Maintenance Agreements: The Benefits and Overall Importance

Most HVAC, electrical, and plumbing businesses offer maintenance agreements or service club memberships to their customers. Offering a maintenance service agreement provides you and your customers with many benefits, strengthening your business model. Learn more about why you should offer a regular service and maintenance agreement as a home service business owner.

What Is a Maintenance Agreement?

A maintenance agreement is a list of specific services a company will perform for a customer within a given period. It’s often called a service club membership, loyalty club, or a home service membership.

Maintenance agreements offer countless benefits to not only your customers but your business as well. Let’s dive into some of the annual maintenance contract benefits you and your customers can expect to see.

Customer Membership Rewards and Other Benefits

When trying to sell maintenance agreements to your customers, clearly lay out and emphasize the perks they’ll get if they join. Customers want to know why they should buy a maintenance agreement from you. So tell them! Loyalty club benefits include:

Cost-Effective Service: An annual maintenance agreement comes with an annual cost. Customers may not see the point or think it is too expensive and not worth it. However, despite the upfront cost, a home maintenance agreement often pays for itself over time. Regular maintenance can extend the lifespan of home fixtures and appliances. Customers tend to experience fewer large, expensive problems with regular yearly home maintenance services.
Early Issue Detection: Routine maintenance agreements help technicians identify and correct any potential/undetected issues before they arise or while they are still minor. This maintenance will help ensure your customer’s equipment is running smoothly and efficiently. Identifying a problem early can save your customers money and the headache that goes along with huge, unexpected repairs.
Equipment Warranty Maintenance: Some equipment requires annual service to maintain its warranty. Joining a loyalty club helps customers remember to schedule the required yearly maintenance and offers them the security of knowing that they’re covered if an issue does arise.
Peace of Mind: Your customers will have peace of mind knowing their equipment is being taken care of and maintained. They can rest assured that this preventative maintenance will keep their equipment running smoothly and efficiently.

How Your Business Benefits from Maintenance Agreements

While maintenance agreements offer many benefits to your customers, you may wonder what’s in it for your business. One of the main upsides is running your business on a recurring revenue model. That means you have regular monthly, quarterly, or annual income coming in from a reliable source.

Here are some other benefits to your business when you offer maintenance agreements:

Create an Annual Recurring Revenue Stream: Maintenance agreements are a guaranteed source of income for your business for the length of the agreement. You can more accurately plan for the future knowing that you’ll have a certain assured budget to work with.
Lower Risk: Home services are particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the market. Running a recurring revenue business plan means you have something to fall back on if people start tightening their purse strings and turning to DIY fixes.
Build Brand Loyalty: Customers will become familiar with their regular technician and start associating your business with dependable, quality work. They’ll also get accustomed to how you do business and know they can trust you to get the job done correctly and efficiently.
Pursue Potential Opportunities: While your technicians are in customers’ homes performing services, they can scope out potential job opportunities. Technician recommendations are an excellent way for your business to generate some additional revenue. And with Successware’s Field Tools, technicians can schedule further maintenance or repairs right away.
Build Positive Business Reputation: If you offer maintenance agreements to your customers, they will start to associate your business with quality and reliability. Your customers will appreciate the fact that you are willing to offer these agreements and stand behind your products and services.
Grow Your Business: With recurring service revenue, you’ll open up more opportunities to re-invest in your business. You can expand your service offerings or team, schedule additional training and certifications for your techs, and easily add more memberships as you grow.

Organizing Agreements within Successware

Successware offers the ability to manage agreements directly in our software. Our platform was designed with home service providers in mind, meaning we offer benefits that other programs may not. For example, we let you defer agreement revenue to the period in which the service occurred, a service not available with most accounting software.

Our software also makes it easy to create marketing lists for unscheduled agreement appointments or renewals, generate invoices for billings with the touch of a button, and quickly identify and renew fixed-term agreements.

For more information about how you can manage and grow your agreements with Successware, request a live demo or call (888) 272-8009 today.