Skip Wintter fell in love with the trades working with his stepfather, crawling through attics and under floors to install cooling systems for his self-owned business.
By Wintter’s own admission, contracting businesses in those days did things “the hard way.”
But he was hooked on the HVAC industry—and on how technology could make it better.
“That led me to dive into the energy efficiency side of things about a decade ago, which led me into the sales and local parts of business,” Wintter said.
Now he’s back in the attics and crawl spaces, working as a comfort adviser and field supervisor for Esser Air Conditioning in Palm Desert, Calif., founded in 1980.
It’s a family business run by General Manager Michael Esser that boasts a special culture, with Esser taking an interest in the lives of every team member and the community at large. Esser programs have donated more than $1 million to local charities.
“Esser is about doing the right things the right way,” said Wintter, “and about providing an unmatched level of service in an extreme climate.”
Providing relief in the Coachella Valley is serious work. In Riverside County between the San Gorgonio Pass and the Salton Sea, Palm Desert (as well as Palm Springs) rests in the Colorado Desert, where summer highs might be 120 degrees (160 in the attic) and winter temperatures cool enough to require a heat pump.
That combination—an interest in technology, the extreme climate, the family atmosphere at Esser, and having watched his stepfather do things the hard way—gives Wintter a lot of great reasons to look for ways to make Esser’s technicians more effective and efficient at doing their jobs.
Those technicians have to deal with technical issues in the units they service, scorching temperatures, and customers on sometimes their worst day. So they have to be better at educating and guiding the customer to the right solution for them.
Often, all of those demands come in the same interaction.
A tool for coaching, accountability and teamwork
To reach that goal, Wintter and Esser rely on Field Pro in ServiceTitan, the cloud-based software for the trades. Field Pro uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide pre-job intelligence, real-time guidance and job coaching for contracting businesses.
Pre-job information allows drivers to hear a history of the job and information about the work while they are en route to do the work, and “not spend 15 minutes sitting on the side of the road, wasting that time,” Wintter said.
“Being able to gain crucial information streamlines things into an efficiency where clients aren't worried about people sitting in front of their house, or technicians being late, or whatever the other impacts might be,” he said.
During the job, Field Pro automatically records the call, tracks key events during the interaction, and scores the technician’s performance against the preset best practices, including building rapport, handling objections, finding a compelling need, closing, speaker share, and pacing.
And after the job, Field Pro’s AI capabilities enable automatic sharing of the visit scorecard and performance updates with techs that celebrate wins and prioritize opportunities for improvement. And it recommends for managers expert training technician video clips and examples of peers executing beautifully in the field.
“With Field Pro, it's definitely easy for us to pinpoint areas of growth, and then we can work one-on-one with each technician specific for what they need,” Wintter said. “And that really allows them to be the best technician that they possibly can be in the field.”
Esser has leveraged Field Pro’s capabilities to build a culture of improvement, where technicians can listen to interactions on their own, share their best moments with the rest of the team, and ask for help when things don’t go the way they wanted.
Wintter said Esser’s approach leads team members to welcome and accept the input, referring to Field Pro as an accountability tool that creates “teachable moments,” automatically pushing clips with great examples from the field into a feed for techs to scroll, review, comment, and like, similar to Instagram.
“I think the biggest benefit with Field Pro is seeing some of those details that might have been missed in the moment, and being able to learn from them,” Wintter said. “Moments that might have been lost with one technician, now we can share with everybody and take out into the community.”
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Opportunities for improvement
Chris Holland, Esser Service Manager and head of the Install Department, said technicians learn better communication skills because of the feedback from Field Pro.
“Field Pro made people more conscious of what they were saying, and when they were saying it, and how they were saying it,” Holland said. “So you get guys who are able to judge themselves and really hold themselves accountable due to the training and the feedback they've gotten from Field Pro.”
And Field Pro’s Manager Dashboard helps Holland and other leaders identify who is working to improve by listening to the recordings and paying attention to the AI-generated improvement suggestions.
“It really lets me know who's actually trying to better themselves,” Holland said, “and who I need to do a little bit more training with.”
Team members respond to the training, Holland said. He may ask them to go over their calls, and they can already acknowledge where they missed a sales opportunity or a point where they could have expressed themselves better.
The bottom line? Wintter said Esser has seen improvement in average ticket, close rate and revenue per hour since adding Field Pro.
And while Wintter’s first exposure to the trades may have been watching his stepfather do things the hard way, he and Holland have found that the technology in Field Pro and ServiceTitan provide an easy way to maximize the skills of every team member.
“ServiceTitan really allows us to focus on the things that matter,” Wintter said. “And those things can drive an impact in the business.”
