Website for heat pump installers, from the home visit to the service plan
The sale takes six weeks and the relationship takes fifteen years. A householder who signs this autumn is somebody whose cylinder you will be servicing long after the scaffold has gone, and both halves of that need to live in the same calendar rather than in a notebook and a memory.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.
The three parts nobody warns you about
Installing is the easy bit. What eats the week is everything that happens before the survey and everything that happens in the years after the commissioning.
The householder who wants a figure over the phone
She has a four bedroom semi from the seventies, a boiler on its last winter, and a neighbour who paid something she half remembers. She wants to know what it costs.
You cannot say, and you cannot say why not in a sentence, because the honest answer is a room by room heat loss survey, a look at the radiators, a look at where the cylinder would go and a conversation about the hot water she actually uses. All of it is a visit, and she is asking on a Tuesday lunchtime.
The service plans that live in your head
You have installed a good few hundred of these now. Every one wants an annual service, and every service is a booked hour that keeps the warranty intact and keeps you in touch with the customer.
The reality is that you remember the ones who ring you. The rest quietly fall off, and you find out three years later when somebody calls with a fault and mentions that nobody has been round since the install.
Explaining the same thing to every third caller
Air source or ground source. Whether the radiators have to be changed. Whether it works when it is below zero outside. What MCS certification is and why it matters for the grant they read about.
You are good at this conversation, because you have had it four hundred times. That is exactly the problem: you are having it live, on the phone, in the hour you had set aside to write two quotes.
Four parts of the system a heat pump firm leans on
Chosen for a business where nothing is priced without a visit and where the money five years out is in the servicing.
The home visit is the thing on offer
Your page sells a visit, not a pump. The enquiry form asks what heats the house now, how many bedrooms, what the radiators look like, whether the loft has been done and where the hot water cylinder could go.
That means the first hour in somebody's kitchen starts halfway through instead of at the beginning, and it also filters out the enquiries that were never going to be a job.
One quote, several routes through it
The survey usually produces options rather than an answer: a bigger unit or more insulation first, radiators changed or left alone, a cylinder in the airing cupboard or in the garage. Each of those is its own cost line, so the household can see what they are choosing between rather than reading three separate documents.
They approve the version they want on its own page, dated, and a deposit runs through your own Stripe account.
The service plan is a product with a price on it
An annual service is a fixed price per year. A commissioning visit is a fixed price. A fault call is an hourly rate. Put those on the page as real, priced items and the plan stops being a favour you mention at handover and becomes something the customer signs up to like anything else.
It is also the line on the page that other installers leave off, which is what makes it worth having.
Every installation you have ever done, on one screen
The customer record holds the address, the unit you fitted, the date it was commissioned, the quotes and the visits since. When the service month comes round you are looking at a list rather than trying to recall who is due.
And when the household in that same street asks who did the one at number eleven, you can answer without opening four years of email.
How the service list is set up
Your own wording and your own figures. The point is that install work and aftercare are priced in completely different ways and the list can hold both.
Two categories work better than one: new installations, and looking after pumps that are already in. The second one is what brings the same people back.
Six things installers ask before they start
Name the mechanism and leave the numbers alone. Say that you are an MCS certified installer, say what the Boiler Upgrade Scheme is for and who applies for it, and explain what the householder has to have in place. A rate on a page goes out of date and takes your credibility with it.
It makes the visit the thing the site sells. A home visit with a stated price and a stated outcome is something a householder can book at ten at night, which is more than a contact form has ever achieved.
Put the annual service in the list as a priced item and keep every installation on a customer record with the commissioning date on it. The month it is due you are working from a list, and the customer gets a confirmation and a reminder by e-mail when the visit is booked.
One page each, written once, so the answer you have given four hundred times is on the screen before anybody rings. The assistant on the site also answers from those pages, which handles the version of the question that arrives at eleven at night.
They run from £49 to £199 a month plus VAT. All of them carry the site on your own domain, SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support, and quoting with online approval comes in at £149.
It can be imported so the boiler work, the reviews you have collected and the pages that already rank stay in place, and the heat pump side gets built alongside them rather than instead of them.
More trades
- BuildersQuotes with cost lines, approved online.
- PlumbersThe emergency line, unburdened by prices and an FAQ.
- ElectriciansFixed prices for small jobs, quotes for the rest.
- Painters and decoratorsQuoted per room and surface, sold on photos.
- Flooring fittersPriced per floor type and square metre.
- Carpenters and joinersHourly rate and fixed price side by side.
- All trades
Set the site up around the home visit
Say what you fit, where you cover and what you charge for a survey, and you get a first version with the visit bookable, the install quoted from cost lines and the annual service on the price list where customers can find it. Everything is editable in place.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.