HVAC Customer Retention: 8 Actionable Ways to Increase It

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention tells you how well you keep existing customers coming back for more. A high customer retention rate means you don’t have to constantly look for new customers. When your customers stay with you and use your services over an extended period, you have good customer retention, aka a low churn rate. 

To keep customers returning, you first have to build trust. They must feel confident you can handle all their HVAC needs, including installations, repairs, maintenance, or upgrades. Offering long-term contracts is the easiest way to improve your HVAC customer retention. When you sign people up for a long-term service agreement, you don’t have to hunt for new customers so often.

Why is Customer Retention Important for HVAC Businesses?

• More affordable: It’s much cheaper to keep your current customers happy and on board, rather than searching for new ones. Up to seven times cheaper, according to one study. Getting a new HVAC customer costs $200–300 while keeping the ones you have costs about $40. That alone is a good enough reason to put plenty of effort into HVAC customer retention! 

• Great for overall revenue: Repeat customers are like gold dust when it comes to growing your business long-term. Boosting customer retention by just five percent can lead to a 25 percent increase in the amount a customer spends with you.

• Generates word-of-mouth referrals: Happy customers tell their friends, who then tell their friends, and so on. This is excellent news for your HVAC business, as referred customers are 37 percent more likely to come back for more. 

• Easier to upsell: As an HVAC contractor, you should try to upsell your customers on packages like upgrades or maintenance plans. If people trust your work enough to be repeat customers, they’re more likely to say yes to ongoing services. 

How Can HVAC Contractors Calculate Customer Retention?

Knowing your customer retention rate (CRR) means you can better monitor business performance over the long term.

To work out CRR, choose a time frame—e.g., six months or a year.

Write down the total number of customers you had at the end of the chosen period and subtract the number of new customers gained over that time. Divide the resulting number by how many customers you had at the beginning. Then, multiply the total by 100 to find the CRR percentage.

Here, it is a mathematical formula.

CRR = ((E – N) / S) * 100

Where:

E = Number of customers at the end of a given time frame  

N = Number of new customers gained during that period   

S = Number of customers at the start of that period

For example, let’s say you started 2023 with 40 clients and ended the year with 36 after gaining four new clients. The formula looks like this: ((36-4)/40) x 100 = 80 percent.

How Can You Increase HVAC Customer Retention?

Below, you’ll find eight top tips to help you increase customer retention in your HVAC business.

Let’s look at each one in more detail.

1. Make them feel unique

First impressions count, but ongoing impressions are essential, too. Every time you reach out to people, make an extra effort to be friendly and helpful, whether by phone, email, or text. Call people by their name and know their HVAC service history before you get in touch.

ServiceTitan helps personalize interactions by making it easy to access complete data displays for each customer, including detailed job overviews, and historical data.

2. Make it easy to contact you

If someone wants to book HVAC services but can’t contact you quickly, they’ll probably get frustrated and move on. That’s why you should make it easy for them to reach out or book your services via an online customer experience platform. The ServiceTitan platform allows customers to book appointments and receive reminders by SMS text messages. Customers can also see where technicians are on a map, allowing them to estimate the arrival time.

3. Don’t try to sell too hard

By all means, promote your services, but don’t go overboard. If you seem too pushy, customers will back off, and you’ll lose customers rather than keep them. Focus on making the whole process as easy as possible for people, by offering easy and quick checkouts, for example. Customers can see all your up-to-date price lists on the platform, book your services easily, and pay for the work, all in one place.

4. Help your techs arrive informed

If your techs show up at a job unprepared, it’s highly unprofessional. Avoid this by using a field service app that lets your staff access all job details in one place, including customer history. It also keeps a record of all paperwork, so no job details are overlooked or lost.  

"Technicians no longer have to call dispatchers and ask questions like, ‘What did we do the last time we were here?’” Randi Thompson, service operations manager at Bill Joplin’s Air Conditioning and Heating, said. “The technician can see that history, so it shortens their whole process. It makes them a lot more efficient."

5. Arrive on time and equipped

Nobody likes delays, especially customers who might be waiting all day to keep the appointment. Ensure your HVAC techs arrive on time with all the right tools. There’s no reason to be unprepared when using dispatch software that keeps everything running smoothly. It schedules appointments, tracks your techs, sends reminders, and more. It connects the office and field seamlessly with on-platform messaging, maps, and tracking.

6. Engage with your customers

Most businesses have a social media presence, as it’s an excellent way to stay in touch with customers. Post regular content on HVAC topics, such as how to do essential maintenance and other valuable info.

Your website should also be easy to navigate, so don’t forget to include a contact form or chatbot. Respond to any inquiries within 24 hours, as keeping people waiting longer will lose potential customers.

A good example of how to engage better with your customer is Ty Faust. After a 13-year stint in the tech industry, Ty returned to his father's HVAC business, integrating ServiceTitan for improved customer interaction. This modernization enabled automated job costing, improved communication workflows, and supported a target growth of 10% for the year.

7. Ask for customer feedback

As soon as you’ve finished work, ask people for feedback. The easiest way is to send them an online survey or suggest they leave a review on a high authority site like Trustpilot. If they give you a positive rating, don’t forget to say thank you. If the feedback isn’t great, ask them how to make things right. ServiceTitan makes it easy to create a feedback survey in the job file and automatically ask customers to complete it. 

For example, Vines Restoration, an HVAC, plumbing, and restoration business, hit 1,000 five-star reviews thanks to ServiceTitan's Marketing Pro tool, which made review collection much easier. This has been key in tripling their revenue over three years and improving customer satisfaction.

8. Tailor outreach to customer needs

Creating individual contracts is time well spent as people prefer or need different levels of service. These days, you can speed up the process with service agreement software that lets you offer different services to each customer. You can increase the chance of recurring business by automatically offering and tracking service upsells and agreement renewals.

What Factors Assist Customer Retention in HVAC Businesses?

• Offering excellent service throughout: Your service quality should be outstanding from start to finish, not just while on the job. Greet people with a helpful and responsive attitude when they contact you for an estimate and maintain it from that point on. Make sure you’re always on time and ready when the job starts. When you’ve finished an item of work, follow up to ask if there’s anything else you can do to help, now or in the future.

• Communicating professionally: Make your customers feel valued when they reach out to your team, even when it’s just for an initial quote. Respond to questions quickly and ensure your field technicians know how to be polite and professional, especially when visiting a private home. 

• Training your workforce: Skilled and knowledgeable technicians are an asset to your business, as you’re more likely to gain customer trust and secure repeat business. If there are areas where your team could improve, provide extra training, as it will pay off in the long run.

• Competitive pricing: Great customer service is the primary way to win repeat business, but it won’t mean much if your prices are too high compared to everyone else. Set your pricing just right—not too high, nor too low—to win over loyal customers.

Over to You

Retaining HVAC customers doesn’t have to be difficult. All you need to do is offer great service regarding the job your technicians do, the way you communicate, and the extra support you provide. 

Make life easier for yourself by using specialized service software that’s designed for businesses like yours. 

ServiceTitan is a powerful cloud-based tool that helps improve HVAC customer retention. It optimizes scheduling, dispatching, customer communication, and billing, so you can provide a consistently good customer experience.