The appointments that we offer are all day appointments between 8am and 9pm. We appreciate that this may seem inconvenient to people so we wanted to clarify what this means, explain why we do it and show you that this is really not as inconvenient as it may seem.
As a company, the largest proportion of our work is responding to emergency plumbing and heating jobs and repairs. This means that priorities are constantly shifting all day as different jobs come in. Factors such as how urgent or potentially dangerous the issue is, whether there are vulnerable people in the property and the location in relation to the position of our engineers all have to be taken into consideration when scheduling the day. A job that may have started as 5th or 6th in the schedule may have to be moved to later as other jobs come in. Likewise, they may become more urgent as situations develop and need to be moved up.
Another influencing factor is the nature of the work we do. If we were simply out conducting services all day, where we have a good idea how long each job will take because they’re all pretty much the same, it would be easier to stick to a fixed timetable. However, the nature of emergency jobs is that we simply don’t know what we might find when we get there; it could be a simple fix or a much more complex repair. We are therefore not in a position to estimate how long each job will take so while we may know the order of jobs during the day (which of course could change anyway) we wouldn’t know how quickly we can progress through those jobs.
You can see then that it’s impossible for us to give customers an accurate time frame for their engineer visit. We have to manage people’s expectations and we think it’s better to be completely transparent and say that it is an all day window rather than give an estimated time and not be able to deliver on that promise.
The biggest concern that people have about all day appointments is that they have to stay in all day to wait for the engineer who may not turn up until 8pm. This is not the case with our appointments. This is due to the 30 minute ‘pre-call’ that we provide. Your engineer will always call you approximately 30 minutes before they expect to arrive at your property.
That means that as long as you can be back at your house within 30 minutes you can go wherever you want. No worrying about doing the school run or popping out to the shop, or even going to work if your employer can be flexible and allow you to leave for your engineer visit.
We understand that people would prefer to have timed appointments but hopefully this does clarify why we’re not able to provide them and why we work the way we do. We are committed to providing a high level of service to our customers: our standard operating hours for both engineers and contact centre are 8am – 9pm 7 days a week and we also offer a 24 hour emergency call out service.
A plumbing emergency can be a distressing experience but we truly are here to get to you as soon as we can and resolve your issue as efficiently as we can. If you have any further queries about appointments or any other aspect of our services please call us on 0333 577 0151 or send us a message using the form to the right.
Complete the form below and one of the Plumbcare.com team will get back to you as soon as possible.
