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Has anyone set up the customer portal? Is it worth it?

Lindsey Park

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I've been going back and forth on whether to set up the customer portal for our clients. We're a mid-sized HVAC company with about 35 technicians and I've been the one handling most of the FieldPulse admin stuff since we switched over from our old system back in March.

So here's where I'm at — I keep getting calls from customers asking "when is my technician coming" and "can I see my invoice online" and honestly it's taking up a lot of my time when I'm also trying to handle scheduling conflicts and parts ordering and about fifteen other things. The customer portal seems like it could help with that? But I'm also worried about...

Okay, let me just list out what I'm worried about because that's easier:

  • Will customers actually use it or will they just keep calling anyway?
  • How much work is it to set up on my end? I don't have a ton of time for configuration right now
  • Can they see everything or can I limit what they see? (We had some issues with our old system where customers could see notes we didn't intend...)
  • What happens if they try to self-schedule and we can't actually accommodate the time they picked?

I guess my main question is whether anyone here has actually rolled this out and felt like it was worth the effort. I'd love to hear real experiences — the good and the bad. We're trying to be more "digital" as a company but I also don't want to create more headaches for myself if this is going to be something I have to babysit.

Thanks so much for any insights! Really appreciate this community — I've learned a lot just from reading everyone's posts.

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  • We tried it... three years ago? Took it back off after six months.

    Problem wasn't the portal itself, it was our customer base. Residential HVAC, older demographic, they wanted to call. Portal got maybe 40 logins total out of 800+ active customers. Not worth the "where do I click" phone calls we started getting.

    Might be different if you're more commercial or B2B. YMMV.

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  • We tried it... three years ago? Took it back off after six months.

    Problem wasn't the portal itself, it was our customer base. Residential HVAC, older demographic, they wanted to call. Portal got maybe 40 logins total out of 800+ active customers. Not worth the "where do I click" phone calls we started getting.

    Might be different if you're more commercial or B2B. YMMV.

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  • in reply to Ray DeLuca

    Ray, that's such a good point about knowing your customer base! We're more mixed — about 60% commercial and 40% residential — and we've definitely seen that split. Our commercial accounts love being able to pull up their service history for their own records, but our residential customers mostly just want someone to answer the phone when their AC dies in July.

    We ended up keeping the portal active but stopped promoting it to residential. Just didn't have the bandwidth to support both workflows equally. Thanks so much for sharing your experience — it's helpful to know when something didn't work out!