Planned maintenance is vital to both your customers and your business. We’re sure you all try and educate your customers on the importance of this. We thought we’d lend a helping hand by letting you know some good reasons as to why it should be at the forefront of both your minds.
What is Planned Maintenance?
First, it is important for you and your customers to understand what planned maintenance means.
Planned, or preventive maintenance refers to routine checking of equipment. Scheduling this kind of maintenance ensures assets are kept in working order, reducing the risk of unexpected breakages or failures.
You can carry out maintenance for a particular asset on an annual schedule. Meaning that every year (or another specified period), your team thoroughly checks the equipment, flagging any errors that you can fix before the problem persists.
Why is Planned Maintenance Important to Me and My Business?
Now we’ve explored what planned maintenance is, it’s also worth looking into the importance of planned maintenance. Planning maintenance in advance has many benefits for your business. Here are a few key benefits and why is it important to do preventive maintenance.
1. Improves customer service
So, you’ve installed the equipment and your customer has paid the bill. Even if you’re the best installer in the world, the customer is likely to have questions. At the back of their mind, they may ask themselves “what if it goes wrong?”
By talking about planned maintenance, you show them you care about the equipment you have installed. Not only does it show you are thinking about this project, but also about your service to them in the long term.
Want to go the extra mile for your clients? Giving them access to their jobs through web-based management software can give them a better look into the progress of their ongoing work. Improve your communication with your customers, help them manage their sites and give them a portal to easily raise service incidents if accidents happen in between planned maintenance visits.
2. Brings in repeat business
That brings us to the second reason why planned maintenance can benefit your business.
By doing a good job of installing the equipment and signing your customer up to a planned maintenance schedule, that encourages the client to keep coming back to your company. You’ve secured yourself repeat business with them and guaranteed income.
But it’s not just about the additional income. Long-term service to your client can help you build a good relationship. Knowing your customers’ preferences or requirements means you are better preparing yourself for each time you come back to the site.
3. Helps organise
Being organised is one of the key elements of a successful business. If you are a new company starting out or a larger business with hundreds of employees, organisation is always going to make the job easier.
If you can plan for maintenance on the equipment you install, you can schedule your engineers in advance. Everyone is at the right place at the right time.
Invest in the right software and you can further streamline your organisation. Easily keep track of your customers and their sites, their jobs and communication. You’ve got all the information you need to make scheduling routine work easy.
You can also see your engineers’ schedules, rearrange their jobs and automatically fill out their timesheets to make admin and engineer management simple.
4. Boosts your reputation
Working in the service industry, we’re sure you know reputation is everything. Word of mouth is a powerful tool to promote your business and bring in more work.
Perhaps you are a small family business or just starting up. When competition is so high, it can be difficult to get your name out. You might have years of experience in your field, but if your company is small, business can be slow.
That’s where planned maintenance can give you an edge. Getting your business known as a company that thinks ahead for its customers can do wonders for your reputation.
You might only have a couple of customers a week but reassuring those customers that you will return to make sure the installation is running smoothly will let them know you care. Soon enough, word of mouth will be spreading like wildfire. Resulting in more business for you and plenty more happy customers.
Why is Planned Maintenance Important to my Customers?
Planned maintenance isn’t just beneficial for your business, but for your customers too. Let’s take a look at why is it important to go the extra mile for your client.
1. Minimises downtime
Whether your customer is commercial or domestic, downtime can be an inconvenience. Carrying out maintenance regularly minimises downtime.
Scheduled maintenance might take some time out of their day, but can your customer afford for that important piece of equipment to be out of service?
Instead of lengthy, unexpected downtime due to a fault, clients can schedule a time for equipment to be serviced. This could be a time when they don’t need to use the equipment. Scheduled downtime can ensure everything continues to run smoothly, even during downtime.
2. Keeps them safe
“If this equipment was faulty, we’d notice.” Well, depending on the equipment, that’s not always the case.
It’s everyone’s responsibility to ensure that the equipment is safe for both the equipment itself and the operator. Regular checks can highlight potential problems, giving you the opportunity to address them quickly.
Some checks are mandatory for certain clients to carry out. Property owners are required to make sure all electrical installations are inspected and meet safety standards. These regulations are in place to ensure the safety of any current or future tenants. These checks require electrical contractors to supply a condition report to reflect the safety of the installation. Make sure you have the right electrical certificates ready for the next job and use the right software to help you manage them.
3. Increases equipment efficiency
Without proper maintenance, equipment can become inefficient. Inefficient or faulty assets can cost your customer time and money due to decreased productivity. They can be slow, inconsistent or ineffective, meaning you are wasting more time correcting mistakes or redoing the work.
This is not just time-consuming, but also frustrating and damaging to future business for your clients.
Regular checks for any type of equipment or installation can be highly beneficial. Whether it is HVAC, lift or catering equipment, efficiency is key. Maintenance can bring attention to inefficient equipment before it’s too late. Allowing time to fix any faults without affecting the quality of work.
4. Saves time
It helps that you can plan ahead for this type of maintenance, ensuring contingencies are in place before you take the equipment out of action. Customers can fit the preventive maintenance into their schedule to suit them.
Planned maintenance procedures usually take much less time to complete than emergency repairs. It also reduces the risk of a breakdown, saving time – and money – in the future.
Planning ahead also means you and your customers are more prepared when the day comes. They can view the job and relevant details in their own diary. With everything planned and everyone in the loop, the service is seamless for everyone.
The bottom line? If you install it, plan to maintain it for the good of your customers and your business. The next step is managing your contracts and customer site maintenance.
Want to be even more organised with your planned maintenance contracts? Take a look at Clik’s contract management software to see how to plan preventive maintenance. Try Clik Service for free today.
This post was first published in June 2014 and has been edited with updated information.