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 two ways to ask without having to remember: put the plan on the paperwork they were going to read anyway, and send a quiet offer after you have been out.
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.
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 boiler, and that is usually the one to leave it on.
If you have recorded the boiler at that address — its fuel, on the property's appliances — Mucka will not pitch an oil plan at a gas boiler or a gas plan at an oil one. It rules out the ones that do not fit and then offers the cheapest of what is left. LPG counts as gas.
To make that work, tell Mucka what each plan is for: open the plan, and under Who can have it set Which boiler this is for to Gas or LPG only, Oil only, or leave it on Any boiler. That setting only decides what gets offered unprompted — you can still put anybody on any plan yourself.
If you have not recorded the boiler, nothing is lost. Mucka offers the cheapest plan that suits anybody, which is what it did before. The same goes for a house where the boilers disagree — an oil boiler and a gas one at the same address — because at that point it genuinely does not know which one they mean.
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.
Tap Edit the wording to change it. The buttons underneath drop in the bits Mucka fills in for you: their name, your business name, 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.
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.
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.
This part is new. Everything here is built and working, but no customer has bought a plan through it yet. Switch one message on, keep an eye on it for a week, and tell us how it goes.