How to keep your HVAC service pricing competitive so you can attract more customers

HVAC service businesses are under constant competitive pressure, which is only set to continue as competition increases within the sector. One of the most significant pressure areas is pricing, as businesses begin to try to undercut each other on pricing to attract more clients. Whilst it's possible to differentiate based on expertise and quality of service, price competitiveness is a significant factor in how customers decide which business to work with. Too low, and people assume you're not a quality service. Too high, and you lose out to cheaper competitors. You need to price your HVAC services just right to maximise revenue.

How much does an HVAC service cost?

The first step to keeping your HVAC service pricing competitive is to understand precisely the market's general costs for services. For the UK, HVAC service pricing varies depending on the nature of the job, but you can see a rough estimation of the average customers are charged below:

Source: Checkatrade.com

Looking at the average cost estimates for different job types should give you an idea of how your current pricing compares. If you find yourself needing to be more competitive with your pricing, then you’ll need to lower your prices, but you’ll also need to find ways you can cut costs in other areas or increase efficiency so you can bring in more revenue.

How to keep HVAC service pricing competitive

Keeping HVAC service pricing competitive through efficient operations

If you’re reducing the price of your HVAC services, then you’ll need to find ways to make your business more efficient. With increased efficiency, you’ll be able to get more jobs completed per day, allowing you to make up for lost revenue from the price decrease. By optimising your scheduling, job tracking, and service routes, you’ll be able to complete more jobs a day to counteract the decrease in revenue for price drops by minimising downtime from your field engineers.

The best way to streamline your operations is by using specialist HVAC software that’s designed to make running an HVAC service business easier. With software like this in place, your day-to-day operations will become more efficient, and your first-time fix rate can increase.

Keeping HVAC service pricing low through flat-rate pricing

One of the quickest ways to make your HVAC service pricing competitive is by charging a flat rate for certain jobs. This allows you to make guarantees on prices that your customer base will find attractive, as it will remove the risk of increased costs through hidden fees, and you can easily adapt your prices over time to ensure that they are competitive.

Not all jobs can use flat-rate pricing, but a lot can, so it can be a very powerful tool in helping make your HVAC service pricing competitive. The only downside is that you need to carefully monitor how profitable jobs are over time. If you aren’t monitoring the profitability of your jobs that use flat rate pricing, then you run the risk of them being unprofitable, which has wider repercussions across your business. The best way to do this is to make use of field service report software, which will allow you to run reports to determine how profitable your jobs are.

Keeping HVAC service pricing low through inventory and stock management

If you’re lowering your HVAC service prices to stay competitive, then you’ll need to make sure you’re not overspending in other areas so you can maximise your profitability. One way to do this is to make sure that you’re not over-ordering parts and units and that you have enough parts and units available to ensure jobs can be completed quickly. To keep on top of your stock levels, you need to use stock control software that will allow you to manage them more easily.

Online Self-Service Options

Did you know that 58% of customers are willing to pay more to get better customer service? Whilst it’s tempting to use this information to justify keeping prices high, what you should be using is to build out ways to get repeat business. If you’re able to build out ways to improve customer services and increase customer satisfaction, customers will start coming back to you for the work they need to complete. You can even make it easier for them to book jobs with you by providing online self-serving options such as customer portals that allow them to request a visit and book an engineer to come through.

Offer additional services and payment options

In a similar vein to offering self-service options through customer portals, you should also look to expand the way your clients can pay once jobs have been completed. This gives them more freedom and is more likely to make them feel like they’ve had a good customer experience. For bigger jobs, you can even look to offer financing plans that will allow steady payments from customers, which can be beneficial for your business when it comes to creating a steady flow of revenue.

Creating a steady flow of revenue can have additional benefits when it comes to price competitiveness. If you can create revenue streams that are consistent each month via financial plans for payments or for subscription services (for example, preventive maintenance plans), you’ll have a steadier flow of revenue that will be easier to predict and provide you with the means to be able to lower prices for reactive maintenance tasks so you can be more competitive overall.

If you’re looking to get competitive with your HVAC service pricing, then you need to make sure you’re operating at maximum efficiency. With the help of specialist HVAC software, you can improve every aspect of a job lifecycle, start completing more jobs per day, and increase first-time fix rates. Book a demo with one of our team of experts, and they’ll happily show you how you can improve your daily operations with the help of Joblogic HVAC software.