Typical call-booking rate for ServiceTitan users? The number might shock you into action

Is 90-percent booking rate attainable?

The aggregated data came from more than 3,000 trade businesses that use ServiceTitan, a cloud-based software for the trades. The businesses are located in the United States and Canada, and include shops of all sizes and shapes – from smaller businesses of fewer than five techs to large ones with hundreds of techs. 

Data was broken down by business size, trade and geographic location.

Powers, Hunter and Angie Snow–a ServiceTitan Principal Industry Advisor, a Go Time coach and Vice President of Western Heating & Air Conditioning in Utah–all feel that a 90% call booking rate is attainable.

The best way to reach that mark: Train, empower and reward CSRs who turn calls into jobs. Focus on what works for your company, then let the CSRs know the process.

As Hunter said: What gets measured and recognized gets repeated and improved.

“If you haven’t ever focused on improving, I would think if you do you’d make 5% really fast,” Hunter said.

A first step is to recognize the importance of a call taker. The days of that position being someone who answers the phone only to transfer it elsewhere are over. Call takers not only answer questions, they assess customer needs, and create and schedule jobs.

“The faster a business can get to a dedicated call taker, the faster they will grow,” Powers said. “And sometimes it’s an investment that people have to make and are afraid to make. But if they want to grow, that’s the first step.”

Key takeaways from the data

Some of the key numbers from ServiceTitan’s data include:

• The $100,000 figure for a 5% increase in booking rates, calculated through a detailed study of data and businesses, can be achieved with less than one additional call booked per weekday.

• Businesses with 25 techs or more have a call booking rate more than double shops with fewer than five techs.

• Businesses with 25 techs or more were at 59% call booking rate; fewer than five, at 24%. Rates decreased with the size of each business (more than 25, 15-24, 5-14 and fewer than 5 techs).

• HVAC booking rates varied with the seasons, with higher booking rates in shoulder seasons and lower booking rates in summer.

• Time of day matters. Mornings had the highest call booking rates.

• The variation by time of day was greater with bigger businesses than small – 61% peak to 21% after 6 p.m. for large; 26% to 9% for small.

• Rates were 2%-5% higher each month of 2022 compared to 2021.

• Plumbing had the highest average booking rate in June at 43%. Electrical was at 41, HVAC 38 and garage door and water treatment 31.

• Plumbing saw little variation in rates during the year. “When you need a plumber, you need them now,” Powers said. “That’s just the truth.”

Prioritizing customer experience

Black Diamond Plumbing and Mechanical in the Chicago area is among the higher-ranked businesses in the data, among the top 25 companies overall with a call booking rate in the 77% range. Kevin Dagner, Branch Coordinator, said the company’s approach starts with a positive attitude and empathy for the customer, who is calling for a reason.

“It's all about giving that customer the best experience, from the office, out to the technician,” Dagner said. “All of our training, all of our decisions are based upon giving the customer a better experience. And of course we get money in the process, but we try not to make that our priority.”

Powers’ analogy: The phone call is the gas that runs the engine. If you’re putting in low-grade fuel, you’ll get low-grade performance. If you put in premium fuel, you’ll get premium performance. To make that happen, Black Diamond pushes positivity, Dagner said.

“It’s a focus on attitude, of taking care of people and doing it as quickly as we possibly can, while simultaneously giving our technicians a work-life balance,” he said. “It’s not about what we can’t do. It’s about what we can do.”

CSRs must understand the job and the role, ServiceTitan’s industry advisors agree. They need to be trained, with clear expectations and goals. Those who meet the goals should be rewarded.

“Are you meeting with them weekly?” Powers said. “Are you sitting down and talking to them? Even if you don't have any opportunities, they deserve a weekly one-on-one with you, so that you can manage not only the system, but the process that they're using.”

Your duty: Listen to calls

ServiceTitan’s call recording feature allows managers to go back and listen to a call. If a job is missed, perhaps the right approach wasn’t taken, or perhaps the expectations were not met.

 Snow admits that few businesses can listen to every call, but spot-checking can reveal a lot. Hunter said it’s even a good idea for an owner simply to call his business periodically and pay attention to what he or she hears.

“You see contractors pouring in money for training their technicians,” Snow said. “But what kind of training are they putting into their CSRs? The money that they're not investing there, they're wasting on marketing dollars. Because if you get a good CSR, you don't have to spend as much in marketing because your booking rate's up and the calls are coming in.”

Snow recalled that Western started paying better attention to call booking rates when it onboarded with ServiceTitan. Before that, she had no idea what her call booking rate was. The software gave Western the ability to track and classify calls and find out how each CSR was doing.

ServiceTitan allows built-in call scripts based on responses to prompt the CSRs. It provides customer history and data (including names and any red flags about the customer) to allow for a more complete experience, perhaps even a personal one. Was someone in the household going to college? Do they have a pet? If so, ask about them.

Required fields in the software mean CSRs need to gather all the right data and information on every call. Recordings allow for coaching opportunities because they can be reviewed. Data can show if calls are being misidentified as opportunities/not opportunities by individual CSRs.

Addressing the elephant in the room

When Snow started to pay attention, Western had a call booking rate in the 60s. The business set out to improve. They trained their CSRs, set expectations, and asked them to hit 70 by the next month. Baby steps, Snow said.

“Pretty soon we were constantly hitting 90,” she said. That allowed Western to be a little more selective and focus on which calls were most important, to pay closest attention to the calls that generated the most business and would add to growth. 

“My gosh, the impact and the importance of capturing this thing on the front end can lead to huge results on the back end,” Hunter said. “Everyone wants to know about marketing, but here we've got a huge elephant in the room. We've got the opportunity right in front of us to make major strides just by getting a little bit better and knowing what to focus on with our existing calls that are coming in.”

Black Diamond stressed its priorities in weekly 30-minute debriefs between managers and CSRs. The time commitment was significant, but the focused discussion mattered.

“Once I started that, that helped me become more organized, that helped me stay better in touch with each CSR, and really helped me motivate them,” Dagner said. “Go through calls with them and say, ‘Hey, I've heard this a couple times. Have you ever considered asking the question a different way? Or with some people it's just like, ‘Hey, you're not showing any empathy out there.’

“Just relate to the customer. We've really focused our hiring practices on being really selected of people who have positive attitudes upfront.”

Keeping booking rate top of mind

ServiceTitan’s dashboard can immediately show the call booking rate of individual CSRs, which keeps the rate top of mind as it shows in real time, all the time. It helps CRSs classify calls correctly and identify leads properly, Snow said. That plus spot-checking ensures accountability.

“If you see someone that’s off, reset expectations, re-educate,” Snow said. “Just get everyone on the same page.”

ServiceTitan also offers custom dashboards, including a pre-built one for a CSR manager. All are designed to allow leadership to monitor the team’s efforts, to reinforce them, then to reward them.

“You get what you expect,” Snow said.

One interesting data point from the research showed that larger shops (more than 25 techs) have a much higher call booking rate across the board than smaller shops (fewer than five). Hunter attributed some of that to scale.

But none of the industry experts were ready to use being small as an excuse. Training can take place and expectations can be set in any shop, no matter the size.

“Going back and listening to a lot of different calls, man, you can tell the difference between the companies that make this a priority vs. those that just leave it to chance,” Hunter said. “That's why the larger shops have a much higher booking rate than the smaller shops. To get to a large shop size, you have to scale. You have to be repeatable. You have to have training in processes in place and people to oversee it.

“And I think that's why those larger shops are significantly booking more calls than the smaller shops from what our data showed.”

One thing that could help smaller businesses is ServiceTitan’s Adjustable Capacity Planning, which helps CSRs see the availability of techs, and windows for jobs.

A reality about call booking rates that cannot be ignored is that a high rate can mitigate against economic downturns. Recession fears continue to swirl, which may stifle business. That makes it that much more important to book as many of the incoming calls as possible. Lower demand could be offset by a very-reachable improvement in call booking rates.

Consider the calculations made by Black Diamond. Dagner estimated an average ticket of $600. An 20 additional calls booked per day means $12,000 per day, which conservatively means $250,000 per month, which means $3 million per year.

“Communication is key,” Dagner said. “That’s what we’re really focusing on.”