How Clean Scapes Improved Customer Service with Laserfiche

Laserfiche Solution Contributed By: Travis Dyer, Director of Technology, Clean Scapes

Clean Scapes is the largest privately owned landscaping company in Texas, constructing and maintaining commercial landscapes for clients across the state. An award-winning landscape leader in the region, Clean Scapes specializes in the construction and maintenance of outdoor environments.

After using Laserfiche to store documents digitally and automatically sort them into the correct locations, the company was looking for a way to expand their use of the software.

“We have many clients and are responsible for enhancing and maintaining a large number of properties owned by those clients. To provide exceptional customer service, it is important for us to let our clients know that we are looking after their property and taking care of issues on their properties,” says Travis Dyer, Director of Technology at Clean Scapes.

Before implementing Laserfiche, Clean Scapes had no easy way to provide reports about a property’s maintenance status. Emails to clients concerning property progress were haphazard. As a result, clients often called for information about their property. Information about repairs or other necessary improvements was not easily accessible or quickly communicated.

Now, Laserfiche enables Clean Scapes staff to communicate with clients much more easily and effectively. As opposed to taking photos during the visit, coming back to the office, loading those photos from their iPhones to their computer and then attaching each file to an email, staff simply upload photos to a file upload field on a Laserfiche form, and submit the form.

Laserfiche then does the rest, embedding each photo, along with the included notes, into a PDF file. It then emails it to the client. The client can open the PDF attachment and see the photos right on the page, as well as notes about each photo.

Because some clients are located in other states, they may not have not seen their properties in person in quite some time, so embedding photos into a PDF has been a huge benefit. With constant updates, they no longer need to search for information about their properties. The PDFs allow Clean Scapes to communicate with clients while simultaneously keeping a record of all notes, allowing it to serve the dual function of internal note keeper and external communication tool.

“Our clients have voiced satisfaction regarding this initiative,” says Dyer. “They get a good idea of what enhancements we have done and how everything looks.”

But clients aren’t the only beneficiaries, Dyer adds, pointing out that Laserfiche helps staff keep track of tasks and stay on top of work.

“Time savings have been the biggest benefit. Laserfiche makes us more efficient and productive,” he says.

Property Visit Report

The organization has automated the property visit form with Laserfiche Forms. When area managers perform their regular visits to client properties, they launch the form on their mobile devices.

They note their general observations about the property directly on the form including:

• Information for the crew leader
• Future work that needs to be done
• Notes for the customer

The original form contains all information needed for both employees and customers

If at any point the company needs to verify the location of the form submission, the company has enabled a geolocation point to ping user location and add it to the form. This ensures that managers are at the correct location during the inspections.

Managers take photos of the property using their iPhone cameras and upload them to the form. This notifies employees of issues that require maintenance and customers to ensure that their property is properly maintained.

Comments, notes and photos are easily added on mobile devices

Once the form is submitted, Workflow embeds each photo into a PDF file, along with the area manager’s general observations, the manager signature and the company logo.

The pdf contains the photos the area manager has taken, as well as notes about each photo

Workflow creates an email and populates it with the customer notes section from the form, an automatic greeting and signature. This email is then automatically sent to the client.

The client notes from the manager are automatically inserted into a PDF and emailed to the client

Reporting

Each day all the notes the managers take for each of their forms gets combined and emailed to them at the end of the day. This email provides a consistent record of all the notes they took on those properties every day.

“We also have workflows that run on a regular basis to provide reporting on weekly and monthly property visits. Workflow compiles statistics and places them on a chart, which it embeds into an email and sends to our company’s executive team, including the owner. This provides them with insight into our day-to-day operations,” said Dyer.

Benefits of Laserfiche

Clean Scapes has experienced the following benefits since implementing Laserfiche:

• Communication between internal employees and external clients has improved as result of standardization
• Issues relating to properties are immediately flagged for repair resulting in accelerated property improvement
• Emails are no longer lost or misplaced as a result of the single, centralized system
• Clean Scapes can easily verify whether the managers are visiting their assigned property locations weekly

Photo credits
Lawn by Kevin Dooley via Flickr CC 2.0.