Barts Appliances Repair Portland — Portland, OR
I've been running Barts Appliances Repair Portland for over twelve years. For most of that time, my "lead management system" was a mess. Sticky notes, a shared Google spreadsheet, whatever I could remember. Calls would come in for dishwasher repairs or dryer diagnostics, and we'd scribble down the customer's info. But here's what actually happened day to day: leads got buried. Follow-up calls didn't happen. Customers who needed a second visit just disappeared from our radar. We were busy enough that it felt like things were working. They weren't.
The moment it really hit me was last spring. A woman called, pretty upset, saying she'd requested a quote for her refrigerator repair three weeks earlier and never heard back. I checked our spreadsheet. Her name was there, highlighted yellow, which was supposed to mean "call back soon." Nobody did. So she went with another company. That one lost job probably cost us $400. But when I sat down and actually looked at how many highlighted-yellow entries we had from the previous two months, I counted thirty-seven. Thirty-seven people we just never followed up with. Can you imagine? I felt sick thinking about the revenue we'd left on the table.
After that, I knew we couldn't keep winging it. We started by setting up a proper CRM designed for small service businesses. Nothing fancy. The key change was automating our follow-up process. When a lead comes in now, they get a text confirmation within five minutes. If we send a quote and don't hear back in 48 hours, an automatic reminder goes out. And we created a simple tagging system: "new lead," "quoted," "scheduled," "completed," and "needs follow-up." Every morning, I spend ten minutes reviewing the dashboard. It's become the most productive ten minutes of my day.
The results showed up faster than I expected. Within the first two months, our quote-to-booking rate jumped from around 35% to just over 55%. That's real money. For a small shop like ours, it's huge. Customers started commenting that we were "so responsive," which honestly made me laugh because we'd been the opposite for years. Also, repeat business picked up noticeably. Once someone's in the system, we can reach out six months later for maintenance reminders on their washing machine or HVAC unit. We're not chasing new leads as hard because past customers are coming back.
I didn't figure all of this out on my own. A lot of my thinking shifted after I came across the article Customer Follow Up Software for Appliance Repair Companies, which laid out exactly why appliance repair shops struggle with this stuff and what tools actually help. It gave me a framework instead of just guessing. So if you're running a repair business in Portland or anywhere else and you're still relying on memory and spreadsheets, do yourself a favor. Rethink your follow-up process. It's the easiest money you'll ever recover.