Monk’s Home Improvements has been using SharinPix to aid in job estimations, documentation, and sharing for two years now. The SharinPix checklist feature helps them capture images on the fly and share them with their clients later via their customer portal.
Who is Monk’s Home Improvements?
Since its founding in 2007 as a painting company, Monk’s Home Improvements has grown into a comprehensive home renovation business. Expanding from its initial focus on painting, the company moved into carpentry and general contracting, addressing a wider range of their New Jersey-area customer needs. Recognizing that many of their clients also required finished materials such as tile, cabinets, windows, and doors, Monk's took a strategic step in 2015 by opening a showroom to offer these products directly. Today, Monk’s Home Improvements proudly operates on both sides of the business, excelling in both the sales of quality home improvement materials and their expert installation, providing customers with a full-service experience.
As a part of this full-service experience, Monk’s employees go to houses to bid on labor for projects, be they bathroom remodels, kitchen outfitting, or any home improvement project. Their customers go to their showroom and meet with a Monk’s designer to plan their project. They also have the opportunity to buy their finished materials directly from Monks.
Monk’s Home Improvements and Salesforce:
Monk’s Home Improvement started with Salesforce in 2009, just two years after the start of their company, using the CRM to track their customer and job data.
The Monk’s Home Improvements Challenge:
Field service employees at Monk’s Home Improvements needed to document the house on their first visit so that when the customer came into the showroom to meet with a designer, the designer could speak intelligently about their options as if the designer had been inside the house personally.
When a Monk’s Estimator visits the house, they need to take photos of the area where the desired work needs to be done while collecting measurements to build a floor plan using an external tool. They do all this using an iPad to take notes and snap photos seamlessly during the visit with the customer. They needed a smooth way to store all of this information in Salesforce for later use.
Ultimately, they wanted to create a customer portal as a way to share status with clients easily, enable them to pay online, and let them know who to contact regarding the progress of their project. As Ty and his team began to construct this portal, they felt it was missing a key element: photos.
The SharinPix Solution:
In 2022, Monk’s Home Improvements started using SharinPix to power their estimation processes, job documentation, and customer portal. Let’s take a look at what SharinPix on top of Salesforce is doing for each of those areas:
Job Estimation
Using the SharinPix Checklist, the photo collection step has become much easier than when the Monk’s team was using the system camera and Evernote to make estimates and track progress. They have built pre-defined SharinPix checklists for each type of room they might encounter on the job (bathroom, kitchen, etc.).
Because of the detailed requirements built into each checklist, they are able to ensure they have every element to estimate the cost of a job accurately. For example, here is their checklist for the renovation of a main bathroom:
Keeping in mind that the design team will need to reference these photos later, Monk’s estimators will gather other information while they capture photos. They use SharinPix to add dimensions to photos that are difficult to understand using a floorplan alone. For example:
Before/After Image Capture in Salesforce
Project managers document the job as it progresses from the quote step all the way to completion, ensuring that all agreed upon work was completed.
Customer Portal
Monk’s Home Improvements decided to take advantage of all the images that were captured in the field and make them accessible to their clients via their customer portal. This ultimately made the customer experience on the portal more enjoyable and gave clients a reason to return and log in, inspiring them to use the other features found within.
Customers who log into their portal can see all of their before, during, and after photos while they log in to make payments or get in touch with their designer or contractor. Take a look at this example home page from within the portal showing both before and after pictures for a project:
The Results
Since adopting SharinPix in 2022, Monk’s Home Improvements has seen incremental improvements in multiple areas of its business operations.
Now that Monk’s has images inside its customer portal; it has successfully instilled the habits of online payments, status checks, and every other original goal the platform sought to implement.
The date and time stamping on SharinPix photos uploaded to each job can act as proof that Monk’s employees have been making progress on a project. If there is ever a discrepancy between a customer's expectations and what was done on the actual job, there is always a photo reference to clarify any confusion.
These job status updates with photos have also allowed greater quality control of all projects carried out by the Monk’s team. For example, a project manager who wasn’t on-site recently noticed an incorrect model of a heated bathroom floor being installed because the color in the job status photo didn’t match the plan.
Use Images to Transform Your Salesforce Like Monk’s Home Improvements
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