Job Preparation includes several topics, from reviewing estimates waiting to be converted into services to alerting your customers to their upcoming services via text or email.
These options can be used at any time, some from different locations within Smart Service. An office user should review this section daily to keep up with notifications waiting to be sent, estimates that have been awarded, and services waiting to be scheduled. All of the options in this section are available for all office users to see.
Estimates Awarded
Remember, you can customize the name of your estimates in Smart Service’s Settings to another terminology like “Proposals” as we have done in the picture above. The “Estimates Awarded” option will always be the first in the list of “Job Preparation” options.
Estimates which have been marked as awarded by the office, iFleet, or Routzy will appear here until converted into jobs. Once the items are converted into jobs, they will become inactive, and thus leave this list.
Estimates created by iFleet will generally be named after the technician’s initials who created it, followed by the date, followed by the customer’s name, and ending with a number representing which estimate this is, provided the technician created multiple estimates for that customer that day.
When ready, click on an estimate, review the information, make any necessary edits, and click the “Convert to Job” or “Convert Prospect First” button at the bottom of the estimate’s “General Information” tab to convert the estimate into a job.
Follow the resulting prompts, choosing to make the estimate inactive when prompted. This will transfer information from the estimate into the newly created job. Make sure to put the job on the waiting list or reschedule it as information from the original estimate contains scheduling information.
Estimate Center
The Estimate Center is the central point where all management and follow-up on estimates can be done. Using the Estimate Center, you can see and convert estimates and prospects created by the office or in the field. If you’re using the estimation features of Smart Service, the Estimate Center will be an important part of your process!
Since you have the option to rename “estimates” in the system to other options like “proposal” or “quote”, your Estimates Center may have a slightly different name.
Filter Options
The basic filter options (shown below) will assist you with filtering all of the prospects, prospect locations, and prospect jobs that are currently being displayed on your Estimates Center. The options can be used alongside the “Advanced Options” to the right.
Smart Service has different record types when it comes to potential clients and their estimates
- Prospects: These are the potential client themselves. If you want to enter a client without making them a customer in QuickBooks also, you can create them as a prospect and convert them to a customer later.
- Prospect Locations: As with regular customers, a location is a sub-customer representing a property for the parent customer. A prospect location is the same, but for prospects!
- Prospect Jobs: This is the estimate itself, which can be converted into a work order when the customer accepts the estimate.
The employee assigned to the estimate is who the work is scheduled to currently. Don’t be confused with the “Sales Rep”, which is the sales person responsible for the sale of this estimate. For some of you, the scheduled employee will be the same as the sales rep.
This option will work with the next option (the date range filter) to help decide what kind of date you wish to see.
- Date Created: Use this option when you want to see the estimates in a given date range by when the estimate was originally created in Smart Service.
- Date Completed: Use this option when the estimates should be sorted by when an iFleet user finished the estimate. If you do not use iFleet, you should skip this option.
- Date Scheduled: This option represents what date the estimate was set to be performed; where it is located on the schedule.
After you’ve chosen what kind of date to use, you can use this date range filter to decide what dates to choose. There’s also an “All” option available.
You can filter the the estimates by a specific job type if you’re looking for a certain kind of estimate.
This will show any inactive prospects, prospect locations, and prospect jobs. Usually, the record are inactive because they have been converted or your company was not awarded the work.
Converted records have already been turned into a customer, location, or job in Smart Service. If you want to see what estimates have been awarded already, use this option.
Advanced Options
These “Advanced” options are additional ways to sort and filter the Estimates Center. The options here can be used with the “Filter Options” (described above) to help narrow down your search.
This options will only be useful for estimates. If you would like to see estimates that are currently open, filter by the “Active” status. You also could filter be the “Awarded” or “Not Awarded” estimates to see estimates won and lost.
If you have assigned sales reps to your prospects, prospect locations, or estimates, you can use this filter to see their assignments. If the estimate was created in iFleet, the technician will automatically be assigned as the sales rep as well as the employee.
Using the Estimates Center
After you’ve made your choices with the filter options above, it’s time to get to work with this screen. You can click on the images below to open them full screen and follow along.
You can open the estimate or the customer’s record by clicking on the customer or estimate name. From there you can make changes, then save and close to return to the Estimate Center.
If the estimate was created for the wrong prospect, you can use the binoculars next to the prospect name to move the estimate to a different prospect.
This was added in case your field user creates a duplicate prospect for their estimate.
When you’re ready to convert a record into a customer, location, or job, click the big “Convert” button next to that record. You will be given the option to choose a name for your new record, which you can accept the new name or type a custom name.
This will also ask you if you wish to inactivate the prospect, prospect location, and/or prospect job once converted. The best practice is to only inactivate the prospect job upon conversion. This is because you may wish to provide another estimate to this prospect or prospect location in the future.
Jobs on the Waiting List
Smart Service contains a waiting list which may be accessed here or from the scheduler. The purpose of the waiting list is to temporarily store any ongoing services which cannot be scheduled currently. The waiting list is a great place to store jobs that are waiting on parts to arrive, items waiting to be scheduled by your dispatcher, or services pending on the customer’s schedule.
If your company offers preventative maintenance services, we do not recommend using the waiting list to track them. Instead, we have created a Preventative Maintenance & Routing webinar to cover the most effective process for preventative maintenance visits.
Clicking on one of the services in your waiting list will open the corresponding job, allowing you to provide status updates, or schedule the pending service. You can add a note in the “Waiting List Instructions” column by opening the job, visiting the “Scheduling” tab within the job, and writing in the text box under the “This job is on the waiting list” checkbox.
Email Job Reminders
This feature allows your office personnel to send automated emails to customers about their upcoming services. You can set up template emails and have Smart Service fill in personal details to address the customer by name, include the actual date of their service, etc.
Before you get started, there’s some setup to take care of. You will need an email address associated with Smart Service. We highly recommend this isn’t someone’s personal work email to ensure that replies from customers can be seen by as many eyes as possible. If you don’t already have a generic “Info@”, “Service@”, or similar already, its never too late to create one.
Gmail Users May Require 2-Step Verification
Google's 2-Step Verification helps keep your Google Account secure by giving your third-party apps (Smart Service, in this case) limited access to your account. In most cases, either this feature or "Allow Less Secure Apps" must be enabled to prevent Gmail from blocking connections from Smart Service. Once enabled, 2-Step Verification will provide a password you can enter in place of your actual email password in Smart Service.
Click here to learn more about enabling 2-Step Verification.
If you plan on using any email client other than a version of Outlook this setting needs to be checked. This lets Smart Service know to not open Outlook by default on your PC.
This is the mail server used to send your messages to others. If your email client is not listed above, this information is generally found in the email client’s settings menu.
This port will also be found in your email client’s setting window if your was not listed in the chart above. Depending on your firewall settings this port may be different from what is listed above.
Your email client might also use encryption to send emails. You have the option of “TLS” or “None” with Smart Service. Check your email client’s settings window to see which one is right for you.
Enter Smart Service Setup and on the “Company” tab, click “Set Up Smart Service Add-ons” at the bottom of the page. The first section in the window is the “Email” tab, which is where we need to give Smart Service some information the email address it should be sending the reminders from.
You may need to check with your IT or the person who set up your email account to get some of this information before continuing. Below we have included the default settings for the most common email clients.
Once your email account information has been entered, you can proceed to the “Email Job Reminders” tab below. These reminders are set up per job type, you will require a template for each job type your company uses, which can be the same generic message. Otherwise, Smart Service will be unable to send a reminder message to any jobs bearing the missing job type.
When creating a reminder, check the “Auto Send” checkbox and set the number of days in advance of the job the reminder should be sent to the customer. If you set this to 1 day, the reminder will be sent 24 hours before the scheduled start time of the job. 2 days would be 48 hours before, and so on.
Continue by adding a subject on the corresponding line. For the message text, you can right-click in the message body to bring up options for merge fields. When used, these fields will be replaced with information from the job.
In the example above, using the field {{First Name}} will display the customer’s first name when they receive the email. Make sure that your company uses the fields you choose, as blank fields will be represented by a space on the email.
Sending Job Reminder Emails
If you have set the “auto-send” checkbox to yes earlier, you don’t need to do the below steps. Smart Service will automatically send emails to customers with a matching job type and template. You can still use the directions below to manually send these reminders if needed.
Once your settings are in place, you can enter the “Email Job Reminders” screen at any time via Job Preparation. From this screen, you must use the filters at the top left to tell Smart Service which customers you’d like to email. You may filter these jobs by the scheduled technician, date range, class, customer type, and job type.
Once you’ve made your selection, you may email each customer individually by clicking the “Email” button to the right, or email all selected items at once by clicking “Email All” at the bottom right corner of the screen and following the prompts. Here are a few helpful tips to consider when using this feature:
- The checkmark at the top left of the screen allows you to select/deselect the entire list
- Click the exclamation button on the left to add an email address to any job missing an email
- Dates of recurring jobs are presented individually here, which can lead to multiple emails sent
Message Job Reminders
Customers who have signed up for Smart Service’s text messaging service can use this option to send job reminders via text message to the desired customers. Please use this link to visit our main article on messaging job reminders with Smart Service.
If you haven’t checked out the texting capabilities available in Smart Service, you can get started by visiting our text messaging article here. This optional feature allows users to send and receive text messages from customers and employees through Smart Service.
View Call Aheads
Any job marked to be called ahead of time will be displayed in the “Call Aheads” window. This is a good option when your customers prefer to be notified via call rather than text or email. iFleet users will notice a phone symbol on any job marked to be called ahead of time. Once the customer has been called, the job can then be “confirmed” to let others know contact was made. Users can also mark jobs as a “call ahead” or “confirmed” by right-clicking the appointment on the scheduling board.
You can mark a job to be called ahead of time by opening the job record and clicking the “Call Ahead” checkbox on the right-hand side. If the call has been made, check the “confirmed” box to the right. Confirming a job will also lock the job in place on the scheduling board.
