What is a Membership/Subscription 

Within the ServiceWorks software, you have the ability to create different types of memberships to offer your customers. These will operate much like a typical subscription service, where a fee is charged in exchange for exclusive services or benefits, with additional terms and conditions for the subscription. 

You can designate specific services and discounts for each individual membership created, giving you more options to meet your customer’s needs. 

What is a Contract? 

A contract differs from a membership in that a contract will have specified number of visits or services that need to be done. A contract for example could be a maintenance type of contract where the customer is paying your to come to their house on quarterly basis to provide maintenance on a product. The contract outlines how many visits will be done and what services will be provided. 

What is the difference between the two? 

The difference between a contract and a membership is that: 

• A contract will have a specified number of visits/services that must happen whether monthly, quarterly or yearly. Reminders are sent out to the customer to remind them it is time for a scheduled appointment 

• A membership gives them 3 visits, for example, per year, and it is up to the customer to go through the steps to schedule those. Reminders are not normally sent out. It is up to the customer to track their usage. 

How can I send out memberships? 

• As and Admin –  

1. From inside ServiceWorks, the “admin” will go to the customer profile page. In the customer profile they will find a membership section (if permissions allow) where they can click “+Add New” to add a membership option to the customer 
2. Once added they will have the options to select the appropriate membership, the start date of that membership, the end date and the billing date. 
   
3. Once that information is supplied, click the save icon “Little diskette” 
4. Now three dots appear at the end of the row.  
   
5. Upon hovering over the three dots, you will have options: 
6. Edit – Edit the membership information 
7. Delete – Remove the membership from the customer 
8. Registration Link – will allow your admin to preview the registration payment page 
9. Send Registration email – will send the customer the welcome email (setup below) that will include the link to pay for the membership. 

As a Technician

• Once setup in the system, when the technician clicks the “Pay” button in the mobile app, they will get a pop up to remind them to offer the membership to the customer. At this time they can review the membership and the customer can pay and sign for the membership while the tech is at the house. 

Setting up a Membership/Subscription 

This is a bit of a lengthy blog due to the setup screens used for a membership/subscription/contract.

Once you are logged into ServiceWorks, open the configuration settings 

In the left panel scroll down to Membership 

Under the membership group you will see: 

• Membership 

• Recurring Service Type 

• Service Reminder Template 

• Contract Notification Template 

• Registration Notification 

First let’s setup our framework for the membership. 

Click on the option “Recurring Service Type”, if this is your first time to do a membership setup you will see an “Add New” button on the screen 

Click the button, and you will be presented with a form to complete. 

This form is where you will set up how often you will provide the service included in the membership. 

We will go through this section by section 

First section: Name and Description 

Here you will give the template a name such as “Service Plus” as shown above, or whatever your service plan will be called 

Below that in the description field, briefly describe what is included in this service plan 

Next, we will cover the recurrence

On the left side you can set a repetition of weekly, monthly or yearly 

OR 

You can offer a certain number of visits per year.  

In this example it is set up that the customer can get 3 visits per year in their membership plan 

(This is one or the other, please do not set both left and right side.) 

Next is the job description section: 

This just gives you the option to expand on the smaller brief description you entered in the first section. 

Lastly you can set the discounted rate on labor or parts, if that will be part of your membership plan. (You will need to have your discount setup in your discount settings before they can be seen in the dropdown menu.) 

When you have things filled out to your liking click the “Save” button 

Once saved you will see you now have a template built under Recurring Service Type

Next, we will cover 

Service Reminder Template 

Reminders are mainly used if you are setting up a “Contract” type of plan where you are required to reach out to the customer to ensure they are setting up the appropriate appointments. Memberships will rely on the customer reaching out. 

Again, if this is your first time setting up, you will see a blank screen with an “Add New” button. You guessed it! Click that button! 

Upon clicking the “Add New” button the setup screen will be shown 

Give the reminder template a name. Sticking with our Silver Plus plan, we will type that into the field 

After that, to the right of the Configuration button, you can see a “Template” button, please click that to move to the next setup screen. 

We now have more options to setup

Let’s cover the top section first, 

You can tell by the highlight we are working with the email template that will go out to your customers,

1. This check box, if checked will automatically send out the reminder to your guests at the appropriate time to remind them they need to setup one of their appointments that is covered in the membership. 

2. In this field you can change the email address you want your customer to see, instead of Sales@xyz.com you can have something like membership@xyz.com if you have a mailbox to monitor those emails. Note: the domain must be the same, or the email will fail. 

3. The subject of the email you want your customer to see in their email list. In this example we have gone with “Your Silver Plus membership appointment reminder” 

Next, we need to create the email that will go to your customer. (Remember this is for contracts, where you are required to meet a certain number of visits to the customer. For membership this would be left blank) 

As you can see you can type any verbiage you would like to convey to your customer. Our legend can be opened by clicking the “Legen” button on the right of the screen. Once opened it will display all the Dynamic links you can include (as shown above) 

Dynamic links are like mail-merge, anything thing in their account or jobs can be pulled from there and entered into this template, in the above example we are pulling the customers first name, and at the end of the email we are pulling the company logo, name, and phone number from the company settings. 

Next, by clicking on the SMS Template tab at the top of the form you can setup the text message that would go to your customer. Many of the links used in the email can be used in the text message as well. 

You can also click the Robo Call Template to set that up as well 

As you can see by the red numbers, robocall is limited to 160 characters. Robocall is used when your customer might have a landline that cannot take text messages, a robocall will be placed as well to cover the bases. 

Contract Notification Template 

As the name implies this is where you will spell out the legalese of the membership. They will receive this via email after they sign up through the membership registration link. 

We will start off as usual by clicking the “Add New” button

That will present you with the familiar template screen, in this example,  we have used Membership Contract email, as a friendly name so we can remember what this is 

Next we will click on the “Template” tab at the top to open the next template 

As you can see we have the usual send automatically check box, the email field if you want this to have a different email address (remember it has to end in the same domain name as your other email addresses) 

And we have the email subject line. 

The difference on this template is that you will probably not use the SMS template or the robocall. You would not want to represent a legal binding contract in a text message. You can skip those 

Below that we have the large field to type up your contract with the customer. As you can see this can also use dynamic links to populate data 

Registration Notification 

The registration notification is the email that your admin/dispatcher/membership campaign person would send out from service works. 

To get started click the “Add New” button 

Much like our other templates, lets give this a name 

And then we will click on the Template button again to access the email and text portion of the template 

This portion functions just like the templates you have done above so we won’t bore you with the same steps again. Once that top section is filled out to your satisfaction, we can fill in the email portion of the template 

This again can be typed out as to how you would like it to display to your customers, and again you can use the legend to insert Dynamic links into your email.  The email received from this template is shown below 

Clicking on the SMS Template tab you can also update the text that would be sent to your customer. 

With the unreliability of emails, like being blocked, going into a junk folder, an alternate text message to go out is always a good thing. 

Now that we have all of the parts created let’s make a Membership!! 

Creating the membership package 

In the configuration settings, scroll down to “Membership” and select “Membership” from the expanded menu. 

You will see the familiar “Add New” button, let’s click that button! 

We will be going through the 5 tabs to set up your membership. 

Tab 1 – Membership 

Above, you can see a place to enter the name of the membership, and a description of what is covered in the membership/contract plan 

In the next section we are going to setup the billing frequency 

Most memberships are annual, however in that drop down we do offer weekly, monthly, yearly, Quarterly and Bi-Annual billing recurrences. 

Beneath that is the option for renewal. By turning the toggle on, you are allowing the customer to decide if they want to renew the membership 

If the toggle is left off, the system will not review the membership 

Note: in an upcoming release there will also be the option available to just renew the membership without notifying the customer 

Tab 2 – Service Frequency 

Next is the Service Frequency tab 

On this screen we will click the white box, which is actually a drop down, and you will see the Service Plus template we built earlier 

You will notice, that there is the +Add New link, you can click to create templates on the fly. In this user’s experience it is easier to the setup above first and then setup your membership. 

Click the add button, to the right to add this template to your membership 

Next up is Tab 3 – Commission 

This allows your employees to gain commission on memberships they sell. Keep in mind this is by role not but actual employee. 

Clicking the “Add New” button add a row to set a role commission rate 

In the example above dispatchers and Professionals get a flat rate of 25.00 for each membership the sell. 

Tab 4 – Terms and Conditions 

This is basically your disclaimer that will be presented in the approval link that is sent to your customer. 

In the top section, you can give the disclaimer a name. In the bottom section you can type out you terms and conditions. 

When sent out with the email this will be shown under the payment information. 

They can see all of the details, and below that are the options to accept the membership, agree to the contract renewal and the “Approve” button 

At that point the customer accepts and pays for the membership a gold star will be shown in ServiceWorks next to the company name 

(Picture blurred for privacy) 

Manage your membership / contracts, helpful blog is here