Emergency plumbing calls, from search to booked job

For your trade 6 min read

An emergency search gives you roughly thirty seconds and one phone call. Here is where that chain breaks, and the plain fix at every link.

Somebody's hot water cylinder has let go at half past ten on a Tuesday. They are standing in a hallway holding a towel against a joint, searching with one thumb, and they will make one phone call before they make a second. Between that search and a job in your schedule there are about six links, and any of them can break without you ever finding out it did.

What people actually type at half past ten

They do not type your business name. They have never heard of you. They type the problem and the town: burst pipe, no hot water, water coming through the ceiling, drain backing up.

That has two consequences. The first is that the words on your site should be the words in the search. "Reactive maintenance solutions" is not a phrase anyone has ever typed while standing in water. Burst pipe is. The second is that if the only trade word on your site is "plumber", you are answering one word of a six-word question.

Write the jobs out in plain form. Burst pipe. No hot water. Blocked drain. Leaking toilet. Water heater not firing. A line or two each is enough, because you are matching the sentence in somebody's head.

Your listing is the first page, not your home page

An emergency search usually ends on the map results rather than on a website. The listing carries your hours, your number, your reviews and the button that dials you. A good number of people will call straight from it and never load your site at all.

So the listing has to be right before anything else is worth doing. Hours that match reality. A number that rings a phone you carry. The trades and the towns written into the description. If your listing says you close at five and you in fact take calls until ten, you are turning away the precise call you most want.

Your website's job at this point is narrow. It confirms what the listing promised, and it gives the people who do tap through a reason to stop looking.

Give the emergency its own page

A home page has to serve everybody, which means it serves the panicking caller badly. One page, built for one situation, is the thing to send an emergency to.

On it: the number as a tap-to-call link at the top, a plain line saying when calls are answered, the towns you will drive to at night, and the four or five emergencies you handle. Nothing that moves. Nothing that has to load before the number appears. If somebody's water is still running, the page has failed unless the number is on screen the moment it opens.

Say what counts as an emergency and what does not

Owners lose calls in both directions. People call at two in the morning about a dripping tap, and people fail to call at nine in the evening about a leak that is going through a floor because they did not want to be a nuisance.

Both of those are fixed by one honest paragraph. Something like: water you cannot stop, no heating in freezing weather, or sewage coming back up, call at any hour. A dripping tap, a slow drain, a toilet that runs on, all of those can wait for the morning and will cost you less in the morning.

That paragraph will lose you a service call. It can win you later ones, because you are the plumber who told somebody not to spend money at midnight, and people remember that far longer than they remember a discount.

The missed call is where the money goes

You are under a sink with both hands wet. The phone rings. You cannot answer it, and that caller is dialing the next plumber before you have got out from under the trap.

Nothing on a website fixes this, so treat it as the separate problem it is. A voicemail that says "leave a message and I'll get back to you" loses the call, because the caller has no idea whether that means ten minutes or Thursday. A voicemail that says "I am on a job until about eight, text me the address and what is leaking and I will reply between jobs" keeps a share of them, because it gives a time and an action.

The other half of it is a form on your site that reaches you as an email on your phone, not a message sitting in a website inbox nobody logs into. Send yourself a test inquiry once a month. Forms fail quietly, and a dead form looks exactly like a slow week.

Give a time, not a promise to hurry

When you do answer, the caller wants three things and one of them is not reassurance. They want to know whether you cover them, roughly what it will cost to get you out, and when you will be at the door.

Say a window out loud. Ninety minutes is an answer. "As soon as I can" is not, and it leaves them free to call someone else while they wait, which is what they will do. If you cannot get there until morning, say so on the call and tell them how to isolate the supply in the meantime. You have lost the service call either way; you might as well be the person who helped.

The job can still fall through after the call

The two ways it comes apart are silence and address trouble. If you are running an hour late and they have not heard from you, they assume you are not coming and they call the next name on the list. A single text saying you are forty minutes behind holds almost all of those.

The address one is duller and just as costly. Take the number, read the address back, and ask for a landmark. A job you cannot find at eleven at night is a job you do not invoice.

A short checklist

• Google listing hours match the hours you really answer the phone
• One emergency page with the number tap-to-call at the very top
• The five commonest emergencies named in the words people search
• A plain line on what is worth calling about at night and what is not
• A voicemail that gives a time and asks for a text
• The website form arrives as an email on your phone, tested this month
• A text when you are running late, every time
• Ask for the review while you are stood in the kitchen, not a week later

Questions people ask

Should I put my cell number on my website

Yes, if it is the number you answer. A landline nobody picks up after six is worse than no number at all. One number, everywhere, is easier to keep true than two.

Do I need a separate page for emergency work

It helps, because an emergency page can be blunt in a way a home page cannot. If you only ever build one page, make the home page behave like the emergency page after six in the evening.

What should my voicemail actually say

Your name, that you are on a job, roughly when you will be free, and an instruction to text the address and the problem. Four sentences. Record it again whenever your hours change.

Is it worth paying for ads for emergency plumbing

Sometimes, but not before the listing and the number are right. Paid clicks landing on a page with a broken form is money going into a hole, and the hole is free to fix.

Should I charge more for a night service call

Charge what the disruption is worth to you, and say the figure on the phone before you drive. The thing that makes people angry is not the night rate, it is finding out about the night rate afterwards.

Why do people call and then not book

Usually because they did not get a time. Occasionally because they called three plumbers at once and someone else answered on the first ring. You can only fix the first one, so fix that one.