Playbook, electrical contractor
The slot is the easy half, the power off window is the appointment
Ask a household when they are free and you get an answer in minutes. Ask them when they can manage a day with no fridge, no freezer, no router and nobody able to work from the kitchen table, and you get a different answer entirely. On anything larger than a socket change the second question is the booking, and a firm that leads with a time slot has arranged the wrong thing.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for appointment booking holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Work of any size isolates the supply, so what is really being agreed is a window in which the building has no electricity, and that is a household decision about food, work and anybody who plugs something in for a medical reason.
- Some jobs will not be sent out with one person: a run through a loft, a fitting on a high ceiling, anything where somebody has to stay at the board while somebody else is upstairs. The date is then the overlap of two diaries and the lead time reads as unhelpful unless that is explained.
- A survey and an installation are two different visits of two different lengths, and customers book one believing they have booked the other often enough that the material has to say so before it says anything about availability.
- Nobody wants an arrival window here, they want a finish time, because the thing being planned around is the moment the power comes back on rather than the moment the van arrives.
How it arrives
- how long will the power be off for
- can you do it on a saturday
- do i need to be in the whole time
- will the freezer be off all day
- can you survey and fit the charger on the same day
- how far ahead are you booking
What has to be indexed for this to work
| How long the supply is off, job by job | The realistic window with the power down for a board change, an additional circuit, a periodic inspection and a charge point install, given in hours. That number is not the length of the visit and customers only care about the first one. Write both and label them. |
|---|---|
| Which visits need two electricians | The jobs you will not send one person to, and what that does to lead time. Without it, a fortnight's wait for a loft run reads as a firm that does not want the work rather than as two diaries that have to meet. |
| What a survey visit is, and what it is not | How long it takes, whether the supply goes off during it, whether a price follows on the day or afterwards, and that no installation happens. Say the last one plainly. A customer who booked a day off for work that was never going to happen starts the relationship annoyed. |
| Who has to be present, and for how long | Whether an adult has to be in throughout, whether a relative or a neighbour is acceptable, and whether anybody else has to be involved to open a meter cupboard or a communal riser. On a flat that last point decides the date more often than the diary does. |
The reply
A board change is usually a full day and the supply is off for most of it, so the thing worth planning around is the freezer and anything you need for work rather than the arrival time [1]. Somebody over eighteen has to be in throughout, because the power goes on and off while circuits are tested [2]. If it is a charge point, the survey and the installation are separate visits. I cannot see the diary or hold a date. Leave me your name, an email and roughly which week suits and the office will come back with the days that are actually free.
It answers the question underneath the question first, which is what a day without power looks like, and only then touches the calendar. The presence rule is given with its reason attached, so it reads as a working requirement rather than as a condition. The last two sentences separate what the assistant can do from what it cannot without apologising for the difference.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor names a date, asks what is free next week, or asks to be put down for a morning.
I have no view of the diary and cannot hold a slot, so anything I said about a date would be invented. Leave me your name, an email, what the job is and the days that would work, and the office will come back with real dates.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say a date is free or a morning is available, since there is no diary here to look at and a slot that was never held is the worst possible first impression in a trade built on turning up.
- Never state a power off window for a job nobody has surveyed, because how long the supply is down depends on what the circuits do when they are tested.
- Never tell somebody they do not need to be in, as access to a board, a meter cupboard or a loft partway through is what turns one day into two.
- Never describe a survey and an installation as one visit, because the customer who booked the wrong one loses a day of annual leave over a sentence.
Questions
- Can it put the job straight into our calendar?
- No. It has no view of your diary and nothing it can write to, so any date it offered would be made up. What it does instead is collect the job type, the address and the week that suits, which is enough for the office to offer two real dates in one reply rather than four messages.
- Should the power off windows really be published?
- Yes, in hours, per job type. It is the question every customer means and hardly any of them ask, and a firm that says a board change means a day without power reads as one that has done a lot of them. It also ends the argument that otherwise happens at four in the afternoon.
- Is it worth naming the two person jobs?
- It costs a line and it buys you the lead time. Somebody who knows a loft run needs two electricians understands why the date is a fortnight out. Somebody who does not reads the same fortnight as a firm quietly turning down small work.
Keep reading
- Everything for a electrical contractorCall out charges, EV charger enquiries and landlord certificates are answerable. A described electrical fault is an escalation, not a question.
- Handling appointment booking in generalIt cannot write into a calendar. The job is removing every reason not to book, then handing over with the details already gathered.
- Half the after hours messages are not the electrician's to answerA dark house at midnight is often the street, the meter or the supplier rather than a fault in the building, and saying so saves a call out.
- The two electrical prices that cannot be a number in advanceFault finding is sold by time because the time is the work, and a board change can grow the moment the old circuits are tested.
- Who the invoice goes to is rarely who opened the doorThe tenant let you in, the agent instructed the job and the landlord pays. The invoice and the report go to different people.
Try it on your own material
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