Plumbing Maintenance Contract Template: How to Grow Recurring Revenue with Streamlined Memberships

When used effectively, maintenance contracts provide plumbing business owners with increased efficiency and revenue growth that tend to result in big gains in market share.

The benefits of leveraging customer service agreements include:

• The ability to foster a reliable customer base, unlikely to shop around.

• A regular, foot-in-the-door presence in customers’ homes that often leads to tons of new work.

• The opportunity for multi-trade shops — HVAC and/or electrical, for example — to generate work across divisions.

At the same time, neglecting to incorporate plumbing service contracts into business operations often leads to a smaller, less loyal pool of customers; fewer chances to conduct home inspections and find new jobs; fewer opportunities to cross-sell — a particular drawback for plumbers that also do HVAC work.

In the absence of plumbing maintenance agreements, plumbers are betting that, when something goes wrong with a plumbing system, homeowners with whom they have no long-term relationship will choose to call them. 

That’s a very optimistic bet. And it also means that these plumbers are constantly chasing new business, which can be expensive and frustrating. 

Meanwhile, competitors are taking potential customers out of the market by earning their loyalty with service agreements.  

To help plumbing contractors get a jump on service contracts, we’re offering a free template available for download below.  

The only trouble is that while a solid template is a great place to start, for most plumbers, it’s by no means the only thing they’ll need to manage their service agreements effectively. 

Especially for shops with larger customer bases, running a service agreement program that takes a business to the next level requires significant organization and management.

Without a plumbing software platform like ServiceTitan, it can become a disorganized, inefficient headache. And when it comes to customer service agreements, some plumbing software are far more flexible and customizable than others — a distinction worth emphasizing, in light of the fact that virtually no two service agreements are exactly alike.

Whether a plumbing contractor is new to service agreements or has been using them for years, with ServiceTitan, it’s simple to design brand new plumbing contract templates that make it easy to import data and customize automated services. 

» Want to grow your plumbing business? Click here to get a demo.

In this post, we’ll explain precisely how it works. Specifically, we’ll cover:

• How to download and use our free plumbing service agreement template

• Why managing service agreements without software is challenging

• How ServiceTitan streamlines plumbing service agreements

Curious about how ServiceTitan can allow you to make the most of our service agreement template? Schedule a call to learn more about how our software can help you realize the full potential of your customer membership program. 

How to Download and Use Our Plumbing Service Agreement Template

By clicking here, you can download our plumbing service agreement template, a sleek PDF, designed to collect and organize the customer information you’ll need to get a membership started for homeowners and landlords who want to opt-in. It works as a kind of order form to document all of the services provided by the agreement.

Our template includes sections for:

Contact information: Document the name, address, phone number, and email of your business and customer. 

Plan options and coverage period: Document the time length of the agreement, and provide Good-Better-Best style options to the customer. 

Services: A detailed description of agreed upon responsibilities for the term of the agreement, including specific fixtures, notes, and recommendations. 

Payment: Arrangements including pricing, terms, and billing — lump sum, monthly, etc.

Customer information can be entered directly into the PDF. Alternatively, you can print paper copies for customers — and internal records — as they sign up for membership plans.   

But while this approach works better than writing up a new service agreement every time someone signs on — or not offering membership agreements at all — it’s still a manual solution to the complex organizational challenge of managing agreements. 

Without an advanced software tool to manage plumbing service agreements, the manual method can lead to problems like:

• Missed appointments 

• Overbooked calendars 

• Billing problems 

• Difficulty tracking renewals 

• Inflexible scheduling

In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at how these and other hiccups associated with the manual management of plumbing service agreements can slow down contracting businesses and reduce their bottom line.

Why Managing Plumbing Service Agreements without Plumbing Software Can Be a Struggle

As noted, customer membership programs can help plumbers significantly grow their revenue. But like any element of a business, service agreements are only as effective as their implementation. 

When business owners attempt to manage service agreements without software — generally with some mix of spreadsheets and calendars — the results can be chaotic.  

Here are some of the biggest challenges we’ve designed our software to solve:

Call Scheduling   

Despite their many variations, customer membership agreements tend to share some basic similarities, and virtually every service agreement prescribes a certain number of annual preventive maintenance visits. 

A common model includes biannual visits to service certain equipment and perform basic inspections — water heater, water lines, shut-off valves, faucet and drain checks, and the like. But service plans can easily become more involved, particularly in shops that offer several different options.

Some plans, for example, provide for things like emergency service outside regular business hours. As the complexity of service agreements increases, manually keeping track of and booking membership visits for hundreds of customers can quickly become an insurmountable challenge, even for experienced CSRs.

Nonetheless, contractors try. And when they do, they often start to see costly errors multiply. Some homeowners might find themselves inundated with twice as many service visits as they bargained for, while others feel cheated when their own bought-and-paid for maintenance calls go unscheduled. Situations like these that can torpedo your retention rate, sending old customers back to the drawing board to find a new service provider. 

Customer Experience

These days, to provide top-notch customer service, contractors need to have membership details available at all times for instantaneous reference. 

Without that capacity, it’s tough for plumbers to keep customers up to date, in real time, about their service calls — the day and hour, which tech has been assigned to the job, and, eventually, their up-to-the-minute arrival time.   

Without plumbing software to facilitate this functionality, nine times out of ten, it’s simply not going to work. 

With only excel spreadsheets and calendars to rely on, CSRs’ ability to keep up with their techs over the course of the day, while they’re out in the field, is limited. As a result, customers get — at best — only a general estimate of when their tech will arrive.  

Keeping customers waiting around in the dark while their plumbing service tech makes their way to the job site is not the best way to win high ratings for customer experience. It’s the sort of thing that can actually reduce the sense of loyalty that membership agreements are in part designed to foster.

And testing the patience of homeowners and landlords is just one customer experience-related issue that tends to pop up in businesses that are trying to manage a membership program without software. 

Plumbing contractors who rely on manual organization often lose tons of man hours — and related overhead costs — maintaining the accurate records they need to even have a chance at providing a decent customer experience: current addresses and equipment, past visits, preferences about payment terms, and more. 

Without a plumbing software, every visit means a time-consuming spin through the files: 

• What kind of water heater does the customer have?

• Are we supposed to check the water heater this time? 

• Does the customer have a preferred tech — and are they available? 

Renewals and Payments

Keeping tabs on the lifecycle of memberships is yet another element of customer service agreements that can be challenging without help from software. 

Onboarding customers for memberships is great. But to maintain a customer base — and a steady, year-round revenue stream — renewals are crucial. 

Without software to conduct automated monitoring of hundreds of membership expiration dates, contractors tend to lose track, causing them to shed members and the recurring cash that they generated.

Payments for plumbing service memberships differ from shop to shop, and many shops these days are offering multiple billing options. Until recently, most plumbers used up-front, lump-sum payments, collecting the entire cost of a membership at the start of a service cycle. But more and more contractors are transitioning to monthly billing, which many business owners have found to be more valuable in the long run. 

Without software to lean on, this new, more lucrative approach is nearly impossible to put into practice.

How ServiceTitan Helps Plumbers Implement Customer Service Agreements

Now that we’ve reviewed some of the issues that trouble businesses that try to handle plumbing service agreements manually, let’s take a closer look at how a best-in-class plumbing software like ServiceTitan allows contractors to get the absolute most out of their membership programs. 

Some of the key points we’ll hit include:

• Leveraging customizable maintenance contract templates to increase service agreement signups and drive revenue.

• Reducing missed payments and cancelations with automated billing and renewals.

• Optimizing the design and marking of service agreement programs with unrivaled data-driven insights.

Flexible Templates That Boost Memberships and Grow Revenue 

Plumbers using ServiceTitan can make use of a diverse selection of templates designed to suit different membership types, with each template providing for a given number of visits and the scope of work to be performed on each maintenance service call. 

By choosing from a list of customizable recurring services, as shown in the screenshot above, contractors can build the membership types that make the most sense for their business. 

For plumbers, whose membership agreements often provide for a broad range of services, this capability is especially useful. 

Customers are bound to have different preferences and financial sources, and this way, they’re less likely to feel pressured into a package that doesn’t reflect their needs — and to walk away from the sign-up.   

While other software offer membership program templates, they tend to be much less customizable than those on our platform, so this is one area where we believe ServiceTitan definitely beats out the competition. 

For example, in the event you already have a plumbing contract program that works for you, our team of industry experts will help you customize templates that take that program to the next level. 

We’ll even import all your existing customer data to our platform, so that after your made-to-fit templates are online, your employees can make seamless use of it when they’re generating invoices and estimates. In this way, one-off visits for routine maintenance and equipment replacements become opportunities to drive membership growth. 

In scenarios like this, plumbers can connect service contract visits to one or more pieces of equipment, reducing the chances that the tech who’s sent out to perform the plumbing work gets confused about what, exactly, they’re supposed to be servicing.

Another benefit of using ServiceTitan to manage memberships is that once an account is created, the contractor should be able to pretty much “set it and forget it” with minimum tweaking. 

Given that commercial plumbing contractors tend to be extremely specific, contractors who do a lot of commercial work might have to do some extra customizing. But on the residential end of things, unless a homeowner or landlord requires significant alterations to their plan, our templates are excellent at giving contractors peace of mind and one less thing to worry about. 

The screenshot above illustrates how plumbing contractors can use our software to eliminate the cumbersome, time-consuming process of individually tracking memberships due for service, contacting each and every customer who’s due for a given service all at once.

Payments and Renewals

Makeshift assortments of reminders and spreadsheets — the usual solution to tracking membership payments, expirations, and renewals for contractors operating without plumbing software — tend to make things challenging, often with the result that important details are overlooked.

Contractors who rely on ServiceTitan, on the other hand, just need to set up a few basic rules, providing for automated membership billing annually, quarterly, or every month, depending on the preferences of the business owner and their members. 

This, too, is a “set it and forget it” model. Other than mailing bills to members who’d rather pay by check — and pinging the occasional customer about a declined or expired credit card — after those rules have been set, all that’s left to do, billing-wise, is sit back and collect. 

ServiceTitan’s optional membership renewal protection feature auto-updates credit card expiration dates, eliminating the need to get customers on the phone to request new card information — an opportune (and thus better avoided) moment for cancelation.

A master list displaying the paid status of each and every membership account gives plumbing contractors the ability to evaluate, month over month, how much revenue they’re bringing in with their service agreements, along with where collections might need more attention. 

The option to run a revenue recognition model is something unavailable through most plumbing software, but ServiceTitan’s QuickBooks integration makes it easy. 

Reporting

Tracking how membership programs and recurring services are performing is nearly as important as facilitating them. 

Our reporting feature allows plumbing contractors to access a menu displaying dozens of KPIs. 

We provide business owners unrivaled insights by enabling them to easily analyze data and get full transparency into where their membership program is performing, where it needs improvement, and how to fine-tune to reach maximum functionality. 

Specific insights might include a precise, near-instantaneous tally of active, renewed, canceled, and expired memberships in a given time window. 

Drawing on such data, ServiceTitan users can put to work the software’s Marketing Pro feature, building campaigns that are ideally suited to speak to their target audiences. 

For example, they can do things like generate automated emails for customers that are due for a visit, and others for those approaching their renewal date, or who have aged equipment in their homes.

Communications can even be prioritized as a function of which members seem to have the best chance of soon producing high-value work orders.

Ready to Streamline Your Plumbing Service Agreements?

Using a service agreement template like the one we’ve provided in this article can give plumbing contractors a sense of how much easier a well-designed template can make managing a membership program.

But as we’ve emphasized, a template alone generally isn’t going to allow business owners to get the most out of their service agreement contracts.

In most cases, to maximize the revenue-generating potential of a customer service agreement program, contractors are going to need a high-quality plumbing software like ServiceTitan to help.  

By seamlessly incorporating service agreements into overall business operations — along with other vital functions like dispatching, job costing, payroll, timesheets, marketing, and call booking — ServiceTitan provides an integrated platform for managing virtually every element of a service business. 

And for plumbing contractors who want to use their customer service agreement program to help them take their business to the next level, plumbing software like ServiceTitan is an increasingly indispensable tool to have.

Curious about how ServiceTitan can help you make the most of our service agreement template? Schedule a call to learn about how our software can help you realize the full potential of your customer membership program.