The Plumbing Inspection Report has been one of the most popular forms that we sell through the ServiceM8 Form Store. 

And for good reason – it has become an essential tool in many plumbers’ toolkits to create revenue through the upsell of added services while on a job. 

Background   

How many times have you done work for a customer and saw there was more to be done beyond the job you were doing at the time?  

This was the case for a Sydney-based plumber, who reached out to us to develop a form that would help him, and his team perform onsite plumbing inspections. Now, we are often requested to build job-specific forms and checklists, usually to supply proof of job completion.  

But this one intrigued us as the form was to help find potential work that was not asked for but needed to be done.  

This idea is not new. We had been in discussion with an electrician several months earlier who had his staff using a similar form, but it was hardcopy and filled in the traditional way using a pen. We suggested it could be digitised using ServiceM8, but he declined. Crazy thing was he and his team were already on ServiceM8 and using a lot of its features. He just did not see the potential for digitising this form. 

The Brief 

Roll forward to this plumber who was now asking for that very thing, but for plumbing-related works. We were sold.

This form was also another case that was spurred on by a coaching business called Lifestyle Tradie. In this instance the plumber was acting on a goal to drive revenue growth by encouraging his team of plumbers to upsell while on the job.

What made this form straight-forward was the fact he had a clear idea of form design, layout, and content. This included having it divided into sections based on rooms/areas, each with a checklist of common items that would be marked Pass / Fail / or NA. All we needed to do was to get that into a digital form he could use in ServiceM8. 

The Solution Design 

This is form is another example centred on the customer experience (CX). And based on what the plumber already had in mind it did not take us long to convert the layout into a document template.  

We used an extensive amount of form question logic that would allow skipping over entire rooms/areas that did not need to be checked. This saved unnecessary effort when completing the form. 

The form can check up to 4 bathrooms, we switched it up by asking a question if it was a bathroom or an ensuite; and then reflecting on the form if it was in fact a bathroom or an ensuite.  

We also supplied options to include up to 6 photos, 3 of which were to help the owner see where key items were found on the property (the water meter, gas meter, and hot water valve) for their future reference. 

For visual impact, instead of using the words ‘Pass,’ ‘Fail,’ and ‘NA,’ we instead chose to use a green tick, a red cross, and a grey dash to symbolise those outcomes. The use of colour, especially red for elevated risk or failures, will mean the eyes are going to latch onto these red icons first, which is the desired effect. 

We also created a way for the plumber to define his own pre-set recommendation text, so he and his staff could select one or more of these recommendation options without having to manually type them in each time. Again, saving time while filling in the form.  

Complexity 

In many ways, this was a very straight forward form for us to develop. All the heavy lifting about design and content had already been considered, we just had to convert it into a ServiceM8-based form.  

Even so, the form still required us to code 134 ServiceM8-side conditional questions, and about triple that amount in terms of Word field codes that needed to be embedded into the document template. This was because for each question in the checklists, there were three answers (tick, cross, and dash). So, in the end there were about 400 field codes that needed to be created and embedded into the final document template. 

In the end, this form took about 25 hours of development effort, and in terms of cost we could have priced this around $3,125 plus taxes. However, this became another case where we decided to absorb a lot of the cost with the intention to realise a return on investment in following months. 

And so, we did, and the effort was worth it. As a result, it has been one of our most popular forms to date. In fact, we made several colour options available, which include our dark theme, blue, orange, red, and green. By far the most popular colour has been the dark theme, which is a combination of black and grey, probably because it is the most neutral. Blue has also been a popular choice. 

What makes this form attractive is the layout and simplicity for customers to readily digest the information, as everything mostly contained on a single page excluding the photos. It is also easy for the plumber to fill in while on the job. 

Modifying this form with different options and questions would be a big undertaking, but worth it depending on the intended use-case. 

Availability 

This form is now available for purchase on the ServiceM8 Form Store.