You might be the best HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) servicing business in town, but if nobody knows about you, you might as well be a total amateur. To be honest, no matter what business you’re in, it’s all about your branding. I am going to focus on branding and promoting an HVAC business, but you can apply the guidance and tips in this post to just about any business.
Your business exists for your customers. Your business only earns you money if customers are happy. Your company only grows if customers are ecstatic about the work you do.
If you use it effectively, though, technology can improve your branding and help to amplify customer satisfaction and broaden exposure for your business.
Branding Issues
- Nobody knows who you are
- Customers bad-mouth you
- Poor quality perceptions
Until you solve these three branding issues the only way you will get business is by competing on price and advertising extensively.
Nobody Knows Who You Are
Start here because people in your target group must know about you before they get to know you.
Design a Logo
You don’t need to offer up the life of your first-born to have a designer create a custom logo – You can do it yourself using free online programs, or you can pay a freelancer $20 to do it for you. However, you must have a logo. Free logo design sites let you design for free, and you then pay to download your creation.
No logo, no mojo.
Build a Website
Similarly, you can also build your own website or pay a freelancer to do it for you. Every web hosting company offers free website building software, or you could use the open-source WordPress program to build a simple five-page site.
Sometimes a simple website building program that includes hosting is all you need to start with.
Increase Your Social Media Presence
Social media can gobble time like a newly hatched swallow gobbles insects. You need a system, and you need to delegate your social media monitoring. Hootsuite is the leading app and includes a free account you can use initially.
Take photos of you and your team at work and solving customer problems. Post them on your social accounts along with general HVAC advice posts: Doing this will establish you as the go-to company whenever someone has issues.
Wrap Your Vans
Your van is a rolling eight-foot cube of advertising space that thousands of drivers and pedestrians see every day – Use it.
Search for a local company that offers van wrapping. You should be able to find someone to wrap your van in self-adhesive film printed with your own design for $2-3000. If that price is out of reach, then get decals printed and professionally applied to your vans for a few hundred per vehicle.
Local marketing like this can also make it easier to recruit the talented employees your business needs to grow.
Wrap Your Team
Print tee-shirts and sweatshirts with your logo and phone number and make sure everyone wears them while on the job: This gives your brand more marketing exposure and is more professional than a random assortment of old tees and tops.
Customers Bad-Mouth You
You need to find out the reasons behind your customers’ complaints, solve those problems, and respond politely.
Understanding Customers Complaints
Most customer complaints are justified. You or someone you employ has disappointed or annoyed the customer in some way.
Solving Your Problems
Your branding suffers the longer customer complaints are unaddressed. Social media can amplify any disgruntled client complaint into a branding cataclysm in a few hours.
There are three aspects to removing this problem: prevention, detection, response.
Preventing, Detecting and Responding to Problems
If your crews have the right HVAC business software on their phones, they can check out of a location automatically when a job is done. You can ring the householder and check for even the slightest issue. If the customer is less than utterly delighted, then you can immediately go round, remedy the problem and turn an unhappy client into someone who raves about your service.
Poor Quality Perceptions
Customers must see your HVAC service business as the option of choice. If people only come to you because you are the cheapest option, they will switch allegiances as soon as a new competitor starts up.
Wrapping your vans and ensuring all employees wear smart uniforms will go a long way in ensuring a professional image, but there is more you can do.
An instant quote delivered to a client’s email address while you are still with them is much better than a hand-written quote in an envelope the next day. You can find trades apps that will allow your company to email professional quotes, send automatic invoices, and update your accounts with a push of a button.
If you set up the same software on employees’ phones, they will be able to automatically log out of one job and into the next, as well as receive updates to their daily job sheets.
Long Story Short
Branding means you don’t need to compete on price with any Johnny-come-lately business that is just starting up.
Branding means your HVAC operation is synonymous with the best practices in the industry.
Branding means you can reduce your marketing budget because customer recommendations give you all the work you can cope with.
Branding is how you stand out from the competition as the HVAC service business that sets the standard in your city.
Your website, uniforms, and software are essential, but the largest part of building a leading brand is getting every employee on board with your objectives. Polite and helpful engineers and office staff are at risk of extinction and customers remember when they meet one. They remember, come back again, and tell their friends.
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I think all of this is spot on except the parts where you are expected to kiss the customers feet.
Most complaints we get are ” I can buy that part on ebay for 10 bucks, why are you going to charge me 50 to install it”. Then they refuse to listen to the logic behind it and now we have a disgruntled customer.
It goes without saying that any successful business man or woman has to stand by their mistakes and do right by them (whether it be an employee mistake or accident in any form), but in the HVAC industry, where you are viewed as a commodity since the “man in the van” or “a friend of mine” will do it for 20 bucks and still manage to make a profit, you cannot succumb to the price shoppers or the do-it-yourselfers, or the rude and nasty for no reason.
The phrase “the customer is always right” needs to go away forever, especially in a day and age where everyone thinks they’re entitled, or thinks it’s ok to swear at and belittle people just because they’re handing them some money because they’re working for them.
Otherwise, great article. I just needed to vent, I apologize. At our company we have been in business for almost 22 years and we just started dropping “problem” clients ( deadbeats, price shoppers, people who always have a problem and are never happy, people who treat our employees like dirt, etc…) and I gotta say that our business is thriving more now because we don’t have to deal with the neediness of those types of “customer is always right” clients. We don’t have to dedicate so much heartache and manpower pleasing these types of people, and it makes a difference.