Depending on where you live, the seasons are either changing or getting ready to change which means it’s time to start thinking about our Service Plan members. Hopefully you put a little more thought into this than most contractors out there, and by thought I mean more than just a desire to finish them at some point. What I am talking about here is having a plan — to take care of these precious customers who pay us to not just be part of our business, but for the privilege of being treated better than our average customers. Creating a plan to serve your Service Plan members will involve a little work, but if you do it, these special customers will have a better experience with your company.

First, gather the following information:

• How many total customers are owed Service Plan or maintenance calls?

• When can you reasonably and successfully complete these calls on a calendar?

— If you start running service plan or maintenance calls next week, you’ll need to speed up the planning process.

— While you look at the calendar try to guess when the first heat wave will hit. Internet research or a good old-fashioned Farmer’s Almanac will do; it’s not exact science. What you’re trying to do is to block off time when you won’t want to run any service plan/maintenance calls in favor of higher potential demand customers.

• Divide the total number of owed Service Plan calls by the number of calls you can successfully run in a day to get your maintenance calls/day. This gets tricky because:

— You’ll want to leave room for demand calls; and

— If you have service plan/maintenance only technicians you’ll want to group the calls geographically for efficiency.

Then take the maintenance calls per day and plot those out on the calendar with your predicted busy week(s) blocked out. How long will it take you to complete your contracted annual service plan/maintenance calls? Is it possible to accomplish?

The point of this blog post isn’t to upset you, but to simply remind us we need to treat the people who pay us for the privilege to be our customers in a very special way. Happy planning!