Customer Service Best Practices: Importance of Live Phone Support
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When it comes to the daily routines, the regularly scheduled appointments, and other things of the sort, modern consumers want digital, self-service experiences. They want to book online.
But there’s also a reason 911 is a phone number and not a form filled on a website. It’s human instinct to pick up the phone when something’s complicated, or worse yet, an emergency. In high-tension situations, you make a call to receive authentic, person-to-person interaction, understanding, and quick resolution of your issue.
Having live phone support in the home services industry is as important as having online booking and live chat services. Don’t believe me? Let’s dig in a little deeper.
Why Is Live Phone Support So Important in Home Services?
Let’s play a quick game of “What Would You Do?”:
It’s 2:00 in the morning. You wake up to use the bathroom, and blurry-eyed, you stumble down the hallway to get there, only to find that a pipe has burst and you’re ankle-deep in sewer water. What do you do?
Do you, A: Pull out your computer, search for a plumbing company, and book an appointment online for the next morning?
Or, B: Pick up the phone.
Situations like this one—which are uniquely common in our industry—make it incredibly important to offer around-the-clock live phone support. Having a real person with real empathy, understanding, and the ability to ask the right questions to help solve an urgent issue can help:
- Improve the customer experience
- Increase booking conversions
- Retain valuable customers
Here’s how.
How Live Phone Support Improves the Customer Experience
Beyond emergencies, there are other less-talked-about aspects of why offering live phone support is valuable.
- Live phone support allows customers to book over the phone at any time, including after-hours.
In a scenario like the one described above, a customer wants to speak to someone with “in-person”—not hit an answering machine and leave a message. If you offer 24/7 live phone support with a home services expert, a customer can count on your company to be there, any hour of the day, ready to empathize with and help solve their problem. Not just any live answering service can do that.
- Live phone support empowers quick issue resolution.
When a customer calls your company, they want a solution to their issue as quickly as possible. If a company has a long wait time or no phone support at all, that customer will hang up and move on. Same goes if a company does answer the phone, but doesn’t schedule an appointment or get them the emergency help they need. By offering live phone support with an expert that’s ready to serve, you can be there for your customer in their time of need and help relieve their stress by booking an appointment immediately.
- Live phone support shows customers you care and enables their trust.
Interactions in the home services industry can be intimate and vulnerable. Homeowners must open their homes to strangers to handle emergencies, which can be both stressful and expensive. As a result, customers seek genuine empathy, sensitivity, and trust from their provider. By offering live phone support with people who are trained in the trades and understand home service issues, you can show your customers authentic care, and help ensure confidence, encouraging them to choose your company when emergency strikes again.
As you can see, live phone support helps ensure a positive customer experience in stressful circumstances. With this improved customer experience, conversion rates improve as well—and it shows in the numbers.
How Live Phone Support Improves Conversion
While many homeowners start their home services consumer journey online (via search engines), several still convert by calling. According to a study by Invoca, the percentage of consumers (by trade category) who call after searching is:
- Appliance repair: 92%
- Electrical: 82%
- HVAC repair: 84%
- Plumbing: 93%
- Roofing: 84%
Many of those call-in interactions result in a close/purchase. According to the same study, 40% of consumers who call from search convert, making phone services one of the most valuable conversion tools for a company. On average, the amount of money spent after search per home services category is:
- Appliance repair: $162
- Electrical: $597
- HVAC repair: $908
- Plumbing: $614
- Roofing: $4,589
As you can see, when there’s an emergency or large project at stake, the consumers will call. And when they call, they will need service (and that service might bring in some revenue).
Why Add Live Phone Support To Your Offerable Services
With all this information in mind, it’s worth it to consider adding 24/7 live expert phone support to your company’s customer-facing communication offerings. While consumers are looking for online booking and online chat ability, there are also situations where they’d prefer to call. Take it from me—that’s why Schedule Engine added Live Expert Voice to our suite of services. Offering a solution for your customers to book however, whenever they want to ensures that you capture every version of them:
- The one that’s looking to book an appointment later this week, books online
- The one that has a specific question about an offering before they finalize their booking, messages through chat
- The one that needs a solution to their emergency as soon as possible, picks up the phone
By catering to how your customers want to communicate, you’ll set yourself up to be their go-to home service provider every time. You can no longer rely on a single channel to reach all your customers, you need a network that can support and centralize all your communications. Learn more about how you can maximize your ROI by integrating all three of Schedule Engine’s services.
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Posted In: Customer Service
