In-Home Services – The Keys to Customer Experience

When your business is based on entering people’s homes, you know they’ll be paying as much attention to your people skills (uniform, kindness, greeting, small talk, etc.) as your work. Even tiny missteps or mistakes can feel amplified when you’re working in someone’s most personal space—their home.

And if those mistakes end up on reviews sites or spread by word of mouth, it can have big consequences for your bottom line…

The Keys to Creating a Great Customer Experience for Home Services

Sometimes—even if you do everything by the book and provide great service—you might still get a bad review. These are the ones that sting the most because you may be doing or missing something you didn’t even know your customers cared about.

When negative reviews show up online, it seems like people want you to read their minds. How many times have you thought, “Why didn’t they just call me?”

The truth is that you’ll never satisfy everyone all of the time. And you’ll never read minds. But you can get a little help in understanding what makes customers in your industry tick.

We analyzed surveys from 1,500 customers in the home services industry to see what makes them tick. And what ticks them off.

Retaining a new client is entirely dependent on creating an exceptional customer experience. In fact, companies that make customer experience a priority generate 60% greater profits than competitors. On that note, you may want to take a look at what we found.

8 Most Common Home Services Pain Points

We looked at each stage of the service process to find out what drove customers away during those periods. Here’s what they said.

Notice how many problems have nothing to do with the actual performance of the service itself. It’s the little details on the front and back ends that cause the most trouble. Varying forms of “communication” shows up in almost every category.

Unless it’s an experience problem among your team—ones you’re likely aware of anyway—customers don’t complain about the service.

Superior customer experience is how you win the game today. That superior experience starts the second a customer sees your brand and it continues long after a service provider leaves their home.

The good news? You can increase customer retention by improving all the instances surrounding the actual date of service.

The Keys to Creating a Delightful Customer Experience

Preparing for the worst will only take your business so far. But you don’t have to focus on “fixing” mistakes to be more successful. Knowing what wows your customers will help you stand out against the competition. Here’s what their surveys told us about making a delightful, exceptional experience.

Once again, communication, honesty, and helpfulness emerged as the biggest opportunities for delight throughout the process.

When you can anticipate and build processes around what matters most to your customers, you can exceed their expectations easily, making them loyal fans of your business.

It’s possible to perfect the way you interact with customers. It’s important to have clear and open communication before and after service, but it’s also just as important to collect feedback from your customers consistently. How else will you know what they’re thinking or feeling? The more you’ll check in with happy (and dissatisfied) customers, the better able you’ll be to provide an experience that will delight them.

How Home Services Can Keep Up With Customer Expectations

Increasing retention by even 5% has been shown to increase profits anywhere from 25-95%.

The numbers don’t lie; acting on feedback pays off.

If you’d like to see how customer feedback impacts businesses large and small—and pick up some best practices in the process—we’ve got you covered.

Our comprehensive customer loyalty benchmark shows you what top-performing brands are doing to keep more customers, which parts of customer experience are their biggest priorities, and how to apply these lessons to your own home services business to improve reviews and increase revenue.

Get your FREE copy of the Listen360 Customer Loyalty Benchmark Report and start creating a customer experience that earns you more repeat customers. (No opt-in required )