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Home services providers experienced one of the bright spots in business throughout the pandemic as people sought to spruce up the homes that they were suddenly spending a lot more time in. This positive trend has continued through 2024, and it isn’t expected to slow down anytime soon! Experts project a compound annual growth rate of 36% in the home services industry, which will reach a staggering $1.3 trillion in revenue by 2026.
As the home services business continues grow, you have to be ready to capitalize on an influx of inquiries and be able to adapt rapidly changing customer needs. Here are a few tips to help you respond during what’s shaping up to be a busy year.
To capitalize on the industry’s growth, many home services providers are using conversation intelligence solutions. These tools use AI to analyze speech in order to derive insights from call center conversations with customers. In addition, they unify the buying journey, giving marketers and sales teams a comprehensive view of how customers engage both online and over the phone.
In the section below, we’ll cover how home services companies use this technology to create better customer experiences that drive revenue growth.
If your home services business has many different locations, dealers, service providers, or call centers, you have to make sure that your calls are being routed to the right place. With Invoca’s call tracking platform, you can improve call conversion and answer rates by getting your callers to the right destination quickly to ensure the best possible experience. You can set rules to filter and route callers based on time of day, caller location, digital source, and even your own CRM or product SKU data.
Watch this video to see how you can personalize call routing with Invoca:
To simplify routing calls and collecting call outcome data for businesses that have many locations, Invoca has also developed a solution that eliminates the old multi-destination call tracking headaches and swaps the tedious manual setup with technology that detects and routes calls automatically and makes updates to local network information a snap. You can read more about our multi-destination call tracking and call routing technology here.
According to Service Direct’s research, the average home service provider could experience a 54% increase in new business just by answering 100% of their phone calls without any increase to their existing marketing budget. By consistently tracking call answer rates and conversion rates, you can make more informed marketing and call center operational decisions.
By using a call tracking and conversational analytics platform like Invoca, both the call center and marketing can get a better view of call performance. This is especially true because in the call center, you have access to the entire range of unfiltered customer emotions. They’re asking real questions because they don’t understand your product. They are telling you all about the problems they are having, and they are not going to hold back because they want to get it solved.
This is where you can start to establish some patterns. When the first 20 people call with an issue, say, navigating your website, you might think “woah, that’s weird.” Then you see 5,000 people are having the exact same issue and you know that you have a problem on your hands.
The best marketers will pay attention to this and you can monitor this performance at scale with technology like Invoca Signal AI Studio and Signal Discovery. With Signal AI Studio, you can detect call outcomes like sale made or appointment set and deliver that data in real time to your CRM, advertising, and analytics platforms. This gives the call center the data they need to measure their effectiveness and create more complete customer profiles, while marketing gets the conversion data they need to optimize online campaigns.
We saw contact centers go fully remote during the pandemic, and many have stuck with these flexible working arrangements. At first this was out of necessity, but when companies operating contact centers discovered that productivity and service quality was not negatively impacted, it opened a lot of eyes to a better way of doing things. There are a lot of advantages to running remote contact centers. Of course, you don't have to pay for the real estate to house hundreds of agents, which drastically reduces call center costs. Even more advantageous is the massive expansion of the talent pool, as you can hire people who live anywhere, in every time zone.
Of course, remote contact centers come with some challenges, namely monitoring call quality and coaching remote agents. Even in physical contact centers, coaching is hit-and-miss because it depends on a combination of managers listening over agent's shoulders and listening to hundreds of call recordings. Call center agent scoring is usually performed by manually listening to a small sample of calls—often under 2% of them—and scoring the agents on those calls. From there, you discover some agents that need coaching and others who are doing well.
There are lots of pitfalls to this, though. You miss the opportunity to score thousands of calls. You're likely only focusing on what's going wrong, not what's working well, so you aren't properly recognizing and rewarding your best agents, which isn't great for morale. And then there's bias. Contact center managers are likely to focus only on their favorite and least favorite agents, so objectivity is difficult if not impossible when scoring agent performance manually.
Tools like Invoca's conversation intelligence solution for contact centers helps solve this problem by analyzing and scoring every single agent call right when the call ends. Since AI is handling the analysis, scoring is accurate and objective. You can also spot specific coachable moments in calls and immediately notify agents and show them what they can do to improve their performance to better serve your customers. Learn more about Invoca for contact centers here.
Of course, even the most effective call centers and franchise locations are going to miss some calls. Since so few of these potential customers will leave voicemail messages, you need a way to follow up on the calls and prioritize if and how you will reconnect with them.
With Invoca Lost Sales Recovery, you get real-time dashboards and reports. You can also set up Smart Alerts, which are real-time messages that automatically notify you (or other stakeholders at your business) when missed calls occur. Each alert includes a link to Invoca to view the flagged calls so you can investigate further and quickly determine the best next step.
Invoca gives you the ability to prioritize your missed sales calls by combining your Lost Sales Recovery Signal data with other critical data like:
You can also use this data to nurture lower-intent calls, whether or not they connected with an agent. Just because somebody wasn't calling to make an appointment right that second doesn’t mean that they will never become a customer. Though they probably won’t become a customer if you ignore them. While you don’t want to spend time calling everyone back, you can place lower-intent callers on your newsletter list or send them email promos to maintain their engagement and awareness of your brand. I mean, who doesn’t like a good coupon?
Renewal by Andersen LLC is the start-to-finish window replacement division of Andersen Corporation. In the past, Renewal by Andersen was grading calls manually on a piece of paper, which was time-consuming and prone to sampling bias, as they were only able to review a small fraction of calls.
To correct the issue, Renewal by Andersen deployed Invoca’s automated QA, which automatically scores calls according to their unique criteria. This gives them accurate and unbiased feedback about each agent’s performance. It also saves managers’ time and allows them to focus on coaching agents, not scoring calls.
The solution helped them achieve these incredible results:
Read the full Renewal by Andersen case study here
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