Five steps, in this order, every time. The order is the argument: nothing gets priced before somebody has seen it, and nothing gets sold on a schedule before somebody has seen it twice.
Before anybody is dispatched you get asked the questions that decide the size of the job: how many fixtures, which one goes first, is there a cleanout, is the property on city sewer or a tank. If the answer is one slow shower and everything else is fine, you are told that on the phone so you are not braced for a main line bill.
Diagnosis is not a reason to leave a family without a bathroom for a day. The line is cabled with a head sized to the pipe, and where there is a camera on the truck the run is checked afterwards to confirm what was cut has gone through to the main rather than been left in the low points for next week.
First time, with an obvious cause, a camera is an upsell and we will say so. Second or third time, it is the only honest thing to offer, because a repeat means something in that pipe is catching in the same place and the interval is the only thing that ever changes. You stand at the screen while it runs.
Every observation goes on the sheet with its distance from the cleanout and its depth below grade, along with the pipe material, where the material changes, where water stands and how much of the run was under water and therefore not really seen. Any defect worth repairing is located from the surface and painted, so the repair is a hole rather than a search. You keep the sheet and a copy of the recording.
The repair is quoted against a known defect at a known depth, with the parts of the line that are sound named as sound. Anything you asked for that we are not willing to do goes on the same document, at $0.00, with the reason next to it — because a decline that is left off the paperwork is just a conversation nobody can check afterwards.
No price over the phone on a line nobody has seen. No price from a photograph. No jetting an old line before somebody has looked inside it. No recurring service agreement sold on a defect that was never diagnosed. And no invoice that says “cleared” when the run sheet says the line will do this again before Christmas.
Stop putting water into a blocked main — every gallon comes back up at the lowest opening indoors. Tell us if a caustic opener has already gone down, because it changes how the job is set up and nobody minds. Say where the cleanout is if you know. And if somebody has cabled this line before, tell us when and how often: that history is the most useful thing you own and it is usually the thing nobody thinks to mention.
Tell us what it is doing and the office will call you back to agree a time. You will leave the visit holding whatever we wrote down.
Scripted demonstration. It cannot book, hold or confirm a time, and it will not quote a price.