The hardest and most uncertain aspect of owning a company is selling a product or service to a new customer. Selling your services is time-consuming, expensive, and often frustrating. You will all be familiar with buying a lead, visiting a customer’s house, providing a quote, and never hearing from the customer again. This will unfortunately never change (although we can improve your success rates!).

It is therefore surprising just how badly most small companies manage one of their most precious commodities - carousel jobs - jobs that keep recurring year after year. Recurring jobs such as a landlord gas safety certificate or a boiler service are valuable and precious and yet they are often poorly managed and lost.

Have you ever considered that every time you win a piece of recurring work, another gas engineer has lost this work to you? You should never be the company that loses recurring jobs to a competitor. JobStaq can stop this from happening and as a result can help you be more profitable.

The value of recurring jobs

Whilst winning jobs such as boiler installations are more lucrative these jobs for most companies are more uncertain. Recurring jobs if managed correctly should keep providing your business with a steady and reliable income. In addition, these recurring jobs will:

• Require zero marketing spend. You do not need to spend any money to win recurring work.
• Deliver a higher margin. Recurring jobs are easier to price as you already know what your customer was happy to pay last time. Understanding this price history means you can look to increase your pricing from year to year.
• Be quicker to complete. You already have all of the customer details, the address details, and details of the appliance. When you use JobStaq completing the paperwork becomes effortless.
• Result in additional work. If you manage the recurring jobs well when the customer needs additional work in their home or business they are most likely to contact you.

Customers are generally quite lazy and short of time and most do not want to look for a new gas engineer every time they need some work doing. Research has shown that 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend up to 15% more with a company they feel provides a superior service. Being responsive to a customer’s needs so they do not need to chase you to schedule recurring jobs will in the long run allow you to price your work higher.

Managing recurring jobs

Do NOT take a recurring job for granted. If you deliver poor service or fail to schedule recurring jobs then your customers may take this business to one of your competitors.

Even though you have a record of your customer details, do not assume that your customer has your details. It is therefore imperative that you contact them about a recurring job before they have the chance to contact one of your competitors. In order to effectively manage recurring job we suggest that you:

• Keep and updated list of recurring jobs. You should be aware of the customers you should contact each week to schedule a recurring job. This list should continually be updated as your business grows.
• Send an email reminder. Send an email reminder to your customers 1 month before their recurring job is due. Specify what work is required and your available dates for completing the work.
• Send a text reminder. This is important as not all customers will regularly check email and as many as 5-10% of your emails may end up in customers spam/junk folders and never be read.
• Chase by email/phone. Make sure you send a follow up email and/or phone customers who do not respond to the initial reminder email and text.
• Mark your territory. After completing your job, leave a branded service reminder on your customer’s appliance. Make sure your customers have your details for when they next need to contact you.

Managing these schedule reminders in a timely fashion is time-consuming and challenging as a small business. Using JobStaq this process will become effortless, by allowing you to send out automatic reminders for repeating work, and make use of our automated booking portal to allow your customers to book in a repeat visit without needing to make a phone call.