It’s 97 degrees outside today in the Philadelphia & Central New Jersey region, with a heat index pushing the “feels like” to well over the century mark. For those of our Home Services Professionals who are not in the HVAC business, today’s weather only has a minor impact on your team’s ability to get the jobs done. Sure, it may not be ideal conditions to be replacing a roof or painting the exterior of a large home, but with some luck, you should still be able to wrap up your day somewhere near dinnertime, if not before. Better yet, most of your customers will be more than understanding if you need to have your crews take a few extra breaks, or call it a day a little earlier than initially planned. For those in the landscaping and grounds maintenance industry, these are the days where your field teams should’ve started super-early, so they could conceivably have finished the day’s cuts and plantings before the midday heat and sun are at their worst.
Such “flexibility” is not even a thought for the HVAC Service Contractors. These are the types of days that they prayed for, especially after the mildness of the winter that just passed, so they could hopefully make up for some of the lost heating system repair & replacement profits they didn’t make between mid-November & mid-March. But like all things, one should be careful about what you wish! These are the types of days where even if you wanted to make an outbound call, you can’t because all of your inbound lines are ringing off the hook with customers. You quickly forgive any new customers who are “orphans” – those without a dedicated HVAC contractor to take care of them – and will give their undying loyalty to the first company that can service them today. But the rest are existing customers; the same customers who should be calling you using the direct line into your Service Department. The same number printed in large red digits on the “for service, call” stickers that all of your technicians are supposed to be putting on each unit they touch. But instead, they’re doing a Google search for your company, and just dialing the phone number they see – the one that was intended solely for sales calls, and not service calls! They started doing this before dawn, and will likely keep calling until just before the 11 pm news broadcast starts; and then tomorrow just before dawn, it’ll start up all over again…
If they like you, why not like you on Social Media? You already know that most of your clients are spending portions of their days & nights checking their Facebook pages (or those of their “friends”), and following lots of Twitter posts of people they don’t know at all. You should be leveraging these platforms to put your company in front of your client base as often as possible – mainly because your competitors are doing the same thing!
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