Customer service in the HVAC industry is a system you can build and measure so that it remains consistent across your technicians and customer support representatives. It’s not a personality trait or ‘just being nice.’
And there’s a reason for that. Ninety-one percent of consumers rely on online reviews when choosing an HVAC contractor. One bad experience becomes a public review, which leads customers to look for other HVAC contractors.
So, instead of just giving you tips for improving your team’s communication skills, we’ll go over a repeatable system that covers the entire buyer’s journey and helps your team stay consistent.
What Does Customer Service Mean in the HVAC Industry?
Customer service means that the customer experience across the entire journey, from the first call to follow-ups, is consistently great, regardless of the CSRs or techs involved.
You might think of customer service as being polite at the door or answering a call quickly. While those are important, they can also be inconsistent if you don’t have a system in place or haven’t trained your team well enough.
This matters even more in the HVAC industry. Jobs are urgent (like no AC in the summer) and customers have to trust a stranger to come into their homes or stores. Offering great service from the start creates trust with your customers.
For that to happen, though, you need a system in place that covers your customers’ journeys.
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The Core Elements of Excellent HVAC Customer Service
The core elements of HVAC customer service lie in the customer journey, from the first contact to the post-service follow-up.
Each stage requires a different approach so the system can work correctly and be repeatable. You’ll need unique scripts for your CSRs and protocols for your technicians, and you’ll measure different metrics for each stage.
That’s how you can deliver customer satisfaction on every job. So, let’s get started with the first contact.
First-Contact Experience
The first call to your company wins or loses the job. If a customer gets sent to voicemail, they’ll just call another company, especially if they need an urgent HVAC repair.
While it’s good to have enough CSRs to ensure fast response times, you should also create a protocol for every step of the first call.
Before a customer service representative answers the call, they should have access to the customer’s history (personal info, previous jobs, etc.) and a scripted greeting for a more personal touch.
On your side, you should also have the right tools in place for after-hours coverage, tracking, and returning missed calls.
The next step is to hand the customer off to the field team.
Scheduling, Dispatch, and Arrival Communication
Customers want to know if their tech is on the way, instead of getting a “they’ll be there when they’re there” message and an eight-hour time window.
This is where the second stage of your system should come in. CSRs schedule appointments and communicate with customers to keep them informed.
They should be texting your customers appointment reminders (including the ability to reschedule), asking them to confirm via text (saving you up to 12 hours per week on confirmation calls), and letting them know when the tech is on the way.
Dispatch matters, too. Sending the right tech for the service request means the issue is fixed on the first visit, so the customer needs only one appointment instead of two.
From there, the customer experience is in your HVAC technicians’ hands.
On-Site Technician Conduct and Professionalism
During job visits, customer service seems more personality-focused than systemized, but it actually isn't. Sure, your techs might be charismatic by nature, yet you can still set a few protocols on what they should do as soon as they reach your customers’ homes or stores.
For one, they should be polite and transparent, introducing themselves by name and explaining exactly what the problem is, without HVAC jargon. This shows the customer what they’re paying for and creates a more friendly environment. To complement that, your technicians should always clean up before they leave.
So why set up a system like that? Well, it standardizes your operations on every job so your newest tech offers the same service and experience as your most experienced one.
Plus, being professional and friendly builds trust between you and your customers, which can lead to more approvals for higher-ticket jobs and repeat business.
Trust also depends on how transparent your techs are about pricing and payments.
Transparent Pricing and Payment Flexibility
An unjustifiably high HVAC bill can turn an otherwise satisfied customer into a complaint. In fact, 70 percent of customers want transparency around pricing and costs for their HVAC systems.
So, your technicians must present the numbers the same way, following the same format and protocol.
Your biggest fix here is to offer consistent pricing that clearly details exactly what everything costs, and to give your techs the ability to show customers in the field the logic behind it, rather than sending the invoice afterward.
A great way to make this repeatable is to offer tiered options as to the level of work carried out and the related parts and materials used (i.e., ‘good, better, or best’ options) giving your customers a measure of control over the project. This also creates a standard for different job types across the team, making the whole process more transparent.
On the payment flexibility side, it’s a bit simpler. You should always offer customers financing, especially for full system replacements and bigger sales. This puts the focus on getting the job done correctly rather than on creating a financial obstacle.
Once the job is done, arguably the most valuable (and frequently overlooked) stage of the customer journey follows.
Post-Service Follow-Up and Relationship Building
The job’s done, and the customer’s satisfied with the work and transparency. If you and your tech fail to reach out afterwards, however, to request a review and discuss future work, you’re missing out on potential revenue in two ways:
Reviews are what bring in the next customer. Ninety-one percent of consumers, remember, rely on reviews to choose an HVAC contractor.
Only 30 percent of homeowners schedule preventive maintenance. With a simple follow-up and clear maintenance agreements, you can turn some of the remaining 70 percent into repeat business.
A standardized process can help you here. With the right software, you can send automated thank-you emails and check for customer satisfaction right after the visit, or even while the tech is still on the job. In these, you should also ask for a public review, as the experience is still fresh in the customer’s mind.
One HVAC and plumbing company, Vines Restoration, Plumbing, HVAC, used automated post-call review requests to build a library of over 1,000 five-star reviews. They just created the system and let it do the work.
And since you have your customers’ phone numbers or emails on record, you can send them seasonal reminders for a service, which can lead to securing more maintenance agreements.
Next, we’ll discuss what kind of impact great customer service can have on your HVAC business.
Why Does Customer Service Directly Impact HVAC Revenue?
While it might seem that customer service can cost you money, it’s actually one of the best investments you can make for your HVAC business, as it reduces your cost per lead and directly increases your profits.
For one, Harvard Business Review reports that increasing your customer-retention rate by just 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent. For HVAC businesses specifically, that happens because acquiring a new customer can cost between $200 and $300, while retaining an existing one costs you around $40.
In terms of overall HVAC revenue, referrals are a major driver. Thirty-seven percent of referred customers are more likely to stick with you than customers sourced elsewhere. So, satisfied customers bring more customers who are more likely to stick with you and cost you less.
On a general note, satisfied customers are more easily retained, more likely to entrust a higher-ticket job to you, and more likely to refer others or write reviews that will bring in more customers.
And technology can help you get more satisfied customers and turn everything we’ve just mentioned into a repeatable system.
How Can Technology Improve the HVAC Customer Experience?
So far, we’ve covered the system you should use at every stage of your customers’ journeys. Getting that system to work every single time, though, wouldn’t be possible without technology. Calls would be missed, and delays wouldn’t be communicated as quickly.
This is where field service management software comes in. Let’s see how ServiceTitan’s HVAC software helps you make your system repeatable across all stages.
From the first contact, ServiceTitan’s Call Booking software helps you track and record calls, which you can then use to coach your CSR team.
At the same time, when the call comes in, ServiceTitan automatically presents your CSRs with the customer’s info and full history. Customers get a personalized greeting and your team can follow best practices based on previous jobs.
Then, when it comes to scheduling and dispatching, ServiceTitan’s Dispatch software makes operations across the field effortless. Customers can receive automated booking confirmations, which reduce the hours spent on manual calls on your end.
Also, when the tech is en route, customers can track them with ServiceTitan’s tech tracking so they know exactly when they’ll be at their door.
When the technician arrives on site, they can be more professional with ServiceTitan’s Field Mobile App. Within this, they’ll have all the customer’s info, be able to present estimates using the pricebook, and create forms digitally that are signed on site.
One thing that’s worth noting is how software can help you during after-hours and emergency calls. A lot of revenue is lost here, especially when you consider that recent data shows 41 percent of home service calls go unanswered during the weekends, and 18 percent Monday through Friday (according to Jeff Martin, ServiceTitan’s Solutions Engineer for Scheduling Pro).
This is where AI can come into play, since you can’t always have a live HVAC answering service or CSR on rotation. With ServiceTitan’s 24/7 AI Virtual Agent, your team won’t have to be on site, as the agent handles calls and booking.
While all this technology helps build the system, it can’t replace the people behind it, which is why training matters.
How Do You Train HVAC Technicians to Deliver Great Customer Service?
Most of the customer service skills, like active listening and empathy, are left for CSRs, which is why training your technicians for these is really important.
Training is a system, too. You should start with structured onboarding that outlines what to expect from every HVAC service call on day one, including checklists and anything else they’ll need.
To really help newer techs understand what’s expected, have them ride along with your best-performing techs to learn how to explain every HVAC service or repair simply, respect the customer’s home, and handle customer hesitations.
You should also coach them using call recordings to show what actually sounds good and what sounds salesy or full of jargon.
Even then, though, the best tech might get something wrong. So, you need to know how to handle it properly.
How Should HVAC Companies Handle Customer Complaints and Negative Reviews?
Since reviews are so important for landing new jobs, complaints and negative reviews can directly cost you revenue. You need a process in place to handle these.
For complaints, the best approach is to acknowledge them, take responsibility, make any necessary fixes, and follow up to make sure the customer is satisfied with the outcome. For negative reviews, you’ll need to respond publicly and try to resolve any issues. The customers usually update their reviews to positive ones after that.
And that actually helps you build more trust with your customers. If they see that you actively own your mistakes and provide fast fixes, they’ll trust you.
But how can you actually see if customer service is working? That comes down to measuring your team’s performance.
How Do You Measure HVAC Customer Service Performance?
We’ve covered most of the core metrics you should measure for customer service. But to sum them up quickly, they all come down to how satisfied your customers are.
For starters, online reviews (scores and volume) reflect your public reputation, while Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS—how likely customers are to recommend you) indicate how your team is performing.
We’ve covered these and many more HVAC KPIs in our guide. Take a look to see exactly what metrics to follow so you can measure your customer service performance.
Over to You!
Customer service in HVAC is a matter of training your team with the right system in place. Your system needs to cover every point of the customer journey, from the first call to follow-up, and deliver the same experience no matter who answers the phone or does the job.
By implementing ServiceTitan’s comprehensive HVAC software system to support your business goals, your company will keep customers who spend more and refer others.
To see how ServiceTitan can help grow your HVAC business while providing amazing customer service, sign up for a free demo now.
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive HVAC business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Q1. How quickly should an HVAC company answer the phone?
HVAC CSRs should ideally answer the phone within three to four rings. Try to answer every call as quickly as possible, considering that most customers who go to voicemail won’t leave a message, and they’ll call a competitor.
Q2. What should you do if an HVAC tech is running late?
Communicate it directly to the customer so they don't have to guess. Text messages or calls can do the job, but the best thing is to offer GPS tech tracking to cover any potential timeline changes.
Q3. What role do maintenance agreements play in customer retention?
Maintenance agreements turn your one-off customers into repeat business, bringing you recurring revenue. This locks in their loyalty, and you can retain them for longer, as they don’t have any reason to shop around.
Q4. Which customer service KPIs should HVAC companies track?
The essential KPIs are CSAT and NPS for satisfaction and loyalty, first-call resolution and callback rate for service quality, average response time for speed, online review score and volume for reputation, and customer retention stats.
Q5. How can ServiceTitan help HVAC businesses deliver better customer service?
ServiceTitan provides an all-in-one platform that helps you across the entire customer journey, with features like call tracking and recording, automated text and email confirmations, real-time GPS notifications, digital good-better-best estimates for transparent, consistent pricing, and 24/7 answering options.
ServiceTitan HVAC Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive HVAC business software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and achieve growth. Our award-winning, cloud-based platform is trusted by more than 100,000+ contractors across the country.
