Launch a maintenance service alongside your products or installations.

Find the reason behind the request. Does the customer want reassurance that equipment still works? Relief from organising routine work? Or someone who can act quickly when a problem occurs?

Make those distinctions explicit. A periodic inspection does not automatically include emergency response. A maintenance visit does not guarantee that every spare part is immediately available.

The customer and the employee explaining the service need to understand its boundaries. Conversations with existing customers can test which commitment has value. Interest in the idea is not yet agreement to a price and defined terms.

Distinguish a response, a visit and a resolution. A call within an agreed period does not mean someone can arrive or fix the problem within that same period. Sales needs to explain the distinction, and scheduling needs to know which capacity has actually been promised.

Work through a representative job: preparation, travel, inspection, delivery and the information returned to the customer. Then introduce an exception. A component is unavailable, something appears unsafe or the job needs more time.

What may the employee decide? When is specialist input required? Who will be available? What happens to the next scheduled customer? Distinguish an included variation, a goodwill gesture and paid extra work. The guide to handling service exceptions helps work through those decisions with the team.

These questions show whether the service fits the organisation. Support needs to exist when the service is delivered, not only when it is sold.

Include preparation, travel, communication, administration, materials and follow-up alongside the planned visit. Separate work incurred per job from capacity that must remain available.

Consider both an ordinary and an unfavourable scenario. What if customers are geographically dispersed? What if requests are more frequent than expected? What if many exceptions require your most experienced employee?

Suppose ten customers each receive a four-hour visit in the same month: forty hours on site. The amounts below are illustrative, not market rates or pricing advice. Internal staff costs are assumed to be €50 per hour, excluding the costs listed separately.

On a small screen, scroll horizontally to read the full table.

With combined monthly revenue of €5,500, this example leaves €950 after those costs. That is not an established profit: first check whether every cost of your service is included. The eight reserved hours cannot also be sold in full to other jobs.

Then test a difficult month. If planned work takes ten hours longer, travel adds five hours and materials cost an extra €150, costs rise by €900 to €5,450. Only €50 remains, with the assistance capacity still reserved. You can now make a specific decision about scheduling, price or the boundaries of the offer. The employee who discovers an exception needs to know which decisions they can make.

If you cannot reasonably keep that capacity available, start with planned maintenance and offer breakdown assistance separately. A narrower commitment that the team can deliver is stronger than availability nobody can organise.

A useful pilot goes beyond signing a proposal. Work through the agreement, scheduling, delivery, customer feedback and invoicing. Include the employees who need to resolve exceptions.

Review what the customer valued, the effort required and where decisions stalled. Agree in advance which information you need to decide whether the service is ready to expand.

Scheduling needs to reflect the capacity promised. The employee needs the agreement and relevant history. Administration needs to distinguish completed work from additional work.

For JobLog, we built the back office, business logic, backend and mobile-first PWA for crews. Recurring agreements connect with work on site and invoicing in Exact. That continuity also matters in maintenance, while the actual offer needs to be defined with your customers and team.

A well-designed service gives employees room to help without making them guess what the business has promised. Explore the service-design process or see how business process analysis connects the offer to the organisation delivering it.