WorkWave, which develops and markets software-as-a-service (SaaS) field service management solutions has launched ServiceBot, a sales automation tool that uses an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbot to enable contractors to easily communicate with their customers. Formerly known as Lawnbot and part of the company's offering for the green industry, ServiceBot will now be available for all contractors who need to efficiently interact with potential or current customers through their company website.
While new for many sectors, ServiceBot is a proven solution having been part of the lawn care solution. ServiceBot is seamlessly integrated into WorkWave’s industry-leading platforms including Real Green SA5 and is currently being integrated into ServMan, the company’s default solution for most construction industries.
Contractors that perform field service management--including product or equipment installation, warranty repairs and service, facilities management, and other disciplines where a technician or crew will perform service on multiple sites in a day will find field service management software essential to profitable operation and customer satisfaction.
ServiceBot automates the sales process and allows consumers to purchase, schedule and pay for service visits right on their website, through AI-driven, human-like interactions. ServiceBot is seamlessly integrated into WorkWave’s industry-leading platforms including Real Green SA5 and is currently being integrated into PestPac, with ServMan and WinTeam soon to come.
With ServiceBot, customers can offer service to potential customers at any moment. As a mobile device-friendly, 24-hour, one-stop-shop sales automation tool, ServiceBot is able to sell to customers wherever they are, at any time.
ServiceBot features include:
- Complete branding aligned with individual businesses
- Real-time pricing tables to ensure the most accurate quotes
- Optimization for mobile users
- Safe, secure payment acceptance
- A detailed dashboard to see all sales and lead data in real time
- Ability to generate great reviews with ReviewBot
- Sales enablement across 25 different service categories
WorkWave Strategy
A recent IronPros product deep dive into WorkWave’s offering describes how the company ports technologies from one product to others in its field service management software portfolio. This portfolio of products has been growing by acquisition since 2012, and as WorkWave modernizes the architectures of each product, they are harnessing the power of narrow slices of one product to extend the capabilities of others and bring powerful solutions to even very small contractors.
“Our most modern is a product called Workwave Service, which is for smaller sized companies. It is a lot of tools for managing your customers—the customer relationship management (CRM), task management,” WorkWave Vice President of Product Rick Agajanian told IronPros. “Another more modern one is a product called Route Manager, and there are a lot of companies in construction or an adjacent space that use this. RouteManager is used for scheduling routes, pickups and deliveries. We can sell Routemanager individually, but it is plugged into scheduling tech used in other vertical for field service like mechanicals.”
This approach to microservices architecture, where a software company exposes narrow slices of functionality in one product that can be consumed by others in the portfolio, is smart and in keeping with where software for the enterprise level is headed. In this fashion, ServiceBot is also now a shared service that can be exposed by and add value to multiple WorkWave software products.
Servman will consume these microservices to deliver a modern approach for these broad processes managing leads, reporting, and payments. The core industry-focused functionality for CRM, financials, scheduling and workforce management are part of the mature and proven solution. WorkWave has constructed an abstraction layer that data from these microservices will pass through to help normalize and it and conform it to the needs of the various industry solutions. Individual pages and functionality within the legacy ServMan solution are still updated as required, but the process is not as fast or graceful as would be the case with more current tech underpinnings.
This announcement by WorkWave comes just days after analyst firm Gartner predicted that chabots will, by 2027, become the primary customer service channel for roughly a quarter of organizations. A Gartner customer service and support (CSS) survey of 50 respondents conducted online in January and February 2022 revealed 54% of respondents are using some form of chatbot, VCA or other conversational AI platform for customer-facing applications.
Other companies offering chatbots for construction include Folsom, Cal.-based Uniweb, and project management/construction enterprise resource planning (ERP) software leader Procore, which has a chat bot built on Slack used primarily for internal employee interactions.
