The great news for those in the Appleton, Fox Valley area, is there are several heating and cooling contractors that would love your work, including us. Unfortunately there are companies in every market that do questionable things that hurt our industry’s reputation and trust.
#3 Too good to be true Tune-Up pricing.
If a company sends out something for tune-ups that are cheaper than $70 it should start asking questions. Service departments have a lot of operational costs, like technicians, vehicles, insurance, truck stock, benefits, and administrative overhead. If you’re not paying a good amount of money for your tune-up, that means that the company most likely has a high pressure sales environment.
We have attended “trainings” that told us we can make it rich by doing only 4 calls a day and spending 2 hours at a tune-up or service call trying to find any possible fault we can morph into a high pressure sale. Needless to say we wouldn’t be caught dead doing that, and would rather shut our company down.
#2 High Pressure Sales.
Every area has companies like this. The ones that don’t like “no” for an answer. If you catch yourself saying “I’m not interested in anything extra” when a technician is coming to your home, it sounds like you may be with a company like that.
The average company is going to be focused on taking care of you and your needs. Will they bring something potentially up? Sure, but it will be because they think it may be relevant to you. If you’re not interested it’s respected. It’s your home and your money, and your choice.
Companies like this also can have incredibly aggressive sales people for estimates. We stand behind the policy of “Anyone offering you a certain price if you go ahead in the next X hours is unethical.” The only time we would have a price change is when our distributor/manufacturer makes a price adjustment to the product. Pressuring people into a sale is not common and you should never reward people who do it, because it only encourages that behavior in the marketplace, regardless what it is for.
#1 Not Answering Phones.
The phone lines are your direct line of communication to a company. We hear this commonly with smaller companies, that they do not answer their phone and they do not return messages. If a company cannot answer the phone reliably, how are you going to get emergency service on a 100 degree day in the summer?
What about if you’re freezing in the winter, and you have no idea how long it will be before someone gets over there. This is why we believe finding a medium sized company is the way to go. Big companies typically have greed driven policies, but a medium company will have a healthy mix of small business style but have the quantity of people to get to more people in case of emergency.
How we do it.
On tune-up pricing, we have always been at a higher price point as advertised. We do this because we do not push products like others, and our customers understand that what we are doing is going to take additional time over what the industry average does on tune-ups.
For our sales process, we do not track technician’s sales and force them to any sort of quota. We tell our team to recommend products they believe in. We keep our offerings small and work with our guys to carry things they believe in. Every thing that we sell we have a satisfaction guarantee on. If you regret your decision (within a reasonable time) just reach out to us and let us know. We’ll do our best to get everything right.
When it comes to availability, we have up to six people available to answer phones. Most companies have 1-3. We also expandable phone lines to accommodate higher volumes on busy days. Our software innovations also allow you to see more than the others, like our live service call tracker. You can see the status of your call in our system, just like your pizza place. Our team is also incredibly good at getting to nearly everyone the same day. Sometimes like extremely hot weather, it could be up to 1-2 days out, but that is when others in town tell customers it could be 1-2 weeks. We care about being available via phone and getting someone to your home as fast as possible!