Problem...
Contractors often feel overwhelmed spending time following up with customers by phone, email, or direct mail, in an attempt to schedule appointments for recurring maintenance visits. Each follow-up can take an average of 7-10 minutes to book, and when organizations have hundreds or even thousands of follow-ups to complete, this becomes an extremely expensive exercise and can take anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred employee hours!
Following up with customers is a repetitive, manual process and is often managed in a relatively unorganized manner, sometimes leading to contacting the same customer multiple times. Additionally, homeowners are less likely to respond to cold call attempts at getting booked for service, and the only way to book the recurring service is to call back the office to confirm.
Those who use a third party services for outreach have to spend additional time exporting data from ServiceTitan, while replies are sent back to contractors outside of the ServiceTitan platform. The disconnection and reconciliation between systems is far from ideal.
What's more, customers are often frustrated with contractors when they buy membership plans but don’t receive the full value because they never saw a reminder or connected with a CSR to schedule their visits. Contractors feel hesitant to sell memberships because they don’t feel confident they can fulfill all the maintenance visits included in membership plans.
As home services companies run on low margins, recurring services are one of the primary methods businesses use to protect themselves financially, so it's important we manage recurring services as efficiently and strategically as we can.
Solution...
With ServiceTitan, you can build campaigns to automatically target and reach out to customers associated with recurring services. This includes automating your booking reminders, follow-ups, and thank you messages. The recurring service reminder campaigns using SMS allow customers to book jobs directly by using text messages.
By using the SMS Text Message for Recurring Service Event Follow-Ups feature, you can automatically attribute revenue to your recurring service reminder campaigns using SMS and use the Analytics dashboard to track how campaigns perform throughout their life cycle. You can also manage and keep your reporting in one place.
Increase efficiencies for your office and lower costs
- Reduce the manual effort and cost it takes for CSRs and office staff to follow-up, get a hold of customers, and schedule recurring service appointments.
- Save hundreds or dozens of employee hours by automating a formerly manual process.
- Get higher response rates with SMS than manual cold calling, email, or other channels.
- Allow customers to request a booking by placing a link to the booking portal.
- Automate and consolidate reporting and tracking.
Deliver an outstanding customer experience
- Ensure your customers are receiving the full value out of their memberships.
- Prevent customers from getting upset over losing a maintenance visit due to not getting service scheduled.
Did you know?
- SMS has a 98% open rate vs 20% for email.
- Homeowners prefer to receive text messages (particularly Millennials). They already communicate this way with businesses today such as dentists, doctors, hair salons, etc. In beta, homeowners were more inclined to read and respond to texts, they were delivered in a more timely manner, and CSRs were able to respond immediately and complete bookings through text.
- SMS is integrated into ServiceTitan, so no need to export and import into third party SMS provider tools.
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Interested in learning more about managing recurring services with SMS text messages?
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information! 🙂
