Best practices playbook: Present multiple options

Overview

When in the field, technicians present customers with multiple estimate options. ServiceTitan recommends presenting customers with at least three options.

Business impact

Grow revenue for your business

By offering customers multiple options, technicians can increase the average ticket, provide a better customer experience, and overcome customer objections. This can grow revenue for your business.

Increase average tickets

Not all customers are the same, so technicians must appeal to a wide variety of buying profiles. Presenting customers with multiple options allows technicians to appeal to different buyer personas by educating customers on different methods to improve their homes.

Let's look at an example with clogged drain jobs, over a week each of your three technicians encounters five similar customers, and they each have their own way of presenting opportunities to their customers.

Let's look at an example with clogged drain jobs:

As shown in the table, Technician Three significantly increased revenue by offering multiple options.

Provide a better customer experience

Allowing customers to review options with the technician via a tablet provides a better customer experience:

• Technicians can thoroughly review options with customers, effectively answer customer questions, and address customer concerns.

• Customers can easily see bundled options in an organized manner.

• Customers can view membership discounts and see the advantages of having a membership.

Overcome customer objections

When technicians don't sell an estimate, the company loses revenue. Following up with customers offers a second chance to explain the product's benefits and possibly close the sale later. Technicians can use the follow-up as a second chance to educate customers on the product's benefits and potentially sell the estimate to the customer later.

Implementation and training

Technicians are only as effective as they are trained to be. The following service workflows and tools will allow you to collaborate with your technicians and ensure they have the tools they need to effectively present options to customers.

Use the Estimate to Invoice workflow

Technicians should always create estimates and convert them into invoices.

Survey common situations and create option templates

Survey the most common situations technicians face when selling estimates, identify commonalities among the situations, and create estimate templates for each situation. Each estimate template should include at least three options (four options are recommended for Electrical). CSMs should then set a date to follow up with technicians to validate completion. The CSM may log into the account, verify if the templates have been built, and follow up with technicians by email.

Train technicians

Set regular training sessions (bi-weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly sessions).

Obtain technician feedback

Obtain technician feedback and adjust options:

• Ask technicians which options they have found to be the most and the least helpful and why.

• Ask technicians if they are building options outside of templates and/or if they are always making the same adjustment to the template.

• Build additional templates, based on feedback. This will ensure that your options continually become more efficient.

Technicians can access training resources to learn more about how to present multiple options to customers. A variety of training resources can be accessed through the Knowledge Base, Academy, or TitanAdvisor.

Knowledge Base

Find documentation related to presenting multiple options by navigating to Knowledge Base Mobile Handbook or you can click the following links for more information:

• Overview: Building and selling estimates in Mobile

• Overview estimates

• Creating recommended estimates

Academy

Enroll in sales-related courses by visiting the Academy and searching for estimates or click the following links for more information:

• Mobile 2.0 Basics

• Mobile Estimates Best Practices

Note: Technicians can also access the Academy through the Mobile app.

TitanAdvisor

TitanAdvisor recommends features in ServiceTitan that can help you achieve your business goals. To view recommended sales-related features, go to the navigation bar and click the Rocket icon to open the TitanAdvisor Overview screen. From the side menu, click Selling & Performing Work. For more, see Titan Advisor overview.

Adoption and performance

Overcome industry challenges

Technicians often refrain from offering options due to four main industry challenges:

Challenges

• Communicating with customers can sometimes be difficult for technicians.

• Options take time to build. If technicians are pressed for time or if they are tired after a long work day, they may skip building options.

• Technicians who offered options to customers at a prior job and were turned down often become discouraged from trying again.

• Technicians encounter various buying profiles and they must discern what customers need. Building multiple options allows technicians to appeal to all buying profiles.

Solution

• Build option templates

• Train and coach technicians frequently

Build proposal templates

Proposal templates help technicians overcome industry challenges by improving communication, increasing technician efficiency, encouraging the frequency of options presented, and appealing to all buying profiles. Once an option template is built in the office, technicians can easily build additional value into the option by adding customer-specific descriptions, photos, videos, and more.

Tips & tricks for building proposal templates

• Build the basics. Upgraded options and accessories can always be offered and added to the estimate at a later time.

• Proposal templates can display member discounts to non-members, helping technicians sell more memberships.

Ensure adoption and track performance

Adoption is an ongoing process. You can track how well technicians are adopting and consistently presenting the multiple-option workflow when they are out in the field.

Track performance

Track technician performance on the dashboard. Technician performance should be reviewed every morning. To view technician performance daily, set the dashboard date range to Yesterday. Then, under Company Metrics, view the Options per opp KPI for Service, Maintenance, and Sales business units.

Service and Maintenance

Click the Productivity tab > Options per opp.

Sales

Click the All tab > Options per opp.

Note: Options per opp (opportunity) is the average number of estimate options presented to customers per completed, convertible job. This KPI includes the total number of estimates created, including open, sold, and dismissed estimates.

A good options threshold is 2. Achieving a 2 means that technicians consistently presented estimate options to customers more than 50% of the time. Technicians that fall below the options threshold (less than 2) should receive additional coaching and training, as appropriate within their company culture.

Tips

It's important for each technician to find the right workflow to present opportunities to customers and offer appealing options. There are a few tips and tricks that technicians can use to make options appear more appealing, such as marking some options as recommended and customizing estimates to the customer's needs.

• Mark an estimate as Recommended

When technicians present estimates to customers, they see each estimate, its price, and potential savings if they have a membership with you. You can mark one or more estimates as Recommended, increasing the likelihood that the customer purchases it.

• Customize estimates

After the technicians build an estimate, they can customize it to suit the needs and budget of the customer. They can add and remove items on both custom estimates and estimate templates.