Summary
Heat Merchants is one of Ireland’s leading suppliers of heating, plumbing and renewable energy solutions, operating 31 outlets across Ireland with offices in Athlone and Balbriggan. The business serves both domestic and commercial customers and provides nationwide aftersales support, including commissioning, servicing and warranty repairs. As demand for aftersales support grew and the engineering team expanded nationwide, Heat Merchants needed a single, centralised system to manage it all. That system was WorkPal.
Challenge
As aftersales operations grew, managing a nationwide engineering team became more complex.
Key challenges included:
- Engineers located across the country with varying availability
- Reliance on in‑house and paper‑based systems
- Disconnected workflows for scheduling, communications, parts and documentation
- Increased customer demand putting pressure on response times
As a result, the expansion of the service team made it clear that the business needed one central workflow system that could support growth while maintaining service quality.
Solution
Heat Merchants transitioned from in-house systems to WorkPal, using it as a central hub for:
- Job scheduling and dispatch
- Engineer communications
- Parts management
- Digital documentation and reporting
Before go-live, WorkPal’s implementation team worked closely with Heat Merchants to digitise existing paper forms and store them securely in one cloud-based system. Furthermore, a structured rollout and tailored training helped office staff and engineers use the platform with confidence from day one.
Results
Key outcomes include:
- Faster customer response times through intelligent job scheduling
- Full visibility of engineer availability for office staff
- Easy rescheduling and workload management
- Elimination of paper forms through digital document management
- Improved parts tracking, helping to minimise customer downtime and outages
- Clear reporting that supports daily planning and decision‑making
Moreover, WorkPal supports better teamwork between the call centre and engineering teams. Now, engineers receive real-time updates and can access all job information directly from their mobile devices.
“WorkPal Support has been very helpful, particularly during the early days. The new Administration Dashboard allows us to make small in-house changes quickly, and the support team is always accessible with fast response times.”
Client Testimonial
“WorkPal now sits at the heart of daily operations and communications in a busy Heat Merchants call centre and a geographically dispersed engineer team. The reliability of the software and the job scheduling functionality have greatly improved customer response times.”