Speed, Not Price, Is the New Dealbreaker in Home Services
Business revenue depends on facilitated interactions between consumers to close deals. Time can be of the essence, especially in the home services market. According to the Harvard Business Review, response times to a research test resulted in only 37% of callers receiving a call back within one hour, 16% receiving a call back within 24 hours, and 24% taking more than 24 hours to receive a response. Worse, 23% never received a response at all.
Indeed, the home services market has seen an important shift in recent years: speed has overtaken price as the top priority for consumers, prompting service providers to adapt with faster response times, online booking options, and transparent pricing to stay competitive and meet evolving customer expectations. This perception is not an outlier either.
New data shows that in today’s home services market, speed is king. A recent survey from CallTrackingMetrics found that 55% of customers prioritize fast response times over price, which ranked second at 46%. The shift in customer expectations is reshaping how home service providers compete—and win.
What can be done to alleviate some of these pain points felt by both home market sellers and buyers? In this article, I will explore how businesses can meet consumers’ demands for speed and transparency by using technology platforms to drive lead automation forward and gain an edge.
The Need to Harness Speed Through Streamlined Technology
The housing market has seen intense uncertainty in the years following the COVID pandemic, demand now reaching a fever pitch. What can be done when there are too few houses to go around? For one, the home selling market needs to adapt to emphasize speed and consistency—this approach will help to overcome concerns with high interest rates, home prices, and many of the high costs in closing on a home in today’s market. According to the survey I mentioned earlier, 90% of customers expect a follow-up within 24 hours. With overburdened realtors and realty staff, this may be hard to accomplish, so the use of technology to facilitate the follow-up process is an essential core of modern realty.
Furthermore, the survey also found that 46% of Millennials prefer to book online compared to only 22% of Boomers. As technology natives who’ve grown up their whole lives with the internet being an immersive part of their experience, it’s no surprise that those who’ve grown comfortable interacting over screens to emphasize speed are also looking for the same user experience when it comes to home buying.
Cost Remains a Challenge—But So Does Bandwidth
This isn’t to say that pricing doesn’t matter anymore to buyers. A whopping 71% say clear pricing gives companies a competitive edge. The pain point of pricing isn’t going away any time soon, but it is shocking to see that speed has taken such a priority in the market. The response that prioritizing speed has increased importance could track backwards to imply that resource commitment and bandwidth among home services staff are misplaced and inadequate.
For this reason, many home services companies should explore digital platforms that can facilitate quick, automated interactions with consumers. This may mean adopting the use of a contact center to track calls and accommodate multiple callers simultaneously, something that will result in a more personalized experience for consumers, while also relieving burdens on your internal staff.
Selecting the Right Technology Platform
Relieving strain on your internal team will be a must for any selected home services technology solution. A call center platform could be staffed by human beings or use AI-powered responses to questions, for example, both of which would introduce efficiency into your outreach and lead scoring process.
A solution should also come with helpful call routing, data analysis, and reporting to track progress and ensure no home buyer is left without a follow-up. This reporting could come in the form of keyword tracking during conversations, multi-touch attribution results, lead automation and scoring, and automated sentiment analysis. Another important qualifier for a digital platform is the integration capabilities the solution has with some of the most popular watering holes for home buyers and owners, such as Facebook, and your technology stack for internal speed, such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and others.
In the end, if you are not exploring how to streamline your customer experience to emphasize increased speed, you may run the risk of being left in the dust by competitors. Home services in this modernized era demand a modernized tech stack, a digital approach to accommodate the wants and needs of buyers and home services staff.