Website for plumbers that keeps the phone for the real emergencies
Monday is a boiler swap you have known about for a fortnight. Tuesday is a stopcock that will not turn at seven in the morning, and the phone rings straight through both of them, mostly with people who want to know what a tap costs.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.
Three things that eat a plumber's day
Not the work. The bits around the work.
The seven o'clock call
Someone has water coming through a ceiling and they are not going to send an e-mail about it. That call has to be picked up, and it lands in the middle of a bathroom you promised would be finished today.
The trouble is not the emergency. It is that the emergency arrives on the same line as everything else, and you cannot tell which is which until you have answered.
The same five questions
Do you cover this postcode. Are you Gas Safe registered. What is the first hour. Can you come today. Do you do landlord certificates.
Every one of them is fair and every one of them takes four minutes on the phone, five or six times a day, usually while you are lying under a sink with an arm behind a waste pipe.
The caller who only wants a number
They are ringing round four plumbers and writing the answers on the back of an envelope. You give them fifteen minutes, they thank you politely, and you never hear from them again.
Meanwhile the household with a burst pipe and two days of work in it got the engaged tone and rang the next name on their list.
What changes on a plumber's week
Four parts, picked because they take work off the phone rather than adding to it.
Rates where people go looking for them
A tap swap has a fixed price and everybody knows it. A first hour on a callout is a from-price, because nobody knows what is behind the panel yet. A bathroom is quoted. Each job goes up with the pricing type it genuinely has.
Emergency and out of hours work can sit in a group of its own with its own rates, which saves explaining the difference twice a day.
Enquiries in writing, at eleven at night
The form asks what has happened, where, and how to get hold of them, with a box to write it in their own words. It arrives while you are asleep and it is still there in the morning, with an address on it, which is more than a missed call gives you.
The ones who cannot wait until morning will ring anyway. That is rather the point: the line is left clear for them.
The five questions, answered once
Postcodes covered, registration numbers, what happens on a first visit, whether a landlord gas safety check can be done this week, how payment is taken. Written down once, in your own words, where anyone can read them.
When somebody rings anyway you can point at it, and half the time they have already read it and are ringing to get you booked.
An assistant that only knows your pages
It answers from what you have written, so if your own page says you do not touch oil boilers, that is what the person asking at half nine on a Sunday is told. It does not invent a rate and it does not promise a slot.
What it does is stop somebody drifting off because they could not work out whether you come as far as their village.
How a plumber's rates sit on the page
Your names, your numbers. The job of the list is to let a caller tell a fixed price from a starting point without asking.
Work can be grouped, so emergencies, gas and bathrooms each read as their own thing with their own rates.
Questions plumbers put to us
No, and it should not. It moves the price questions and the postcode questions onto the page, so the calls you do take are more often from somebody who wants you to come out.
Yes. Your registration number, your public liability cover and anything else worth checking can sit on the page and in the questions, where a landlord finds it without having to ask you.
A from-price on the first hour, an hourly rate after that, and quoted against the larger work. Nobody expects a firm number for a leak of unknown origin, but they do want to know where it starts.
Enquiries and confirmations go by e-mail as standard. SMS is available as a prepaid add-on if you would rather have it buzz in a pocket while you are on site.
Payment sits with quotes. The customer approves the quote and pays on that same page, through your own Stripe account, so it reaches your bank rather than passing through ours.
From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT. Every plan carries the site on your own domain, SSL, hosting, nightly backups and support. SMS is bought upfront when you want it.
More trades
- 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.
- RoofersThe roof survey as the bookable way in.
- Tilers and bathroom fittersPackage prices per bathroom size, with a start date.
- All trades
Put the plumbing on a page
Say what you cover and where, or point at the site you have now, and you get a first version with your rates, your questions answered and a form that still works at midnight. Then you edit it yourself.
The site runs on your own domain, with SSL, hosting and nightly backups in every plan. From £49 to £199 a month, excluding VAT.