A plumbing or HVAC service call may only take up one spot on the schedule, but there's a surprising amount of work surrounding that one appointment. Someone schedules it. The customer needs to know when the technician is coming. The appointment may need to be confirmed. A reminder goes out. The customer replies with a question. Maybe the appointment gets moved. Then there may be follow-up after the work is finished such as 6-month or 12-month maintenance checks.

Most of this work isn't difficult. There's just a lot of it.

This is where many companies fall short. Because some companies, especially smaller companies or sole proprietors, are focused mainly on the actual service call, administrative or communication tasks may fall through the cracks. This can sometimes lead to a dropped or missed appointment.

There's also another type of appointment that can fall through the cracks: the one that never gets scheduled.

A customer may need another service in six months or a year, but unless the contractor or the customer remembers to follow up, that future service call may never happen. Automating that communication can be just as important as automating reminders for appointments already on the calendar.

As a service business adds customers and technicians, this administrative work grows along with it. Ten more appointments don't just mean ten more jobs. They can mean ten more confirmations, reminders, replies and potential schedule changes for someone in the office to handle.

One way to find unnecessary office work is to follow a service appointment from beginning to end. After an appointment is scheduled, what does the office have to do? Does an employee call or text the customer to confirm it? Is another reminder sent the day before? What happens if the customer replies that the time no longer works? What happens when the dispatcher changes the appointment?

I've seen many cases where a business owner is so busy with service calls that they don't answer the phone when a customer calls and sometimes forget to call them back. This can lead to customer frustration, and the customer may eventually try to find someone else.

Scheduling and Communication Need to Work Together

Field-service software has made it much easier to manage jobs, technicians and schedules. But having an automated schedule doesn't necessarily mean all of the communication surrounding that schedule is automated.

This is something I've seen firsthand while working with businesses connecting appointment communications with field-service platforms such as Jobber.

Maintenance reminders are one example. The system already knows when the previous service occurred. If the business knows that a particular type of service should happen again in six months or a year, that information can be used to trigger future communication rather than depending on an employee to remember it.

The same principle applies to existing appointments.

Consider a customer originally scheduled for 9:00 AM. If the dispatcher changes the appointment to 1:00 PM, the customer shouldn't receive a reminder that still says 9:00 AM.

It sounds obvious, but this is exactly the type of problem that can occur when scheduling and customer communication are treated as completely separate processes. Ideally, a schedule change should flow through to the customer communication without requiring an employee to remember another step.

Let Customers Reply

Automating outgoing messages is only part of the equation. Some responses are simple confirmations. Others are cancellations, requests to reschedule or questions the contractor couldn't have anticipated.

I've seen many cases where an outbound text message asks a customer to text "1" to confirm. Instead of texting a 1, the customer may ask a question or send a completely different response. It's important to make sure those messages don't get overlooked.

The same is true with maintenance reminders. If a customer receives a message saying it's time to schedule their annual HVAC maintenance, they may respond by asking about available dates, pricing or whether a particular service is necessary. That response needs to reach someone who can help them.

The simple responses don't necessarily require an employee to handle them individually. A confirmation, for example, can often be recorded automatically. But an unusual question should still get to a person.

That's an important distinction. The purpose of automation shouldn't be to prevent customers from reaching the office. It should be to keep employees from spending time on interactions where they aren't really needed.

Decide What Should Stay Human

Not every customer interaction is a good candidate for automation.

A customer with a complicated scheduling problem may be easier to help with a phone call. The same goes for someone who is unhappy with the work or has an unusual situation that doesn't fit into the normal process.

There will always be some portion of customer communication that can't be automated. But the more routine communication a company can handle automatically, the more time employees have for customers who actually need their attention.

A useful rule is to start with communication that's repetitive and predictable. Appointment confirmations are predictable. Reminders are predictable. Asking a customer to confirm or cancel is predictable. Reminding a customer that it's time for regularly scheduled maintenance is predictable.

Those are very different from solving a customer's problem.

The contractor isn't trying to automate the relationship with the customer. The goal is to remove repetitive work so employees have more time for the conversations that require them.

Start With the Tasks Employees Repeat Every Day

You don't have to automate every part of the customer experience at once. Look around the office and ask a simple question: What are we doing over and over again?

If an employee sends essentially the same text 30 times a day, that's worth looking at. If someone spends every afternoon calling customers about tomorrow's appointments, that's another obvious candidate.

The same question should be asked about follow-up. Is someone periodically going through customer records to figure out who hasn't been serviced recently? Does the company rely on a spreadsheet or calendar reminder to remember annual maintenance? Or does the company simply wait for the customer to call?

I've seen offices that spend an entire morning on customer outreach when it isn't necessary. Automation can help determine which customers actually need personal follow-up.

It's usually better to automate a few repetitive tasks well than to build a complicated system that employees and customers don't understand.

A Few Minutes Per Appointment Adds Up

Saving two or three minutes on one service call isn't going to transform a business.

Multiply it across an entire schedule and the calculation changes.

If an office handles 20 appointments per day and spends roughly ten minutes on repetitive communication around each one, that's over three hours of office time per day!

Maintenance outreach adds another layer. If employees are manually reviewing old jobs and contacting customers who are due for service, that takes time as well. If nobody is doing it because the office is too busy, there's a different cost: potential service calls that never get scheduled.

And the benefit of automation doesn't necessarily come from reducing staff.

It may mean the dispatcher has more time to deal with a technician who's running behind. The person answering the phone can spend more time with a customer who needs help. The office manager can work on billing, scheduling or other tasks instead of making routine reminder calls.

Most importantly, communication doesn't have to end when a job is completed.

For businesses that provide recurring or preventative maintenance, the next service call may already be sitting in the customer database. The customer just needs to be reminded that it's time to schedule it.

Contractors have spent years improving how they schedule and dispatch service calls. It makes sense to take the same look at the communication that happens before the appointment, after the appointment and in the months leading up to the next one.

There's probably more office work—and more repeat business—hiding there than you think.