Should a plumber quote over the phone?
A number given before anybody has seen the job is either too low to honour or too high to win, and there is no way to know which until you arrive.
Why is quoting over the phone a bad idea?
Because the caller describes the symptom, not the job. What they call a leaking tap is sometimes a tap and sometimes a corroded feed behind a tiled wall, and those are not the same price.
Quote for the tap and you either absorb the difference or have an argument on site. Quote for the wall and you lose every job that really was a tap.
What should be captured instead of a price?
What the problem is, property type and age, access and parking, when they need it, and whether anything is currently leaking or unsafe. Then book the estimate.
Photographs are worth asking for. A picture of the thing under the sink answers more than five minutes of description.
Do callers accept not getting a price?
Most do, provided they are told a range exists and when they will get a firm number. What loses them is vagueness, not the absence of a figure.
Publishing a callout fee and a rough hourly rate handles most of it. Callers who cannot find any indication of price assume the worst and ring somebody who published one.
Also asked
- What about a fixed-price job like a boiler service?
- Standard work with a published price is fine to state, because it is genuinely fixed. The rule is about jobs whose scope is unknown until somebody looks.
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