FloQuote

The Field Services market in the UK is worth GBP 5.8 billion and is growing at a compound rate of 11% a year. It is a significant provider of tax revenues for the Government, but it relies heavily on estimates and quotes undertaken at the client's property to secure business.

Homeowners and landlords will obtain 3 quotes before selecting a supplier so for every 3 companies that quote only 1 can ever be successful.

Taking London as an example, each appointment takes 2 journeys at an average of 40 minutes each. In rural areas this can be even longer. Adding up the time and expense taken to travel, the time to build the quote, parking and congestion charges shows that each appointment costs the company £70 to £100\.

There are 3 areas of concern here.

1)As two of the competing companies will be unsuccessful, four of the journeys are wasted. This is a significant environmental impact.

2)Making those journeys means lots of people are out meeting others, potentially spreading the Covid 19 virus far and wide

3)Travelling to quote is time consuming and expensive

The solution is not to make those journeys at all - or at least for the initial estimate.

This can be achieved by asking the client to send the required information to the tradesperson using technology. Videos, images, schematics and information on the project can be sent to the tradesperson to enable them to make an estimate without ever visiting physically.

However, there are limitations on getting this information easily, simply and quickly for both the client and tradesperson. Email has limits for file sizes making it time consuming and overly complicated for the average person to send in a video for example. This is a barrier for adoption. If it is hard for the client to do they won't do it.

Similarly, for the tradesperson, extracting this information is time consuming and convoluted. Often when information comes in there is no record of who it is from, which makes cataloguing it and retrieving it very hard.

Whatsapp and other messaging platforms are seemingly perfect for this process. The advantage they have is they have mass market adoption, and everyone knows how to use them making transfer of data easy. However, uncoupling that information at the tradesperson end is a difficult and manual process. Again, this makes it a significant barrier for mass adoption.

Our software application is designed to make this process simple for both parties. By automatically extracting and cataloguing information and converting into a usable format from the messaging app that can be 'plugged into' any existing CRM, database, quoting tool or even word document. Thus, allowing the tradesperson to make an estimate for their client very quickly.

The outcome means there is no need to take a physical journey to make an estimate at all. Six journeys saved, environmental impact reduced, no physical contact to spread the virus, costs to service significantly lowered, customer and tradesperson satisfaction increased.