CRM & Automation · Roofers
CRM for roofing companies, built around a phone you cannot answer
A roofer is the worst-placed tradesman in Britain to answer a telephone. You are two storeys up, in the wind, with gloves on, and the person ringing has water coming through a ceiling. Everything in a roofing CRM follows from that single fact.
In short
CRM & Automation for roofers in the UK needs a different build from an off-the-shelf CRM, and this is how PipelineOS structures it. The leak is the call. Roofing enquiries arrive by phone far more than by form, they arrive when it is raining, and the person ringing will try three numbers in ten minutes. The first automation to switch on is Missed-call text-back: recovers the caller who was already dialling the next roofer. The most common way this goes wrong: treating voicemail as follow-up.
How we build it
The leak is the call. Roofing enquiries arrive by phone far more than by form, they arrive when it is raining, and the person ringing will try three numbers in ten minutes. So the first build decision is not the pipeline, it is what happens in the sixty seconds after a call rings out. The pipeline itself stays short: new enquiry, triaged, inspection booked, quoted, chasing, won and scheduled, completed. Triage is the stage that matters, because a leak and a re-roof are the same word to a receptionist and two completely different businesses to you.
Triggers, in order of how much they recover. A missed call fires a text within about a minute saying you are on a roof, asking whether it is a leak or planned work, and offering the next inspection slot. An enquiry tagged emergency starts a timer: if nobody has moved it out of new enquiry in fifteen minutes it escalates to a second phone. Enquiries arriving during a named storm or an amber wind warning are tagged automatically to the weather event, which is how you find out in March what February actually generated, and which lets you send a single honest holding message about lead times rather than losing forty people to silence.
The re-roof sequence is the money. A survey happens, a £7,000 quote goes out, and in most firms that is the last contact. The system sends a text at day two asking whether the figure landed as expected, an email at day nine with two similar completed jobs and the guarantee wording, and a message at day twenty-one saying the price holds until a stated date. Twelve months after completion a gutter and moss check reminder goes out, which is the only recurring revenue most roofers never build.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Missed-call text-back | Any inbound call that rings out or goes to voicemail, seven days a week including out of hours | Recovers the caller who was already dialling the next roofer. On a wet week this single automation handles more enquiries than the website does. |
| Storm and wind-warning tagging | Enquiry received while a named storm or amber warning is active in your coverage area | Prevents a fortnight of chaos being invisible in the numbers, and triggers the holding message that stops overflow enquiries silently going cold. |
| Re-roof quote sequence | Quote value over a threshold you set, marked as sent in the pipeline | Recovers the buyer who collected three prices and got busy. Runs day two, day nine and day twenty-one rather than stopping after one polite email. |
| Twelve-month roof check | Anniversary of a completed job, and the guarantee anniversary thereafter | Turns a one-off customer into a returning one, and puts you on the roof again before a small problem becomes somebody else’s emergency callout. |
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Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the build involves
The build is a fortnight of setup rather than software development: the call-tracking and forwarding sorted so ring-outs are detectable, seven pipeline stages agreed with whoever answers the phone, the text and email templates written in your voice rather than a template library’s, and every enquiry route — website form, Google Business Profile messages, Facebook, the mobile everyone actually rings — landing in one place. The recurring cost is a platform subscription, commonly £50–£120 a month for a firm this size, covering the pipeline, the calendar, and the text and email sending volume that the automations consume.
The arithmetic is unusually blunt in roofing. Take a firm fielding sixty enquiries a month and missing a quarter of the calls, which is conservative for a trade working outdoors. That is fifteen missed callers, most of whom ring someone else. Recovering even a third of them is five extra conversations, and an emergency repair is commonly worth £300–£900. Separately, one recovered re-roof quote at £6,000–£12,000 a quarter, won purely because it was chased at day twenty-one, pays for the platform for several years.
Four ways this goes wrong
- Treating voicemail as follow-up. A voicemail greeting asking someone with a ceiling leak to leave a message is a polite way of sending them to the next roofer.
- One pipeline for leaks and re-roofs. The emergency work moves through in hours and makes the board look healthy while three five-figure quotes sit untouched behind it.
- Quote follow-up that stops at day three. Re-roof buyers are waiting on a partner, a payday or two more prices, and the useful contact is the one at three weeks.
- No record of which storm produced which enquiry. Come the next wind warning you have no idea whether to put two crews on standby or four, so you guess and either turn work away or pay men to wait.
The two pages behind this one
This page is the intersection. For the wider picture:
CRM & Automation in general
Everything about marketing for roofers
Questions
Will the text-back annoy someone who rang by mistake?
Very rarely, provided it reads like you wrote it. A short message saying you are on a roof, cannot pick up safely, and will ring back within the hour is read as competence rather than automation. The ones that irritate people are the long, cheerful, obviously templated ones with a marketing sign-off, so we write the wording with you and keep it to two sentences.
Can it handle the surge after a storm?
It handles the honesty rather than the volume. When forty enquiries arrive in two days you cannot attend forty roofs, so the system tags them to the weather event, sends everyone a realistic lead time, and holds the non-urgent ones in a sequence that checks back in a week. Most of those people are still unrepaired a fortnight later, and nobody has spoken to them.
Does this replace the diary and the job sheets?
No, and we would not try. The CRM owns enquiries, quotes and follow-up, which is where roofing firms lose money. Scheduling, materials, day rates and invoicing usually stay in whatever job management software you already run, and the two are linked so a job marked complete there triggers the review request and the twelve-month check here.
Related
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CRM & Automation for your roofer business
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