Foggy-glass season is here. What a window repair shop should have ready before the first hard frost
The first cold mornings make every failed insulated unit visible. A checklist for the next three weeks so the fall foggy-window calls turn into booked installs, not voicemail.
The first morning under freezing does something no ad can do. Every failed insulated unit in town shows fog, and homeowners who have ignored a cloudy slider since March walk past it with coffee and decide today is the day. In most of the country that morning is one to three weeks out. This is what to have in place before it arrives.
The phone
The foggy-unit caller is not an emergency caller. She will leave a voicemail, sometimes. More often she will call the next shop. With the fall surge, the owner is on a ladder more hours than usual, and the miss rate climbs exactly when the calls are worth the most.
Before the frost: a missed-call text that goes out in seconds, from the number she dialed, asking for a photo of the window. A photo lets you quote a range by text within the hour and book the measure in the same thread. Shops that turned this on last fall recovered a third to half of the calls that used to vanish. The missed-call guide has the exact message.
Also: check the hours on your Google profile. 26% of window and glass repair listings have none, and Google treats that as possibly closed. Takes two minutes.
The price
The foggy-unit customer asks what it costs before she books. A shop that says "I have to see it" loses to a shop that says "usually $280 to $520 a unit installed, and the measure is free". Put the range on the phone script, on the website's foggy-glass page and on the Google profile's services list. The pricing guide covers how to present good, better and best so a one-unit call becomes a three-unit job.
The multi-unit line matters most this time of year. A house with one foggy pane has three. "$420 for one, $380 each for three or more" on the quote gets the other two done now instead of next fall.
The lead time
Insulated units are made to order and manufacturers slow down in November. Tell every caller the real lead time on the first call, and put it on the website: "measured this week, installed in 5 to 10 business days". The customer who hears a date relaxes. The customer who hears nothing calls someone else to compare and books whichever shop measured first.
If your supplier's lead time stretches past two weeks in the surge, say that too, and offer the January install at the fall price with the measure done now. Many customers prefer it, and it is how a shop fills the quiet weeks after the holidays. More on that in the slow-season plan.
The photos
Every foggy unit you replace in the next month is a before-and-after you will use for a year. Same window, same angle, cloudy then clear. One photo each, from the phone, into a shared album. By Thanksgiving you have thirty of them and the Meta retargeting campaign, the Google profile posts and the website's foggy-glass page all have fresh, local, real images instead of a stock photo of a window.
Post one a week on the profile with the town and the house age. "Four fogged units on a 1994 colonial in Westerville, measured last Tuesday, installed this morning." That sentence does more for the next search than any slogan.
The ask
The fall customer is relieved when the fog is gone and the room looks right again. That is when the review gets asked for, at the door, with the text sent before the truck leaves. The median glass shop has 26 reviews; the map pack in most metros is held by shops past 100. Thirty foggy-unit installs in November, asked for at the door, is ten to twelve reviews. The reviews guide has the three sentences.
The ads
If you run Google Ads, the foggy campaign should be live now and the broken-glass campaign should keep its budget; storm season is not over in the south and break-ins rise into December. Check the search terms report this week for windshield and auto terms that crept in over the summer.
If you run Meta, this is the one stretch of the year where a cold campaign with a before-and-after and a price pays. $20 a day, September through November, with a three-field lead form and a five-minute reply.
The checklist
- Missed-call text live on the shop line, asking for a photo.
- Hours on the Google profile, services list with a foggy-unit price.
- Price range and lead time on the website's foggy-glass page.
- Multi-unit pricing on the written quote.
- Before-and-after photo on every install, one post a week.
- The review ask at the door, every job.
- Search terms report checked, Meta before-and-after campaign running.
None of this costs more than an afternoon. All of it is the difference between a November of booked installs and a November of voicemails and "I will think about it".
If you would rather have it set up for you, any one of these is a service in the free 14-day trial. No card. Text or call (385) 380-5907.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, window repair companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor