While some HVAC dealerships’ sales are cooling down during COVID19, others are heating up. The difference? A sleek digital transformation.

Over 20 years ago, Trane Technologies, one of the nation’s largest manufacturers of heating and cooling systems, decided to partner with its dealers through an “elite” program. Dealers who met certain criteria would receive benefits from the company to boost their online presence. These benefits included online lead generation, social media advertising, and online banners.

After many years of success, Trane wasn’t pleased with the value they were providing, and dealers were having a hard time gauging the true worth of some of the program’s non-quantifiable benefits.  Concerned, Trane executives began brainstorming ways to deliver more effective and measurable value to their elite members. It was time to level up their dealer elite program.

Podium gives dealers tools for a sleek customer experience

Like any successful business, Trane knew that manufacturer sales depend not only on the product itself but on the customer experience as well. After talking it over, Trane executives scrapped the program’s old benefits and focused afresh on improving the customer journey.

Most modern consumers expect a sleek digital experience, from the first impression to a done deal. In response, Trane revamped its elite offerings to allow members to choose from a list of software products and services to enhance their digital presence.

Out of those software solutions, more dealers chose Podium than any other platform.

Dealers who chose Podium increased revenue for Trane by 8% more in sales than those who didn’t

Through Podium, these dealerships began interacting with website visitors, texting customers, boosting their online reviews, and implementing touch-free payments. This provided a smooth and personalized experience unmatched by competitors. In fact, during COVID19, dealers with Podium delivered 8% more revenue for Trane than those that did not.

Suddenly, Trane’s elite program was providing the type of value they always envisioned.

“Getting Podium through Trane’s Elite Program has been a huge benefit,” said Gary Nordin, Head of Information Systems at Renaud Electric Heating and Cooling. “We have seen the value immediately. We are glad that Trane sees the value too and made the move to a better process in collecting reviews and growing our business.”

Since January, Elite Trane dealers who choose Podium have, on average, experienced:

• 402% increase in online reviews
• 77 website visits per month converted to phone calls
• 15% conversion of web chat conversations to actual sales
• 4% Positive YoY growth despite a global pandemic

“It is very clear how important customer experience is to the success of our business. Our dealers’ ability to connect with customers should drive strong online reputation scores and provide a better homeowner experience. Now that thousands of our elite dealer partners are operating their businesses with Podium, they are delivering a higher quality customer experience to homeowners. Podium is helping Trane Technologies deliver a differentiated experience which has translated into meaningful growth of our business.” – Jason Bingham, President, Residential HVAC & Supply

Pandemic or not, our goal is always to help companies like Trane delight their dealers’ customers through a seamless digital experience.

Aptly put by  Katherine Shin, Trane’s President of Customer Experience: “When customers are happy, the dealer is happy, and when the dealer is happy, the manufacturer is happy.”

And when you’re happy, we’re happy.

Joel Masters has been selling window coverings for 14 years. In 2017, Joel started his own online gallery in partnership with Hunter Douglas, the world’s leading manufacturer of window treatments. A year later, he opened his own brick-and-mortar store.

“It was by far the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” Joel told us. But despite his fears, he has steadily grown his business over the last few years and now employs a team of seven. He’s added invaluable business experience to his knowledge of the window covering industry. And he’s learned how to make his customer experience unlike that of any of his local competitors.

“We created a showroom that’s different from a lot of other Hunter Douglas offerings,” Joel told us. “People come in, we walk them through the showroom, help them understand what’s available in the market and what might work for them.” Once the customer had seen their options and asked any questions they had, Joel and his team would book a home call for their design team to go out and measure, provide a quote, and move toward closing the sale.

While Joel had been steadily growing his business for the first couple of years, his online reputation wasn’t reflecting the quality of his customer experience. Portland Window Coverings had a solid star rating on Google but with only a handful of reviews. Joel knew that customers would only trust a high star rating if the quantity of reviews was also high. But Joel was a busy business owner who already had too much on his plate. He didn’t feel he had the time or resources to manage his business’s online reputation.

Collecting reviews with a simple text link.

Joel reached out to the web design agency he had hired to build his website. He told them about his need to improve his online reputation and collect more reviews. Since some of their other clients had seen success with Podium, they recommended it to Joel.

Joel and his team started using Podium to send review invites to customers via text. They nearly doubled their monthly review volume and have maintained a 5.0 average star rating with more than 100 reviews.

Joel was relieved to see that his team was quickly bringing in more reviews and that his online reputation was on its way to more accurately reflecting the offline customer experience his team was providing. As he started to understand all that the Podium platform had to offer, he quickly realized that he could use it to connect with customers in a more efficient way.

Connecting instantly with website visitors and customers.

While Joel historically relied on his website’s ‘contact us’ form to collect leads and would reach back out to those leads over the phone or via email, that form was generating only a handful of leads each month.

“I used to have a ‘contact us’ form on the website that people could fill out,” Joel told us. “But that feels like a bit of a commitment, right? They aren’t ready for that type of engagement yet.”

Joel needed a way to communicate with his customers digitally since coming into the showroom was no longer an option. He recognized that he needed something other than his website’s ‘contact us’ form—something less intimidating, more natural, and that would allow for synchronous, two-way communication.

“These days, online chat is an expectation,” Joel told us. “People want to have a way to interact from your website.” That said, what Joel didn’t want was another chat tool that relied on a third-party source to field conversations or something that felt like an automated chatbot. When he saw Podium Webchat for the first time, he felt confident that his team could use it to more effectively capture leads and communicate with customers.

“I saw the potential in Webchat right away,” Joel told us. “When we can begin conversing over text, it can evolve into something very promising for us.”

With Webchat added to his site, Joel’s prospects and customers could now start asking questions with the click of a button—whether they wanted to schedule a home call with the Portland Window Coverings design team, ask questions about custom treatments, ask follow-up questions after purchase, or anything else. And they could do all of that while safely quarantined in the comfort of their own homes.

“Webchat helps us stay on the ball. It makes us look better than we are at times.”

“Our web interaction is up 583%,” Joel told us. “And clients truly enjoy being able to chat through the widget and start the process with a simple click to talk to an associate.”

Joel had not only solved how to connect with website visitors and communicate with customers, but had also made his business much more efficient in the process. What Joel’s team used to accomplish with a customer over the course of 24 hours or so, they were now able to do in a matter of minutes.

“I think of our customer communication like rugby, where I’m able to continuously pass the ball to a teammate running besides me and they can keep running,” Joel told us. “Each player runs the ball as far as they personally can, then passes it. It works incredibly well for our business.”

On top of communicating more effectively and efficiently with customers, Joel’s team had been able to consistently gather new leads. In the last year, they’d generated around 30 inbound Webchat leads every month. But before he even had time to celebrate that win, an entirely new kind of challenge was knocking at his door.

Transforming the payment process during a pandemic.

In March of 2020, Joel found out about the launch of Podium Payments, a text-to-pay option that would allow his business to send payment links to customers via text. Because of his success using Podium to get reviews, connect with website visitors, and communicate with customers, he didn’t hesitate to start using Podium’s text-to-pay tool. And it was perfect timing.

COVID-19 had reached the U.S. and was taking its toll. People everywhere were under quarantine and leaving their homes only when absolutely necessary. Joel himself was suddenly running a business entirely from home. Like most local businesses, Joel had historically accepted payments from customers mostly in person. But since the pandemic began, his team had been accepting a lot of payments over the phone, and he didn’t believe that was the best option for his customers or his business.

“Not only are people apprehensive about giving a credit card number over the phone—as they should be—but I also don’t want to take it over the phone,” Joel told us. “It places a liability on us.”

Joel started searching for a way to collect contactless payments. Since he had started using texting to collect reviews from customers, connect with website visitors, and communicate with customers, when he found out about Podium’s text-to-pay tool, he didn’t hesitate. Instead of wasting time taking payment over the phone, creating liability for his business, and requiring customers to do something they often were uncomfortable with, Joel’s team started sending a simple payment link via text.

“Text payments actually do what a lot of Podium does for us, which is help us look better than we are,” Joel told us. “As good as we try to be, we’re still a small business. I don’t have the financial backing of a big corporation to put together these awesome ways to pay right in an app or something like that. So it opens that door for people to process payments and interact with me financially in a way that is not only comfortable, but feels very professional. And I think it’s overlooked by a lot of companies.”

As COVID-19 cases have decreased and customers have slowly started physically coming into Portland Window Covering’s showroom, Joel has added Podium’s card readers so that customers can choose to pay over text or right there in the showroom.

“We process 90% of all our transactions through Podium Payments on either a card reader, mobile reader, or text-to-pay every month,” Joel told us. “That represents about a $60,000 savings in fees compared to my previous payment solution. And 93% of all transactions process in less than five minutes. It’s just become an integral part of everything that we do every single day. So it allows us to take payments in any way that a client is available or feels comfortable with.”

Now that Joel and his team have made it through the worst of the global pandemic, they’re now capitalizing on the tools they used to get through those challenging times to set their business apart from local competitors and provide a modern experience that customers aren’t used to getting from a local business.

“Podium is so integrated into our day-to-day business,” Joel told us. “I don’t know how we would do what we do at the level we’re doing it without Podium or something like it. And honestly, to my knowledge, I don’t think there’s anything else like it.”

For Valentine Roofing, it’s not about roofs but the people living under them. That may sound trite, but it’s truly baked into the way they run their business. Take their Peace of Mind program, for instance, where they install new roofs free of charge for people in need in the Puget Sound area. Plus, their commitment to their customers and community is visible in each customer communication. 

“Connor (the founder of Valentine Roofing) is a real person of integrity,” Steven Heller, Sales & Technology Manager at Valentine Roofing, told us. “And he wanted to start a company that put the customer first, focused on seamless customer communication and going the extra mile.”

Steven explained to us that roofing has historically been one of the least trusted industries out there, according to many studies. People are usually going through a difficult time when they need their roof repaired or replaced, and the process is incredibly disruptive to their lives. If you’ve been displaced from your home, and your roofing company fails to communicate or deliver on expectations, that’s going to impact your life in a significant way. 

“Our focus is on, how do we provide the best customer experience?” Steven told us. “People hate waiting around for days or even hours to hear back. We try to measure our response time in minutes rather than hours.”

Valentine Roofing has always been focused on providing a superior customer experience, but it wasn’t until two years ago that they discovered a better way to deliver that experience. 

“We were communicating with our customers primarily through telephone and to a lesser degree, email,” Steven told us. “And we realized that we’re in the 21st century and people are communicating in different ways. So, by forcing ourselves to stick with only phone or only email, we were really limiting ourselves.”

Problem #1: Inefficient and inconsistent communications.

Valentine found that the speed and content of their communications with customers didn’t always represent their business values.

“Our team is top notch,” Steven said. “Every employee here is just firing on all cylinders. But sometimes, if left to our own devices, and we’re typing a message from scratch, we might miss things or we might not word things the way that would be best worded. Half of the time spent composing any message, email or text or whatever, is just thinking about what do I want to say? How do I want to word this? And especially, like I said, our team is so qualified, they’re really thinking about how they say things and they’re very customer service oriented but that requires some thought and that requires some brain power.

Solution: Streamlining communications with text message templates.

With Podium, Valentine discovered that they could create text message templates for every point in the customer journey, arming their team with clear communication at the click of a button.

“We’re on a mission right now to ignite the customer experience,” Steven said. “We’ve been customer focused for so long, but we’re just identifying ways that we can improve. So, one of the things that we realized is that our connection with customers on an individual level is so important. So, we developed bios for each one of our employees here who will have contact with the customer, and they’ll send that bio out to the customer just introducing themselves along with a photograph because you can attach photographs in Podium. So, the customer knows who they’re talking to. We’re trying to humanize that connection. We don’t want them just to feel like they’re talking to a nameless, faceless company but that they’re talking to a real human being here and having this conversation with this person who is invested in the success of this project. 

Result: 9,930 customer conversations managed with Podium.

Problem #2: Online reputation didn’t reflect reality.

Valentine’s online review ratings were decent, but they didn’t have enough reviews to rise to the top of local search results. 

“We realized that we had not been focusing enough on our reviews prior to Podium,” Steven said. “We’re one of the biggest, if not the largest, roofing company in the Puget Sound area, and our reviews did not reflect that. Our reviews on Google and Facebook, not that the quality wasn’t good. Our scores were good, there just weren’t enough reviews. 

Solution: Collecting reviews via text.

With Podium, Valentine started sending their customers a simple text invite to leave a review with the tap of a couple of buttons. 

“It was so easy to use Podium to harness that ability to just send the customer a [text] review request,” Steven said. “I don’t fill out reviews for things that often myself. It’s just that I don’t have time and it’s a pain. But once I saw how it works with Podium, when a customer gets a review request it’s like two taps, pretty much, two or three taps and they’ve posted a review. And maybe they’ve said something, maybe not but we’ll take a five star review just the same whether they comment or not, although we love to hear what they have to say. So that was just the ease and the simplicity just to get people to be able to fill out a review was key.”

Result: 592 new reviews with a 4.6 average star rating

Problem #3: Inefficient payment process was costing time and money.

Valentine noticed that their payment process wasn’t as efficient as it could be, resulting in unnecessary work for their accounting team (and their customers). 

“Before Podium Payments sometimes people would call in,” Steven said. “Predominantly our accounting team would just send out a QuickBooks payment link and they would pay via that. It worked okay. It was just slower. It relied on someone here back at the office to generate that or they would call in and speak to our sales support team who would process the transaction. So, no matter what, we were adding layers of other people who they would have to call in or wait for us to email them. So, it just slowed everything down.”

Solution: Collect payments via text and wireless card readers.

With Podium, Valentine started collecting payments through either a simple text link or wireless card readers, making it faster and easier for their accounting team and their customers.

“The first step when Podium Payments became a thing is that the estimator would, on the Podium app on their phone, generate a link and send it via Podium to that customer,” Steven said. “So, they would receive it as a text message. Super easy. Also, once they saw how easy it was to pay and they could use Apple Pay or whatever their digital payment solution or situation was right on their phone. It was just so fast. And to be able to have the estimator right in front of the customer generate that link and send it to them, it was awesome.”

“The next step was a few months ago when we got the card readers. As soon as I showed that to the sales guys they were just losing their mind. I did a little demo showing how you just generate the payment, the customer taps their card, done. They loved that and they immediately started just flocking to that because it’s a more secure transaction as well. The pricing is a little better because the customer has the card present. I used to be in the payments industry for many years so I’m familiar with how it works.  I don’t know what degree of our down payments are via Podium pay but I would venture near all of them. So, yeah, it became the way that we operate.”

Result: $6.7 million collected via Podium Payments.

“For us, knowing that communication is so important, Podium is a key piece in our strategy for our relationships with our customers,” Steven told us. “I don’t know how we would operate the same way without it.”