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In a Nutshell: Millions of plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, and other field service professionals perform essential installation and maintenance tasks. But these skilled workers are not always the best at handling the basics of business. The Workiz platform contains all the features the owners and managers of field service businesses need to run the company, pay employees, and serve customers. Workiz deftly handles the managerial, administrative, and customer-service aspects of field services so the pros can concentrate on what they do best.
Here at CardRates.com, we’re consumers of household goods and services like everybody else. We’ve all undoubtedly had experiences with local field service professionals — plumbers, electricians, HVAC technicians, and others — who seem indifferent to the impression they leave while working in and around our homes.
It doesn’t bode well for a business when a lack of preplanning and procedural focus leads customers to believe it’s flying by the seat of its pants. The technicians in the field may be highly skilled. But it only makes sense that consumers will eventually shy away from businesses that lack an aura of professionalism around their work.
That’s why some companies thrive and others fade away. Like most small businesses, field service firms depend on their ability to provide a seamless customer experience to generate enough repeat customers, referrals, and positive reviews to sustain themselves and grow.
And that’s why Workiz has seen such rapid adoption among field service companies since its inception in 2015. More than 120,000 service pros trust Workiz to manage their businesses, teams, and customers across the purchasing journey and beyond.
It works because it solves a problem the founders experienced firsthand — always a good sign in entrepreneurship.
“Idan Kadosh, who founded the business, and I had both been in the service industry and had seen a lot of the challenges in being a technician,” said Didi Azaria, CEO of Workiz. “The entire Workiz platform rests on his realization that simple digital tools can reduce the stress and churn common in field service industries.”
Workiz combines ease of onboarding and use with scalability to grow businesses from a few employees to ever greater strength and status. Handling the managerial, administrative, and customer details helps teams play to their strengths, which Azaria said are usually decidedly not in business niceties.
“Some manage themselves so badly that there’s no one around to follow up on unpaid invoices,” Azaria said. “We enable them to be more efficient by reducing the amount of office work and paperwork down to almost zero.”
Schedule, Dispatch, Invoice, and Pay in One Place
Workiz provides a free Lite version for the smallest teams. Successive product tiers ramp up services to include integrations, customization, and AI tools. Tools include a built-in phone system and Workiz Genius AI, which leverages data and interactions to engage and convert more prospects.
The key is simplicity — the Workiz team of more than 120 understands and caters to an audience not particularly interested in the intricacies of software.
“Most of them are looking for what we call a business in a box — just schedule my jobs and send my invoices and don’t send me out to buy anything else,” Azaria said.
It indicates the benefits of systems integration. For your business, Workiz can send customized work estimates from the field, create ongoing service plans, and schedule multiday jobs. It provides easy performance tracking through customizable reports and a dashboard.
For your team, Workiz provides integrated dispatching, payroll, commission management, and lead tracking. Techs benefit from the use of Workiz Card, a charge card that streamlines procurement in and out of the office.
“You can control the actual flow of the business just by giving them a charge card,” Azaria said. “Suddenly, technicians have the freedom to buy equipment, assign it to a job, fill the tank, and buy lunch — all the routine things they do day to day.”
For your customers, Workiz provides access to a client portal and an anytime/anywhere payment infrastructure. With credit based on your job volume and no hard credit checks, monthly fees, credit line charges, or card fees, the Workiz Card is free for Workiz Pay customers. It offers 0% APR and simple, automatic repayment, along with expense tracking and reports.
Azaria said credit access through Workiz helps businesses tide themselves over during that gray area of compensation between purchasing inventory for a job and cashing out the invoice.
Although conventional card companies may shy away from issuing business credit to field service businesses, Workiz believes in its customers enough to offer that flexibility, which calculates out to about five days of additional cash flow.
“We believe the additional breathing room helps our customers build bigger businesses,” Azaria said. “I wouldn’t call it a loan — it’s really five days of breaks from the need to pay everything right now.”
Automation and AI Help Teams Gain Efficiencies
Automation is at the heart of the Workiz experience, which makes using it even more transparent for field technicians and their colleagues in the home office than it would be if everything were manual. The argument — and it’s a good one — is that automation fueled through AI gives people more time to do what they do best.
“Our mission is to automate almost everything other than holding a wrench,” Azaria said.
Workiz calls its suite of AI automation tools Workiz Genius. Azaria said it contains smart messaging that can actually step in to make routine customer interactions seem more human than they would if humans were composing the texts.
“If you advertised, somebody called, and you weren’t there, the system sends them a text message with an apology for missing the contact and a link to book your services,” Azaria said. “That automation by itself is a huge moneymaker for any business.”
Call insights leverage the built-in phone system to extract contact details from customers and prospects, flagging the most promising follow-ups and upsell opportunities. That means recording, transcribing, summarizing, and analyzing every phone call coming in, Azaria said.
“With a single click, the entire CRM gets filled,” Azaria said. “There’s a human in the loop because we want everything to be perfectly accurate. But this saves a huge amount of time.”
Genius Leads then takes lead data and automatically makes it actionable by intelligently extracting relevant info from service requests, warranty inquiries, and third-party lead providers. The efficiency gains produce quicker and easier lead conversions than competitors not equipped with AI.
The final component of Workiz Genius is Genius Scheduling, which pulls from throughout the system to suggest optimal time slots for jobs. Eliminating the hassle of manual planning reduces travel time between jobs, boosting team efficiency and productivity.
Azaria said one of the paradoxes of field service work is that while technicians are out in the field during regular business hours — say 8 AM to 5 PM — home residents only learn their air conditioner is on the fritz when they get home from work.
Azaria said that means up to 40% of business calls go unanswered in conventional field service businesses. Workiz Genius fixes that.
“It’s all about amplifying the ability of your business to work almost 24/7,” Azaria said.
Made by Experienced Pros to Serve Your Needs
The inspiration for Workiz came from a group of locksmith pros in San Diego who surfed all day and helped people get back into their homes and cars at night. The hassle of handling routine management tasks over and over, night after night, made them realize there had to be a better way.
The story is a classic illustration of the entrepreneurial mindset because it may explain why some businesses seem destined to be successful. The surfer crew went out into the market looking for a solution to manage their locksmith business. They couldn’t find one to match their needs. So they built one.
The rest is history. Workiz continues to iterate in the spirit of innovation, looking at bottlenecks in the software experience and even going out in the field to personally experience its functionality from the point of view of its users.
“I’m visiting clients on a monthly basis, picking up junk in junk removal businesses and installing HVAC in HVAC-installation businesses,” Azaria said. “Many of our most successful features bringing growth to these field service businesses came about just because I saw — with my own eyes — a technician doing something that didn’t make any sense.”
Azaria said when you observe pain points in the field in that way, it’s impossible to unsee them until you go back to your colleagues in the office and build a solution. Azaria prides himself on keeping quiet during these customer visits. He said it’s the only way to get to the bottom of the problem at hand.
“I’m a talker, but you’ve got to listen,” Azaria said. “Then you begin to understand how hard field service professionals work, what friction in the field looks like, and how to make things better.”