Memberships and service agreements get sold, then the renewals slip.
A plumbing membership plan is supposed to bring the same customers back every year. That only happens if someone books the yearly visit, handles the renewal and catches the card that stopped going through.
Sound familiar?
- Billing and renewals are where it gets messy. Keeping up with each member by hand turns into an endless loop of notices and phone calls.
- A member calls about a clogged drain and asks for their discount, and you find out their plan ran out months ago.
- The yearly water heater flush or drain check never got booked, and the member noticed before you did.
- Plan details live in one place, payment info in another, and the visit history somewhere else.
What it costs you
A membership that lapses quietly is a customer you already won, drifting back to every other plumber in town.
If the yearly visit never happened, the member has no reason to pay for another year.
You sold the plans partly to fill the slow days. When nobody books the visits, the slow days stay slow.
And a lapsed member rarely comes back on their own. Someone has to notice, call and ask.
Why it keeps happening
Memberships don't all renew on the same day. Each one starts when it was sold, so renewals trickle in all year, and they're easy to miss one at a time.
Billing problems hide. A card expires or a payment fails, and you may not hear about it until the member is already out.
A backed-up drain has to be handled today. A yearly inspection can happen any week, so it keeps getting pushed until the year is over.
And the plan was often set up by whoever sold it. If that person has moved on, nobody is quite sure how it's tracked now.
Who you'll talk to
On this call, it's me, Kevin Kirchner, on the other end. I'll ask how memberships get sold, billed, renewed and serviced at your shop, and where members fall through.
Watching renewal dates and lining up yearly visits is steady, repetitive office work. That kind of work can now be lifted off your staff, and what it means at your shop is something we sort out together.
Questions
Why do plumbing members let their plan lapse?
Often it isn't a decision at all. The renewal slips by, a card stops working, or the member forgets what they're paying for because nobody came out.
How do I know if memberships are slipping?
Usually a member tells you first, by calling about a visit that never happened or a discount they no longer have. If nobody can say quickly who renewed, who lapsed and who is overdue, the plan is running on memory.
What exactly do you build?
It depends on how you work today; we figure that out on the call.
Related shop headaches
See all shop headaches, or go back home.
Keep your members on the books
Tell me how a membership gets sold, and what happens the day it comes up for renewal. If it's running fine, I'll say so and we'll both get back to work.