Bart's Appliances Repair — Portland, OR
I'm Bart, and I've been running Bart's Appliances Repair here in Portland for over twelve years. For most of that time? My "system" was sticky notes, a shared Google Sheet, and whatever my techs could remember between jobs. Calls would come in for refrigerator repairs or dishwasher diagnostics, and we'd scribble down the info. But things slipped through constantly. A customer would call back frustrated because nobody showed up for their scheduled appointment. Or I'd find a sticky note buried under paperwork for a lead that was three weeks old. It was embarrassing. And we were losing money every single week.
The moment it really hit me was last spring. A property manager who handles about forty rental units across Southeast Portland called to set up regular service for multiple appliances. That's the kind of account that could've been worth thousands over a year. But the message sat in our voicemail for four days because my front desk person was out sick, and I was elbow-deep in a commercial oven repair in the Pearl District. By the time I called back, they'd already hired someone else. I sat in my van after that call and just stared at the dashboard. We couldn't keep operating like this.
So I made real changes. First, I invested in a CRM built for service businesses. Every lead now gets logged automatically. Phone calls, website forms, Google—it all feeds in. Second, I set up automated text confirmations when we book appointments and again the morning of service day. On top of that, I created a simple follow-up sequence where customers get a check-in message three days after a repair. It asks if everything's working properly. My techs pushed back at first because they thought it'd create more callbacks, but it actually did the opposite. Customers felt taken care of. Small issues got resolved before they turned into big complaints.
The results showed up faster than I expected. Within two months, our missed lead rate dropped dramatically. We went from losing maybe ten to fifteen potential jobs a month to catching almost everything. Our Google reviews jumped too, because that post-service follow-up text made it easy for happy customers to leave feedback. And repeat business increased by around 25% once people started getting seasonal maintenance reminders from us. The biggest surprise? My stress level dropped. I wasn't lying awake wondering what I'd forgotten.
I didn't figure all of this out on my own. Early on, I came across the article Customer Follow Up Software for Appliance Repair Companies, and it genuinely changed how I thought about the follow-up problem. It helped me realize this wasn't just a "me" issue. Appliance repair companies everywhere deal with the same chaos. So I stopped trying to patch together random tools and started thinking about follow-up as an actual system. Know what I mean? If you're running a repair business in Portland or anywhere else and you're still relying on memory and sticky notes, do yourself a favor and read it. Your future self will thank you.