The customer loyalty tool
for you, the building tradesperson

Eighteen months of silence, then a call at 10pm

You do flawless work, the customer thanks you warmly, they say they'll keep your number — and you don't see them again for one to three years. The night their water heater fails, they don't search for your name: they search for whoever picks up. They type "plumber open now" into their phone, land on a referral platform, and you lose a customer you'd actually already won. The magnet on the fridge disappeared in a move, the business card is at the bottom of a kitchen drawer. This isn't a quality-of-work problem, it's a memory-availability problem. Loyalty for a tradesperson therefore has nothing to do with loyalty for a walk-in business: the goal isn't to bring people back more often, it's to already be the name on their phone at the moment of the emergency. A card in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet has the advantage of surviving a phone change, which no business card does.

From €120 to €6,000: the trap of a badly calibrated program

This is the most common mistake when a tradesperson copies a retail program. Your amounts have no consistency: a €130 drain unblock, a €1,800 electrical panel, a €4,500 boiler, a €12,000 custom kitchen. With a "1 point per euro" rule, the customer who replaces their boiler clears every tier at once and you end up owing a reward that did nothing to bring them back; the one who calls you twice for repairs never reaches anything. The rule that holds up in this trade is counting by job: three visits, then a reward on the fourth, optionally topped up with a bonus above a certain project size. Second trap, just as costly: a percentage discount. Five percent on a €4,500 job is €225 — an amount no tradesperson's margin absorbs. The rewards that work have a fixed, known-in-advance cost: a free call-out or diagnostic, a free annual service, €50 off the next job, a pre-winter inspection.

Seasonal lulls, platforms, and the customer file you already have

A heating engineer barely sleeps from October to February, then watches their schedule empty out in May. A carpenter lives the opposite: everyone wants their windows before summer, nobody thinks about it in November. During the lulls, the temptation is to buy quote requests from a marketplace, which takes its commission and keeps the customer. But you already have, in your old invoices, the exact list of people who trusted you — except it isn't usable. A loyalty file makes it usable: your customers sorted by date of last job, and a legitimate follow-up reason that genuinely exists in the trade. The annual boiler service is legally required for the occupant. Chimney sweeping is mandated by local health regulations. A pre-winter installation check or spring wood treatment explain themselves in one sentence. These follow-ups don't read as prospecting: they fill your schedule in the off-season, with no commission, and your customers thank you for thinking of it before they did.