Reputation Management for Roofing Companies: Practical Guide

What is Reputation Management for Roofing Companies

Reputation management means monitoring online and offline chatter to influence customers' perceptions and discussions about your brand. 

It involves every employee's participation, especially those in direct contact with customers.

Roofing reputation management incorporates eight basic principles.

• Responding to customer feedback and resolving complaints.

• Monitoring listing and review platforms like Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business), Yelp, Nextdoor, social media, and other sites.

• Checking customers’ discussions about your brand on social media platforms.

• Actively collecting customer feedback with surveys, emails, one-on-one interviews, and post-project check-ins.

• Comparing competitors’ brand perception to yours.

• Delivering quality customer service.

• Resolving potential problems via effective communication.

• Promoting positive brand stories.

Why is Reputation Management Important for Roofing Companies?

Humans are naturally loss-averse—we hate to lose more than we love to win. That’s why we hate parting with a considerable sum of money and not getting what was promised and do all we can to avoid such a situation.

This psychological phenomenon manifests in our buying process.

We (customers included) instinctively search for potential downsides or red flags before paying for a service. This includes consulting reviews, gathering recommendations from others, and making personal inquiries.

In line with this behavior, 97 percent of customers read reviews when evaluating local service providers.

Furthermore, 90 percent of buyers say they are more inclined to book an appointment after reading positive reviews. And 85 percent of buyers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations.

That’s why top-rated roofing companies and other service providers actively invest in managing their reputations.

“Review management is a huge part of our marketing here because it’s more than just a pat on the back from your customers,” says Brittany Brewer, marketing and customer service manager at Bradbury Brothers Cooling, Plumbing & Electrical in Magnolia, Texas. 

“It’s giving potential customers feedback from the people they associate with when looking for a company to use. It’s super, super important.”

Aside from convincing customers to purchase, reputation management is important to roofing companies for the following reasons.

• Boost search ranking: It’s easier to rank high and get featured in the Local Map Pack when you have multiple online positive reviews and respond to the negative ones.

• Monitor customer behavior: Customers’ online chatter can provide ideas for creating or switching business strategies. For example, you can identify recurring roofing challenges and restructure your service offering to solve them.

• Build trust and brand awareness: Customers are predisposed to picking roofing companies with positive reviews due to increased trust. Having a positive reputation also encourages organic referrals and grows brand awareness.

How Can a Roofing Company Manage its Reputation?

Some key elements of a reputation management strategy are listed in the graph below:

To be fair, doing all that can be hard for solopreneurs and business owners with few employees. Responding promptly to positive and negative reviews, soliciting customer feedback, and monitoring listings take time.

That’s why roofing companies use ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management software to streamline the review collection, management, and response process.

Below, we’ll explain how to use ServiceTitan to implement each strategy listed in the graph.

1. Get customer reviews

Soliciting customer reviews is a cornerstone of reputation management for many good reasons.

First, people easily trust the words of a company’s former customers. Second, reviews are a chief local ranking factor. Lastly, 47 percent highly value “sort by newest” filters and use review recency as a factor when picking local businesses.

Technicians should be encouraged to ask for reviews from satisfied customers and urge CSRs to assist customers in leaving online reviews to fill up listings with positive reviews.

“Reputation is kind of a numbers game,” ServiceTitan Strategic Project Manager Heather Donaldson says. “The more people you ask for reviews, the more likely you'll get a high number of reviews back.”

ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management platform automates the review request process by delivering customer review request messages whenever technicians complete a job.

Sending review requests to satisfied customers immediately after a job encourages them to sacrifice their time to provide detailed accounts of the services rendered. Due to their authenticity, people will find it easier to believe such reviews.

Heather Donaldson says, “We've seen an increase in reviews from our clients because we're asking at the right time, and it's fresh in the homeowner's mind.”

“We’re closing that loop between when they start the journey with the customer to the end of that job. They're getting all of their review requests and every communication with the company within that same text thread, and so it’s connecting the dots.”

Pro tip: If you're a new business, incentivize customers to leave reviews. This can trigger the bandwagon and social proof effect, which causes other customers to leave reviews.

2. Make sure your business information is accurate

Providing accurate information across all online listings makes it easy for customers to contact you. It’s bad practice for potential customers to discover the phone number on your listing is incorrect when trying to book a job.

Business information consistency is also a local ranking factor. 

Search engines reward businesses with consistent NAP (name, address, and phone numbers) with higher rankings, as it proves your business is legitimate.

Manually going from one listing to another to confirm details are accurate isn’t a great use of your time. You might also miss a letter or number when updating in haste, rendering the updated information inaccurate.

ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management helps roofing companies update their details across over 60 listings simultaneously.

We also created a free listing scanner to help business owners monitor how their details appear on different review sites.

This helps companies maintain customers’ trust, update their details whenever they change location, and achieve higher search engine rankings.

3. Engage with users and customers

One sure way to connect with current and potential customers is to respond to reviews (even negative ones) and reply to customer questions.

You can also use responses to resolve complaints and disprove misleading information before they tarnish your online reputation or competitors use them to steal customers. 

Customers also value brands that engage with them. That’s why 38 percent recall brands that respond to social media comments, and 88 percent are likely to use a business that responds to all reviews.

Rather than going defensive, be transparent and acknowledge your mistakes when responding to reviews. You can continue the discussion in the customer’s inbox to prove you’re doing everything possible to resolve the issue.

Additionally, respond quickly to reviews and customers, as they appreciate timely responses.

ServiceTitan’s in-app responding feature helps business owners respond promptly to reviews. This allows businesses to respond to reviews without leaving the platform or opening multiple windows.

4. Be accessible

Disgruntled customers who cannot contact you directly will likely voice their complaints and leave scathing remarks online to show their frustration. This harms your brand image and makes it impossible to proactively resolve their complaints before they escalate.

You can integrate a chatbot into your website to provide customers with a direct communication channel for sharing complaints. Remember to program it to answer basic and recurring questions.

Additionally, ensure your contact details are accurate across all digital platforms, including your website, listings, and social media.

ServiceTitan’s Customer Experience platform allows roofing companies to ensure they’re accessible to customers by providing them with various direct communication channels.

The platform has an online web-booking widget that roofing companies can add to their websites. Customers can use this widget to book appointments, which are automatically reflected in the company’s dispatch dashboard.

ServiceTitan also has an integrated SMS feature that allows customers to communicate with roofing companies and vice versa. This feature also will enable technicians to confirm job orders while customers can ask questions, submit complaints, and reschedule appointments.

By using ServiceTitan to enable customers to contact them directly, roofing companies resolve issues before they get online and deliver a positive customer experience.

5. Ensure a superb customer experience

Customers’ perceptions of a roofing company depend on how they are treated. One bad experience can sully your brand reputation, make them view you negatively, and cause them to switch to competitors.

Quality service delivery also drives positive reviews and referrals, boosting brand reputation.

Delivering a superb customer experience starts from the first interaction a customer has with your company. And since that’s usually via a phone call, you should train CSRs on customer service principles to deliver a positive first impression.

They should pick up the phone early—within the first two to five rings—and listen attentively to customers’ needs. This is crucial since customers hate to be kept waiting.

“Customers don’t like to navigate a call tree; they don’t like to go to voicemail,” says Travis Ringe, co-owner of ProSkill Services. 

“I think many people (who encounter obstacles) just hang up,” he adds.

Technicians who spend the most time with customers play an important role in ensuring a positive customer experience. 

They should arrive early at the job site, obey the project’s specifications, and learn to explain the entire process to customers clearly.

Ian Goldberg, president of the commercial division at Frank Gay Services, “[the customer] wants you to call and walk them through what that solution is, so by the time you're done with the explanation, they kind of nod and just give you the go-ahead…”

In an ideal world, every employee will excel at customer service. However, that’s not always the case since experience levels, personalities, cultural values, and backgrounds differ.

Therefore, business owners are tasked with finding employees who struggle with quality service delivery and offering assistance in any way possible. 

To help with this, we included a Tech Matching feature in ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management tool. This allows roofing business owners to identify the exact technician and job responsible for each review.

Roofing business owners use this feature to identify employees needing extra quality service delivery training. This improves customer satisfaction, leading to a positive reputation.

6. Respond to negative reviews

Every company loves receiving and responding to glowing customer feedback. Negative reviews, however, can be a bitter pill to swallow, making it easier to ignore them entirely.

However, research shows it’s beneficial to respond to negative feedback.

Doing so shows you’re credible and always willing to make things right. Perhaps that’s why 88 percent of customers prefer businesses that respond to both positive and negative reviews.

When responding to negative feedback, avoid sounding defensive. Begin with appreciating the customer, then explain the steps you’re taking to fix the issue and continue the conversation privately. 

If you’re not at fault, explain to the customer (privately, of course) what happened and thank them for taking the time to leave the review. 

ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management platform allows users to sort reviews by star ratings, so CEOs or relevant employees can quickly address negative ones.

Guardian Roofing has used this feature to easily collect and manage customer reviews from one place. Co-founders Lori and Matt Swanson receive a text notification whenever a customer submits a negative review. 

This has allowed the company to retain customers and triple in size in just six years.

Read more about Guardian Roofing’s success story and the key ServiceTitan features they’ve used to grow their business.

7. Monitor your online reputation

You may not know it, but customers use online chatter to determine whether you can deliver top-notch services. 

Therefore, it is important to regularly monitor what customers are saying about your business on social media platforms, roofing industry websites, discussion forums, and business directories.

For effective reputation monitoring, identify the platforms frequently used by customers. 

Then, find the phrases, hashtags, and terms they use when discussing your company. This includes roofing-related terms, branded keywords, and competitor searches.

Do this frequently to determine your position in the roofing market, your reputation compared to competitors, and your vulnerabilities.

ServiceTitan’s Reputation Management platform empowers roofing companies to perform reputation monitoring on a large scale.

It centralizes reviews from over 60 listing sites and provides valuable insights, such as service types with unusually high negative reviews and customer sentiment trends.

This provides insights for rewarding employees, improving service delivery, and nipping negative reputation trends before they escalate.

8. Use testimonials

Testimonials are endorsements from satisfied customers about the quality of a company’s services. Unlike reviews, which can be negative, they only narrate positive experiences.

Furthermore, the unfiltered and authentic nature of testimonials can trigger an emotional reaction in potential clients, convincing them to book an appointment.

You should promote testimonials across digital platforms. This includes your homepage, social media handle, and email newsletters.

Testimonials can also be turned into social media posts and PPC ad copy (after getting the customer's permission) and featured in other marketing materials.

9. Be on social media

Building a social media presence lets you reach customers and control their perception of your brand. 

It’s also important since customers use social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and Threads to source local business reviews.

Before building an active social media presence, find the platforms your target audience is most active on. For example, a commercial roofing company can use LinkedIn, which has a major user base of business owners and decision-makers.

Then, create a content calendar that contains two to three months' worth of content. This will help you post consistently, causing the social media algorithm to increase your account’s reach.

What Can Harm a Roofing Company’s Reputation?

A recent study by Deloitte consulting agency rates reputation as a company’s most valuable asset. Reputational damage is also said to be every company’s greatest strategic risk.

Below are some practices we’ve identified that sully roofing companies’ reputations and may cause a business to fail.

• Poor service: Customers who receive substandard services can tell others to avoid your company, losing revenue and brand trust.

• Negative reviews: Customers can be reluctant to book appointments or request free estimates after reading a negative review.

• Fake reviews: When unscrupulous elements leave false reviews, customers may be deterred from using your company. This leads to a loss of trust and revenue.

• Misleading customers: Unclear contracts, hidden fees, deceptive advertising, and the use of substandard materials can destroy customers’ trust and lead to a negative brand reputation.

• Bad user experience (online): Unclear website structures, slow loading speeds, and cluttered design discredit roofing companies and poorly reflect their brand reputation.

• Bad behavior outside of work: Customers may express disapproval of an employee’s behavior outside of work and transfer their anger to the company they work for.

• Treating employees poorly: Poorly compensated and unmotivated employees tend to treat customers poorly, leading to reputational damage.

Reputational management can be an arduous endeavor. However, it becomes easier with the tips we’ve provided above and a tool to manage it all.

Consider investing in ServiceTitan, an end-to-end reputation management tool that allows you to easily track reviews, monitor customer feedback, and promptly remediate issues.

ServiceTitan is a cloud-based software built to help roofing companies manage and streamline their business processes. Roofing contractors and other home service companies have used it to increase their revenue by an average of 25 percent in just one year.