An aircon company cannot answer its most common question. “How much to service my
aircon” has no answer until you know how many units, what type, and which service. So the
exchange takes four messages before anything useful happens, and all four are conducted by
someone who should be on a job.
That gap, between the question a customer asks and the facts needed to answer it, is
what automation is genuinely good at in this trade.
The quote conversation
Every home service job is priced on variables the customer has to supply.
| Trade | What you must know before quoting |
|---|---|
| Aircon servicing | Number of units, wall-mounted or cassette, normal or chemical wash |
| Plumbing | What is wrong, which fixture, whether water is currently running |
| Pest control | Pest, property size, treatment or ongoing contract |
| Cleaning | Property size, frequency, whether it is a post-renovation clean |
| Electrical | The specific fault, property age, whether power is off |
A workflow that collects those facts and returns a real price range is the single
highest-value automation here. Not “prices start from”. The actual figure for three
wall-mounted units on a normal service, with what would change it.
The quote range must be a rule the system enforces, not a figure the AI produces. In
AeroChat the limits on what may be quoted or discounted are set by the business and
applied by the system. A technician arriving at a price different from the one quoted in
the chat is how home service companies lose reviews.
Scheduling is a geography problem
Booking a home service job is not booking an appointment. A technician’s day is a route,
and a job in the wrong part of town at the wrong hour costs you the next two jobs.
So the useful scheduling workflow does not offer every free slot. It offers the slots
that fit the route for that area on that day. That means the system needs the customer’s
postal code early, and it needs to know how you group areas. This is configuration work,
and it is the difference between automation that helps dispatch and automation that fights
it.
Three things worth collecting in the same exchange: the address, whether anyone will be
home, and whether there is parking or a lift. The last two sound trivial and are the
reasons jobs get aborted.
Emergencies need a different path
“Water leaking from the ceiling” and “how much for a tap change” are the same channel
and not the same message.
Emergency triage needs its own rule: recognise the message, acknowledge it immediately
with what the customer should do right now, such as turning off the supply, and get a
person involved without a queue. Out of hours, give your actual emergency number rather
than a message saying you will reply on Monday.
What makes this reliable is defining the trigger by consequence rather than keyword.
Water, electricity, gas, no cooling in a home with an infant or an elderly resident, and a
security problem such as a broken lock. Those bypass everything. See
live chat handover.
The technician ETA question
This is the second-largest volume after quotes, and it arrives in a predictable spike
between the start of the window and the technician’s arrival.
It is the same question as “where is my order” in a different trade, and the same
solution applies: if the system can read the job status and the technician’s schedule, it
answers without anyone stopping. If it cannot, every one of those messages interrupts a
dispatcher. See WISMO.
Better still, send the update before the question. A message when the technician is
dispatched and another when they are on the way removes most of this traffic. Note the
trade-off honestly: on WhatsApp those are chargeable messages, so sending three updates to
avoid one question is arithmetic, not an automatic win. See
conversation-based pricing.
Contracts and repeat work
Servicing is recurring revenue that leaks. A customer on a quarterly service who is not
reminded becomes a customer who services annually, then not at all.
Two mechanical workflows recover most of it. A renewal reminder at the right interval
for that customer’s plan, sent to the channel they originally messaged from. And a
reactivation message to customers whose last job was more than a service cycle ago. Both
are dull, both are ignored by most companies in this trade, and both convert better than
new-customer advertising.
Payment for contracts and deposits can be taken in the conversation with a
payment link, which removes the bank transfer and screenshot
routine that otherwise consumes your admin time.
Channels
WhatsApp and web chat, with WhatsApp dominant. The trade also gets a high share of
enquiries from search ads, and pointing those at a conversation rather than a contact form
is usually an improvement: the customer with three units and a weekend preference can say
so in one message instead of filling in five fields.
After the job
Home services live on reviews and referrals, and the window for both is the hour after
the technician leaves. Almost nobody uses it.
Two messages belong there. One confirming the work done and the warranty period, which
reduces the “is this covered” call three months later. And one asking for a review, sent
once, to the customer who is currently satisfied rather than to a list of everyone.
Keep the review request to a single message with a direct link. A second ask reads as
pressure and earns a worse review than no ask at all. And do not send it to a customer
whose job had a problem, which means the workflow needs to know the job outcome, not just
that the job closed.
The warranty confirmation is the quietly valuable one. It puts the terms in the
customer’s own chat history, where they can find them, which turns a dispute into a
lookup.
Where to start
- Collect the pricing variables and return a real range.
- Offer slots that fit the route for that area, and collect address, access and
parking. - Define emergency triggers by consequence and bypass everything for them.
- Answer technician ETA from the live job status.
- Automate service renewal reminders.
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