Empowering Service Technicians at Home Services Businesses

How Home Services Companies Can Empower Service Technicians

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The home services business is a highly competitive one that relies on quality service, rapid response, and customer satisfaction. In this, it is imperative that everyone is on the same page throughout the entire customer buying process—from the first time they look for a review on Yelp/Angie’s List/Home Advisor to the first interaction they make with your customer service representative to the final repair or improvement project that your service technician completes.

As we discussed in a recent blog, there is a lot of confidence among home services businesses, but little to back it up—come companies are seeing decreased revenues, some companies can’t find talent, and some companies are having trouble moving homeowners from lead to customer. In that blog, we discussed a few ways to empower your entire team with technology, and today, we would like to look at how to drive higher levels of satisfaction by making your service teams’ jobs easier.

Empowering Your Service Team to Complete the Last Mile of Customer Interaction

Your lead called in, spoke with a caring, knowledgeable sales/customer service representative, and has decided to move forward with your organization. Now comes the completion of the job. All of the legwork was done to set up the service technician for success, right?

If so, the technician can get in quickly, get the job done to the specs of the customer, and you can look forward to this customer telling his or her friends about you and calling you next time they need a home service.

However, without the right planning, briefing, or flow of information, there are many things that can go wrong. Poor scheduling could result in the technician being late. Poor planning could result in your technician not having the tools or materials for the job. Poor communication could result in unexpected slip-ups. Below, we discuss a few snags that could result in your service technicians being “hung out to dry,” and your customers feeling short-changed.

Issue 1: Scheduling

Your technician just got off a job. Now they have to drive 40 miles across town—and they have to do it in an hour and a half. Failing to plan is planning to fail, and improper scheduling could result in your service technician being late, getting stressed out by a long hassle-filled commute, and ultimately not arriving at a customer’s home ready to help.

How can you address this? You can try to tackle the problem by drawing on a map, writing down schedules in a book, and trying to balance all of your dispatches in a spreadsheet, or you could leverage easy-to-use, drag-and-drop dispatching technology. Through this technology, you can give your customers status updates and your technicians ample time to prepare and get to a location. This results in less stress for both customer and technician, and higher satisfaction of both.

When a technician arrives to a call promptly and ready to solve that particular customer’s problem, it sets the stage for a memorable service experience and creates an ideal selling environment. Learn more about creating a memorable experience for customers here.

Issue 2: Knowing Your Customer

“Doug Jones needs [repair].” So, what does your technician need to know about this person, about the repair, and about the home? Providing top levels of service means you’ve accounted for anything that could go wrong before it does.

By leveraging the right technology, you can brief your service technician on important customer and job details before they arrive at the job site. No rummaging through papers, no hiccups in invoicing. Just a simple, streamlined process that lets your technicians get in, get out, and get on to the next job.

Issue 3: “That’s a Nice Dog You Have ”

Even if your technician is a dog person, it’s unlikely they want to be carrying tools to the door when, out of nowhere, a large dog comes bounding at them. Simply put, no one likes surprises that much.

Luckily, technology has even made this interaction easier. Now, customer service representatives can send customers reminders about the time, and even let customers track when the technician is pulling up with technician tracking. One such example of this is ServiceTitan, which automates a lot of the final steps before a technician arrives, sending a notification when your tech is on his or her way, giving the customer ample time to put the dogs away.

Issue 4: Transparent Pricing and Billing

The last touchpoint could be the make-or-break one. An inconvenient payment process or an unanticipated charge could turn a five-star review into a one-star one. Make the process easier on your technicians and customers by leveraging technology to provide transparent pricing, simple invoicing, and in-field payment capture to clients. Take this further by providing simple financing options with rapid decisions.

Happy Technicians, Happy Customers: Why Fast-Growing Home Services Organizations Are Turning to ServiceTitan

Customer service is the name of the game, and with so many different touchpoints, one slip-up could result in poor reviews, fewer word-of-mouth recommendations, and lower business. By focusing on the last mile of the customer interaction—the service itself—you can improve technician and customer satisfaction. With easy to use scheduling and dispatching, advanced features like option builder and rapid financing, and customer-focused tools like technician tracking and reminder texts, you can reduce the risk of slip-ups and allow everyone to rest easier knowing the job will be done on time, on budget, and exactly as the customer expected.

This is why many of the fastest-growing service companies are turning to ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan is designed to help home services professionals do more, grow faster, and provide better service. Learn more about the platform here.

Taking It Further with Sage Intacct Integration

While the software was originally designed to integrate with QuickBooks, implementing ServiceTitan has been such a boon for companies, that many have found QuickBooks to be unable to handle their needs as they grow. This is why an increasing number of growing home services companies are turning to Sage Intacct to handle their back-office needs. From cash flow to contract revenue, general ledger to project accounting, AP to AR, Sage Intacct is becoming a game changer for businesses in need of automation, productivity, and support for growth.

Learn more about ServiceTitan by taking a product tour, and learn about our relationship with the company by reading our blog, Why Trade Services Companies Turn Toward the Cloud.

How Home Services Companies Can Generate New Business

Paths to Confidence: What Home Services Companies Need to Do to Drive More Business in 2018

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Following major hurricanes and other adverse weather events throughout the southeast, home services organizations are feeling more confident than ever in their ability to grow revenues, support customers, and convert leads to sales. However, recent research has found that many of these companies may have misplaced confidence in their futures, with many expecting tempered revenues or lead conversion challenges. We would like to look at recent research among these professionals and offer tips on improving in 2018 and beyond. Read more

ServiceTitan

Product Spotlight: ServiceTitan Home Services Software

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Whether HVAC, Plumbing, Electrical, Garage Door, or one of the many other home services industries, companies that offer repairs, maintenance, and improvements face high levels of competition, and one bad review could spell disaster. For those organizations, customer service is a top priority, and they need to put as much focus on providing high-quality service. This is why they not only need a complete view of the customer, they need to have a complete view of their service technicians, customer service representatives, and more.

Simplifying Service, Sales, and Operations for Home Services Professionals

Home services organizations—from those with a few techs to those with dozens or even hundreds—have the same concerns. From knowing the who, what, where, why and when to taking steps to increase bookings, measure success, and improve efficiency, the challenges are often similar. However, how the companies tackle these challenges is what separates the successful ones from the average ones. Enter ServiceTitan.

ServiceTitan was founded to help companies grow revenues, increase customer service, and integrate with leading finance and back-office applications to save time and money.

Simply put, ServiceTitan empowers your home services organization to:

  • Grow revenue and increase your average ticket: Book more estimates from the office with intelligent call tracking features, then win more jobs in the field with a powerful visual sales experience.
  • Connect your office to your techs with real-time data: Forget double entry, keep your team on the same page, and be more efficient with real-time updates between the field and the office.
  • Create an extraordinary customer experience: Send automated “meet-the-tech” bios and let customers see their tech driving to their house on a map to reduce anxiety and prepare for the call.

Call Booking

If you’re looking to improve your conversions, build rapport with customers, and track the effectiveness of your customer service people, call booking is a can’t-miss feature that ServiceTitan has designed for its home services customers. ServiceTitan makes this easy by:

  • Revealing high performing and underperforming customer service representatives by tracking conversion rates.
  • Record and listen to conversations to create coaching opportunities.
  • Know and identify return customers, empowering sales and customer service people and allowing for improved satisfaction and increased sales opportunities.

Customer Experience

Keep your customers up to date and well-informed. ServiceTitan allows you to create an unforgettable customer experience by doing the little things customers love:

  • Send text and email reminders to customers
  • Provide easy to create, information-rich bios of service technicians, reducing stress and putting a face to a service.
  • Display where the technician is and when they will be there—allowing customers to prepare for the arrival.

Dispatching

ServiceTitan’s dispatching software can help you ensure there is minimal downtime for technicians, increase satisfaction by putting the right person on the job, and improve route efficiency by allowing CSRs to map out routes and schedules easily, accurately, and efficiently.

  • Save time with easy to use drag-and-drop scheduling and dispatching.
  • Match the technician to the job, allowing for improved service quality for customers.
  • See technician capacity and availability in real-time.

Marketing

Marketing your home services business is a challenge, but ServiceTitan makes it easy, taking care of tracking, measurement, and reporting so that you can focus on providing top quality service.

  • Generate custom, unique phone numbers to track exactly where each new lead came from.
  • Prove the value of your marketing efforts by automatically attributing the campaign to the job.
  • Know that your efforts are providing value by displaying revenue per campaign, acquisition cost, and more.

Financing

If you’re working major jobs, your customers may not always have $5,000 or more on hand. This is why ServiceTitan integrates with financing companies to provide near-immediate approvals with minimal paperwork. ServiceTitan connects customer to financer and makes the financing process simple,

  • Display and offer financing options to customers with no additional paperwork.
  • Let customers know whether they’ve been approved within thirty seconds.

All of this has combined to provide ServiceTitan Customers amazing growth and high ratings. With more than 1,000 customers in the home services community, ServiceTitan is growing at a torrid pace—and so are their customers: The average increase in revenue for ServiceTitan customers is 25%.

Ramp Up the Benefits: Sage Intacct Integration

ServiceTitan is designed to help home services professionals do more, grow faster, and provide better service. While the software was originally designed to integrate with QuickBooks, implementing ServiceTitan has been such a boon for companies, that many have found QuickBooks to be unable to handle their needs as they grow.

This is why an increasing number of growing home services companies are turning to Sage Intacct to handle their back-office needs. From cash flow to contract revenue, general ledger to project accounting, AP to AR, Sage Intacct is becoming a game changer for businesses in need of automation, productivity, and support for growth.

Learn more about ServiceTitan by taking a product tour, and learn about our relationship with the company by reading our blog, Why Trade Services Companies Turn Toward the Cloud.

Specialty Trade Contractors in the Cloud

Why Trade Services Companies Turn Toward the Cloud

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Day in and day out, specialty trade contractors are in steeped in providing exceptional service. Customers have high demands—sometimes urgent—and there’s always a willing competitor around every corner, ready to swoop in and over-deliver. So the more time business owners and admin staff can focus on providing value-added service, the better.

That’s why simplifying back office activities through cloud-based financial management and accounting process automation is part of a winning strategy for growing trade services companies. Here, we’ll take a closer look at the reasons why.

Automating Across the Business—And Making it Mobile

Time is of the essence, especially for companies with seasonal field service operations. From managing an already loaded calendar to accommodating emergency service calls, focusing on anything but the customer can be a challenge. And thanks to modern technology, more of the business management is happening out in the field, where every employee is on the go.

This helps explain why tech adoption among trade services companies emphasizes cloud-based, mobile-ready solutions. For example:

  • Mobile field service management and fleet telematics tools help business owners and fleet managers schedule and dispatch technicians, optimize their vehicle health and safety efforts, and prepare for tax time—all while remaining responsive to customers.
  • Customer billing and payment and employee expense management software solutions are handy in the field and the office, removing steps from traditionally paper-centric processes that take time and energy away from more strategic, customer-focused activities.
  • Financial management and accounting software frees up time for decision-makers by taking the highly transactional, manual, and spreadsheet-based heavy lifting out of the back office and into the cloud, where actionable data can be accessed from anywhere.

Integrating Data for Process Optimization

All-of-the-above cloud-based software systems provide business owners with game-changing data. Fleet telematics data can be used to route drivers and deliveries more efficiently; employee expense data can help business owners allocate budgets more effectively; historical or even real-time financial performance reports can uncover opportunities to improve vendor relationships and contract pricing. It’s easy to see the bottom-line impact of the right information coming in at the right time in a user-friendly way.

When data from disparate systems is connected, managers get an even richer view into operations. Take the field management platform Service Titan, for instance, a cloud-based technology vendor providing comprehensive solutions to home services business. Their tools are multi-faceted, as they touch different areas of a business, from technician scheduling to marketing to customer service. The data generated from these processes is powerful on its own—and Service Titan arms customers with robust business intelligence tools. But consider how much more powerful the insights become when they can be “sliced and diced” alongside data from other business systems, like Sage Intacct’s financial management and accounting software.

With this front office (Service Titan) and back office (Sage Intaact) integration, a specialty trade contractor is given one single view of customer and financial information across their entire business. They also experiences these benefits of automation:

  • Elimination of manual data entry for invoices and purchase orders into the accounting software.
  • The systems can work together to allow comprehensive financial consolidation, reporting, and analysis across multiple business entities.
  • Non-accounting staff can access financial information from within the ServiceTitan platform they’re familiar with.

As the first Sage Intacct VAR partner to complete integration between Sage Intacct and Service Titan, rinehimerbaker can help you maximize the data coming from your cloud-based field service management and financial management software. Contact us to find out more.