There are many different types of businesses and industries that can benefit from working with a call center or using one to handle incoming and outgoing calls for your business. One such industry is home services and home improvement. These are often small businesses, run by one or two primary contractors who are constantly on the go and busy managing a team of professional tradesmen, all the while trying to schedule future projects, manage ongoing ones, and communicate with prospective customers. That is a lot of responsibilities that these home service professionals have to juggle, but a call center—and the right call center software—can help take some of the weight off their shoulders, improve efficiency, and grow the business. Here are some of the reasons why.

Better Lead Conversion

As busy as home services companies are, they are always searching for and in need of new business. Because of the nature of the business, they might complete a job for a customer who then does not need their services for another decade or more. That’s why it is almost as important to be constantly cultivating new business as it is to make sure that existing jobs are done well. However, it’s difficult to field incoming new customer inquiries and respond to them in an efficient manner when you’re constantly on the job. And depending on the size of your business, having one person in an office fielding calls may not be enough. In these cases, a call center can be the first line of communication for prospective clients, able to answer basic questions about the types of services offered and pricing and schedule consultation visits. It is crucial that these first steps need to happen quickly—since people in need of home services may be contacting more than one company, the speed and reliability of these initial communications can be the thing that earns or loses their business.

Improved Customer Service

 

Home services is, essentially, a customer service business. Professionals are working directly with customers in the most important space in their life: their home. It’s a very sensitive area that deserves to be treated as such at every stage of the relationship between the business and the customer. It doesn’t matter if you do the best work in the county if no one ever answers the phone and it takes you a week to return calls. Likewise, it doesn’t matter if you offer the best prices in the area if you take too long to schedule consultations and prospective customers have already decided to go with a different contractor before you’re able to make it to their home. Having a designated call center to handle all over-the-phone interactions, from scheduling visits to answering logistical questions to processing payments, you can be sure that you won’t fall behind on these administrative tasks that are just as important to running a successful business as offering high-quality services.

More Professional

 

As previously mentioned, most home services companies are small businesses with just a few employees. Folks are often speaking with customers on the way from one job to another and texting has risen in popularity as a way to communicate with clients. While customers know all of this, they still expect a level of professionalism from home services providers. Having competent, efficient people to answer calls from customers and keep the process moving, from scheduling to providing services and more, creates a much more professional experience overall for customers that makes it much more likely that they will become first time and repeat customers.

Home services companies looking to create a call center and reap these benefits need an easy-to-use, high quality call center software platform like CallShaper. To learn more, contact us today.