Exterior Home Improvement: Steps to meeting customer expectations

If you sell exterior products or building materials for the home, you likely have crossed paths with the fiercest, most demanding of all consumer classifications: homeowners needing home improvements.

These individuals are highly protective of their home investments and use cunning and skill to hunt top-caliber product and service providers. They have sophisticated tastes and relentlessly pursue perfection, like on-time arrival and quick resolution of installations or repairs. They are discerning, opinionated, and quick to resort to social media assaults if they get the faintest whiff of sub-par performance.

Don’t risk an encounter with a disgruntled homeowner. It is smarter to make sure your team is adequately prepared and knows how to prevent provocation. Late arrivals, missing parts, and poorly trained technicians can be hazardous.

On the other hand, with the proper care and attention, this species is also fiercely loyal, staying with preferred providers for the full lifespan of their home, promoting your offerings to other members of their pack.

Software to the rescue

Investing in modern field service software is a wise step, certain to help you master the treacherous landscape of home improvement. Here are four ways ServicePower helps keep your field service team well-prepared for encounters with homeowners.

1. AI-Powered Scheduling for Enhanced Operational Efficiencies

Homeowners are busy creatures with complex schedules for work, school, and social activities. They have no patience for waiting for a service technician or installer to arrive. By automating the scheduling of jobs for your service teams, your projects will be timely and efficient from the start. Homeowners will be pleased.

ServicePower provides real-time, AI-powered schedule optimization to help you efficiently manage scheduling, assigning the right agent to the right job, based on multiple factors, from current location to job training or experience. The schedule is updated throughout the day, reacting to traffic or job delays. 

Customers report that ServicePower Scheduling helps deliver as much as a 40% increase in first-time fix rates.

2. Mobile Access for Field Worker Empowerment

Your field workers are vulnerable in the field if they don’t have the support they need. Supply them with information so they can make well-informed decisions, communicate with the home office and customers, and access valuable customer information, such as location and any existing warranty agreements. Technicians or engineers often need to access parts availability, service history, and details of the service request. 

Without easy access to this information, the field worker may face costly delays, being forced to make extra trips back to the office or parts warehouse. Being out of touch with the customer also proves frustrating. In case of a traffic delay, the technician should be able to inform the customer of changed arrival times. Customers may need to cancel or change the scheduled time, too. 

Mobile field solutions from ServicePower make these communications simple, keeping field workers highly productive. The mobile connectivity also allows agents to receive payments, and sell upgrades, replacements, and extended warranties. Field workers get more jobs done in a day and customers are pleased.

3. Customer Self-Service for Consumer Happiness

One of the behavior characteristics of today’s consumer is an intense dislike of lengthy phone calls with customer service. Customers despise being put on hold. A self-service portal eliminates phone call hassles while providing the information and capabilities needed in one place.

The ServicePower self-service portal gives customers the information they need, in the way they want it. Customers can easily schedule, reschedule, and cancel jobs. They can track a technician’s arrival time, see status updates, receive texts directly from a tech, and access their job information without a phone call.

Because the portal is branded with your messaging, you have valuable opportunities to share upgrade stories and offer cross-selling products and services to your customers, reinforcing the positive relationship. 

4. Data-Driven Analytics for Visibility and Enhanced Decision-Making

Data is one of the most important factors in the proper care and handling of homeowners. It provides a valuable tool for making key decisions, based on fact, not hunches.

When it comes to field service management, analytics are important to your strategy, planning the use of resources, understanding the return on investment (ROI), and analyzing where you may have gaps in performance or unexpected drops in satisfaction ratings.

For your service operation to be successful you need analytics to help you stay on track and move in the right direction, pursuing customer satisfaction, without risks of surprises.

ServicePower provides a sophisticated and customizable analytics dashboard so you can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs). You can accurately forecast future demand, predicting when to supplement field resources and increase parts inventory. 

The dashboard will help you monitor travel expenses, and spot abnormalities or spikes that may indicate an issue to address. You can also monitor call volume, fix rates, and time-to-service for a complete view of the service operation. You’ll be able to track trends and strive for continuous improvement. 

You'll have them eating out of your hand.

With these four tools, your service team will be well-equipped with the technology they need to keep homeowners happy, satisfied, and enjoying their habitats. With ServicePower’s award-winning field service management solutions, you can be confident that you are doing everything possible to keep field workers in step with homeowner expectations and needs. Your customers will be exhibiting highly desirable traits: repeat sales and sharing news of your excellent service with their circles of friends and neighbors.

Request a demo to experience the benefits for yourself.