Dispatch: The Road to Successful Digital Transformation

Avi Goldberg, Founder & CEO

ServiceMaster, America’s home services giant, is taking the lead in defining what it means to digitally transform a business. To gain a competitive advantage, strengthen its processes, and improve service quality, ServiceMaster focused on their own digital transformation two years back.

ServiceMaster gets 75,000 service requests per day across their Terminix, Merry Maids, and American Home Shield brands. The home service company was clear in its objectives—to offer a consistent customer experience that engages its homeowners across a variety of technologies.

Attacking the Communication Black Hole

In the process, ServiceMaster set out to eliminate their biggest challenges: the communication black hole in the “last mile” of service, and the lack of communication between the company, third-party contractors, and the homeowner. "We want to visualize and measure the entire customer journey, curate it, and be proactive in our customer’s lives. That is the kind of software we truly needed," said Jamie Smith, CIO and SVP of ServiceMaster.

The many facets of their service offering had to be integrated into an easy-to-use solution. The difficulty is that some of ServiceMaster’s brands use third-party contractors while others depend on their own dedicated employees. Standard offerings in the market like Oracle Field Service Cloud, ServiceMax, ClickSoftware, or any of the Gartner Field Service Magic Quadrant Leaders work best with companies that have dedicated technicians not companies that use third-party contractors or have hybrid workforces.

How did ServiceMaster resolve this communication black hole when using 3rd party contractors?

Dispatch Solves the Communication Black Hole

Enter Dispatch, the global leader in service logistics. This Boston-based company, founded in 2013, connects people, process, and data in order to create a modern, tech-enabled home service experience that delights customers, empowers contractors (connecting them with home services companies like ServiceMaster), and promotes a positive brand image for the enterprise.

With Dispatch, any home service company can easily manage their third-party contractors as if they’re W2 employees

Dispatch’s powerful, yet simple cloud-based application caught the attention of Jamie. The Dispatch team connected the three essential parties of ServiceMaster’s core business— the enterprise, the third-party contractor (and dedicated technicians), and the homeowner. This solution gave ServiceMaster exactly what they were looking for: Complete “last mile” visibility that enabled successful third-party contractor management.

What value has Dispatch’s solution unlocked for ServiceMaster’s business?

ServiceMaster can now gain complete visibility into the ‘last mile’ of service. They receive analytics about their 3rd-party network including compliance rate, time-to-schedule, real-time status updates, and all valuable KPI data - helping the home service giant increase customer lifetime value and reduce churn. With the Dispatch solution, any home service company can easily manage their third-party contractors as if they’re full-time, W2 employees.

According to Smith, if a customer wants to delay a technician’s arrival by an hour or wants the technician to arrive early because the customer has an urgent appointment, Dispatch’s flexible and real-time platform can help them accomplish that. ServiceMaster wants to provide a service so convenient that a customer should never have to take half a day off from work.

Jamie Smith, CIO

A Success Case in Miami

One success was in Miami and it centered on one of ServiceMaster’s Terminix branches. The Dispatch platform collected customer feedback scores in real-time and relayed the information directly to Terminix and ServiceMaster. Knowing about a problem is the first step in fixing it. If a customer ranked Terminix as less-than-satisfactory, the platform immediately notified the company, giving Terminix the ability to remedy the problem before the unhappy customer complained online or worse, churned. The Terminix customers were pleasantly surprised that their responses and reviews were taken so seriously and dealt with so quickly.

“We want to easily fit into our customer’s lives and not the other way around. Consumers are demanding frictionless service, and we want to be the company to provide that,” said Smith.

Dispatch became such a critical component to ServiceMaster’s customer experience roadmap that they expanded their partnership with the Boston-based company. The home services giant even participated in the Dispatch Series A funding round, along with other investors.

Jamie Smith, CIO, Dispatch

The Dispatch solution provides any service enterprise with functions like customer notifications, real-time technician tracking, mobile payments, omni-channel messaging, and instant customer reviews etc. “We set out to build a highly configurable and modular mobile app that would enable brands to better manage their reputation, jobs, and communication with their customers,” said Avi Goldberg, CEO, Dispatch.

Solutions and Collaboration Continue to Grow

Dispatch and ServiceMaster are also working on additional technologies that will change the way home services are delivered. With the strategic data that Dispatch collects, ServiceMaster can begin incorporating the Internet of Things (IoT) into their service offerings. For example, the data collected by Dispatch will allow American Home Shield to understand and possibly predict their customer’s maintenance needs before receiving a service call. If a connected appliance like an AC is not working properly, the platform can detect it, assign a technician to fix it, and schedule a service appointment with the customer quickly and efficiently. This flawless process can be powered by the data and the platform, without the customer having to make a service call. That’s predictive, automatic maintenance -- every customer’s dream scenario.

“We can be a proactive part of our customer’s life and anticipate their needs as opposed to being a business that customers call when something is broken. Predictive, connected home service will be a game changer,” explains Smith. By arming ServiceMaster’s national network of W2 and 3rd-party contractors with advanced communication tools, they’re reinforcing their position as a “top player in connected home services.”

ServiceMaster and Dispatch are continually working together to deliver memorable service experiences that surpass the expectations of the modern-day customer

- Leah Jane
December 14, 2017