Week 3: Assessing customer readiness

Thumbtack_Research

Thanks for continuing to provide feedback on booking inquiries and your patience with sharing week 3's prompt—please feel free to take an extra day to respond to this post (responses due Wednesday, June 17). We'd love to know about your experience in evaluating whether customers are truly ready to hire:

• How do you assess how ready a customer is to hire, and what has your experience been so far with evaluating how ready customers are with booking inquiries?
• What do you feel is your biggest challenge so far with getting customers to hire you using booking inquiries?
• What information or tools would help you better assess customer readiness?

AlexandraLohay

To answer your first question,

• How do you assess how ready a customer is to hire, and what has your experience been so far with evaluating how ready customers are with booking inquiries?

I ask the customer when are they thinking of having someone over and work from that day. I will confirm time and day then explain that they will have to agree and confirm by using the booking inquiries

• What do you feel is your biggest challenge so far with getting customers to hire you using booking inquiries?

Having to explain what they need to do to confirm booking.

• What information or tools would help you better assess customer readiness?

Have a hire button for the customer click. After the display of day and time is confirm, this way we will be able to see contact information. I think a hire button will help them understand that they are hiring you.

royalcleaning

1st question - Usually, many clients are just looking for information such as prices and availability. They don't always hire or want to hire. So, Booking Inquiries make a lot of sense, because we are only charged when the client hires us. After researching prices and finding them favorable, some hire. I assess when a client is ready to hire when they know the date and indicate the details that need to be done in the service.

2nd question - One of the challenges in getting clients to hire me more for Booking Inquiries is having to ask some basic questions that could be asked to the client beforehand through Thumbtack, for example: what is the size of your house in square feet? Because there are houses with 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms with 2,000 sq ft and others with 4,000 sq ft. So, this is relevant information for the final price and some clients take a long time to respond or don't have the patience and choose those who ask fewer questions due to unrealistic prices. Another example: how many pets do you have in your house? A house with 1 dog and 1 cat is less dirty than one with 3 dogs and 5 cats. So, perhaps if we already had this information it would be faster to close the contract.

3rd question - In my opinion, it would be possible to create some tools to help the client. Sometimes the client has a clear need, but they don't know exactly how much the service costs. Thumbtack gives a very low and imprecise price estimate and displays it at the end of the search, where many clients don't see it. So, could you update the price estimates for the services based on the most searched companies so that clients already know what prices they can find when interacting? It would also be interesting to make it clear to the client that after confirming the reservation, the professional has a financial commitment to Thumbtack and if they do not wish to proceed, they must cancel the reservation or notify in advance to avoid losses with travel and staff, since not everyone responds to calls and messages.

royalcleaning

The other thing I forgot to write in the first comment. You need to tell customers that they cannot send their personal phone number before making the reservation. To release the address and phone number, you will have to make the reservation, because they always try to send the phone number and wait for calls, so I try to explain that the number is not visible to me. Maybe you already tell them and they forget, so when they send it, maybe an automatic message could appear explaining this to them.