Playbook, electrical contractor
Answering hours, working hours and the hours the power can be off
An electrician has at least three sets of hours and the customer only ever sees one. There are the hours somebody picks up the phone. There are the hours a van is on the road. And there is the much narrower window in which a job that puts a building into darkness can sensibly be started, which is why a firm answering the phone at four will still not start a board change at four.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for opening hours holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The start time for anything that isolates a supply is bounded by daylight and by the household, so a job that is fine at eight in the morning gets refused at three in the afternoon, and a customer who read that the office is open until five reasonably assumed otherwise.
- Commercial electrical work is scheduled against the building rather than against the trade: after the shop shuts, during a planned shutdown, on the one weekend a line is down. Those hours have nothing at all to do with the firm's own.
- Testing in an occupied building has its own windows, because alarm sounders and emergency lighting are checked at a time agreed with whoever manages the site and the time gets recorded in the log book, which makes the hours the customer's decision as much as yours.
- In a firm of this size nobody is in the office during working hours, which is the real reason messages sit for a few hours, and saying that plainly beats implying a reception that does not exist.
How it arrives
- what time do you start in the mornings
- are you open on saturdays
- can you come after i finish work
- do you work bank holidays
- can the alarm test be done out of hours
- is anyone in the office at lunchtime
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Your answering hours, labelled as answering hours | When the phone is picked up and when messages are read, kept explicitly separate from when work happens. Two lines, and on most sites they should not be the same line. |
|---|---|
| The latest you will start each kind of job | A cut off for anything that isolates a supply, with the reason in one clause. It reads as competence rather than as reluctance, and it prevents the argument that otherwise happens on the doorstep at four. |
| How commercial and shutdown scheduling works | That testing and shutdown work is arranged around the building's own hours, who agrees the window, and whether a different rate applies. Facilities managers ask this before they ask anything else, including the price. |
| Bank holidays, annual closure, and what runs anyway | The dates you are shut and whether anything is covered during them. One published closure notice ends a fortnight of messages every winter. |
The reply
The phone is answered during the hours on our contact page, but the answering day and the working day are not the same thing [1]. Anything that means turning the supply off gets started in the morning rather than the afternoon, because the power has to be back on before the end of the day and testing takes as long as it takes [2]. Alarm and emergency lighting testing is arranged around the building rather than around us, so those visits can sit outside normal hours by agreement. I cannot see who is where or agree a time, so if you need a particular day, leave me your name and an email and the office will tell you what is free.
It separates the two sets of hours in the first sentence, because that confusion is what generates the message in the first place. The reason for the morning start is given in physical terms, which stops it sounding like a firm that finishes early. The commercial line is there for a completely different reader who arrived at the same page.
Where it stops
The trigger. The visitor asks whether somebody can attend at a particular time, wants an evening visit, or needs a test arranged around a building's own opening hours.
I can tell you the published hours but I cannot see who is where or agree a time with you. Leave me your name, an email and the window that would work, and the office will come back with what is actually possible.
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 present the answering hours as the hours work can start, because the customer who books an afternoon board change on that basis loses a day and blames the person who told them.
- Never say somebody is available at a weekend or on a bank holiday unless it is published, since the only thing worse than being shut is being thought open.
- Never agree a test window in an occupied building, as that has to be settled with whoever manages the site and written into the record rather than arranged in a chat window.
- Never imply the office is staffed all day in a firm where it is not, because a message that then sits for six hours turns a reasonable wait into a broken promise.
Questions
- Is publishing a cut off time not just turning work away?
- It turns away the job that was going to go wrong. A board change started at three either finishes in the dark or does not finish, and the customer remembers whichever of those happened rather than the fact that you squeezed them in.
- Can it tell somebody whether we are working today?
- Not really, and it should not pretend to. It can read the published hours and any closure you have written down. It cannot see whether the van broke down or the first job overran, so the honest design is published hours plus a way to leave a message, not a live status it is guessing at.
- We are one van. Does any of this apply to us?
- More than it does to a large firm. One van means the office hours and the working hours are the same hours and the person who could answer the phone is under a floor. Saying that in a single line sets an expectation you can actually meet, which is worth more than an implied switchboard.
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 opening hours in generalHolidays, seasonal variation, last orders and multiple sites. Keeping one source of truth so the assistant and your map listing agree.
- One date, and several diaries that are not the electrician'sScaffolding, a suspended bay, a second electrician and a supply appointment can all hang off one day, and moving it moves none of them.
- What has already been spent when a job is called offA board, a charge point unit or cable cut to length stops being stock the day it is ordered for one address. That is where the cost sits.
- Two charges customers hear as one, and only one is a penaltyThe deposit buys the parts. The abortive charge covers the morning where the board turned out to be behind a fitted wardrobe.
Try it on your own material
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