Having a good plan is the easy half. Getting customers onto it is the half that actually pays, and it almost never happens because nobody remembers to ask. Mucka gives you three ways to ask without having to remember: put the plan on the paperwork they were going to read anyway, send a quiet offer after you have been out, and email it to all your customers at once.
You need Service Plans switched on, plus at least one published plan. If you have not built one yet, start with Monthly service plans.
Putting a plan on a quote or an invoice
Open a quote or an invoice as you normally would. Under the line items, before the totals, there is an Offer a service plan button. Tap it, pick the plan, and it sits there as a chip until you take it off again.
When the customer opens their quote page or their invoice page, the plan appears in its own block, with what is covered and what it costs a month, and a tick box. If they want it, they tick it. If they do not, nothing happens and the quote is exactly the quote it always was.
The plan price is not part of the quote total, and that is deliberate. A quote is a one-off price for a job. A plan is a monthly payment that carries on. If we added £18.50 a month into a £2,400 quote, the deposit would be a percentage of a subscription and your accounts would count the plan twice — so it is shown separately, in its own words, with a month written on it, and it never touches the total.
What happens when they tick it
Ticking the plan is them saying yes please, set that up — it is not them signing up.
The moment they accept the quote (or, on an invoice, pop their name in and tap Send it over), Mucka sets the plan up waiting and sends them their own plan page. That is where they read what is covered, agree to your terms, and set the Direct Debit up. Nothing is collected until they have done that.
Why it works that way. Cover sold over a link gives the customer 14 days to change their mind, and if you want to start covering them straight away they have to specifically say so — that is what the Consumer Contracts Regulations ask for. A quote page has one tick box, for your quote terms. So the plan gets asked properly on its own page rather than smuggled in under a tick that was about something else.
You will get a notification the moment somebody asks, and the plan will be sitting on your Clients tab marked Waiting to start until they sign.
Emailing a plan to all your customers at once
At the top of the Selling tab, Email a plan to your customers sends one email about a plan to everyone who is not on one yet, through your Mailchimp. Mucka writes it, you send yourself a test, then you send it. See Email a plan to your customers.
Offering a plan after you have been out
The best moment to sell cover is the day after you have fixed somebody's boiler. Nobody will ever think better of you than they do right then, and it is exactly the moment you are on to the next job and have forgotten all about it.
Go to Service Plans and open the Selling tab. There are four moments you can pick from:
- After a certificate goes out. The strongest one. They are holding proof that this is a yearly job, which is the plan's whole argument, made for you.
- After a job is finished. The highest volume, and the warmest.
- After an invoice is paid. They have settled without a fuss, so you know they are good for it.
- When a service falls due. "Or put it on a plan and never think about it again" is the easiest sentence on this list.
Each one comes as an email and a text, and each has three settings: how long to leave it, which plan to pitch, and the wording. They all start off. Nothing goes out until you switch it on.
Which plan it offers
Which plan starts on Whichever suits their heating, and that is usually the one to leave it on. Mucka names a plan in the message only when it is sure exactly one of yours fits that customer. When it is not sure, it does not guess.
To work out what heats their home, Mucka looks in three places, in this order:
- The boiler or heat pump on the property's appliances, if you have recorded one.
- The certificates at that address. An oil service record or an oil tank assessment means oil, a gas safety record means gas, and a heat pump service record means a heat pump. Certificates you brought over from your old system count too.
- The work they just had done — the job type (say, Oil Boiler Service), the lines on the invoice, and the job description.
Then it matches that against what each plan is for. An oil plan never goes to a gas boiler, a gas plan never goes to an oil one, and a boiler plan never goes to a heat pump. LPG counts as gas.
What each plan is for comes from the plan itself: open it, and under Who can have it set What this plan is for — Gas or LPG boiler, Oil boiler, Air-to-water heat pump, Air-to-air heat pump, Ground source heat pump, or Any boiler or heat pump. If you left it on Any boiler or heat pump, Mucka reads the plan's name instead, so a plan called Gas boiler service is treated as a gas plan and Oil boiler service as an oil one. That setting only decides what gets offered unprompted — you can still put anybody on any plan yourself.
For heat pumps, Mucka goes by what the appliance is called. "Air-to-water heat pump", "Ground source heat pump" or "GSHP" match exactly one kind. "Air source heat pump" or "ASHP" does not say which air kind it is, so it suits either air plan but not a ground source one, and plain "Heat pump" suits any heat pump plan. Air conditioning is not counted as a heat pump.
When there is a choice
If Mucka cannot tell what heats their home, or more than one of your plans fits, or none does, the message goes out without naming a plan or a price. It says you have service plans, and the link opens a page showing the plans that fit — or all of them, if it could not tell — each with what it covers and what it costs. The customer picks the one they want and carries on from there exactly as they would with a single plan.
So an oil customer is never told about your gas plan by name, and a customer whose boiler you have not recorded gets to choose rather than being sent whichever plan is cheapest.
You can also pick a plan by name instead, and if you do, that is the one everybody gets — Mucka will not second-guess a choice you made yourself.
Read the wording first
The wording is shown before the switch, not behind it. Have a read of it — it is going out under your business name to your own customers, so it should sound like you.
Every message has two versions, and you can change either:
- When one plan suits them — names the plan and what it costs.
- When we can't tell which plan suits — names no plan and no price, and the link shows them the plans to choose from. The plan name and price buttons are not offered here, because there is no one plan to fill them in with.
Tap the pencil beside either one to change it. The buttons underneath drop in the bits Mucka fills in for you: their name, your business name, boiler or heat pump, and in the first version the plan and what it costs. If you change your mind, Back to Mucka's wording puts it back, and it will keep improving as we improve it.
Mucka's wording only ever promises the annual service, because that is the one thing every plan includes. If yours include call-outs or a parts discount, say so in your own words — the page they open lists exactly what each plan covers either way.
Texts cannot have links in them. UK mobile networks block texts containing links, and the worst part is they do it silently — no bounce, no error, your customer just never gets it. So the text asks them to give you a ring, and Mucka puts your phone number on the end automatically. The email is where the link lives.
Who gets skipped
Mucka is careful about who these go to. It leaves out:
- Anyone already on a plan — including one that has not started yet.
- Anyone you have marked do not call.
- Anyone in Breathing Space, the debt respite scheme. An unprompted approach about money is exactly what that scheme does not allow.
- Anyone who has already had this message. Once per customer, ever — not once per job. Somebody who has you out four times a year gets asked once, not four times.
- Anyone who has been offered a plan by any of these messages recently. At the top of the Selling tab, Offer the same customer a plan at most once every sets how long: 30 days, 90 days, 6 months or 12 months. It starts at 90 days. Without it, somebody could get the "job finished" email and then the "invoice paid" one a few days later.
It also only looks at work finished in the last couple of days, so switching a message on does not fire off five years of history at everybody on your books.
What you will see
Nothing lands in an approval queue — once you have switched it on, it goes. You will get a notification when somebody takes a plan up, and the plan appears on your Clients tab marked Waiting to start until they have signed and set the payment up.
Keep an eye on it for the first week. Switch one message on, see who it goes to and what they pick, and tell us how it goes.