When it comes to outstanding service in the HVAC, plumbing and electrical industries, awareness is key. By learning the importance of a checklist and how to use one without overburdening your techs and customers, your company can meet with greater success.
Here at Service Excellence, we teach the critically underused principle of producing the desired outcome with the minimum amount of effort. In other words, how can your team most effectively meet its goals without wasting time and energy?
A Checklist For Every Service Call
If you aren’t using a ‘stoplight’ checklist on every call, you’re compromising your customer’s comfort, health, safety and efficiency. You’re also leaving a significant amount of money on the table.
This checklist style includes a margin of colors — green, yellow and red — that your tech can mark to indicate which elements of the system have been inspected, repaired or require replacement or additional servicing.
It’s not as simple as printing a checklist and giving it to your techs. They must know the purpose and how to use it properly. When used effectively, checklists are a tool to gain confidence from the customer, bring awareness to issues and stimulate those issues.
Although this process is commonly used in the AC + heating field, it’s not just for successful HVAC companies. A checklist can be used in plumbing, electrical, pest control and many other trades that provide service or maintenance calls. Regardless of your trade, a checklist does three awesome things for your company, your techs and the customer.
How Does A Checklist Bring More Sales?
Confidence
It gives everyone confidence. The process is transparent. Everyone knows what services have been provided and what still needs to be done. That gives everyone confidence that the job was done right and dictates where they can go from there.
There’s more confidence in your company and in your tech — from you, your tech and the customer. Confidence means more sales.
Awareness
It brings awareness about system issues to everyone. You and your techs know the technical details, but the ‘stoplight’ colors let the customer understand the issues. They will instinctively understand that green is ‘good,’ yellow means ‘caution’ and red means ‘bad.’
When the customer is aware of the issues and understands them, they’ll want to do more to make sure things are right. Awareness means more sales.
Accountability
Checklists create an ‘official’ history, or record, that stimulates the customer to correct the issues. Everyone in the process will know that there are things that need attention at some point.
Your techs are probably telling the customer to ‘be aware of this,’ or warning them ‘this could happen’ if something isn’t done. That’s great, but the customer usually doesn’t remember the details. There is certainly no urgency.
Once the good, caution and bad — green, yellow and red — items are documented on a checklist, it then becomes ‘official’ and part of the record. That means there’s more stimulation to take care of the issues. Stimulation of the issues means more sales.
If you don’t have a checklist and/or your techs haven’t been trained to use it, it can be dangerous. It will become a seldom-used tool that’s just one more thing they have to do. Some may abuse it and use the checklist to manipulate the customer into buying things that aren’t needed. To avoid this, training is a must.
Coaching With Service Excellence
We know training, and we definitely know how to use a checklist. Get in touch so we can help your techs be as effective as possible.
We can help raise confidence, bring awareness of issues and stimulate those issues to lead to more sales. Stop leaving so much money on the table — sign up for your training class today and IGNITE THE POWER WITHIN!
