ElectricalBossPro Blog — Electrical Contractor Software

The Customer App: What Homeowners See After They Hire Your Electrical Company

Most of a homeowner's experience with an electrical company happens before and after the tech is in the house. When is the electrician coming? Did the invoice go through? How do I sign up for the yearly generator visit? The customer app answers those questions without a phone call to your office.

The Other Side of the Tech's Phone

The tech's side of each visit is covered in The Electrician's Phone: What the Tech App Handles From Clock-In to Card Charge. The customer app is what the homeowner sees as the tech works.

Every customer of your company can use it. It is where their visits, invoices, card and plans live. Customers who never open it still get texts and emails. Customers who do open it get a lot less uncertainty.

Service Day: The Live Map

On the day of a visit, the customer app shows today's route on a live map with the customer's place in line: “You're stop 12 of 20 — the crew is 5 stops away.” The homeowner can plan around it: be home, open the side door, move the car out of the garage so the tech can reach the panel.

The map pairs with alerts the customer chooses: a reminder the night before, an alert when they are next and an alert when the tech arrives. More on those in Night Before, Next Stop, Arrived: Customer Alerts From Electrical Contractor Software.

Requesting Service

When something goes wrong, a breaker that keeps tripping or a dead outlet in the bathroom, the customer can request service from the app. The request comes to the office with the customer and address already attached, so the office books the call without asking for the address again.

Because the house record already has the equipment on it, the office can pick the panel or generator onto the new job with the From House picker, and the tech arrives knowing what is there.

Signing Up for Services and Plans

The customer app shows the services and pricing you choose to offer there. A yearly generator maintenance plan at $189, or a yearly safety inspection at $149, can be signed up for right in the app. Once a customer signs up, the plan is set by its minimum days between visits, and each visit comes due on your Waiting List on its own.

For a shop building recurring work, this is a quiet salesperson. A homeowner who just had a good service call sees the yearly plan in the app and signs up without anyone having to pitch it.

Invoices, Payment and Cards

After the visit, the invoice shows in the customer app with its line items. If a card is on file, it may already have been charged when the tech tapped Complete. If not, the customer can pay online right there.

Customers can also update their card in the app. When a card expires, the customer updates it themselves instead of reading numbers to the office over the phone. Past invoices stay in the app, so a homeowner who wants to know what they paid for last year's panel upgrade can look it up.

Property managers on monthly accounts see their monthly statement, with each line labeled by address. For someone responsible for a dozen rentals or a handful of retail stores, one statement with every address on it is far easier to approve than a stack of separate invoices, and the customer app gives them one place to find it every month.

Rating and Referring

After a visit, customers can rate the job and refer friends and neighbors from the app. For a residential electrical company, word of mouth matters, and the best time to ask for a referral is right after good work, while the homeowner still remembers the tech who showed up on time and explained the inspection report.

Ratings also tell you how each tech and each type of job is landing with customers, which is useful when you are training someone new.

Fewer Calls to the Office

Add it up and the customer app takes a lot of routine calls off the office phone: when is the tech coming, can I pay my bill, can I update my card, can I sign up for the yearly visit, can someone come look at this outlet. Each of those is a minute or two of someone's day. Over a season, it is a lot of minutes.

The calls that still come in are the ones that need a person. That is a better use of the office. For how the customer app connects with dispatch, billing and recurring plans, go to the ElectricalBossPro electrical contractor software overview.