Michael Israel of Zuper, a provider of an end-to-end field service management software application for solar, storage and other field service businesses, talks with Kerim Baran of SolarAcademy about the various aspects of Zuper’s SaaS platform including customer and equipment management, invoicing, dispatching and more. The video is below.

Below is the video transcription.

Kerim Baran of SolarAcademy: Hi everyone. This is Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. I have today with me, Mr. Michael Israel of Zuper. Zuper is a software SaaS tool for the solar industry and specifically focuses on field service management functions. So, Michael, thanks for being with us and I have a couple of quick questions for you. 

Michael Israel of Zuper: Certainly my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I’m looking for looking forward to our conversation. 

Kerim: Thank you. And so tell us a little bit about Zuper’s solution and mission. What do you guys do and how is it different than other field service management software providers in the market, especially in the solar market.

Michael: Well, let’s talk a little bit about what it does and what the mission is. And then I’ll talk a little bit also, as you suggest, about what’s different as far as we’re concerned versus the competition. So we are a traditional field service management software application. That means that we help companies that have field service technicians, field service engineers, that go to the field to do installations, repairs, installations, upgrades, et cetera, et cetera. 

We help the companies that have that type of a service staff that manage all of the service operations that go on in their organizations. So we are able to keep track of all the customers, all of the equipment that is installed at customers, all of the warranty, information and service contracts that are part of those equipment installations. And we are able to keep track of the technicians and the skills that the technicians have. Having that information we can determine which technicians are best to be identified to respond to a service call. We dispatch them. We can schedule them into certain blocks of time that fit the customers’ needs.

We keep track of what the technicians do when they’re on site, how much time they spend, what parts they use, what diagnostic routines they go through. We can actually guide them through some of the repair processes, using checklists and task lists and that type of thing. And then we also keep track of all the costs and the billable side of things.

So we generate invoices. We can also generate quotes for customers before the service provider actually delivers the service. So basically we are an end-to-end field service management tracking system from the very beginning of a customer all the way through to keeping track of all the service that’s delivered to the customer and ultimately to the point of having whatever equipment is there, deinstalled and replaced by a new piece of equipment, perhaps.

So that’s what we do. Our mission is to make sure that companies and specifically the field service people themselves are able to deliver the best possible service in the shortest possible time to their customers. So we try to make sure that we always dispatch the right person to the right place with the right parts, with the right tools to arrive at the right time.

So that’s essentially our mission statement. What differentiates us from our competitors is that we are very, very easily user customizable. So we make it very easy for the end users to configure the screens that they work with to match their business processes and their needs precisely. So we do not require that organization to match their business to the software. It’s the other way around. We’re very easily, as I said, configurable. So the software can be used to match the specific business processes and we can generate specific workflows that fit a specific company’s business process and that type of thing.

So we consider that to be a significant differentiator. We’re also very customer obsessed, especially when it comes to implementing the software and bringing the customers on board and helping them understand how to get value from the software as early as possible. Rather than waiting a year or two, before they get some value, we wanna see them get value within a matter of weeks or a few months.

Kerim: So got it. 

Michael: I hope that answers your question. It was a bit long-winded. 

Kerim: Yeah, that, that was very, very useful. Thank you very much for that answer.