HVAC Customer Text Messaging: The Best Way to Send Job Reminders

For your heating, ventilating, and air conditioning company, preventative maintenance/service agreement customers who you visit on a regular basis likely represent a significant portion of your business. You need to do these jobs smoothly and efficiently if you want to get the most out of your business. 

One key element to making sure these jobs get done in an efficient and effective way? Establish a reliable form of communication with your customers. Your customers likely don't think about their equipment on a daily basis, so left to their own devices they may forget about appointments and the need to get regular maintenance done. Having a reliable means of communicating appointment info to customers will make life better for everyone involved. Let's take a look at some customer communications options.

Phone Calls

Your simplest option? Calling customers. Every customer has a telephone, so this option will always exist.

Unfortunately, although simple, this solution is far from the best. Calling each individual customer to confirm their maintenance appointment will become an incredibly high-touch, time consuming task. Call times for your office staff will balloon.

This method also presents another issue; you need to put a system in place to track who has and has not gotten called yet. Phone calls don't leave an obvious paper trail, making them harder to track.

Emailing

Another popular option for establishing communication with your customers? Email. Most, if not all, of your customers will have an email address, so this is definitely a viable option. However, there are some drawbacks. 

First, consider how often your customers access their email. Your customers likely receive dozens of emails a day, and likely don't pay close attention to each one. This becomes an even greater issue when doing work for commercial companies. Typically, a commercial customer will have a business email they are even less likely to check on a regular basis. 

What does that mean to you? Well, it means that you will have to wait longer to get responses from your customer. This would be okay if you allowed more time for your customers to confirm their appointments before they are scheduled, but that raises another issue. You don't want to increase the lag time between scheduling an appointment and confirming that appointment.

Text Messages

The best option? Text messaging. When texting your customers, you have all the benefits of calling without the drawback of handling the texts individually. With this option, you can just send the same text to each customer to confirm their appointment. 

Of course, you don't want to send business texts from your personal phone. So, how do you manage customer text messaging and create a paper trail anyone within your company can follow? We've got a solution.

Texting with Smart Service

If you utilize the texting features within the HVAC software Smart Service, you can cover all of your bases and make sure everything with these jobs goes as smoothly as possible. With Smart Service, you can set up templates for text reminders and send them all out with a click of a button, automating the whole process. 

If your customer responds, their message will come right back to Smart Service for you, so you can easily keep the conversation in a single, convenient place. Because Smart Service is also a scheduling platform, all of your jobs and customer info will be right there in front of you when you need to reference this data during a text conversation.

Take advantage of this new age of technology and communicate with Smart Service. Handle all of your maintenance jobs with ease.