CSRs are the backbone of the trades—juggling incoming calls, scheduling jobs, handling upset customers, and coordinating with techs. But what does a day in their life really look like?
In a recent webinar, ServiceTitan Principal Industry Advisor Angie Snow and Senior Customer Advocacy Specialist Brittany Burgess walk you through a typical day in the life of a CSR, from morning chaos to evening wrap-up. They discuss the job’s biggest stress points and how to solve them with training, ServiceTitan features, and Pro Products.
Check out the full episode, A Day in the Life of a CSR, on demand, and read on for 6 key takeaways from the session.
1. The Typical Day Can Be Crazy
Snow believes the CSR role is one of the most underappreciated and underrated jobs. She says most people don’t realize how “crazy” a typical day can be until they’ve sat in that seat.
The morning starts with setting up the phone system, logging into ServiceTitan, and reviewing any jobs that came in overnight.
“In the afternoon, you're continuing to look at job boards and making sure you know how many calls you still need to book,” Snow says. “You're staying in close communication with dispatchers. And if you have a combo role of CSR-dispatcher, you're talking to the technicians as well. And then you're checking all of the different contacts that are coming in from so many different places.
“At the end of the day, you're trying to clear the abandoned calls, making notes of any outstanding tasks, making sure you have systems ready, preparing to send your phones to after-hours. And on top of all of this, you’re answering phones all day, talking to customers all day, and booking jobs all day,” Snow adds
2. CSRs Wear Many Hats
Burgess says CSRs are sometimes unfairly looked down on as some people assume it’s an entry-level position, when in reality, they affect all aspects of the business.
“They’re answering calls, booking jobs, confirming appointments—all of these things—and they're actually impacting the customer experience,” she says. “They're impacting if that customer is going to be loyal to you and keep using you for many years. They're also impacting revenue growth.”
Customer service representatives are responsible for creating the first impression, shaping perceptions, and directly influencing your brand’s reputation. They’re also responsible for your call booking rate, one of the most important CSR KPIs.
3. CSRs Must Overcome Customer Experience Challenges
Snow says today’s customers demand more than ever before. They want fast service and expect to communicate in their preferred way, whether by text, email, or chat.
“No. 1, they want empathetic service. They want to work with a company that actually cares about them,” Burgess says. “They want to work with a company that's responsive and will reply quickly in the way they want to reply. And they want it to be as easy as possible.”
To be successful, CSRs need to navigate and manage these contacts regardless if they call, text, or send an email, and have solutions at their fingertips to communicate with customers in a timely manner.
Burgess says several of the core features in ServiceTitan help CSRs deliver a better customer experience, including customer notifications.
“This is a great way to keep your customers in the loop, because if you're open about all of the things happening with your customer's job, they're going to trust you more,” she says. “So, No. 1, we have our job booking confirmations. This is an automatic text that goes out once a job is booked.
“We also have job confirmations, where a customer receives a reminder of their visit with the option to reply, confirm, or just text back if they need to reschedule,” Burgess adds.
Dispatch notifications alert the customer when their technician is en route and include the tech’s photo and bio. If you use ServiceTitan's native GPS, you can actually share their location with them too.
Additionally, missed-call notifications, a feature in Marketing Pro, automatically call or text the customer if they don’t reach a CSR.
“They're going to get a text message that says, ‘So sorry we missed you,’” Burgess says. “Then you can provide the call to action you want them to take.”
4. CSRs Juggle Fluctuating Call Volumes
Snow says businesses experience fluctuations in call volume, especially HVAC companies who see high demand in the summer and winter but slower service during spring and fall.
ServiceTitan solutions for high call volume include:
Adaptive Capacity Planning: “When you set it up, you can put in your zones, skills, job types, all sorts of things,” Snow says. “When you're booking that call, it's going to pop up a ‘get availability’ window and give your CSRs options to choose from right out the gate. They're going to sound confident, your customers are going to get off the phone quicker, and your dispatchers are going to be happy.”
Interactive Voice Response: When someone calls your business, they can follow commands to speak directly to specific departments or people. This cuts down on spam calls and shortens average call time.
Contact Center Pro: With this Pro product, AI Voice Agents automatically handle overflow and after-hours calls with ease. “You get to map this out and build it yourself. You get to decide if there's a prerecorded message, or if it goes automatically to an agent. And you can set it up for times of days,” Snow says.
ServiceTitan solutions for low call volume include:
Customer Follow-Up: From the follow-up tab, you can sort customer lists and make outbound calls to check on recently completed jobs, unsold estimates, soon-to-expire memberships, and more.
Marketing Pro: Automate direct mail, text, and email campaigns to target new and existing customers during the slow season.
5. CSRs Face Constant Brain Overload
“There are so many things a CSR needs to remember in their day-to-day job,” Snow says. “Think about all of the different types of scripts, promotions, and questions you need to ask, and the different products and services you offer.”
Burgess says job type summaries in ServiceTitan provide scripts for CSRs to answer highly specific questions.
“If you have multiple trades where they have to answer different questions for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, garage door, whatever it may be, you can adjust those questions so that when they select that job type, it pops right up into the summary, and then they can answer them,” she says.
ServiceTitan tags can also help CSR brain drain by saving time and reducing manual processes.
“These can be used to differentiate members versus non-members, new customers, and even not-so-nice customers,” she says. “Maybe you need ladder access. Maybe you have a technician that's allergic to cats.”
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6. You Have to Measure CSR KPIs
Burgess says service businesses should leverage ServiceTitan to track and monitor CSR KPIs in real time.
“It's going to show you everything you need to know about each CSR, their booking rate, outbound call number, average inbound call time, cancellation percentage, and so on,” she says.
“Unbooked jobs by call reason” is another important CSR KPI to keep an eye on.
“It’s going to help you understand the objections that they need some training on,” Burgess says. “Do they need to understand how to talk someone out of not paying a dispatch fee?”
Snow also suggests using scorecards in ServiceTitan to help CSRs better understand their own performance.
“As a CSR, they want to do a good job, they want to improve,” Snow says. “If you don’t have a scorecard in place, put one together. We can't improve what we're not measuring, and that's why these reports and these data points are so important.”
Do your CSRs have the right tools to succeed? Check out the full episode on demand to learn more about how ServiceTitan empowers CSRs and streamlines call center operations.
