’re using Commusoft.”
How Has Vehicle Tracking Helped You in the Field?
“Working in a rural location, we often find that phone signal is not great and engineers would end up driving back to the office to find out they were going into the next village along from where they’d just been working. Now, with the vehicle trackers we can see that they engineer is still on site and we can phone their next customer to inform them if they’re running late. Rather than relying on the engineer finishing their work, driving to mobile phone signal, and letting us know – by which time it’s too late for us to preempt it with the next customer.”
Would You Recommend Commusoft to Other Field Service Companies?
“For any company working in the plumbing and heating industry or electrical industry – it’s very handy having all the certificates that you need for oil, gas, LPG, and electrical – all built into the software. The biggest impact that Commusoft has had on C.P. Jefferies as a business has been consolidating all of the information into one area, whether that’s customer information, job information, invoicing, product, testing – it’s all in one place for everybody to see.“
