For pest management providers and other home service businesses, staying connected to customers is an important part of building a trustworthy and reliable brand. But due to the nature of the industry, 25% of new sales opportunities arise outside of regular business hours when no one is answering.
Homeowners can discover an unsettling pest problem or home heat emergency that needs immediate attention at any time. You can ease customer anxieties and engage new leads by offering comprehensive omni-channel communications where they can reach your business any time and on any channel.
Slingshot offers a 24/7 answering service — which includes round-the-clock lead response, sales, and support. As a technology-enabled service provider, Slingshot seamlessly integrates with your existing teams and platforms to ensure that customers can engage with your brand on-demand.
Having an all-in-one engagement platform like Slingshot at your fingertips allows you the flexibility of turning on multi-channel communication with the flick of a switch.
You can access all of the options Slingshot offers or just a few that work for your business, and you can adjust your preferences at any time. This level of responsiveness and customization is why Slingshot serves 30% of the top 100 pest control companies.
Reap the Benefits of Slingshot’s Flexible Answering Service
Here are five ways your business can count on Slingshot to help you maximize your company’s sales opportunities.
1. Take a Proactive Stance With Outbound Sales and Retention Campaigns
If you want to leverage outbound sales to drive customer engagement but don’t have the in-house staff to support outgoing campaigns, Slingshot can serve as your outbound sales team, reaching out to past customers on a set cadence.
Beyond that, Slingshot has also demonstrated success in launching customer retention initiatives for clients. Growth comes from more than just recruiting new customers, and customer retention is crucial in home services. Slingshot’s agents can pursue targeted strategies aimed at winning back previous customers and increasing current customer retention and satisfaction. Throughout the various campaigns our CSRs are able to support, they work as an extension of your existing team.
2. Never Miss a Lead on Nights and Weekends
You don’t want to miss out on connecting with potential customers outside of business hours. But staffing to ensure 24/7 response can pose financial and logistical challenges.
With Slingshot’s sales and lead capture services, virtual representatives will be there for your current and potential customers around the clock. You can capture leads even when your staff isn’t in the office. The services allow you to give your employees a break while keeping your brand, services, and sales open at all times.
With Slingshot, you’ll increase staff efficiency and morale while continuing to drive revenue. And you get all of the benefits of being available 24/7 for less than the cost of a single 9-5 employee.
Whether your business is a pest control company, an HVAC service, or another key home services provider, customer calls after hours and on weekends are typically the most urgent. When a customer finds ants in their bathroom or their heat shuts off on a cold night, Slingshot can help you stay connected and increase trust in your brand. No call should go to voicemail, especially emergencies.
3. Capture Overflow
Slingshot can serve as a back-up answering service for overflow if staff lines are busy. This can be an additional line of defense to capture leads and drive engagement while ensuring your customers don’t have to deal with long hold times. Setting it up could be particularly useful if your core sales or customer service teams are 5-star employees but often find themselves running at capacity.
You can set a customized time limit, like 30 seconds, for keeping a customer waiting on a busy line before a Slingshot customer service representative (CSR) automatically answers the phone. You can also customize the wait time before a customer is sent to a Slingshot CSR based on the communication channel be it web form lead, web chat, email, text, or Facebook Messenger.
Whether your company features a five-person communications staff or a multi-team sales and service operation, Slingshot adapts to meet your needs. You can switch on our flexible answering service during peak periods of activity, leave it on during the entirety of your company’s busy season, or anything in between.
4. Increase Flexibility
Unlike many BPOs that home services businesses may turn to for help with customer concerns, you can turn Slingshot off and on in response to your team’s day-to-day needs.
If you need to take employees offline for a team lunch or afternoon training, turn on Slingshot for a few hours so you don’t need to worry about staffing the phones during that time. If something unexpected occurs, like a power outage or a staff member calling in sick, Slingshot can continue answering calls and servicing customers until your team is back online.
Slingshot also offers flexibility through omni-channel communication options. Industry trained agents, you can connect with leads and customers via web chat, text, email, web form leads, Facebook Messenger, and more.
By providing prospects and existing customers with different options for communicating, you make it easier for them to reach you at both high-stress times when they urgently need your services or low touch interactions where a customer simply has a follow up question on something like scheduling that can be completed via webchat or a chat bot.
The availability of customer relationship management (CRM) software integrations that Slingshot offers with their CSRs and platform also means you can save time and improve the customer service workflow.
5. Count on Reps for Every Season (Busy and Slow!)
Is the service you offer seasonal? Slingshot can help your team offset the rush of the busy season and fill staffing gaps during the slow season. This means you can skip the headache of hiring, onboarding, and training new employees while still being more than prepared to take on new customers for when the season ramps up. Whether serving as a complement to your existing team or acting as your main front-line brand representatives, Slingshot can recruit incoming leads and support existing customers.
Never Miss a Lead Again!
Unlike other technology-enabled service providers that aren’t geared specifically toward home service businesses, Slingshot combines industry expertise with a fusion of service and software. The platform also integrates seamlessly with many CRMs and Slingshot CSRs are able to work within your CRM to provide real-time updates.
Slingshot’s flexible answering service can also be turned off or on with ease, allowing maximum adaptability to your needs. Turn it on after hours, on weekends, or any time you want to access omni-channel customer communication, first call resolution, and low-cost scalability. With our agents representing your brand, you can go home at night and leave the business (and sales!) to us.
Join more than 1,000 home service professionals who are already enjoying the benefits of using Slingshot: tripled conversation rates on average, a 25% increase in overall sales opportunities, and up to a 40% boost in annual sales. For less than the cost of a single employee, you can leverage every channel to capture every lead, every time.
