As you may have heard during more than one HVAC conference presentation, simply offering customer “satisfaction” has become a shopworn expression after many decades of use.
Customers today are more often seeking an “experience,” not undefined satisfaction. To deliver a true “customer experience,” service company personnel must be focused on customer expectations from the point of first contact, especially if they expect to receive one or more good referrals from the customer.
Victoria Cheshire, senior director of customer experience for EverConnect, explored the various steps to enhancing the customer service or installation experience during Service World Expo 2023 in Phoenix, AZ. Her 15 years of experience in the customer experience field
has given her opportunities to optimize processes that enhance customer interactions and elevate service quality. EverConnect provides website creation, digital lead generation, search engine optimization, billing, analytics and overall guidance in creating customer satisfaction that goes beyond ordinary. They call it “the homeowner journey”.
Cheshire based her presentation on four questions that lead to specific digital solutions.
- What drove the project need?
- How did the customer conduct their search?
- How did the contractor make first contact?
- What was the sales experience like that caused the prospect to either move forward or back away?
What Drove the Project Need?
“What was the incentive for the homeowners to decide that they needed a project in the first place?” Cheshire asked. “Is this a passion project that they’ve been saving up money for over the last decade? Is this just something that they needed to do over the general maintenance of their home? Is this something that they’ve been saving up for during the pandemic because they realized they’re stuck in their home and they want to make some changes?”
Next, how did they search for help? Are these folks that are relying on word of mouth? Are they using Google? Are they using print ads? What’s the demographic of your particular client? “You want to make sure that you understand the demographic, to determine where to invest your marketing dollars.”
Outreach Methods
The outreach experience provided by the contracting business includes the customer outreach experience when working with you and your team directly, but also the experience that they had if they reached out to one or more competitors first. You can’t control that experience, Cheshire said, however it does create a holistic view of what the homeowner has gone through in order to get to this point in their journey.
Finally, is the sales experience. “Whether virtual or in person, this is a major point in the homeowner journey and whether or not they decide to move forward with you and your team,” Cheshire said. You and your team can only influence a portion of these items, which means that the portions that you can influence are critical.
Right from the start, it’s important to know where the prospective customer learned about your company, because it will influence where you invest your marketing dollars.
“What was their experience like upon engaging with your team, in the call center or in direct contact with a team member? What does that in-home punch list experience look like? Are we going through their sales agreement with them? Are we checking change orders? Are we again referencing back to their motivators for the project in the first place? And then finally, and this is often neglected, what is the follow-up experience after a project is completed? Are you checking back, to make sure that they’re still happy with the project one month down the road or six months down the road? Have you met their expectations?”
Where and How to Market
Cheshire advised that it is of critical importance where you market the consumer experience itself and your reputation. You want your company name to be present where there is a demand. Assign a team member to review completed projects and separate them into “successful” and “unsuccessful” buckets. Cheshire said the definitions of “successful” and “unsuccessful” are up to the project manager or team.
“Maybe it’s about how happy the homeowner was at the end of the job. Maybe it’s the revenue that you made off the job. It’s completely up to you and your team, based on your goals for the year,” Cheshire advised, “but you want to make sure that you are separating those into groups, so that you can find common denominators for those successful projects and invest your dollars there.”
Focus on Needs, Where to Market
Chesire advised the audience attending her morning presentation to focus on areas of need. Whether it’s environmental areas or high-investment neighborhoods, “you will need somebody on your team that is great at data analytics and can separate those out, looking for trends in customer needs.”
Market where you can drive awareness and where there is easy repetition of keywords. These include social media, multimedia, and high activity neighborhoods. Spend the money where you’re receiving the best ROI.
According to Cheshire, Pay-Per-Click supports seasonal shifts, is best supported by special offers and helps you measure website performance. Google’s “Guaranteed” Program has a Pay-Per-Lead model, and enables the provider to target customers who are ready to purchase. She said Google’s Guaranteed program is designed to promote the contractor reputation.
Where Can You Find Them?
Cheshire provided two examples of prime sites for live contact: “Home shows are great, because it’s a condensed group of folks that you can be pretty sure need a project that’s along the lines of the type of project that you and your team want to provide.” She added that home show activity must be measured post-event.
“Not all home shows are built the same. So you want to make sure that after each of these, you are reevaluating the success of that particular show,” Cheshire said.
“Second, have a really clear home show sales process. When you are at the show, make sure that you understand exactly how to approach leads, how to gather their information, how it’s being given to the admin team, and ensuring the admin team has a clear follow-up process.
“Ideally, you’ve got some sort of CRM or customer communication software in place where you can log all of this information in real time,” she said.
A home show is not a day of standing around.It requires a lift from your marketing team.
“We want to make sure that we have tangible, branded items that we can leave behind with folks. So if you’ve got seasonal offers, if you’ve got calls to action, if you have examples from previous projects or homeowner referrals, make sure all of that is packaged up nicely,” Cheshire advised.
The second “live contact” scenario Cheshire described is neighborhood marketing. This is a high effort/high reward activity that often only works when done with consistency.
“What I mean by consistency is, not necessarily knocking on somebody’s front door every other month. You want to be invested in the community. If there are community events, you want to make sure that you have someone there representing you. If you can’t have somebody there representing you, make sure that your brand is there supporting that community and working into the culture of that community so that they understand that when a need arises, they’re looking to you as a local option,” Cheshire said.
Market Where There’s Repetition
1. Spend your marketing dollars where you will find repeated exposure. Pay-Per-Click can support seasonal shifts.
“This is wonderful if your marketing team can also adjust your seasonal offers,” Cheshire said. “If you’ve got New Years offers or other holiday offers, this is a great option, because it’s easy to pull those levers and adjust those on an as-needed basis. It’s also great for measuring performance.”
Also, you need to have somebody on your team that is evaluating the return on the investment.
“I would suggest Pay-Per-Click on a weekly basis because again, there are so many levers that you can pull here that you can pivot within a day’s notice,” Cheshire advised.
2. The Google Guarantee program is Google’s Pay-Per-Lead program. It targets customers who are ready to purchase, which is the “gold standard” and designed to promote your reputation, not the reputation of the industry or of your market. These are the reviews that you and your team specifically have collected with the Google Guarantee program, and then also with the Google Ad program.
What’s important here, Cheshire said, is that you have landing pages that are mobile friendly and that are providing the same level of customer service that a customer or a potential client may experience if they were on your website directly. Oftentimes with any of these three options, businesses are using a third party to set these up and manage them. Cheshire said the service provider should be certain that no matter what third party is being used, that they review that landing page to ensure it’s mobile friendly and that it’s meeting your customer experience criteria.
3. Google Ads with Pay-Per-Click. Within Google Ads, advertisers bid on specific keywords. The caveat here, according to Cheshire, is the cost of the clicks can vary quite a lot depending on volume, keyword, time of day or how many competitors are also bidding on those keywords.
“So again, I would suggest if you’re utilizing a Google Ad that you’ve got somebody reviewing them on a daily basis, if at all possible. The quality of the landing page is going to be very important in this scenario.”
4. The last point is about your budget. If you are using Google Ads, have a large enough budget to allow the campaign to breathe. If you start bidding on ads, you’re not going to see a return within a day. It’s going to take a few days or a few weeks to allow for those biddings to really settle in so that you can see what the return is. But Cheshire advised that, more than the size of your budget, pay attention to not just the keywords that you’re bidding on, but the keywords that you’re not bidding on.
“Typically what we find is, businesses will have a really narrow list of keywords that they’re willing to bid on, which is totally fine if everybody’s got their own way in which they’d like to market. However, oftentimes their competitors have a more generalized keyword search that they’re choosing to bid on. And so, their competitors are throwing out a wide net,” Cheshire explained. “They may get 10 leads that aren’t working out for them, but they get two leads out of that that they’re able to close. And those two leads pay for those 12 leads in 10-fold plus seven. So again, you want to make sure that you are consistently evaluating your keywords, but also evaluating the keywords that you’re choosing not to bid on.”
Email/Text Campaigns & Rehash
The final examples Cheshrie provided of marketing where there’s repetition are email, text campaigns, and rehash. Cheshire said email and text campaigns will not prove to be super successful if they are stand-alone. But they do, she added, provide an easy lift.
“I would highly encourage all of you, no matter what pipeline you’re using for lead generation, to tack this on in addition to your other pipelines, especially if you’ve got a CRM or a customer communication software. It’s exceptionally easy to pull this lever if you’ve got a CRM, and typically it requires an initial setup where you’ve got somebody that’s creating an email or text content for you. And then oftentimes you don’t have to recreate the wheel; you can copy that content, change a sentence or two around for seasonality and use that same content over and over again.
“The catch is, you want to make sure you’re being diligent about how often you are reaching out to homeowners. I typically suggest that you group homeowners into quarters, and you reach out to them on an annual basis within the quarter that they had their project completed the first time around,” she said.
Cheshire added that the caution to using email and text campaigns is, they require the business to have an organized staffer who will remember to send the campaigns and will then be able to AV test your content.
“It’s easy to pivot within these because you have full control over what you’re sending out through these rehash programs, but you do want to make sure that you’re paying attention to open rates and click rates, finding what subject lines are more successful, and pivoting accordingly,” Cheshire said.
Multimedia
Cheshire said multimedia is less about lead generation than it is about brand awareness, and is more of a long-term investment to expand your brand awareness over time. One of the easiest way to gather leads is for a homeowner to recognize the name of your company or your logo.
“If prospects see you on Google or through a print ad, they’re going to go directly to the ones that they recognize, whether they actually understand the reviews for that company or not. If they recognize the company name, they’re more likely to call on those folks first. Multimedia is a long-term investment for expanded brand awareness,” Cheshire shared.
Get an ROI
Cheshire’s final point related to where to put marketing dollars, was that they obviously should be spent where there’s a return on investment (ROI).
One example she offered is to use lead aggregators, typically a low cost/high volume method.
“If you’re using lead aggregators, have some sort of call center or designated call handler within your team. The easiest way to lose a lead is by not answering the phone call. So, first and foremost, you want to make sure that you have got somebody answering every single call that is coming in,” Cheshire urged.
Live calls also require a clear sales process. “If you’re using a call center, you want to make sure that the call center professional understands exactly what’s going to happen once they hang up with that homeowner. Is that homeowner going to a scheduler, or directly to a sales rep? Or is the call center scheduling on your behalf? You want to make sure it’s clearly documented and trained throughout that call center team,” Cheshire said.
Phone Call Clarity
Cheshire said phone discussions must set proper expectations with the homeowner. Oftentimes the homeowner is going on and they’re doing general search terms. They’re not looking for your company specifically. They’re looking for any company that can help provide the services that they’re looking for. Because of that, oftentimes the homeowner journey after the call varies depending on who that homeowner was speaking with.
“You want to make sure that that call center, or someone internally is very clearly communicating what the next steps are going to look like and when that homeowner should expect to hear back from you.”
Answer the Phone!
Cheshire shared important tips for taking calls, repeating the point that the easiest way to lose a lead is to not answer the phone.
“You want to make sure that you have a live person answering the phone each and every time someone calls in,” she said. “And make sure that you are prioritizing call handling.” It’s also best to have your best phone closers taking the calls at all times.
“Oftentimes,” Cheshire explained, “folks will have a script or a set of guidelines that they suggest using. My personal suggestion is that you start with an actual script for closers to use verbatim. Once your call center or your call handler is confident that they understand the types of leads that you’re looking for and how to qualify those leads, you can get rid of that script and allow them to freestyle as they’d like.”
Callers must be verified by type, such as “homeowner” or “decision maker,” which is discovered by qualifying questions.
“If you have a minimum requirement for the types of jobs that you’re willing to accept, make sure you’re qualifying the caller right off the bat, during the first 30 to 45 seconds,” Cheshire added. “Is this a lead that we want to work with, and are we a good fit for each other? Don’t waste your time or the homeowner’s time. Discover the scope of work, size of project, location, if there are any motivating factors behind why they need the project completed, and any time constraints. Gather all that information upfront,” Cheshire said.