CRM & Automation · Glaziers
CRM for glaziers, starting with the board-up nobody followed up
A window goes through at eleven on a Friday night. You board it, take a card payment, and drive home. Six weeks later the householder has a new unit fitted by somebody else. That sequence happens in every glazing firm in Britain and it is not a sales failure, it is an absence of anything that remembers.
In short
CRM & Automation for glaziers in the UK needs a different build from an off-the-shelf CRM, and this is how PipelineOS structures it. Glazing runs two clocks at once and the system has to hold both. The emergency clock is minutes: a smashed shopfront or a broken patio door produces a caller who will try four numbers, and the firm that answers or texts back first takes the job. The first automation to switch on is Out-of-hours capture and text-back: emergency glazing demand arrives at the worst possible times and the caller is ringing a list. The most common way this goes wrong: treating a board-up as a completed job.
How we build it
Glazing runs two clocks at once and the system has to hold both. The emergency clock is minutes: a smashed shopfront or a broken patio door produces a caller who will try four numbers, and the firm that answers or texts back first takes the job. The planned clock is months: a full window replacement is quoted, compared against two others, and decided somewhere between February and the following autumn. A single pipeline that mixes them makes the board looks busy while the five-figure opportunities sit still, so the build starts by splitting them at the point of capture.
The board-up sequence is the automation almost nobody has and the reason this page exists. When an emergency job is marked complete, a timer starts. Two days later a message goes out offering a measured quote for the permanent unit, because at that point the customer is looking at plywood every morning and is highly motivated. A week later, a note about whether the insurer is covering it and what you need from them, which is the actual obstacle in most cases. A fortnight later, a final offer to measure. Boarding is low-margin work that exists to produce replacement work, and without the sequence it mostly does not.
Then the gap that generates the complaints. Units are made to measure and the wait between survey and fit runs to weeks, during which the customer hears nothing and assumes they have been forgotten. Automate that silence away: a confirmation when the deposit clears stating the expected fit window, a message when the frames are ordered, another when they arrive, then a fit confirmation the day before saying who is coming and what needs clearing. On completion the FENSA or CERTASS registration goes off and the customer gets told what the certificate is and when it will arrive, followed by the review request a few days later once the house has been lived in with the new windows.
What runs automatically
What fires, when, and what it stops you losing. Every one of these runs without anybody remembering to do it.
| Automation or stage | What triggers it | What it recovers |
|---|---|---|
| Out-of-hours capture and text-back | Any call outside office hours or any call that rings out, including nights and weekends | Emergency glazing demand arrives at the worst possible times and the caller is ringing a list. An immediate text with a realistic arrival window holds the job. |
| Board-up to replacement sequence | An emergency job marked complete, running at day two, day nine and day twenty-one | Converts low-margin boarding into a measured replacement. This is the single largest recoverable sum in a glazing firm and almost no one automates it. |
| Survey-to-fit progress messages | Deposit cleared, frames ordered, frames received, fit confirmation the day before | Removes the four weeks of silence that generate chase calls and poor reviews. It costs nothing and it changes how the whole job feels to the customer. |
| Certificate and review on completion | Job marked complete, triggering the FENSA or CERTASS registration and a review request a few days after | Stops certificates being registered in batches at month end and asks for the review at the point of greatest satisfaction rather than weeks later. |
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Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the build involves
The configuration work is mostly about capture and about wording. Emergency calls need routing so an out-of-hours ring-out is detectable, the two pipelines need separating at the point the enquiry arrives rather than by hand afterwards, and the progress-update messages need to map to the stages your supplier actually gives you. The messages themselves want writing in the voice of whoever the customer met. The mechanics of the call handling itself are covered in the missed-call text-back guide. The platform subscription is paid to the software vendor directly.
The leak is easy to price in this trade because boarding is countable. Suppose a firm does six emergency board-ups a month. Nationally these are almost never followed up in any system, so assume all six go cold. A replacement unit or door commonly runs £400–£1,400, with a full house of windows at £5,000–£12,000. If the sequence converts even one board-up a month into a replacement at £900 with a forty per cent gross margin, that is about £4,300 of gross profit a year from work you had already attended and paid a van to reach. Add the planned side: forty enquiries a month, a fifth of the calls missed and half of those gone for good, is roughly fifty lost conversations a year before anybody quotes anything.
Four ways this goes wrong
- Treating a board-up as a completed job. It is a customer with plywood where a window should be, and they are going to buy a unit from somebody within the month.
- One pipeline for emergency and replacement. The fast work churns through and makes the board look healthy while the five-figure quotes go stale behind it.
- Total silence between survey and fit. The customer rings twice to ask, decides you are disorganised, and mentions it in the review even though the windows are perfect.
- Asking for the review on the day of installation while somebody is hoovering up the mess. Wait a few days, when they have opened and closed the thing a dozen times.
The two pages behind this one
This page is the intersection. For the wider picture:
CRM & Automation in general
Everything about marketing for glaziers
Questions
Is an automatic text really appropriate at two in the morning?
For an inbound emergency call, yes, and customers read it as competence. Someone who has just rung a glazier at two in the morning wants to know a human being exists and when they will arrive. What matters is the wording: a short, specific message with a realistic time, not a cheerful marketing template with a sign-off.
Will the board-up follow-up look like we are profiteering?
Not if the first message is useful rather than a pitch. Asking whether they are claiming on insurance, telling them what the insurer will usually want and offering to measure while the board is still up is a service. The version that grates is a sales message with no information in it, sent the morning after.
We already use a window design and quoting package. Does this conflict?
No, and we would not replace it. The quoting package prices the job and the CRM owns everything around it: how the enquiry arrived, whether anybody rang back, what happened after the quote went out, and the progress updates during the wait. They connect so a quote marked sent in one starts the follow-up in the other, and the terms are defined in the glossary if any of that is unfamiliar.
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