ServiceOne is an Omaha-based home services company covering plumbing, HVAC, electrical, and appliance repair. Whatever a homeowner needs fixed, improved, or replaced, ServiceOne has a technician for it.
That breadth of service is a competitive advantage in the market and a coordination challenge internally. Getting four different trades to document work consistently, communicate clearly with the office, and share information with customers in a way that builds trust requires a system that works for everyone, regardless of which van they drive.
Before CompanyCam, ServiceOne had the documentation habit. They were already taking photos on every job. What they didn’t have was a way to organize all of those photos, sort them by location and project, and make them accessible to the people who needed them.
The result was a constant process of digging through emails looking for photos that should have been easy to find. For a company running four trades simultaneously across a metro area, that inefficiency compounded across every job every day.
The Problem: Photos That Were Hard to Find and Harder to Share
ServiceOne had always understood the value of job site photos. The problem wasn’t the habit. It was everything that came after the photo was taken. Photos ended up in email inboxes sorted by date rather than by job.
Finding a specific photo from a specific job required knowing roughly when it was taken and searching through everything around that time. Sharing photos with customers or other team members meant forwarding emails or downloading and re-uploading files.
For a company running multiple trades across multiple jobs simultaneously, this created problems at every level:
- Office staff couldn’t see what field technicians were looking at without a phone call
- Customers asking about job progress had no easy way to see what was happening
- Photos from different trades on the same job lived in different email threads
- No consistent standard for which photos to take meant documentation quality varied by technician
- Poor field-to-office communication meant small problems took longer to surface and resolve than they should have
What Changed When All Four Trades Moved to One Platform
When ServiceOne implemented CompanyCam, the first thing that changed was visibility. Every photo taken by every technician across every trade appeared in the same place, organized by project, accessible to everyone who needed it without anyone having to forward anything to anybody.
Jolene Laakso, ServiceOne’s Installation Coordinator, noticed the difference immediately. “You can see exactly what the tech or comfort advisor is talking about when they send a picture,” she said. The gap between what was happening in the field and what the office could see closed overnight.
Jeremy Ebertowski, the HVAC Service Team Lead, put it in terms that matter for any trade business: “The information is what it is, no one can go in and change a picture — they’re there. It makes things flow a lot easier, less mistakes.” For a company where keeping crews in the loop across four different trades requires a system that works the same way for a plumber and an electrician, that consistency was the foundation everything else was built on.
How CompanyCam Simplified Office Communication
The communication improvement at ServiceOne wasn’t just between the field and the office. It changed how the office itself operated. When a coordinator needs to understand what a technician found on a job, instead of calling them away from the work to explain it over the phone, they open CompanyCam and look at the photos. The technician documented it. The photo is there. The question is answered.
John Salmans, an outside salesman at ServiceOne, described what that meant in practice: “It’s simplified the communication with others in the office. When you give someone a visual picture of what you want, it’s easier for them to understand.” That simplification compounds across a four-trade operation where the volume of inter-department communication is significant.
Comments and mentions in CompanyCam let team members communicate directly on specific photos without losing context in a separate thread, keeping every conversation tied to the job it’s about.
How CompanyCam Changed the Customer Experience
Beyond internal communication, CompanyCam changed how ServiceOne communicates with its customers. Sharing galleries and project photos with homeowners became a standard part of how ServiceOne closes jobs, and the customer response was immediate.
Gary McCollum, ServiceOne’s Operations and IT Manager, summed it up simply: “It’s an easy way to get pictures organized and shared with customers.” For home service customers who often don’t understand what a technician found or why a repair was necessary, seeing photo documentation shared through galleries and timelines changes the dynamic entirely.
Instead of taking the technician’s word for what was wrong, the customer sees it for themselves. That transparency builds the kind of trust that generates repeat business and referrals across all four of ServiceOne’s service areas.
The Case for CompanyCam
ServiceOne runs four trades in one market and needed one platform that worked the same way for all of them. CompanyCam gave every technician, coordinator, and salesperson the same view of every job in real time, regardless of which trade they worked in or which van they drove.
“Our whole team can visualize what we see in the field,” John Salmans said. “It’s documented evidence of what you need on the job. It just works.” For a home services company where the quality of communication between the field and the office determines the quality of the customer experience, having all four trades documenting on the same platform wasn’t a convenience. It was the foundation of a consistent operation.
