How ServiceTitan helped Rainforest Plumbing & Air think differently about customers’ needs

Residential customers don’t behave the same way as commercial customers.

Spencer Tippetts realized this four years ago when he became the director of business development at his father’s company, Rainforest Plumbing & Air. Rainforest, which had long been a commercial HVAC and plumbing shop, was opening a residential service unit—and Tippetts would be leading it.

Rainforest started using ServiceTitan, the software built for the trades, to help build out the new division. With advanced reporting tools and metrics at his fingertips, Tippetts was able to think about customer behavior in a new way—and make better business decisions.

For example, he now runs Google Search ads at night to attract more residential customers. Why? Most residential customers are at work during the day. If their air conditioning breaks, they wouldn’t even know until they got home in the evening.

This one adjustment quadrupled the amount of Rainforest’s residential leads.

“You have to remember: What does the consumer need?” Tippetts said. “What do they expect from a service company—and how can we live up to that?”

Answering these questions has been the most difficult part of growing the residential unit. But Tippetts hasn’t had to do it alone.

“I couldn’t imagine trying to start a different division without (ServiceTitan),” Tippetts said. “To not have the tools to manage any of it would have been a disaster.”

Tech that builds trust

Today, Rainforest has specialized teams for the residential and commercial sides of the business. And although both teams use ServiceTitan, “the experience is actually different, depending on what (type of) customer you are,” Tippetts said. 

Take appointment booking as an example. Commercial customers see appointments as “work orders,” Tippetts said. They don’t really need—or want—to know techs’ exact arrival time or to be notified if it changes.

But residential customers absolutely want to know what time they should expect a tech to arrive. So Tippetts turned on the appointment confirmation feature in ServiceTitan.

Now, residential customers get confirmation text messages after booking appointments. On the day of a job, customers can even track techs’ arrivals on a map and communicate with them via text. 

“Those were things that really made it easy for us to appear like we’re the experts at service in your home,” Tippetts said.

Five-star features 

In the last four years, ServiceTitan has elevated Rainforest’s customer experience. According to Tippetts, these features have had the biggest impact:

• Memberships: Through ServiceTitan, Rainforest has launched a maintenance membership program to serve residential customers. The software makes it easy to manage memberships, renewals, billing and more. “You're missing an opportunity if you're not using those features,” Tippetts said. “We have several hundred memberships, and we get 100 unit replacements from those people every year. That's a ton of money.”

• Reputation building: Since joining ServiceTitan, Rainforest has gained over 1,000 five-star reviews on Google. Tippetts believes that’s due to the many customer experience features ServiceTitan offers, like online bill payment, text message capabilities, accurate tech arrival times and more.

• Increase efficiency: Thanks to ServiceTitan’s efficient call booking software, Rainforest’s customers spend less than three minutes making an appointment. Recently, Tippetts tested this time by making an appointment for a friend. He drafted an estimate, emailed it to be signed and booked the appointment. “It took seconds to do all of this,” he said. 

Real revenue growth with ServiceTitan

When Rainforest started using ServiceTitan, its residential unit was bringing in about half-a-million dollars in revenue each year. 

This year, Tippetts expects the unit to hit $5 million. 

“That’s still only about 20 percent of what we do, just because the commercial department is growing so aggressively—which is also a kudos to ServiceTitan,” Tippetts said. “In fact, (...) we’ve doubled (our revenue) since we joined ServiceTitan.”

And now that Tippetts knows Rainforest can expand successfully, he’s looking into adding more verticals, like electrical, duct cleaning, refrigeration and industrial service. 

“My brother and I hope to help my dad retire one day, and that we get to continue his legacy,” Tippetts said. “We saw what it took (to build Rainforest), and we think we can do more.”