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Providing Great Service Means Being Proactive (And it’s Good Business, Too)

hvac contractor

I’ve been a homeowner for 20 years now and, yet, I know very little about maintaining my house. I’ve been busy raising a family and building several businesses over that time. The home service professionals that my family works with are the experts that I depend upon.

Unfortunately, my home service pros do a terrible job at helping me think through the things I should be doing now to keep my house in good repair and comfortable. The result is that in some cases, they get a panicked call from me (or more likely my most excellent wife) asking them if they can come by to fix something immediately. The problem isn’t always urgent. In those cases, we bear with the problem until our plumber or HVAC contractor can come by to see us. Not ideal.

 

What could they do instead? With a little effort they could help me head off some of these problems by reaching out to me proactively to educate me about the steps I can take and make it easy for me to reach out to them to have the service done. This has the benefit of driving revenue (frequently, non-peak season revenue) for the home service pro.

 

Let me give you some examples of offers that a HVAC pro could deliver through an email newsletter to help me keep my house more comfortable:

 

  1. Buy back campaigns: Offer a credit towards replacing older systems up to a given value. This works great for cooling systems after the summer months: “Now that it’s fall, you may want to consider a replacement.” In addition to postal and email, you might want to consider calling clients directly. That new system will prevent a mid-August failure that will drive a panicked call.
  2. Comfort and performance maintenance: Provide a discount on maintenance during the edge season.
  3. Follow up on quotes: You’d be surprised at how many homeowners still haven’t repaired or replaced the system that they called you about a while back. Give them a call, text or shoot them and email.
  4. IAQ Products: Inevitably, we have summer fires in my part of the country (Colorado), and portable air purifiers don’t always do a great job. Proactively offering IAQ products before the summer months could be useful to many clients in the West.
  5. Heat Exchanger Integrity Testing: Testing the integrity of the heat exchanger in the winter months might be a way to make sure that the house stays toasty.

Each home service industry has their equivalent list of proactive services that I would find helpful. Sure, this is marketing, but it’s also a useful service.

 

What kind of programs have you run that work?

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