Why AMC contracts lapse, and how to stop it
Nobody decides to lose an AMC. It expires on a Tuesday, nobody looks at the list that week, and four months later the customer has signed with whoever called them first.
By Edynex Technologies · · 6 min read
Why AMC is worth protecting
For most dealers, AMC is the only revenue that arrives without being sold again every month. It also holds the customer: the contract puts your engineer in their building four times a year, which is four chances to catch the failing compressor before a competitor does.
That makes a lapsed contract expensive twice — the contract value, and the relationship that quietly moves to somebody else.
The four places contracts leak
- ▸Nobody owns the list. Renewals belong to whoever remembers. In a busy season, nobody remembers.
- ▸The reminder comes too late. A call on the expiry date is a negotiation from behind. Six weeks earlier, it is a routine renewal.
- ▸The schedule was never made. A contract with four visits a year and no dates becomes two visits, then an unhappy customer who will not renew.
- ▸Nobody can prove the visits happened. At renewal the customer asks what they got for the money. If the answer is a memory rather than a record, the price conversation goes badly.
Build the schedule at signing, not later
The single highest-value habit: the moment a contract is signed, the visits for its whole term exist as scheduled work. Not a note to create them, not a reminder — the actual visits, dated.
This changes two things. Your service planning stops being reactive, because next month's preventive visits are already in the list. And at renewal you can show exactly which visits were done, when, by whom, and what was replaced.
Work a renewal window, not a date
A renewal is not an event on the expiry date; it is a window around it.
Roughly six weeks before expiry, the contract should appear on a working list — early enough to schedule the conversation with the last preventive visit of the term, which is the best moment to ask, because your engineer is standing in their plant room having just done the work.
Keep a grace period after expiry too. Customers go quiet for a month for ordinary reasons, and a contract that vanished from the list the day it expired is one nobody calls back about.
In Nexus HVAC these are the defaults: contracts appear 45 days before expiry and stay visible for 30 days after. The exact numbers matter less than having both a lead time and a grace window at all.
What the renewal conversation needs
Three facts, ready before you dial. None of them should take an afternoon to assemble.
- ▸Visits done this term, with dates — the answer to "what did we get for it".
- ▸What was replaced or repaired, and what it cost them outside the contract, if anything.
- ▸The machines covered, by serial number, so the renewal is priced on what they actually run today rather than what they had three years ago.
Comprehensive or non-comprehensive: decide it in the record
Whatever your terms, the system must hold which one applies to each contract, because it decides whether a spare on a visit is billable. Dealers lose real money here: a part fitted under a non-comprehensive contract, issued off the van, never billed, because the engineer assumed it was covered.
The fix is not a policy document. It is that the cover is recorded against the contract, and the person logging the job sees it at the moment they log it.