The Benefits of Automating Your Small Pest Control Business

Every day, you work hard to keep the moving parts of your pest control business running smoothly. New customers, incoming orders, scheduling, routing, your technicians in the field, the materials they depend on… the list of things that demand your attention goes on and on. Handling the operations of your small business is no small job.

To keep things under control, you might find yourself trying to stay on top of organizing files, jotting down notes, checking calendars, printing pages, poring over maps, and making frequent calls to your technicians out in the field to let them know when things change unexpectedly. All of that places a strain on your time and energy, and prevents you from focusing on the big picture. Automating parts of your day-to-day operations with PestPac Lite, on the other hand, frees you up to help your small pest control business reach its full potential.

Streamlining Customer Information

Whether you’re setting up a new customer or updating information for an existing one, it’s crucial that everything is synced and up-to-date. Different members of your team may need to pull up a customer’s account via different devices at a moment’s notice, and you can’t afford to have them pulling up outdated information or struggling to find the info altogether.

With PestPac Lite, the process of adding new customers is automated to ensure that all of the necessary information is added in a way that makes sense when you’re creating the first order. You’ll be guided seamlessly through the process, ensuring that no crucial information fields are skipped or accidentally missed. The result is a system that stores all of the crucial customer data in one place, providing the relevant data automatically when it’s needed down the line.

If you need to update customer information later on, it’s also quick and easy to do. No need to update the data in a bunch of different places; simply update the contact info, billing info, or anything else, and the same information is updated throughout the entire system.

Intelligent Order Creation

Creating an order is as easy as dragging and dropping the desired service into place. Whatever sort of pest you’re dealing with, PestPac Lite allows you to predefine the service so that the time spent, materials used, and application method are all included in the service order automatically. 

When you create an order, you can specify which technician should receive the job, whether the order is a one-time or a recurring service, and when it needs to be completed or how often it should occur. There’s no need to shuffle your calendar or dig through each technician’s schedule to find out who has time; it’s all neatly displayed to make things easy.

Tailor-Made Routing to Save on Time and Expenses

Once you add your orders to the system, you find yourself at what used to be one of the most time consuming parts of managing your operations: route planning. Where once upon a time you might have found yourself staring at a map and a schedule for hours in an attempt to figure out the best way to get all of your technicians where they need to be, PestPac Lite’s automated route optimization makes it as simple as clicking a button.

Drawing addresses for each work order from the customer information you’ve already entered into the system, PestPac Lite’s route optimization module automatically organizes each technician’s day to help you make the most of your resources. By accounting for the duration and location of each job, the system automatically gives you the best schedule and route. Need to account for additional parameters, like how many jobs each technician can handle, a maximum amount of drive time on a given day, or last minute scheduling changes from your customers? Not a problem! Just add those restrictions to PestPac Lite, and watch as your technicians’ optimized routes are instantly created.

The result of automated route optimization isn’t just easier drives for your technicians; it’s a fully optimized schedule, which means reducing both your fuel costs and the time your technicians spend behind the wheel. With that sort of power, your small pest control business can handle more orders with the same staff and fleet, allowing you to reach your full potential without increasing your budget.

Everything You Need to Thrive in the Field

Automating tasks like syncing customer data, scheduling jobs, and optimizing your routes doesn’t just make things easier on you in the back office—it also simplifies things for your team in the field. The day’s jobs are sent directly to each technician’s mobile device along with GPS routing, ensuring that they have a concise schedule and the most direct navigation to make the most of their day. If there are unexpected changes, there’s no need to play phone tag; simply update the schedule in PestPac Lite and the changes are automatically reflected on your technician’s device.

PestPac Lite also gives your technicians more power while they’re out in the field. If the situation on-site calls for different materials or application methods than what was expected, they can easily switch the information on their device and it will all be tracked back in the office. The same goes for all of the necessary state forms, which technicians can fill out on their mobile device and submit to the office automatically—no more wasting time trying to decipher someone else’s handwriting so that you can input the data into the system manually.

Your technicians can also use their mobile device to make notes and recommendations on the customer account for other technicians to reference in the future; everyone stays on the same page. They can add photos, jot down notes, and use the sketch feature to note where they set traps, applied chemicals, or noticed signs of pests.

When the job is done, your technicians can just as easily accept payments in the field thanks to the seamless integration of WorkWave Payments within PestPac Lite. You want to shorten the road between creating orders and receiving payments, and that’s exactly what automating your operations with PestPac Lite facilitates.