The same question, five times a day
A family with one bathroom has had it stripped out. They are showering at the gym and asking the neighbours for favours. Naturally they want to know: is the plasterer still coming tomorrow? When will the toilet be back in? Why was nobody here today? They ring the office. The office rings the fitter. The fitter is on a ladder and does not answer.
Multiply that by every live job and a large part of the office day goes on relaying information that already exists somewhere.
Why customers feel in the dark
A bathroom refit has gaps that are normal to you and alarming to the customer: a day for adhesive or screed to cure, a morning waiting for a part, a trade arriving at a different time. Without explanation, an empty day looks like an abandoned job.
- Customers get a start date and an end date, and nothing in between.
- Normal pauses, such as curing times, are never explained in advance.
- Trade arrival times are not shared.
- Changes are communicated late, by whoever has time.
- There is nowhere the customer can check progress without calling.
What the calls cost
Office time spent relaying updates is time not spent on quotes, orders or chasing payments. Fitters interrupted by calls work slower. Customers who feel ignored become harder to satisfy at handover, and more likely to hold the balance over small snags. Reviews often mention communication more than the tiling.
Updates driven by the job plan
- Before work starts, the customer receives a plain explanation of the stages, including normal pauses such as drying time, and what they will have access to on each day.
- When a stage is marked started or complete by a fitter or trade, the customer gets a short text or email.
- The evening before a trade visits, the customer is told who is coming and roughly when.
- If a stage moves, the customer message is drafted from the updated plan and sent once the office approves it.
- A simple progress page, opened by a link, shows the stages, what is done and what is next.
- Customer replies come back to one place in the office, attached to the job.
| Moment | Message the customer receives |
|---|---|
| Day before start | What happens on day one and what to clear |
| Strip-out complete | What was found and what comes next |
| Drying day | Why nobody is on site today |
| Trade tomorrow | Who is coming and a time window |
| Date change | The new date and the reason |
Messages are sent through a service such as Twilio for text or your own email, and the wording is yours. We set up templates your team is happy with.
What the office notices
The phone rings less, and the calls that do come are about something genuinely new. Customers understand the pauses. Fitters stop being interrupted to confirm arrival times. When something does go wrong, the customer hears it from you promptly, which makes a big difference to how they take it.
We usually start with a small number of messages, the ones that answer the questions customers ask most, and add more only if they help. It is easy to overdo it, and customers do not want a text every hour. The aim is fewer calls to the office and a customer who feels looked after, not a stream of notifications they learn to ignore.
Could this help your team?
- Customers ring the office several times during each refit.
- The office rings fitters to find out what to tell customers.
- Customers have thought a job was abandoned on a drying day.
- Date changes are passed on late.