Building a customer base is costly, as many electrical contractors find themselves dishing out more than they’d like while trying to bring in new business. And when you do acquire a customer, you want them to come back. But without a membership or service agreement program, there’s much less certainty that they will.
Service agreements make it possible to capitalize on your efforts to maintain (and grow) a loyal customer base.
Not only do customer service agreements curb the uncertainty of where business is coming from next, but they also help you save money on customer acquisition. Even better, they save customers the trouble of searching on Yelp or Google for an electrician every time they need electrical work. Once they become a member, they’re less likely to switch over to another service provider.
Having a high-quality electrical services agreement template is a good first step, but the real challenge is actually managing (and efficiently managing) all of your agreement documents, customer appointments, equipment needed for these appointments, as well as billing and renewal.
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Below, we cover the following in more detail:
Note: We help electrical contractors streamline and manage service agreements — as well as manage the other key areas of their businesses from dispatching and scheduling to invoicing and payroll. Want to see how ServiceTitan can help you manage your entire electrical business from a single platform? Schedule a call for a free walk-through of our software.
Our electrical service agreement template provides a professionally designed PDF that businesses can use to collect and outline the necessary information from customers that want to opt into membership. You can think of it as an order form for any of the following services you plan to provide.
The template includes sections to document the following:
To use it, simply download it, make copies for each new customer who signs up for a membership, and you can fill out customer information directly into the PDF.
This can work as an interim solution, and it’s better than typing or writing up service agreements from scratch every time. However, if you’re going to begin offering membership programs, you’re best to do so with a tool that allows you to easily manage them all.
If not, you’re forced to manage your memberships manually, which can lead to a whole slew of issues, such as missed maintenance appointments and overscheduling, challenges billing, troubles tracking renewals, inconvenient appointment times for customers, and more.
Let’s take a closer look at these challenges, and then walk through how our service agreement software helps solve them.
Using Docs and Sheets to manage a membership program can work for a time, but for growing businesses it quickly becomes difficult to track and manage when customers are due for appointments and renewals.
Using this manual approach, customers are often forgotten about, overserved, or left dissatisfied, since details can so easily slip through the cracks. In-office staff are constantly juggling many tasks, and occasional errors are bound to occur — errors that can result in lost business and damaged reputations ( think: those dreaded Yelp reviews).
Typically, most problems arise when …
Maintenance agreements often vary and consist of different services, but some customers may have more specialized needs and require individualized service agreements, making things even harder to keep track of in an efficient manner.
Without software to remind you when customers are due for scheduling, you may miss appointments, leaving customers feeling angry or forgotten about; or, on the other hand, you could end up following up with some customers too many times, and this could cause annoyance and make you appear disorganized.
Software that organizes memberships in a clear, simple, scannable way lets you easily browse who’s due for follow-ups and maintenance calls, and it takes the legwork out of keeping track of who’s ready for scheduling. All you have to do is pick up the phone and set the appointment.
It’s the norm to book appointments in service windows; so though it’s not ideal, customers typically expect they’ll have to book a time slot and wait around for the electrician to arrive. And with manual management of appointments, you’re unable to offer your customers better than this. Field service management software allows you to view status updates of jobs in real-time and view technician field locations so you can provide updates to customers on when to expect their tech to arrive. This makes it possible for customers to go about their days without worrying about missing their service appointment. Just the ability to provide more specific appointment times for customers makes you a more convenient choice than the next guy.
Not only that, but field service software also allows technicians and in-office staff to store job notes for later reference. That way, technicians can view the whole scope of what’s needed for current and follow-up services in one place, and ensure they’re always showing up prepared.
Just like it’s time-consuming and tricky (and virtually out of the question for larger electrical companies) to manually keep track of when customers are due for maintenance calls, it’s challenging to track due dates for membership renewals, too. ServiceTitan organizes customers by membership expiration date so you can stay on top of who’s due to renew, or even upgrade, their service agreements.
In addition, ServiceTitan allows you to set up automatic billing rules so all you have to worry about is periodically checking the billing history for failed payments or payments that need to be sent via mail.
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