For Stillman Jordan, who runs a service company that handles commercial and residential customers in four states, it can be a pain to tailor preventative maintenance agreements (PMAs) to meet the needs of large manufacturers and homeowners.
But the president of Connecticut-based ENCON Heating & AC considers them crucial to the long-term success of his company.
“I think (PMAs are) one of the most important things we do,” he said during a recent webinar on the best practices for PMAs hosted by Service Council. “Face time with customers is how you build a relationship.”
Jordan’s priorities dovetail with recent industry data that shows PMAs are a must for service companies hoping to thrive in 2025 and beyond.
Service Council, a trusted community of 75,000 business execs overseeing functions of service and customer management, has partnered with ServiceTitan to share insights with service leaders and executives in the trades.
According to Service Council, top performing service companies secured extended service contracts with nearly 90% of their customers in 2024. PMAs are “also part of the pathway to monetization,” said Service Council founder and CEO John Carroll.
It’s simple math: PMAs reduce downtime and extend the life of equipment, keeping customers happy. And happy customers become long-term customers, boosting revenue and growth.
Jordan also loves that PMAs allow companies to be more in control of when they work on equipment instead of simply reacting to emergencies. But managing 300-plus employees and a customer base with wide-ranging needs helped him understand how PMAs are evolving.
“Do you just want us to change a filter and punch a drain and get out at a low price?” he said. “Is this a commercial application where you're taking care of data centers and you absolutely cannot have downtime?”
“I can't just give you, ‘here's my cookie-cutter proposal for preventative maintenance.”
Compiling info to boost efficiency, retain customers
Recognizing the need to find a platform that could handle ENCON’s commercial and residential needs, Jordan reached out to Alex Kablanian, general manager for commercial and construction markets for ServiceTitan, which provides all-in-one software for contracting businesses.
The software has helped Jordan deal with headaches that can arise with PMAs, like deciding which technician to send to a job. If a customer has a preferred technician, a company might have to weigh whether it should send one who is available immediately or closer to the job.
ServiceTitan’s software makes life easier in those situations, allowing companies to compile info about each job – like a roster of preferred techs and details of the work history – which Kablanian views as crucial to retaining customers.
“We have an internal saying – how do we make every tech feel like the primary tech for any given situation?” he said.
That’s important, because it helps companies answer more difficult questions, like how will they manage complex properties with several assets? And how will they keep track of all the variables in their service contracts?
For Kablanian, compiling information is the key.
“You need that information hierarchy such that anyone who shows up there knows what happened, what did we quote in the past, so that you're not only an expert on a customer, or a location, but even on very complex pieces of equipment.
“You build that up to deliver a really good end experience, regardless of who the customer is. Could be a restaurant, could be a data center, could be a residential property.”
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Innovation is the path to progress
Jordan envisions a day when it’s easy to create and execute agreements that meet every customer’s needs.
“In order to do (PMAs) right, you need to have 30 different flavors,” he said. “You want to customize it to different people, to what customers want.
“And the answer to that is AI, right? That's the thing that's got to enable all this stuff.”
Kablanian agrees that harnessing artificial intelligence is the next step for the industry.
“There's a lot of fancy things that can be done here,” he said. “There are flexibility needs for these types of markets, because no property, no technician, no set of equipment is created equal, and everyone's looking for different things.
“So it’s definitely a burden to manage for sure, but also a very beautiful prize on the other end if you can get it right, and you can build a business like Stillman and his team.”
