I was delighted with the response to the Sept. 8 column and especially the interest in maintenance agreements. We received many requests for the forms we use for maintenance agreements, and many readers had some very good questions regarding our program. As a result, I thought it would be worthwhile to further explain how we started and continue our maintenance agreement program.
We began the program with a large number of customers and no maintenance agreements. Our first step was to put together a brochure outlining all of the services we planned to perform on a maintenance agreement call. (I’m still happy to send this to you, just contact me at the email address under my picture.) We also learned from others it was necessary to include some additional incentives to encourage participation in the program. We established those to be: A 10 percent discount on parts, priority service, and a discount on our diagnostic fee. We then took all of these benefits, added some additional information about our company, touted our 100 years of business experience (at that time), and developed a one-page, two-sided, tri-fold brochure.