Retention & Reminders for Electricians
Your customer has no reason to call for fifteen years. Give them one
Two halves, one with a clock and one without
A full rewire is £3,990. An EV charger installation, £1,015. A consumer unit changeover, £710. A new lighting circuit, £581. An EICR, £266.
Your commercial work has a built-in cycle. Rented properties in England require an electrical safety report at set intervals, and that report has a date on it. Landlords and agents come back because the law brings them back.
Your domestic work has nothing of the kind. A homeowner has a consumer unit changed and then, quite reasonably, does not think about electricity again until something stops working. Guidance for owner-occupied homes suggests periodic inspection at roughly ten-year intervals, and essentially nobody follows it because essentially nobody has been told.
That gap is where a domestic electrical business quietly loses its customer base. Six hundred households who were perfectly happy with you, none of whom have a reason to make contact, all of whom will search from scratch when the extension gets built or the charger goes in.
The answer is not to send them newsletters. It is to give the relationship an actual clock, and there are three legitimate ways to do it.
Three ways to create a cycle where there was not one
The periodic inspection, offered properly. A domestic EICR at around £266, offered on a ten-year rhythm from the date you last worked on the property, framed as what it is: a check on an installation that has aged. It is honest, it is genuinely advisable for older installations, and it converts because nobody else has ever raised it.
Install-driven intervals. The things you fit have their own timescales. An EV charger has a manufacturer service position. Emergency lighting and alarms in commercial and communal settings have testing regimes. Consumer units installed twenty years ago are approaching the point where a check is sensible. Each of those is a date you can hold.
The upgrade path. A consumer unit changed three years ago is a house ready for a charger. A charger is a candidate for battery storage. An extension needs circuits. This is not a reminder in the strict sense, but it is a scheduled reason to make contact that is genuinely useful rather than promotional.
Underneath all three sits the commercial cycle, which needs no invention — only a system that never misses a date.
The ratio
Our Noticed package is £49 a month — £588 a year. One rewire at £3,990 covers more than six years.
On the base: six hundred past domestic customers, a ten-year inspection rhythm and a modest take-up produces a steady flow of £266 jobs that currently do not exist at all, from households you have already been paid by. The commercial side is larger again — one agent with forty properties is roughly £10,640 of certificate work across a cycle, and it renews on a legal date whether you chase it or not.
What we’d actually set up
Certificate expiry tracking, so every commercial renewal prompts itself well before the date rather than after a tenant complains.
A domestic periodic rhythm, set from the last date you worked at the property, with an honest explanation of what an inspection is for.
Install-based schedules for chargers, alarms, emergency lighting and anything else with a manufacturer or regulatory interval.
Upgrade prompts by installation type, so a charger email only reaches houses whose board can take one.
A lapse alert on commercial accounts, because a portfolio thinning out is the most expensive thing that can happen quietly.
Rebooking measured, split between domestic and commercial, so the base is a number rather than a feeling.
What good looks like at twelve months
- No commercial certificate expiring without a prompt going out first
- A domestic periodic programme running from real job dates
- Charger and upgrade prompts segmented by what is actually installed
- A commercial account going quiet flagged in weeks
- A measurable share of quarterly work arriving from the existing base
The mistakes we see most
Assuming domestic work cannot recur. It cannot on its own. It can with a rhythm attached.
Tracking certificates in a spreadsheet. It works until it is three months out of date and a renewal is missed.
Selling inspections on fear. The honest version — an ageing installation is worth checking — converts perfectly well and survives scrutiny.
Not measuring rebooking. Without it, a base eroding at five per cent a year is invisible for a decade.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Certificate expiries loaded properly and the commercial cycle made reliable, because that is where the immediate money is.
Weeks 5–8. The domestic base tagged by what was installed and when, which is what everything after this runs on.
Weeks 9–12. Periodic and upgrade rhythms set live, plus rebooking reporting so the base becomes visible.
At ninety days the measure is whether any work has arrived from a household you last saw more than two years ago. That is the specific thing this service exists to produce.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Certificates sit against the property with their expiry recorded, so renewals prompt themselves from real data rather than from a maintained list.
Job history holds what was installed and when, which is what the domestic rhythm and the upgrade prompts both run from.
And churn risk flags clients whose work has stopped, which on a commercial account is the difference between noticing in six weeks and noticing in six months.
The commercial account that thins rather than leaves
The domestic side erodes household by household, which is slow and visible if anybody is counting. The commercial side fails differently and considerably faster.
An agent with forty properties does not usually terminate. They stop sending the reactive work first — the void, the tenant with no power, the emergency on a Friday — because on one occasion you could not go. The scheduled certificate work continues for a while, because it was already booked and nobody has thought about it. Then a batch of renewals is quietly given to whoever has been doing the reactive calls, and the account is gone.
That sequence takes about six months and it is entirely visible in the data if anybody is looking, because the shape of the work changes before the volume does.
Which is why the monitoring on commercial accounts has to be different from the domestic reminder cycle. Not just “have they instructed anything recently” but “has the mix changed” — reactive falling away while scheduled work continues is the specific early warning, and it appears months before the account is actually lost.
The intervention at that point is straightforward and it is a phone call rather than a campaign: something changed, what was it, and what would you need from us. Made in month two it usually recovers the account. Made in month eight it is a winback, which is a much harder conversation with somebody who has already found an alternative they are content with.
Questions electricians ask
Is a ten-year domestic inspection a real thing? Periodic inspection at intervals is long-standing guidance for owner-occupied homes. Offering it is legitimate; overstating it as a legal duty is not.
Will homeowners buy it? A proportion will, particularly in older properties, and they are households you would otherwise never hear from again.
How far back should the domestic base go? Ten years comfortably. Older than that and ownership has often changed, though the new owner is a prospect in their own right.
What matters most? The commercial certificate cycle. It is legally driven, it is worth the most, and missing a date is how portfolios are lost.
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