Cell networks have gotten better and better at covering those dead spots. However, sometimes you are going to stumble into one. Whether you are headed into a deep dark basement, or just over a few big hills into the wilds. ServiceWorks has got you covered!
If you know that you may be traveling to the far reaches of a cell signal or even suspect you might. Open your mobile device, Go to More, Manual Data Sync, and then Download Data
This will not take long as most of the syncing to your phone happens behind the scenes. The steps above will just ensure that you have the latest changes to customers’ information or job changes that may have happened since the last sync. You are now good to go.
These steps can be performed anytime whether in the office or out on the road and you think you might go offline. If you unexpectedly go offline, and you did not do the Data Download, your mobile device still has all of the data up to the last auto-sync that happened in the background.
While off-line you can pull up the job and the details pertaining to that job. You can populate the job with notes, and explanations of services. Since ServiceWorks is cloud bases there are a couple things you cannot do without a network connection. You will not be able to accept a payment, if you are linked to Marcone, you will not be able to pull up that part, and if you take pictures, and attach them to the job, they will not be transmitted back to the office.
Payments – If payment is needed on the spot, your tech may have to use the customer’s landline to call the payment into the office and be entered through the web interface. Without a mobile connection, an email or invoice cannot be sent out by the technician.
Items – If you are linked to Marcone and you put in a new item it will not be able to pull that item information for you. . You can still enter the item number (be sure to enter the number correctly) a description and the price into the job. An item previously used on any other job will be pulled from your local inventory items
Photos – Photos can still be taken and attached to the job to show before and after pictures or maybe a damaged doorway from moving in an appliance. The photo will be stored in the job and transmitted as soon as the mobile device is back online.
Coming back online, once you have come back up to civilization (cell signal area) after a few seconds (10-15) your offline data will sync to ServiceWorks, and all of your information will be visible from the web interface side. Anyone back at the office will see the information is now populated in your service jobs. If it seems to lag, depending on network strength, you can follow the same steps above except instead of downloading data (which pulls the latest data to your mobile device) you will select “Sync Data”
This will “push” data from your phone to update ServiceWorks on the office side.
Once that happens if a job is opened that you entered a Marcone item, it will then pull the items details, pricing, etc. IF the item number was entered incorrectly, it may ask the user if they want to add it to inventory (first clue of a mistype) they can select “No” and enter the correct item number.
Any pictures/notes etc entered out in the field will now be visible in their respective areas on the job page.
Whether in a basement, a forest or out on an ice tundra ServiceWorks has you covered!
