Customer story · Trades & services
Customer story · Trades & services
Acme Plumbing is a six-van plumber in Melbourne's north-west. Like most trades, their problem was never the plumbing - it was the enquiries that slipped away while everyone was on the tools, and the thousands of past customers who never heard from them again. Here is how they fixed both.
Someone fills in the form on your website at 7:42 on a Tuesday night. It lands in an email inbox nobody checks from a crawl space. By the time anyone sees it, they have already booked whoever answered first.
And the quotes you did send? Chasing them happens "when we get a minute" - which at 6pm, after a day on the tools, is never. Every one of those is a real job that went to someone else.
Acme had done work for over 4,000 households. How many of them could say who their plumber was? You fixed their tap in 2019, did a great job - and the next time something leaks, they Google "plumber near me" all over again.
Nobody knew who was due a service, whose hot water system was about to die, or who had gone quiet after a quote. That is not a marketing problem - it is a memory problem.
This is the quote form on Acme's website. The first question is one tap on a coloured box - a customer with water coming through the ceiling doesn't want to type an essay on their phone.
The moment they hit the button, three things happen on their own:
Every enquiry becomes a line on a board: who they are, what the next step is, and when it's due. Call back within the hour. Written quote the day after the visit. Chase the quote two days after it went out - because that call is where most jobs are won.
The dates take care of themselves. Miss a callback and it reschedules instead of vanishing. Ring three times with no answer and the system sends a polite "we keep missing each other" note and parks it - no more mental lists in the ute.
And because every quote has a dollar value and a likely close date on it, the owner can see in one glance what's out there, what it's worth, and which quotes are going cold.
When a quote goes quiet, most plumbers do nothing - not because they don't care, but because it's 6pm and there are eleven of them. At Acme, the system does the nudging, and it sounds like a person, not a robot:
The moment they book, buy or say "no thanks", the emails stop. Written once, they run for every enquiry, forever.
This is the part that pays for everything else. A past customer already trusts you - they just forget you exist. So Acme never lets a finished job go cold:
A thank-you email with a Google review link - reviews are how the next customer finds you. Leave one and a $50 "send a mate our way" offer follows. Emergency customers get a courtesy call too: "everything still dry?"
A month later, free seasonal tips - "check your flexi hoses", "clear the gutters before autumn". No sales pitch, which is exactly why people read them and remember the name on the bottom.
"It's been about a year - time for your plumbing health check." The customer books, the job lands back on the board, and the cycle starts again. Nobody had to remember; the system did.
A plumber notes a hot water unit is over ten years old - on any job. Two days later the customer gets "replace it on your terms, not the tank's", with the government rebates explained. That one note is Acme's most profitable email.
A quote lost on price isn't lost forever. Sixty days on, one friendly off-peak offer: 10% off a mid-week slot. If they've moved on, they never hear from it again.
"Every house in 3056 with a hot water system over ten years old we haven't offered a replacement." Tick, tick, done - and the follow-up above takes it from there. Your customer list becomes a job list.
Everything on this page - the forms, the boards, the follow-up emails, the come-back-next-year reminders - is simply how one plumbing business decided to work. Our onboarding and sales consultants will guide you to have your own business rules and practices automated - and running on Sales Intellect.
Register your businessAbout this case study. Acme Plumbing is an illustrative business created by Intellecta to show how a trades company runs on Sales Intellect. The set-up shown is real and running in a demonstration organisation; the company, its people, phone numbers, licence number and results are fictional. Rebate programmes mentioned (Victorian Energy Upgrades, small-scale technology certificates) are real Australian schemes - eligibility and amounts change; check current rules.