Winback for Gas Engineers
They did not leave. They missed a year and nobody rang
The quietest loss in the trade
A power flush is £615. A gas meter relocation, £425. An emergency gas repair, £255. A hob and oven connection, £255. An appliance service, £125.
Two hundred service customers at £125 is £25,000 a year. That number only holds if the same two hundred come back, and every year a proportion do not.
Look closely at how that happens and it is almost never a decision. The reminder came at a bad week. They were away. Money was tight that month. They meant to ring back and did not. Twelve months passed, then eighteen, and now there is a slight awkwardness about it — they feel they have let it lapse, so they do nothing, and eventually a landlord’s agent or a boiler fault brings somebody else in.
Nobody chose anything. A booking simply failed to happen and no second attempt was ever made.
At a five per cent annual lapse rate on two hundred customers, that is ten households a year, £1,250 of annual service work, and every replacement boiler and callout those households would otherwise have given you. Over five years the compounding is significant, and it is entirely invisible in the accounts because the money never appears as a loss.
Why lapsed service customers come back so readily
Because there was no grievance. That is the whole reason this works.
A customer who left over a bad experience is difficult to recover. A customer who simply missed a year is not — they liked you, they know the boiler needs doing, and quite often they have been meaning to sort it out. What stops them is inertia and mild embarrassment, and both are dissolved by one plainly written contact that removes the awkwardness.
The tone is the entire trick. Not “we have missed you”. Not a discount, which implies they need buying back. Something like: your boiler was last serviced in October 2023, it is due, here are two dates this month. Factual, easy, and it does the deciding for them.
The other group worth naming is the repair-only customer. Somebody you attended once for a breakdown and never serviced. They are not lapsed exactly, but they behave the same way and they are the single largest untapped source of service customers in most gas businesses.
The ratio
Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. That is under three appliance services.
On winback: recovering six lapsed service customers is £750 a year of recurring work, plus the replacements and repairs those households produce over the following decade. A boiler at £2,000 from one of them settles the argument on its own, and the entire exercise is a query against your own records and one well-written message.
What we’d actually do
Identify the lapsed properly. Everyone with a service more than fifteen months ago and nothing since, ranked by how long they were a customer before they stopped. Long-standing customers who lapsed once are the most recoverable group of all.
A factual, dateless-of-guilt message. Last service date, boiler make, why the interval matters for the warranty, and two specific dates. No apology, no discount, no sentiment.
A landlord variant with the compliance angle. For rental properties the lapse is not merely inconvenient, and a plain reminder of the annual obligation is welcomed rather than resented.
The repair-only sweep. Everybody you have attended for a breakdown who has never had a service. Different message, larger group, and it converts.
A lapse alert, so it stops repeating. The winback fixes this year. An alert at fifteen months means next year it never gets this far.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every lapsed customer identified with their last service date
- A single, plain annual contact to that group
- Repair-only customers offered a service properly for the first time
- Alerts running at fifteen months so lapses surface early
- A rebooking rate that is a number you watch rather than an impression
The mistakes we see most
Treating a lapse as a decision. It almost never is, and writing as though it was makes the message awkward for everybody.
Discounting to win them back. It suggests the original price was wrong and it devalues every service you do afterwards.
Ignoring repair-only customers. Hundreds of households with your name in the phone and no annual arrangement.
Doing the sweep once. Lapses happen every year; the alert is what makes this permanent rather than a one-off tidy-up.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. The lapsed list and the repair-only list, both pulled from your own records with dates attached.
Weeks 5–8. The contact written and sent, with the landlord variant handled separately.
Weeks 9–12. The fifteen-month alert set up, so next year’s lapses are caught before they become winback.
At ninety days the measure is how many lapsed customers have booked. In this trade it is usually a larger number than expected, because nobody ever asked them twice.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Every service schedules the next one, so a customer who did not rebook shows as a gap rather than disappearing quietly into the list.
Churn risk flags exactly that group, which turns winback from an annual excavation into a standing alert at fifteen months.
And because job history holds the boiler make, age and what was found last time, the message can be specific — which is the difference between a reminder that books and one that gets ignored.
The property is still there when the agent changes
Landlord work lapses for a reason that has nothing to do with you, and it is worth handling separately from everything else on this page.
A managing agent loses the instruction. The landlord moves the property to a different agency, or takes it back to self-management, or sells the portfolio to somebody with their own contractor list. The flat has not moved. The boiler has not moved. The annual certificate is still legally required on the same date. But the person who used to ring you no longer has anything to do with it, and nobody thought to tell you.
From your side it looks identical to any other lapse: certificates that used to renew every year simply stop.
The recovery is different though, because the customer you need is not the one you lost. It is whoever holds the property now, and finding them is usually a matter of asking the old agent, checking who is currently letting the address, or writing to the property itself. A tenant will normally pass on a letter about a gas safety check, because it is plainly in their interest that one happens.
Worth doing because these are the cleanest wins available. There was no dissatisfaction, the obligation is unchanged, and the new agent has to appoint somebody. Being the engineer who already knows the appliance and holds the last certificate is a strong position to write from.
Questions gas engineers ask
Should I offer a discount to win them back? No. It implies the price was wrong and the reason they lapsed was almost never money.
How far back is worth going? Three years comfortably. Beyond that the boiler may well have been replaced by somebody else.
What about customers who moved house? A proportion have, and they still need an engineer at the new address. It is worth asking.
Is the repair-only group really winback? Strictly it is conversion rather than recovery, and it uses the same list and the same afternoon, which is why it belongs here.
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