The Technician Performance Trifecta: Recognition, Rewards, and Retention

So I had sold pest control door to door in Southern California. I was just marching all the way up, you know, Riverside, Nurieta to Mekula, Ranchacucamonga, down to Hemet. I remember getting out of the car one day in Hammond, it was a hundred and twenty five degrees and I still gotta sell, so I was proud of myself that day. And so I got to know pest control through that sort of quirky job. Ended up going to law school.

And then while I was in law school, I decided I didn't want to practice law. And so I was I was trying to get a startup off the ground while I finished my degree. Being a pest control Door to door sales rep was the really the only job I'd ever had. And so I started to think about things that I could do for some of the pest control owners that I knew. And that's how my last company was born. It was called Slingshot. We largely service pest control and lawn care companies.

And then after that was acquired, ended up starting Applause. So it's now been, if I think back to 19 and 41, it's been twenty-two years. of being in pest control in some way, shape, or form.

You know, we would sort of get together with the team, you set your goals, and then even though it would be really hard or something would go wrong, I would still try to hit the goal. And I have never done that before in life, and so I think It was learning how to do that that taught a lot. Certainly overcoming rejection and adversity.

learning some basic communication skills. I was also really shy growing up, just learning to sort of get out of my shell and talk to adults. And it was mainly adults just slamming the door on me and telling me to get off their property. But we were talking. You know, and every once in a while I'd have a good conversation with one. It wasn't something that I wanted to do long term, but it was a awesome stepping stone coming out of high school for sure.

Like my idea as an owner of how a customer interaction should go didn't always translate with my team. They didn't always show up the way that I wanted them to show up. And working on that was just really hard. And I never felt like there was a great set of software tools that helped me. I felt like it was just a lot of manual work that I had to do with managers and training and spreadsheets. And I always wish there was a tool that could automatically calculate their performance metrics.

And assign bonuses to them and leaderboards and just sort of automate a lot of the things that we were doing manually. I thought that it would help my team perform better. That was the original place that I had thought of this idea. And then how that sort of then translated to launching applause, my dad was uh was an HVAC guy.

He did servicing and sales for a local HVAC company. And he was really smart, very gifted. And I think he ended up finding himself as he was getting older in life in a job that he was probably overqualified for and he didn't give us all. You know, I like the way he talked about his job was like, eh, it's just a job and I just often felt with my dad that, you know

there there had to have been a way for his company to to capture m more of his talent and to get more out of him. And there also had to have been a way for my dad to just feel more pride and satisfaction in that work. Because I do think there's a lot of pride in being a technician and showing up to someone's property and taking care of their home and making the home like a safer, happier place for whoever lives.

So as as I was sort of thought about my dad's experience as the technician, and then mine as an employer of hourly folks. I felt like, you know, maybe the answer to this is there's there's a tool that that automatically calculates performance incentives or performance criteria, makes it really easy on management. And then it also is doing a lot of things that just naturally inspire guys like my dad to do great work.

They're getting that recognition when something goes right. A five-star review, or they have a chance to get a tip, or they see the 10 on the net promoter score, the CSAP. They see what the customer says, like, oh, like my dad's name was Tim. And they see like, hey, Tim showed up, went above and beyond, couldn't be more happy with his work. Five stars. I mean, it just feels good.

And then to see that you're showing up and serving customers really well, you're hitting goals that your employer needs, and you're making more money because of it. Part of what pushed me over the edge to launch it as I had thought about this tool was Part of the reason I had gone to sell my last company was I wanted to retire my dad. And because my solution for him was, hey, you don't love your job.

Let's retire you. Let's get you out of it. You've been a great dad. This is your reward for being a great dad. He ended up having an unexpected heart attack uh a a a little bit before I sold and he passed away. And so the the timing of not being able to do that for him and just seeing how his career and then life ended. It was really hard to accept. And the more I thought about what applause could be, and it's its sort of full manifestation, I thought.

This company has to exist because it's a way to take my dad's experience and and use it for good and sort of rewrite his legacy a little bit. And maybe one day there'll be a million technicians like my dad that are on the tool. And their job is a little bit better and a little bit more rewarding because we exist. That's kind of the full long version. Now that the podcast is over, um thank you very much.

Uh for those who are unfamiliar with applause and they're hearing all of these really cool things that you're doing over there, can you define what applause is and also what its goal is within the industry.

things that a company wants to communicate to that customer, we help automate that and facilitate it. So a CSAT or NPS score on how the tech did. Opportunity to get a referral, opportunity to generate a new leader upsell. In some industries, they like to enable tipping where the customer can tip the tech if they did a good job, and then leaving a five-star review and facilitating that.

And then we take those things and the way that we started is we said, hey, these are things that happen more often when the technician cares and treats the customer great. make sure that we automatically map all those outcomes to the technician and then facilitate recognition and reward. So a really common use case for a plaza is a company will say for every five-star review that comes from a customer that the technician serviced, we're going to pay out a$10 spit.

And then Applause automates that full thing end to end. We send the review link, we map it to the technician, and then we we send the bonus and we do it all immediately. And then the technician has the money in their Applause account instantly. They don't have to wait to pay.

On the performance criteria, we we pull in those things that we already know. We know how many five-star reviews they're getting, what sort of NPS or CSAT score they're getting, we know about upsells and referrals that can sort of indicate performance. And then we started pulling in other performance criteria from fleet tracking software, like safe driving scores and then the CRM.

Things that have to do with time and attendance or route completion or uh production per month, callback ratio, reservice ratio, churn rate. You know, how for for your route, how well is that holding up month over month? And we pulled all of those in automatically to a full scorecard for the technician. Management can see and assign goals and rewards to it. And then the technician sees where they're at in real time. So we we really believe in automating things and things to happen quick.

I think it's tough when a technician is sitting around waiting to the end of the month to see how they did. And then their pay, it's a little hard to untangle like how does that impact based on what I did? I'm just sort of getting the paycheck. So applause makes it very clear to the technician how they're doing in real time on the month and how that's going to impact their pay.

been focusing on automated Google reviews, NPS that you said, and tipping. How do those core features directly contribute to both customer retention, but also employee engagement?

A 10 out of 10 the last time the technician came, or that left a five-star review once or twice throughout the year, versus those that did not. Clearly, those people had taken the time to signal that they were happy. And the technician took care of them. And so it's just a really good signal for a company and technician to know this customer's happy. They've been taken care of. They're gonna be with us longer than a customer that did not respond.

I think similarly, a technician, you know, like A motivation theory, there's lots of different reasons that people are motivated to show up and do great work and be engaged. When you look at the core buckets of motivation, we try to provide motivation in each of those core areas so that there's something for every personality.

Some technicians are very financially motivated. Not all of them. Some of them are. And so if they're seeing more money come in because of their good work and it's real and it's instant and it's meaningful, they're gonna stay lost. And your average owner is more than happy to pay the technician more if their performance commands it and if they're really stepping up their game on performance or say, hey, we'll pay you a little bit more for that for sure. That's a win-win.

So I think for those techs, it's it's about the money. I think for other folks, they respond to recognition that matters to them. That's sort of their love language. They need to hear that they're doing a good job. And if they showed up and were really consistent for a week and on time, or if they were getting a lot of five star reviews. If they don't hear uh an attaboy a good job, that's demotivating to them. They don't feel like someone cares. And so applause really automates the recognition.

Because now when the customer puts their hands up and is saying, you did an incredible job for me, that is being fed to the technician in the app instantly and they get a little notification on the phone. So the recognition piece and then also something we don't talk about as much is just sort of recognition tooling for management that lives in applause as well. At any time a manager can go into the tool and do spot recognition or spot bonus.

They can just type in great job on route completion goal this week or thank you for covering this extra job when you were going to go home in the evening and you took it and they could drop'em twenty five dollars right in applause then and there. So that's how sort of recognition I think helps some technicians feel valued and stick around. The last major bucket is competition and gamification. Leaderboard.

being able to compete against other technicians and see their name at the top of the leaderboard on the metrics that matter and having fun with that. We really see a lot of technicians in that part of our app a lot. And so I'd say those are the three big ways that Applause really helps attack stay engaged. And when we first launched.

We would tell we would talk to owners and say, Hey, we're pretty dang confident that you're gonna have better technician retention because of a plots. Uh of all the reasons I just said and more. But we couldn't prove it. You know, like you have to be around a while to really prove this. We're now over three years in and now we can prove it. Now we can see companies that year over year

that didn't have other meaningful changes to the tech experience other than Applause was with them one year and wasn't another year, are seeing meaningful technician retention gains. We we've had companies that were Losing one out of two technicians over the course of the year that got all the way up to only to keeping, you know, four out of five.

And when you think of the replacement cost of a technician, it's about half a year's salary when it's all accounted for. So just, yeah, a lot of savings and just better culture and throughout the team.

Um, because they log in to see how much money they have and they can cash out instantly, like it's Venmo. That ended up being very true. So we sort of have a cheat code with it, which is there's money in there and they like to go in and check on that a lot and they like to cash out a lot during the week. So that's one. But two, I I would say the the second most common thing for a technician to look at in the app outside of their earnings.

Is the sort of the leaderboard and where they're at on the scorecard. They they definitely like to see how they're trending and they like to see how they compare against the other tech.

is as companies grow and become more sort of buttoned up and more performative, they measure things and they have some sort of scorecarding for their technicians. A lot of them are doing it on whiteboards in the office.

or manually in Google Sheets or Excel. And then there's an admin or a manager that has to put all that stuff together. They try and get it together at the end of the month and they let people know. They sort of email it out. And as we talk to companies about the process, you know, the the there was definitely a lot of feeling of if I didn't have to spend all the time

cobbling it all together, that would be a huge win. And then if I could get it in front of a technician sooner rather than after the month is over, but if they could see it during the month, that would be a huge win. And then if I could be confident they were actually looking at it, because I like a lot of technicians aren't getting into their email that much. So like if if if I know they're gonna be looking at a lot, that's a huge

And then I guess the fourth one would be, yeah, if you if you're just gonna go ahead and automate the bonus and the payment on that, that's gonna save us a lot of admin work too. So that's what we tried to do. Uh we brought in what we knew, which was Google Reviews, Net Promoter CSAT, referral upsell tip.

And then we brought in safe driving scores from the fleet tracking software. We integrate with the major ones there. We brought in things from the CRM, route completion, product production value per month, time and attendance. Reservice rate. We now have 66 different metrics that folks can choose from. They can pick what metrics matter and they can make a scorecard.

And then the thing that we help companies with so they don't overdo it is we say on that first screen of your technician's experience in the Applause Mobile app. You pick three focus metrics that are the three that are sort of showing up when they log in. So pick three things that matter the most that you really want to see improvement on through the course of this month. The technician of course can click into the broader scorecard and see all of them, but

That's effectively how it works. So it's automating the metrics. It's showing them in real time. It's tracking to goal in real time. It's making it easy to see. It's rewarding the bonus and paying that on real time at the end of the month when the reward when the goal's been hit. And so, you know, from a manager's view, it just takes away a lot of the admin burden and chores. And frankly, most good managers that are in field services.

They didn't get into it because they like to sit behind a computer screen and calculate things in Excel. That's not their favorite part. That's not what they're good at. That's not their favorite part of the job. They're good at training and managing and motivating and and ride-alongs and taking care of customers. And so we give them more time to do what they're great at. And then we take care of that admin work that is important.

and you're using safe driving and things like applause, you can start to not have as heavy of increases in your year over year insurance rates. Might not go down based on the way insurance is trending, but it's not going to go up as much. So you're definitely saving there. And so a lot of companies are saying, hey, let's pull in the safe driving score, let's make that a focus metric, let's really make sure we're reducing action.

And so we had a company that had been doing this without applause. They had never hit ninety on the way that they calculate safe driving with their fleet tracking tool and telematics tool. They'd never hit ninety. But they wanted technicians to hit 90, and they made it a focused metric in applause scorecard.

Pulled it in in real time, gave a bonus to technicians. I think they gave fifty dollars at the end of the month if you hit ninety. They ended up having over half of their technicians hit ninety in the first month. Um and it had never happened before. And that is just over the course of a year, that's gonna translate into less accidents and lower insurance costs. So that was one that that I love to see out the gate. We've seen a lot of companies sort of replicate that.

Another one is reservices. Like in pest control there's an unpredictability of bugs to a degree. There's weather things. It's just sometimes you're gonna have to go back. You can't get rid of them all, but you certainly want to keep them low because it's it it there's two problems with a reservice. One is that the job from the customer's view wasn't done correctly, so there's a dissatisfaction there.

And then the second problem is you don't make money on the reservice. And so you're losing a lot of money by having technician do that stop. And so a lot of companies want to bring that down. So reservice rate as a focus metric is something that we see a lot. We had a company that set goals around that and given their size. They reduced the reservice rate by n not a ton. Like at an absolute level. I forget if they were in the teens and it came down two percent.

So two percent absolute as a percentage of all reservices, maybe that would have been 10 to 20% decline. So they got gains by doing it in applause. And because of their size, that saved them over a hundred thousand dollars over the years. Uh because reservices are expensive. I mean if you can stop another thousand reservices, it adds up because that tech will be able to go do a job that uh the company's making.

You know, it's like when you have the scorecard and it's crystal clear how someone is doing, how they rank against their peers, how they're doing against goal, how they've trended over the last few months. Like the conversation just sort of starts and ends itself. It's just like, let's say someone is in the bottom quartile on reservices. Clearly that's what we need to talk about. Let's let's talk about how long you've been on site. Talk me, let's let's go look at your last ten reservices.

How long were you on site? What was your process during the first time you treated the home? L let me go on a couple ride alongs with you and let's let's work on it. That's just obviously what needs to happen for it to improve. And then you don't have the defensive technician is if you don't have the data, the tech might say, I'm not really doing more reservices than anyone else. When you have the data, it's

You don't have to sort of get into that. It's just like here it is. Like let's face the facts and let's let's go work on it. And then I think for a technician too, it it makes it clear to see that you're progressing and doing better. And then for the folks that are your upper quartile technicians, the ones that you really need to keep. Like those are the ones that that you can't lose them.

I think they're just so more likely to stick around because they're just seeing day in, uh daily, weekly, monthly, they're seeing that they're winning and they're seeing that they're valued. So I I just think for a manager, it just it just makes things so much easier.

And he would I think he would feel really good that his experience led to them having this tool that that honestly did make their job a little bit better every day. So I I think it would be both sides.