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How to Manage Electrical Service Agreements with Ease (Including a Free Template)
Electrical
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:
How to use our electrical service agreement template download.
The challenges of managing electrical maintenance agreements and customer memberships.
How ServiceTitan makes creating and managing electrical service agreements easy and streamlined, solving for the inefficiencies of managing them manually.
The various features we offer for managing memberships, including scheduling, billing, creating payment schedules, and tracking performance.
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.
How to Use Our Electrical Service Agreement Download
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:
Responsibilities: A detailed description of your exact responsibilities for the term of the agreement and the location of work.
Time: The length of time for the agreement with provisions written on how it can be terminated early.
Payment: Payment arrangement, including payment terms and amounts.
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.
Challenges of Manually Managing Electrical Contracts and Customer Memberships
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 …
#1: Scheduling Maintenance Calls and Follow-Ups
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.
#2: Narrowing Down Appointment Times and Keeping Customers Satisfied
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.
#3: Organizing Membership Renewals and Conveniently Billing Customers
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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How ServiceTitan Helps Electrical Businesses Manage Service Agreements More Effectively
In the next sections, we run through how ServiceTitan allows you to:
Customize service agreements so you can find unique solutions for every customer need.
Easily store customer billing and contact information, schedule appointments, and keep track of follow-ups.
Set up automatic billing rules and streamline membership payments.
Keep track of how memberships are performing and take an in-depth look at a broad range of KPIs.
Creating Memberships in ServiceTitan
Within ServiceTitan, electricians and their staff can browse a wide range of templates, all geared for different membership types. And if you have an electrical service agreement you’re already using that works for you, our software allows you to create custom agreements to make implementing and managing them that much easier.
Users can set up and store as many templates as they’d like to coincide with their different membership types. Once the templates are up and running, they’re easy to add to invoices and get activated on the fly. Users can even tie memberships to specific pieces of equipment so techs knows exactly what needs serviced.
Having the flexibility to flip back and forth between using standard templates and creating more personalized programs allows electricians to service all customers — from customers requesting more complex electrical installations and needing more in-depth service plans, to those just looking for basic home visits to keep their units and electrical wiring spick and span. Now, you can offer the right program to people who want to buy it!
Scheduling Appointments and Tracking Follow-Ups
Keeping track of who’s up-to-date for service appointments has never been more straightforward. With the “Follow Ups” tab, you can click over to a list of your recurring service appointments. This list lets you easily organize by Date, Service Type, Preferred Technician, Customer, Location (and more), so you can choose any which way you want to manage your follow ups.
All that’s left to do is schedule the appointment!
Another convenient feature about keeping track of follow ups and scheduling through ServiceTitan? You can leave notes within the job regarding the specific scope of work, exact amounts of materials needed, and expected completion dates; that way, both in-office staff and field technicians can view the most current job notes and stay up-to-date on what is needed for every service call.
Setting Up Automatic Billing and Streamlining Membership Payments
Our electrical service management software also makes billing and membership renewal quick and easy (for both you and your customers) with features like automatic payment rules and membership renewal protection.
Within the invoice tab is a “Charge Members” button. With a click, you’re directed to a screen that allows you to bill customers by date range or tab over to “Billing History” or “Automatic Billing Rules”.
If you like to keep things simple and bill customers once a month or once a quarter, all you have to do is come in here, select the date range you want to invoice for, and create the batch. Payments will automatically run, and all you’ll have to worry about is checking up on failed payments or sending invoices to the customers who request to pay by mail.
If you want to take a more hands-off approach, you can “set it and forget it” by creating payment rules within the “Automatic Billing Rules” tab. Then, you’ll only have to pop back into the Billing History every so often to check up on failed payments and send invoices out in the mail.
Setting up these rules are pretty simple, as our software provides all the fields to set up specific billing cycles for specific membership types, customers, and more.
Our latest addition to our billing feature is membership renewal protection — a handy tool to automatically update credit card expiration dates when they expire. This is helpful because it saves you from having to check in with customers to update their payment information, ultimately sparing you time and avoiding a situation where a customer could opt to cancel.
Keep Track of How Memberships Are Performing
Most importantly, our software allows electricians to look at detailed insights drawn from tracking how specific programs and services are implemented and performed.
To take a closer look at the success of various maintenance agreements, you can search within 2 main datasets: customer memberships and recurring services.
Electricians can then filter within these datasets — using dozens of KPIs — to get a closer look at all facets of what’s working (and what isn’t) with current membership programs and service offerings. Without these insights, it’s way more challenging to analyze how and if memberships help business, and how you can improve what you’re already doing to make your business even better.
Even more is that in-office staff and electrical contractors can use the information gathered from these reports to better tailor their marketing efforts and determine how to best appeal to customers. Our Marketing Pro upgrade even allows you to send emails directly to customers, or batches of customers, to put yourself in more opportunities to win business!
Getting Started with Electrical Service Agreement Templates within ServiceTitan
To make step one easier, we’ve put together this sample electrical service agreement to download and test the waters with. But don’t overlook the need for a way to customize templates and manage all of your service agreements. Standard templates and manual management processes only take you so far.
We provide all the tools to quickly put together personalized agreements for all of your customers and keep them organized in one place. Not only that, but our many other features, such as our QuickBooks Integration and suite of marketing tools, allow you to create opportunities for growth and stay organized as you expand your customer base.
Click here to download the services agreement contract template PDF.
Curious about how ServiceTitan can help you make the most of our electrical service agreement template? Schedule a call to learn more about how our software can help realize the full potential of your customer membership program.