Small details make all the difference

You can have the best tool in the world, but if it’s a pain to use—guess what? You won’t use it. At this point, it is accurate to point out that Shepherd’s solution, whether web or mobile app has always had positive feedback about user experience and how intuitive it is. But that’s no excuse to sit on one’s laurels, so when the opportunity arises to smooth things out for the customer, even if it makes no difference to the functionality, Shepherd tries to do just that.

It’s no surprise, then, that this blog looks at one such example.

Smoother UX

The login page for technicians was previously rather “technical” you might say. Now, it is friendlier to the eye, particularly if you, as a technician eager to start a job, want to be able to navigate the login process with the least hassle possible. One such change is a new “change password” button: no rooting around in Settings menus anymore, just click, and follow the instructions. Naturally, the “forgot password” remains because that happens to the best of us, and never at a convenient moment.

The small but beneficial tweaks don’t stop there. On a more practical front, Shepherd has long had the option of setting reminders for up-and-coming as part of a service plan, for example. This made advance staff allocation, budgeting, and billing all easier to do. These reminders could then be used to create a service order, but all that had to happen, manually, on a separate page.

To mass create or not mass create

That additional step can now be avoided. Instead, a button within the service order reminder allows that service order to be created there and then. No risk of that ill-timed phone call coming in, or that knock at the door distracting you as you navigate to another menu, causing that reminder to be forgotten in the process. All the service details are visible so you know what you are committing to.

The only aspect to remember, or at least take into account, is there’s nothing to say you’ll only get one single reminder. If you do, this works nicely. But a larger department might get 5 reminders, 10, 20. What then? That convenient button in the reminder form might not seem as practical if you have to repeat the process two dozen times. 

When that happens, bulk creation remains an option. One menu lists all reminders that apply. From there the user can select all those reminders they want to act on. This could be over the coming week, or the coming month, etc. Once the timescale is set, the active reminders will remain. The user chooses those they want to address and then creates the service orders. The service manager or technician carrying out this process will just need to open the reminders themselves to be sure of what work a given service requires.

Full pricing flexibility

The final notable tweak in this blog that Shepherd has brought out relates to the pricing method within Shepherd. This is an important topic given that one of Shepherd’s key uses, being NetSuite-native, is translating a service performed within its own solution into an invoice issued within NetSuite. The pricing method previously had 3 approaches. The sales order route, hourly rates, and a fixed price. And one of these would be applied to the service item to enable the invoice creation mentioned above.

If you provide a service to a customer, contractual negotiations will require an idea of the price that will eventually go on invoices. That could be a blanket fixed rate for one and all. Otherwise, it might be an hourly rate: again, consistent across the board, only that service duration then dictates the cost. The last was the sales order route which allows for a price to be set based on, not only the work done but also the customer being billed. In this respect, it acted somewhat like a fixed price invoice, but where the fixed price is specific to a given client.

That meant that hour rates felt a little left out, given that they did not have this option to be adapted on a client-by-client basis.

The most recent update resolves that by bringing in sales orders hourly. It essentially extends that same functionality to hourly rate billing that can be adapted, from the norm to suit particular clients whose rates are not the same as others’. The flexibility afforded to Shepherd users to accommodate their clients’ needs and adapt to these relationships has now been evened out.