CRM for HVAC Companies: Leads, Jobs and Service Tickets

Most guides to CRM for HVAC companies are really lists of field service apps with a CRM tab. That helps if your problem is getting trucks to addresses. This guide is about the other problem, the office: estimates that go cold, a property manager whose six buildings are six spreadsheet rows, and tune-up customers who only hear from you when the AC dies in July.

CRM, field service software, or both?

Buying the wrong category is the expensive mistake. Field service management (FSM) software is built around today's schedule; a CRM is built around the customer across years. Match the tool to the symptom:

If most of your ticks land in the top two rows, buy dispatch software first. If they land below, a CRM is the fix, and plenty of shops with three or more trucks end up running both. Our pillar guide to CRM for small service businesses has a broader version of this split for all trades.

What an HVAC CRM should track, record by record

HVAC has quirks that generic CRM setups handle badly, so decide up front which record holds what. Here's a layout that works in Argento:

Be clear about the equipment row: Argento has no equipment or asset record, so this is a workaround. A consistent note format makes it workable: Furnace · Carrier · 59SC5 · 2017 · 16x25x1 filter. If you service hundreds of commercial rooftop units and need per-unit histories, that's a real reason to use FSM software with an asset register.

The HVAC year, set up in your CRM

ENERGY STAR's maintenance checklist tells homeowners to have a contractor do annual pre-season checkups, with cooling checked in the spring and heating in the fall. That's a calendar your CRM should run for you, so nobody has to remember it. Here's the rhythm we'd set up:

Campaigns in Argento send from your own mailbox with {{first_name}} personalization, scheduled sending, and open and click tracking. Sending is capped at 50 emails per person per day, and a bigger list continues automatically over the following days. For a 400-customer list that means about eight days to finish, which is another reason to start the spring email in late February rather than the first warm Monday.

Replacement quotes: the follow-up most shops drop

Repair calls pay the bills; system replacements carry the year's margin, and that's where small shops lose work through silence. The homeowner gets three quotes, and the contractor who calls back usually wins. The routine:

1. Log the quote the same day. Under Deals → Add Deal, name it something you'll recognize in a list ("Ruiz – 3-ton heat pump replacement"), link the company, set priority and a due date one week out. Drop the quote PDF into the customer's folder in Documents.
2. Add the first chase. Under Tasks → Add Task, create "Call Ruiz re: heat pump quote" due two or three days after the visit, linked to the same company and contact. Turn on the reminder inside the task so an email arrives the morning it's due.
3. Send reminders where someone will see them. Under Settings → Email Preferences, reminder emails can go to a shared office inbox instead of the comfort advisor who's out on a call.
4. Review open deals every Monday. The dashboard's Open Deals count tells you how many are outstanding; the Deals list sorted by due date tells you which ones are stale.
5. Close it either way. Won becomes a project for the install. Lost gets a status and a one-line note on why (price, timing, went with the other guy). Six months of those notes is the cheapest market research you'll ever get.

One thing Argento's deals don't do is forecasting or win probability. For a shop sending a few dozen quotes a month, that's rarely a loss: what you need is a list of what's waiting on an answer, and that list is the whole point.

Worked example: an eight-person shop's Tuesday in January

Say you run an HVAC company with an owner who sells replacements, an office manager, a dispatcher, and five technicians. You use a dispatch app for the board and Argento for the customer record. Here's how one cold Tuesday plays out:

• 7:40 a.m. A homeowner fills in the "no heat" form on your WordPress site. Argento's form capture works with Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, WPForms, Elementor and plain HTML forms, so a contact appears without anyone retyping it. The office manager links it to the right company, one of a landlord's rentals already on file.
• 7:45 a.m. She opens the company and sees the note line for the furnace, installed 2012. She creates a ticket, "No heat – 14 Elm St," status Open, and passes it to the dispatcher, who books it on the board.
• 11:30 a.m. The tech finds a cracked heat exchanger and a 14-year-old furnace. The ticket moves to Waiting with a subtask, "Owner to quote replacement," and a deal is created for the replacement quote with a due date Friday.
• 3:00 p.m. The owner, who uses Claude, types: "Show me everything on file for 14 Elm St and list the landlord's other properties." Through Argento's MCP server, Claude pulls the company profile and the contact's linked companies in one answer. Setup takes a few minutes and is covered in the Help Center; our Claude CRM integration guide has more prompts.
• Thursday 8:00 a.m. The quote follow-up reminder lands in the shared inbox. The office manager calls the landlord, who approves. The deal closes; the install becomes a project.

Commercial accounts and refrigerant paperwork

Light-commercial work adds paperwork. Under the EPA's Section 608 recordkeeping rules, owners or operators of appliances with 50 or more pounds of refrigerant must keep servicing records showing the date and type of service and the quantity of refrigerant added, plus records of leak inspections and verification tests, and technicians must give the owner an invoice showing refrigerant added. Your CRM isn't a compliance system and shouldn't pretend to be. What it can do is keep copies where your office will find them: a Documents folder per commercial customer, with subfolders by year, holding the service invoices you hand over. Keep the system of record wherever your technicians create those invoices.

For multi-site accounts, make each site its own company and link the facilities manager to all of them. If service requests are most of your week, our guide to a CRM with a ticketing system goes deeper on running service requests as tickets.

What Argento won't do for an HVAC shop

Better you hear this now than in week two of a trial:

• No dispatch board or calendar. Argento has tasks with due dates and email reminders, not a schedule view. If you route more than two or three techs a day, you need scheduling software.
• No invoicing, payments or price book. Keep those in your FSM or accounting software.
• No equipment module. Notes and documents work for a residential shop; a large commercial service book needs a real asset register.
• No visual job board. Tickets, tasks and deals are list views you can search and sort, and on tickets and tasks you choose which columns show with Edit Columns. There are no drag-and-drop cards.
• No SMS or automated if-then workflows. Reminders are email; campaigns are email.

Setting up a CRM for HVAC companies in one afternoon

1. Agree on statuses first. Decide what lifecycle stage and lead status mean for you (new inquiry, quoted, customer, agreement customer) before you import a single row.
2. Import addresses, then people. Under Settings → Data Management → Import Data, import companies first, then contacts, so contacts have something to link to. Set unneeded columns to Don't Import. If an import fails, nothing is saved.
3. Add equipment notes for agreement customers first; fill in the rest as calls come in.
4. Connect your website's request form so new inquiries arrive as contacts.
5. Create next season's visit tasks for every agreement customer, reminders on.
6. Invite everyone who talks to customers, including techs who need to look up a history in the driveway.
7. Write three knowledge base articles: how you quote a replacement, what happens on an agreement visit, and how a no-heat call is triaged after hours.

What it costs when the whole crew needs a login

On per-seat CRMs every technician costs the same as the comfort advisor, which is when shops start sharing one login and records go stale. Argento is priced per plan: Starter is $25 a month for up to 10 users, Growth is $50 a month for up to 50 users, and Scale is $100 a month for up to 100. Deals, tickets, tasks and projects are unlimited on every plan.

The eight-person shop above fits on Starter. Add three summer helpers and you're at eleven people, which tips you into Growth at $50 a month. That's still a flat bill for the whole team, and it doesn't drop back down by itself in October unless you remove the extra users. Our guide to CRM without per-user pricing prices a seasonal team both ways, and the pricing page has the full plan limits.