The company
Strittmatter has been providing residential heating, air conditioning, and plumbing services to homes in the Denton, Texas area since 1980.
The problem
But business seemed to be slowing down a bit and owner Joe Strittmatter knew it was time for a change. "One of the things he learned is, if you want to grow, you cannot keep doing what you're doing. You have to make a change."
Estimate follow-up. "One of our biggest black eyes in particular was following up on unsold estimates," says Casey Sprabary, Strittmatter's Marketing & Recruiting Manager. The technicians didn't have the time to follow up on estimates, and when they did follow up, it was only once as they were hesitant to pester the customer.
The solution
After attending Service World Expo and hearing keynote speaker Lou Hobaica, Casey got connected with him for some one-on-one coaching.
"He is all about automation and simplifying doing things with customers, and I liked that because we want to be the Amazon experience of heating and plumbing, if you will. Our number one goal is to make doing business with us easy."
"We want to be the Amazon experience of heating and plumbing."
Hatch for rehash. Lou recommended Hatch for rehash. He explained that Hatch would allow Strittmatter to automate their quote follow-up through a series of texts, ringless voicemails, and emails over multiple days.
"I'll admit, I was hesitant at first," says Casey. "I was worried about it being repetitive and redundant for customers. But I decided to go with your out-of-the-box cadence and I haven't touched it."
"I just go in there and change up the tone of the messages so it's me talking, like with exclamation points and everything and customers love it."
Text for the win. Casey explained that text is the way to reach people now, with diligent follow-up. Especially since they're often at work when you're trying to reach them and it's much easier to respond to a text rather than step out for a phone call.
"Just recently, we had reached day five in the cadence with no response. The guy finally responded to the text saying, 'Hey, I'm going to call you after work.' And he's now getting a $17,000 system installed."
"People want it now. They don't want to call you, they don't want to have to explain things, they want to type it out, book an appointment, and move along with their life."
An intermediary for communication. Casey also finds that when customers can communicate with someone other than the technician, it's more effective.
"Customers are not comfortable saying no to the person that was in their home that they built that rapport with, but they'll talk to me over text." That's when Casey can handle objections and work out financing options with them.
The results
59:1 ROI and $600K in additional revenue. Strittmatter closed out the year with a 59:1 ROI, and brought in an additional $600,000 in revenue.
"And that is literally from an automated text message. And the manual labor that is required of me to close those is very minimal."
Happier customers. Casey continues to emphasize how effective it is to follow up multiple times, starting with text.
"I started off not wanting to upset people and I can't even tell you, the thank you's we get from people for following up. They're constant! I've only had to opt out maybe 20 people in this entire time since we started using Hatch."
"We had a client who was upset we didn't get out there in time, but she was able to express her frustrations to me over text. The next day she purchased an $8,000 installation package."
More uses for Hatch. "[Lou] recommended Hatch for rehash," Casey explains, "but we took it on as our baby and now we use it for any and everything you can imagine. We can literally touch any single person in our database in a matter of seconds, for any reason."
Strittmatter now uses Hatch to:
- Send 24-hour follow-up thank you texts
- Send links to blogs and newsletters
- Educate them on the importance of maintenance
- Handle customer feedback
- Engage current customers
"We do a three-touch sequence for existing customers. It starts with a text, and if no response that week, a voicemail. If no response in a month, we send a postcard. And we haven't had to send out a postcard in a year and a half."
