Woodfin Uses Cargas Energy to Manage Huge Customer Base
Based in Richmond, Woodfin offers the most diverse range of home services throughout central Virginia. Founded in 1977, the company offers everything related to home comfort, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical work, indoor air quality, generators, heating oil, propane, and home security and automation. Customers can purchase bundled care packages that cover every system in their home. Woodfin trains its employees and technicians on the job to provide the best possible customer experience to its clients
Company Profile
Founded 1977
Serves Richmond, Virginia and surrounding area
Provides Total Comfort services: Heating, Cooling, Electrical, Plumbing, Security, and Home Automation
Ready for Improvements
Woodfin had used their legacy software since 1988 and was very loyal to their software provider. However, the company’s leadership was willing to experiment with new technological innovations, especially if it would help their technicians provide better service to their customers. Woodfin was one of the first companies to adopt a wireless ticket dispatch system on their service vehicles, but their software provider did not have as many capabilities to offer for home service as they did for fuel delivery.
In the words of Bryan Vay, the company’s Director of Technical Services, “We’ve been wirelessly dispatching service vans since 1997, but we hadn’t been doing it in a convenient way for the service technician.”
In order to resolve a ticket, the technician needed to input a code into a bulky miniature computer. This code was received by a user in the back office, who would “translate” the code into a message and transcribe the message into the back office. This process was awkward for the technician and made it hard for customers to relay information about their service experience to the company, as only the bare minimum of information could be transferred wirelessly.
With the discrepancies between their software’s delivery capabilities and service capabilities, Woodfin was doing a lot of manual work outside of the solution to manage their various departments.
Woodfin had a decision to make—they could continue using their existing solution, paying to customize the software to better fit their needs, or they could look for a new solution with the service functionality they needed already built in.
Shared Principles
Woodfin reconnected with Cargas at a conference in Atlanta in 2015. Woodfin had seen a demo of Cargas Energy nearly 10 years before when the product was still very new. At the time, Woodfin did not think the system was ready to handle their large customer base and complex operations and chose to continue using their legacy solution. Seeing Cargas Energy again in 2015, Vay was impressed by how far the software had come.
Before Cargas Energy, Vay said, “No one had impressed us with the ability to scale [their software] to the level that we needed to perform the way we needed it to.”
While Cargas Energy had caught Woodfin’s attention, what really hit home was Cargas’ attitude towards its clients.
“Cargas thought of us as a partner, not as someone they could bill for feature upgrades,” Vay explained.
Woodfin appreciated that Cargas listened to their input, and considered their suggestions for upgrades and improvements.
“What we hadn’t seen from other companies is a willingness to treat our ideas for system upgrades and feature implementation as things that would make their software better,” Vay said, “We think Cargas sees Woodfin as a partner that has good things to say about how to make software better for people who do the things we do for a living.”
Once Woodfin knew they would be in good hands, they made the switch to Cargas Energy.
““Cargas thought of us as a partner, not as someone they could bill for feature upgrades”
—Brian Vay, Director of Technical Services
Ready for the Future
During the implementation process, Woodfin got a sense of Cargas’ company culture, especially as reflected in its employees.
“Cargas has an excellent corporate culture,” Vay said, “Everybody is enthusiastic and likes doing what they’re doing.”
He also appreciated the skill and talent demonstrated by their implementation team, especially during go-live.
“We set some goals to accomplish during go-live, which we expected to be an enormous task,” Vay recalled. “We did it all in a weekend. We couldn’t have forecasted it would go that smoothly.”
With Cargas Energy, Woodfin was able to upgrade their wireless dispatch system, giving their technicians not only more efficient hardware, but also access to informative PDFs and web sources to improve their performance. Cargas also helped Woodfin improve its customer service by allowing the company to hold an entire house’s equipment under one account. An integration to an easy-to-use web portal where customers can place orders and communicate with Woodfin’s customer support is another bonus. Cargas’ route building tools are especially good for Woodfin’s business.
“I can expect that with Cargas’ route optimization, we can make our deliveries more efficiently,” said Vay.
Woodfin is grateful for Cargas’ technology and expertise, and enjoys giving back to Cargas through its online product management portal, where they can suggest new features for the software. Woodfin is optimistic about its future, and whatever comes their way, they know they can rely on Cargas and its team.