You always feel like you could use a little more help in your home services business. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be your extra set of hands as well as a powerful tool for digging deeper into customers’ wants and needs. But, it is not enough to choose a platform that uses AI. It’s essential to apply it to the specific needs of your business.
CallRail understands the many challenges facing home services businesses, such as the consistent labor shortage. You may have more business than you have staff to handle it, leading to missed customer inquiries and neglected leads. Your team may also be so busy with service calls that there is often little time for essential administrative tasks, resulting in piled-up messages and forgotten sticky notes.
However, letting leads and customer inquiries slip through the cracks is hurting your business. Your retention and customer referral rates are lower than you’d like, but you lack the time and tools to gauge what your customers are saying and apply those insights to improve the customer experience. At the same time, intense competition in the industry means you’re always worried about keeping ahead of competitors. Without a dedicated marketer or team to help analyze tactics or results, you may spend a lot on marketing but not know which ads work best.
You’ll see a lot of companies offering AI as part of their call tracking or marketing tools, but AI isn’t enough if it’s not solving your challenges. The robust features in CallRail’s AI-powered Premium Conversation Intelligence™ are proven to deliver value and resolve challenges for the home service industry.
Jimbo Fogarty, Chief Idea Farmer at Brand Ranch Media, uses Premium Conversation Intelligence to help home service businesses learn more about their customers and make better marketing decisions. “The AI can automatically transcribe the conversation, and we can tell what the tone of the conversation was without ever listening to it–that’s extremely beneficial.”
Here’s how CallRail’s AI offerings will help you stand out in the competitive home service industry and help alleviate many of the business and marketing challenges you face.
How CallRail’s AI helps home services businesses
- Improves conversion rates
- Increases the value of each job
- Boosts efficiency
- Provides clearer insights
- Enhances the customer experience
Improves conversion rates
Every lead requires some level of effort and investment, so improving your conversion rate can have a significant payoff.
Here are some ways the AI features included in Premium Conversation Intelligence can help you convert leads more effectively:
- Summarizing key details about lead quality. After a consultation call with a homeowner interested in garden redesign, a landscaper can review call summary and sentiment reports to gauge the customer's enthusiasm and commitment. This information can help prioritize leads and tailor subsequent interactions accordingly. For instance, you can identify a high-quality lead worth pursuing based on positive sentiments, a detailed transcript, and a brief summary of the call outlining specific project requirements.
- Improving lead qualification for higher quality leads. Ensure that valuable leads are identified promptly, allowing resources to be allocated effectively for maximum impact. For instance, AI listens for phrases like “emergency plumbing service” to automatically qualify the lead based on the automation rule set up by the plumbing company.
- Providing tailored conversation feedback using call recording and AI-powered call coaching. Using this CallRail Labs experimental alpha feature, you can highlight instances where a sales representative successfully addressed customer concerns about roof durability but missed opportunities to upsell additional services like gutter maintenance.
- Refining sales scripts and training programs to bolster conversion rates. Gain insights into customer service team interactions by reviewing call data, such as identifying instances where customer service representatives effectively communicate the benefits of weekly yard maintenance to potential clients and using these learnings to improve sales scripts and training programs.
- Identifying common objections and training customer-facing teams to effectively close more leads. This can be achieved by analyzing call transcripts for insights and tailoring responses accordingly. For example, a painting company may uncover that homeowners frequently express concerns about paint durability. Knowing this, marketers can highlight the quality of paint products the company uses in ads and on the website.
Increases the value of each job
Use call recordings and call transcriptions to understand customer satisfaction and solve your challenges. This will allow you to boost the value of each job or service call by taking the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell the right service to existing customers. An HVAC company, for example, can use CallRail’s call recording, AI-powered transcript analysis, and summaries to identify a homeowner’s concerns about rising energy bills and inconsistent heating. The AI can recognize key phrases about heating inefficiencies, and then the company can use this information to upsell a complementary service such as duct cleaning or insulation upgrades.
Additionally, by analyzing recurring themes and pain points across multiple calls, the HVAC company could identify common upselling opportunities. For instance, if several homeowners inquire about improving indoor air quality during service calls, the company can proactively offer air purifier installations or filter replacements to all customers. More generally, AI can help ensure your team mentions your current promotion on every relevant call.
By addressing homeowners’ concerns and offering solutions tailored to their specific needs, the HVAC company not only enhances the value of the initial service call but also strengthens customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Boosts efficiency
Save time and manage customer interactions more efficiently with CallRail’s advanced AI features. Another one of the experimental features in the CallRail Labs program is automated action plans. Following a call, Premium Conversation Intelligence can provide an automated action plan with the next steps based on the conversation. The plan can remind you to follow up with a customer or to show up at a service appointment.
Additionally, AI-powered transcripts provide other efficiency-boosting features, such as multi-language transcriptions, which can assist in serving the diverse client base that characterizes most home services businesses. Additionally, automated call summaries save your team from manually taking notes on a call. You can also review previous conversations before getting on a follow-up call and easily reference the estimates you provided over the phone.
Qshark Moving Company saw a 90% reduction in time spent on quality assurance for customer calls thanks to Conversation Intelligence. Vlad Kandybovich, CEO of Qshark, explained how time-consuming call reviews were before. “I listened to every call to see if we were handling inquiries correctly and to look for areas to improve. But we can easily get 84 calls a day, and I’d spend hours upon hours listening to call recordings.”
Once the Qshark team began using Conversation Intelligence for call scoring, automated call transcription, and keyword spotting to simplify call quality review, they saved significant time.
Increases productivity
CallRail enables you to send timely responses to prospect and customer inquiries, helping you land more jobs and retain more customers. For instance, when a homeowner submits an online form requesting a quote for lawn maintenance services, you can use CallRail’s Form Tracking to trigger an automated email that acknowledges receipt of the inquiry and outlines the next steps. Similarly, CallRail's Automated Response feature allows you to send an automated text message to someone when you missed their call. What’s more, another feature we’re testing lets you save even more time by using AI to create follow-up emails.
In addition to streamlining customer interactions, you can also get more done because Conversation Intelligence significantly reduces the time spent qualifying leads. By analyzing call data and automating the lead scoring process, CallRail has been shown to reduce time spent qualifying leads by 50%. This allows you to focus your efforts on leads with the highest potential, ultimately increasing the chances of landing more jobs and retaining more customers.
Provides clearer insights
Learn more about customer expectations and what drives their behavior. The AI features included in Premium Conversation Intelligence will help you uncover which of your marketing efforts drive the greatest ROI. With Premium Conversation Intelligence, you can already see which campaigns drive the best leads. But our AI-powered self-reported attribution alpha feature lets customers recall where they found you, whether through an online search, billboards, word of mouth, or elsewhere.
These insights into your business can help you make smarter marketing and business decisions.
Scott Patterson, CEO of Stuff Junk Removal, chose CallRail to solve the challenge of seeing where the company’s advertising is most effective. “As a small business, we have a limited amount of advertising dollars,” Scott explained. “We have to make sure we're allocating those dollars effectively in order to grow our business.”
Enhances the customer experience
CallRail’s AI allows you to improve customer experiences by discovering what customers say on calls. You can use that information to improve conversations, marketing, and sales efforts.
Task automation also lets you spend less time on administrative details and more time on jobs and customer satisfaction. For example, Premium Conversation Intelligence keeps a record of conversations so you can refer back to key points in the automated transcript or call summary. There’s no need to take manual notes or try to find them when a customer calls back.
In addition, CallRail’s tools are agile and can accommodate businesses of any size, from a solo contractor to a small service team to a large multi-location business. Here’s how all kinds of businesses benefit:
- Large home service businesses that have a website, multiple brick-and-mortar locations, and customer service teams can benefit from analyzing call transcripts and using call data to coach your frontline teams. Alpha AI features like call coaching can also help ensure calls are handled properly so you’re not losing out on qualified leads. AI can support the team you have and take the most mundane tasks off their plates. It can also improve marketing which gets more complex as you grow.
- Small home service businesses consisting of a handful of employees filling multiple roles can use CallRail’s advanced AI features to lighten their workloads while also helping them be more effective in their most important tasks. They can benefit from features like call coaching and transcription. Keyword spotting is also valuable to small businesses that don’t have a dedicated marketing team, helping you identify:
- Topics your customers and prospects are mentioning on calls
- High-value words associated with qualified leads and sales
- Where marketing dollars are best spent to drive more quality calls
- The source of leads using specific phrases (e.g., “need pool pump” vs. “my pool is dirty.”)
- The best keywords to invest in for search
With the ongoing rollup of smaller contractors into larger businesses and the continued expansion of franchise models, CallRail’s AI-powered software platform can be especially useful for helping home service providers stand out among the competition. CallRail home services customers of any size can benefit from using the AI features in Premium Conversation Intelligence. In fact, the average CallRail customer sees a 200-500% ROI on the investment after a year.
