HVAC ResLoad Mobile App for iPad (www.carmelsoft.com, 800/339-6030) is an ACCA-approved cooling and heating load calculation app that performs peak cooling and heating load calculations, per ACCA Manual J8, for residential and light commercial buildings. It executes both block and room-by-room loads and includes construction data for hundreds of wall, floor, roof, ceiling, window, and skylight types. Users can also add appliance loads for accurate load calculations.
The app now includes HVAC ResLoad-J Cloud, allowing storage of all ResLoad-J projects in the cloud, enabling backup and sharing of projects with other devices (iPads) and affording the ability to share specific projects with other technicians within a company. It also includes the full version of Carmelsoft’s HVAC Equipment Locator app (see my August 2021 column).
The HVAC ResLoad J-Cloud consists of two components: the ResLoad-J app, which allows you to run HVAC load calculations and enables the ability to sync the project to the cloud, and the HVAC ResLoad-J Web, on which you can display and share all the uploaded HVAC ResLoad J and assign projects to others within your company.
Pricing: base price for the app, then a tiered monthly pricing if you wish to store projects in the cloud.
Here is another entry in the increasingly popular category of software designed to help companies manage online presence and customer satisfaction. Birdeye (www.birdeye.com, 800/561-3357) is a cloud-based experience marketing software platform designed to help companies, including home services businesses, build a positive online presence, manage their reputation, and improve the customer experience.
How it works: Birdeye automatically sends personalized review requests to customers after a job is completed, prompting them to review the company on Google, Facebook, Birdeye, or other social media sites. The software automatically monitors 150+ review sites and alerts the company via email or text when a new review is posted on any monitored site. The company can post selected customer reviews and their ratings on its website and easily set custom rules and logic to share those reviews to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
The platform features templates that—in response to a review— will thank, apologize to, or initiate follow-up with customers. You can set review responses on autopilot, based on the number of stars the customer has given your company. In addition, the software identifies reviews with spam, slander, and other violations within them and removes them from your feed, while alerting your company of negative reviews so you can respond instantly. Such reviews easily be converted into support tickets and assigned to your team to help ensure customer issues are resolved quickly.
Birdeye generates a review summary in chart form that shows the number of reviews, overall rating (one to five stars), and top review sites frequented by your customers, with the overall rating for each. Reviews are filterable by state, city, location, or time-period. An employee leaderboard facilitates tracking of requests, reviews, and ratings for each employee automatically.
Pricing: The platform comes in three different packages, depending upon business needs. The Standard plan includes all the Review functionality described above. The Professional package adds in Webchat; the Premium package provides the entire platform and includes competitive Benchmarking capabilities; Surveys; AI-power Insights; and other features.
Text Request (www.textrequest.com, 423/218-0111) is a business texting platform (desktop and mobile apps) that enables contractors to connect professionally with customers through text for various communications, including scheduling and confirming services, rescheduling, and sharing dispatch and travel updates with customers.
How it works: office administrators generally use the platform on their desktops, logging in at textrequest.com, while contractors in the field tend to use the iOS and Android apps. Typically, companies add Text Request to their existing office numbers, enabling text and calls using the same phone number.
Office staff can interact with prospects by text direct from a company website via SMS Chat (which installs as a widget on the website) and can continue a conversation from within the prospect’s smartphone’s texting app. Company users can also send and receive MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) picture messages to one person or to groups.
Contractors can also use the communications channel for giving estimates and closing sales (using MMS picture messaging to assess the problem), promotions, upselling, mass customer updates (e.g. seasonal maintenance reminders), and requesting online reviews.
The business communications tool also includes BCC group messaging to small or large groups from your business phone; one-to-one texting to reach contacts; and a dashboard that facilitates managing text messages as a team.
A Text Merge feature allows personalizing of messages with custom contact fields and you can create and schedule automated replies to inbound messages.
The solution, which can support an unlimited number of users, contacts, and reports, also includes the ability to automatically forward inbound messages to a personal cell phone; messaging forwarding to other numbers from your text request dashboard; and the ability to add additional lines to the account. Each line gets its own dashboard with unique contacts, users, and settings. A company can also download partial or entire text conversations for saving on a computer or for printing.
Pricing: monthly fee scaled based on features and number of messaged needed.
Patti Feldman writes articles and web content for trade magazines and manufacturers of building products. She can be reached at [email protected].