Homeowners have plenty of options when choosing who to hire. For example, there are more than 110,000 HVAC companies in the United States, each capable of replacing a failing compressor. So, what makes a customer choose one company over another? How do they even know about your company?
According to a PwC consumer survey, convenience, speed, and helpful, friendly service matter most. In other words, a great customer experience is key.
Nearly half of consumers say they would switch to a new brand after just one bad experience, and after more than one, about 80% would prefer to do business with a competitor.
Good customer service starts with good customer communication. Here are five tips to help your home services business ensure effective communication and provide customers with an exceptional experience.
Tip 1: Respond quickly to customer inquiries
After calling for a service, 46% of consumers expect a response within four hours, and 12% expect to hear back within 15 minutes. With 78% of customers choosing to buy from the company that responds first, the speed of your response can make or break your getting the job.
To ensure you respond quickly and route calls to the right people, even when you're out on a job, use our call flow builder and call routing features. Custom greetings provide callers with instructions and recording alerts, creating a professional experience from the start. Using whisper messages, which callers don’t hear, only the person who answers the phone, can also help improve the experience. For example, your whisper message could be "This is an incoming call from Google Ads for spring duct cleaning," alerting your staff to what the inquiry will be about before they even speak to a customer. Our call routing options — geo-location, round robin, responsive routing, and simulcall — ensure calls reach the right person promptly. This way, if you're busy, calls can still be efficiently routed to a team member who can assist.
Using advanced Call Tracking features like tagging and automation rules allows you to better route and classify calls automatically. You can use automation rules to route calls by repeat customers, the marketing campaign a call is associated with, words spoken during a call, and more.
Additionally, self-reported attribution gives you a clearer understanding of what sources are driving calls. For example, a customer might find your website through a Google search after a friend’s referral and call from there. CallRail’s AI-powered self-reported attribution categorizes mentions like "return customer," "print ad," "social media," or "neighbor," helping you pinpoint the true source of leads. This enables informed decision-making for better marketing ROI.
Related reading: How to use the Call Flow Builder to maximize inbound leads
Tip 2: Use multiple channels of communication
Your customers have different communication preferences, and you need to accommodate them all. Some people will call you directly, while others prefer filling out a form on your website or sending you a message via live chat or text.
Whatever their preferred channel, 40% of consumers won’t do business with you at all if they can’t communicate with you easily — which is why you need multiple ways for homeowners to contact you – whether that’s phone, text, web forms, or chat.
CallRail enables home services businesses to efficiently respond to and track customer communications across all these channels. You can monitor all interactions in one place, ensuring no lead goes unnoticed.
Advanced Call Tracking, Form Tracking, and Conversation Intelligence™, such as call transcripts and call summaries, provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. This helps make the most of your marketing efforts, improve customer service, and drive higher conversion rates.
Related reading: CallRail’s top 4 form tracking features & how to use them
Tip 3: Keep customer communication in context
Eighty-four percent of consumers want businesses to treat them as individuals, not “a number.” And 70% say “connected processes — like seamless handoffs and contextualized engagement based on previous interactions — are very important to winning their business.”
Giving your customers personalized attention is manageable with a small customer base, but as your home services business grows, it becomes more challenging. Remember, the key to your profitability is a growing customer base and repeat business. This is where integrating CallRail with your CRM (customer relationship management) tool like Hubspot, Salesforce, or Mailchimp can help.
CallRail’s integration with these CRM tools allows you to maintain a unified view of all customer communications. This includes information like:
- When they first contacted your business
- The last person from your company they spoke to
- Notes from previous conversations
- Which pages they’ve visited on your website
This information helps you, or anyone who answers the call, understand the customer's history with your business and deliver personalized service.
By recording and reviewing calls, and using our multi-conversation insights report, which distills the most important details from numerous customer calls into one comprehensive report, you can spot patterns, understand customer sentiment, and extract actionable intelligence to inform your next move. This helps you better identify upsell opportunities, monitor your team's performance, and craft targeted strategies to improve your home services business.
Tip 4: Leverage field service management software
Better customer communication begins with better internal communication. Field service management software (or FSM software) keeps your field technicians and office connected, so you can deliver efficient, high-quality service to your customers.
Field service management includes things like scheduling service calls, dispatching field technicians to those calls, tracking inventory, invoicing, and managing contracts. Field service software like Jobber, Sera Systems, HousecallPro or other upcoming integrations will enable you to improve customer experience by:
- Finding more efficient routes so your technicians can get to more jobs faster.
- Sending the right field technician — and the right tools — to each job to avoid repeat visits.
- Enabling field techs to seamlessly communicate with the office in order to answer customer questions and solve complex problems.
Field service management software not only improves customer satisfaction but can also increase operational efficiency, allowing you to complete more jobs with fewer field workers. With trades labor being in such short supply, this is vital to your success as a business.
Related reading: CallRail partners with Jobber for easier lead management
Tip 5: Keep the conversation going
Continuing to communicate with customers after completing a job shows your customers that you care about their experience and provides valuable feedback for improving your service. It’s also crucial for improving customer retention, which is important since there is zero customer acquisition cost on returning customers, making them extremely profitable.
Here are a few ways to keep the conversation going:
- Send out a survey about their experience. More than three-quarters of consumers in the US think of brands that seek out (and react to) customer feedback more favorably. Even a simple yes/no question like "Were you happy with our service?" along with a space for comments can tell you a lot about what you’re doing right and where you need to shore up your efforts.
- Ask for reviews. Requesting reviews shows you care about customer satisfaction and can attract new customers, as 81% of consumers read reviews for local businesses. Positive reviews also boost your local SEO, making it easier for potential customers in your area to find you.
- Respond to negative feedback. Thoughtfully responding to negative online reviews or social media comments demonstrates your commitment to customer service. It might help retain a dissatisfied customer and show prospects that you take their concerns seriously.
Occasionally, you might receive less-than-glowing reviews. While these can be tough to handle, they offer opportunities to improve your customer service and resolve issues. It's better to know why customers are unhappy and address it than to lose them without understanding why.
Get the tip sheet: 7 ways to build a lead management strategy
Level up your home services customer communication with CallRail
With built-in Call Tracking and other powerful features, CallRail helps you simplify your customer communications so you can focus on providing an excellent customer experience.
Try CallRail for free today.
