Whether you’re just starting out offering maintenance packages or need to streamline your existing system, FieldPulse’s Maintenance Agreements feature is the ideal tool to save you time and maximize your sales and profit.
In this article, we’ll cover the importance of maintenance agreements and benefits of digitizing your maintenance program. You’ll learn to set up Maintenance Agreements inside FieldPulse, including how to attach maintenance contracts to customer files. We’ll also show you how you can re-use maintenance contracts by templating them and how to present customers with tiered pricing options with FieldPulse’s Variant Proposals.
The Importance Maintenance Contract Agreements
Beyond maintaining the quality of the initial work, having extensive and precise maintenance contracts is critical for business owners because these service agreements…
- Guarantee repeat business from a customer instead of one-time jobs
- Keep cash flowing in and technicians busy during the slow months for seasonal businesses like HVAC and pool service companies
- Build relationships with customers through routine maintenance service visits, making customers less likely to take their business elsewhere
- Open up more opportunities for technicians to upsell so they earn more on commission and grow your business’ bottom line
Why Get Maintenance Agreement Software?
Does having maintenance agreement software make that big of a difference compared to filling out a maintenance contract with pen and paper or storing that file on your computer? Absolutely. Here’s how:
Accessibility
By keeping a digital record of each maintenance contract, you’ll be able to access associated files more quickly and easily than manually searching through your computer or filing cabinet. Each maintenance agreement links to other files and paperwork associated with the customer account. This way, you can quickly view information about the equipment you’re performing maintenance services on under Assets. Or you can view customer information, job history, payments, photos, signed forms, and more in the office or out in the field so your team can deliver the highest quality customer service possible without repeating unnecessary work.
Loss Prevention
Another perk of using software to manage a maintenance contract is that the information inside that contract will always be available to you. With physical maintenance agreements, there’s a much larger risk that the agreement will get misplaced or lost in the shuffle.
Quality Assurance
By using software for your service agreements, you and your technicians will be far less likely to make errors communicating price or recording customer information. Turn technicians into salesmen by equipping them with high quality, error-free sales material inside the app with all the information they need to communicate the offering to customers, ensuring that no important details are left out.
Establish Expectations
By sending your customer an electronic copy of the maintenance contract that they can access at any time, you’ll be establishing an open and transparent relationship.
Security
You can collect electronic signatures on custom forms or invoices for service agreements which not only makes signing off easier for the customer, but also provides a level of security to your business in case any legal disputes arise.
How to use FieldPulse Maintenance Agreements
FieldPulse’s Maintenance Agreements feature allows you to track and store maintenance contracts and their associated files in one central hub.
While you’re crafting your maintenance contract, you’ll be able to create and schedule reminders that notify you when that customer is due for a service. Or, alternatively, you can go ahead and pre-schedule maintenance visits as recurring jobs on your calendar.
Then, once the maintenance contract is complete, you can attach the agreement to a specific customer profile so nothing gets lost in the shuffle as well as set up scheduled maintenance visits for that customer and create invoices for those jobs and convert those jobs into work orders.
Enabling
First, head over to Company Settings inside your FieldPulse account. Under “Features and Plugins,” you’ll need to make sure that the Maintenance Agreements feature is toggled on.
Once the feature is enabled, a tab labeled “Agreements” will appear under Schedule in the side navigation.
Click the Agreements tab, you’ll be shown a list of your service agreement contracts organized by their next service occurrence with an option to create a new maintenance agreement using the Create Agreement button at the top of the screen.
Creating A Maintenance Service Agreement
To start crafting a maintenance agreement, you’ll want to click “Create a new agreement” on the right side of your screen. From there, create a title for your agreement and select the status and customer name.
By selecting the customer name, the app will automatically pull that customer’s information into your maintenance contract, so there’s no need to go back in and fill out repetitive information.
Next, you’ll need to select the job frequency from the drop down menu, starting month, and starting year.
From there, you can toggle on ‘Attach to Recurring Billing’ if you want the FieldPulse app to automatically create an invoice and collect payments for this job. Keep in mind that as a tag-on to invoices, the FieldPulse software will automatically calculate your sales commission and add it to the overall bill.
Next, select your billing frequency, and the price per bill, which will automatically generate a total annual price or the total price for the selected period.
Lastly, you can include any extra details about the contract in the ‘Agreement Notes’ section. These notes are internal, so they won’t be sent to the customer if the agreement is shared.
In the ‘Job Notes’ section, you can add notes and specifications that are automatically inserted if a job is created from the maintenance agreement.
Then, just click ‘Save Maintenance Agreement’ and boom, you have your maintenance agreement!
Ways To Use FieldPulse Maintenance Services Agreements
Once you’ve saved your newly created maintenance agreement, click on the ‘Actions’ button which will give you several different options to modify the agreement such as the ability to duplicate the agreement, attach a file/photo, create an invoice using the agreement’s information, and more!
There are two ways to present service agreements to customers. First, you can create a variant proposal which can be emailed to the client that showcases Good, Better, Best tiered pricing options and each plan’s benefits. Second, you can present the options to customers in person from the Pricebook and let them select a plan while you’re creating an estimate or invoice.
Another benefit of FieldPulse’s Maintenance Agreements for field service companies is that with all the contract information being stored in a singular database, you’ll have easy access to several features. First, you’ll be able to generate reporting documents to see their effect on your overall revenue. And second, with automatic service email reminders, you’ll be able to schedule a reminder for your customer to schedule their upcoming service.
Take Advantage of Good, Better, Best Pricing Tiers
Everyone loves options. The more options you can show your customer, the less likely they’ll be to try and negotiate with you on pricing, and the more opportunities your technicians will have to upsell. That’s why FieldPulse now allows you to create custom tiered maintenance agreement packages, which you can generate using our Variant Proposals feature.
This feature allows you to present three different pricing tiers to customers so they can easily understand the differences, benefits, and services offered under each maintenance plan.
Simply click on “Variant Proposals” under the Sales tab of your FieldPulse account for access. From there, insert your variant proposal title (what you want to name the overall proposal), internal notes, and customer name (if you’re creating the proposal for a specific customer).
From there, you’ll add a maximum of three items for side by side comparison. For each item, add a title, price, and description of the item. Next, upload an image of the item you’re providing maintenance services for, and repeat this process up to three times and hit save!
In addition to creating these proposals for a specific customer, you can also save them as reusable templates or Pricebook items. To re-use your proposal, duplicate it, and assign it to a specific customer. To add maintenance packages to your Pricebook, add each plan as a Flat Rate Job inside your Pricebook, then organize these jobs under a Good, Better, Best category.
New Features, New Capabilities, Endless Opportunities
Want to learn more about FieldPulse’s features and how they can automate your business’ operations? Get a free demo today for a comprehensive walkthrough of our software.
