The Technician Performance Trifecta: Recognition, Rewards, and Retention

If you don't have the data in a meaningful way or folks are ranked, you can see how they're training against past months, you can see how they're training against goals, it's difficult to manage. You're going off of gut feel 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. You're listening to "Pest in Class," expert voices and pest management brought to you by field routes. You're ultimate destination for insider knowledge and conversations with top professionals in the pest industry. Join us as we sit down with leading experts, seasoned entrepreneurs, and the innovative minds who are shaping the industry today. Hello and welcome to "Pest in Class," expert voices and pest management. Today we spoke with Taylor Olson, CEO and co-founder of applause. We dive deep into how applause is changing the game by driving significant improvements in performance, customer satisfaction, and staff engagement. If you're searching for powerful ways to motivate and show genuine appreciation for your team, you won't want to miss this episode. I'm your host, Amanda Savitour. Let's get into it. Taylor Olson, you are the CEO and co-founder of applause, and today we're going to be discussing how technology is used to drive performance, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement. Welcome to "Pest in Class." Thank you for having me, Amanda. Love the podcast. We love "Pest in Class," and excited to be here. Thank you. You're too kind. Since you're such an avid listener, I'm sure you're ready for what's coming next. We have a little icebreaker for you. If you were giving a Ted Talk tomorrow, what would be your topic? I think it would be on entrepreneurship. It would be on getting a startup off the ground and making a career as a founder in any category. You know, it could be a service business, a tech company, but I love entrepreneurship. I think it's what I was put on the earth to do. So I think it's a passion, and I think I wouldn't have to repair a lot. I'd imagine in a Ted Talk, it's so much work to prep that, and I could just show up and start talking. So that would be a win. I love that. I love that. Who needs to prepare? You know, just go and get the knowledge out there to the people. So let's get into it. How did you find yourself in this industry? Kind of a weird path to it, but not so weird for where I grew up. I grew up in Salt Lake, and I was raised Mormon, and so a lot of folks that grew up in that culture, they're profiting for their church for two years, and then they come home and they're like, well, the only skill I have is I know how to knock on doors and talk to people about things, and so then they end up doing door-to-door sales to pay their way through college, and I did that for two years. So I had sold past control door-to-door in Southern California. I was just marching all the way up, you know, Riverside, Newrietta, Temecula, Rancho Cucamanga, down to Hemant. I remember getting out of the car one day in Hemant. It was 125 degrees, and I still got a sell, so I was proud of myself that day. And so I got to know past control through that sort of quirky job. I 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 trying to get a start-up off the ground while I finished my degree, being a pest control door-to-door sales rep was 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'd largely service pest control and lawn care companies, and then after that was acquired, ended up starting a pause. So it's now been, if I think back to when I was 19 and 41, it's been 22 years of being in pest control in some way, shape, or form. That's an incredible story. And the commitment to do door-to-door sales in 125 degrees heat, I commend you for that. That is dedication to the craft, if you will. Yes, the character building. I mean, I want my own kids to go do it, honestly. It's just a lot of rejection. And you got to get up every day and just got to put the work in, but you get rewarded. You know, every day, if you knock 100 doors, you're usually going to get one sell, and so yeah, learn a lot. What do you think is the biggest lesson you learned in your time with door-to-door, other than dealing with rejection? I think I was 18, and then I think I did it again when I was 21, if I remember correctly, and as particularly when I was 18, I was not a particularly ambitious teenager. I graduated with a 1.2 GPA, so I had some growing up to do, and it was, I think it was the first time that I really like set goals, and then went out throughout the day to accomplish those goals. 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 the property, but we were talking, you know, and every once in a while I'd have a good conversation with one, but it wasn't something that I wanted to do long-term, but it was an awesome stepping stone coming out of high school for sure. So let's talk about applause. How did you come up with this idea? The idea of applause was something that I think first came to mind with my last company, because part of my last company is we had back office call center services, and at peak we had 500 agents that worked for us, and they were making $10 to $20 an hour as sort of an entry-level call center job, as I was managing that workforce, recruiting them, working on retention, working on quality and skills and motivation day in and day out. I quickly found out that 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 wished 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 the launching applause, my dad was an HVAC guy. He did servicing in 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's probably overqualified for, and he didn't give us all. I liked the way he talked about his job, was like, "Yeah, it's just a job," and I just often felt with my dad that there had to have been a way for his company to capture 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 with someone's property and taking care of their home and making the home like a safer, happier place for whoever lives there. So as I 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 a tool 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 tan on the net promoter score, the CSAT, 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, it's for tired of 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 a little bit before I sold me past away. And so 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 sort of full manifestation, I thought, "This company has to exist because it's a way to take my dad's experience and use it for good, and 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 existed." So that's kind of the full long version. Now that the podcast is over. Thank you for coming on to Best in Class. I have to say, that is a wonderful story, and I am sure your father would be incredibly proud of the work that you've done. 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 is goal is within the industry? Yes. So it is a little bit tricky to just have a piffy statement of what a applause does because we do two things, and we connect them in a unique way. If I were to say sort of one phrase on what we are, I would say that we're performance management software, specifically for technicians. And specifically, we service past control, the green space, lawn care, plumbing, electric, and HVAC. A little more broadly, I would say we do some customer engagement automation. So when the technician leaves the home, things that a company wants to communicate to that customer, we help automate that and facilitate it. So a C-SAT 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 start is we said, hey, these are things that happen more often when the technician cares and treats the customer great. Let's make sure that we automatically map all those outcomes to the technician and then facilitate recognition and rewards. So a really common use case for applause is a company will say for every five star review that comes from a customer that the technician service, we're going to pay out a $10 spiff and then applause automates that full thing end to end. We send the review link, we map it to the technician and then 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 payroll. On the performance criteria, we pull in those things that we already know. We know how many five star reviews they're getting, what sort of NPS or C-SAT 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 in the CRMs, things that have to do with time and attendance or route completion or production per month, call back ratio, resurface ratio, churn rate, you know, 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 really believe in automating things and things to happen quickly. 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 and 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. What I love about applause is that it's this instant gratification for your text so that they feel that appreciation and they understand where they are instantly and then they can continue on that month being able to set goals for themselves or pay attention to a kind of where they are on the scoreboard, if you will. So I know that you have been focusing on automated Google reviews and PS that you said and tipping. How do those core features directly contribute to both customer retention, but also employee engagement? Yeah. So on the retention side, those are really good signals for a customer that's been taken care of. You know, like if someone were to pull all their data from their customer base, a past control company and say, hey, let's look at characteristics of who churned this year and who stayed. You're going to see a correlation of folks that left a 10 at a 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 technician to know this customer's happy. They've been taken care of. They're going to be with us longer than a customer that did not respond that way. 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 going to stay longer. 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, they 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 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 lots of five-star reviews, if they don't hear an out-of-boy a good job that's demoting, 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 and 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 from $25 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. Leaderboards. 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 say, hey, we're pretty dang confident that you're going to have better technician retention because of applause 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'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 salary when it's all accounted for. So just yeah, a lot of savings and just better culture and throughout the team. That's incredible. Now as an owner, you can go into the app. Can you set what the goals are and what the rewards are? Yes, exactly. You set it all up. And then after it's set, for the most part, it's set it and forget it. Like we're tracking every day how those metrics are being updated. We're showing that to managers in the dashboard and then certainly the technician they're seeing in the app. I bet you that a lot of technicians are checking that out a couple of times during the day. See where they are on that on that leaderboard. Oh yeah, it's hard to get a technician's attention. You know, a lot of companies have rolled out some sort of app and it fell flat, a communication app or some gamification app with the tech. So yeah, they don't open it. We thought that well, above all else, if there's money in this app, the techs are going to open it because they log in to see how much money they have and they can cash out instantly, like it's Ben Mo. 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 would say the second most common thing for a technician to look at in the app outside of their earnings is sort of the leaderboard and where they're out on the scorecard. They definitely like to see how they're trending and they like to see how they compare against the other techs. So I know you recently launched a new feature called scorecards. Can you dive into that a little bit? Yep. Yeah, scorecards is sort of the culmination of what I mentioned before when we said, "Hingy, we have some of the performance metrics. Let's go get them all and let's put everything into a single view." And just to sort of paint the picture of how a lot of companies are doing this without applause 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, 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 like a lot of technicians aren't getting into their email that much. So like if I know they're going to be looking at a lot, that's a huge win. And then I guess the fourth one would be yeah, if you're just going to go ahead and automate the bonus and the payment on that, that's going to save us a lot of admin work too. So that's what we tried to do. We brought in what we knew, which was Google reviews, net promoter CSAT, referral upsell tips. 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, resurface 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 west so they don't overdo it is we say on that first screen of your technicians 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 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 and excel. That's not their favorite part. That's not what they're good at. That's not the favorite part of the job. They're good at training and managing and motivating and and rightalongs 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. Do you have any specific examples of companies using the scorecard feature and achieving those goals that they had set for their team? Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing insurance costs in every category you're filling it in California where you are Amanda with home insurance. I don't even know if anyone's going to insure your home anymore at this point. Yeah, right. If you find someone, it's going to be pricey. And that's happening throughout the country at a car insurance rates are getting so high. And so insurance costs for a lot of owners on their fleet have consistently been going up a lot. There's a lot of interest in how can we bring our all-in fleet cost down? One way to do it is just to have less accidents. And then the other way is that if you have less accidents and you're using safe driving and things like applause, you can start to not have as heavy of increases in your year over your 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 accidents. And so we had a company that had been doing this without applause. They had never hit 90 on the way that they calculated safe driving with their fleet tracking tool and telematics tool. They'd never hit 90. But they wanted technicians to hit 90. And they made it a focus metric in a plot score card, pulled it in in real time, gave a bonus to technicians. I think they gave $50 at the end of the month of you hit 90. They ended up having over half of their technicians hit 90 in the first month. And it had never happened before. And that is just over the course of a year that's going to translate into less accidents and lower insurance costs. So that was one that I'd love to see out the gate. We've seen a lot of companies sort of replicate that. Another one is resurvices. In past control, there's an unpredictability of bugs to a degree. There's weather things. It's just sometimes you're going to have to go back. You can't get rid of them all. But you certainly want to keep them low because there's two problems with a resurface. One is that the job from the customers, you wasn't done correctly. So there's a dissatisfaction there. And then the second problem is you don't make money on the resurface. 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 resurface 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 resurface rate by not a ton. Like at an absolute level, I forget if they were in the teens and it came down 2%. So 2% absolute as a percentage of all resurvices, maybe that would have been 10 to 20% decline. So they got gains by doing it in the plas. And because of their size, that saved them over $100,000 over the year. Because resurvices are expensive. I mean, if you can stop another thousand of resurvices, it adds up because that tech will be able to go do a job that the company's making money. We talk a lot on this podcast about data and that the data doesn't lie. And that transparency with your employees is really important. Even though it's fun, there's this transparency where we can see what everyone is doing and where they're succeeding. And it keeps them engaged and honest and excited to show up and ready to set some goals and accomplish them. And it makes it so much easier to manage. If you think of being a manager over a bunch of technicians, if you don't have the data in a meaningful way or folks are ranked, you can see how they're training against past months. You can see other training against goals. It's difficult to manage. You're going off of gut feel. You're sort of having conversations with someone. I'm like, hey, I think you need to improve, but I'm not totally sure where. 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 resurvices. 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 10 resurvices. How long were you on site? What was your process during the first time you treated the home? Let me go on a couple write-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 you don't have the data that tech might say, I'm not really doing more resurvices 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 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 you can't lose them. I think they're just so more likely to stick around because they're just seeing day in, daily, weekly, monthly. They're seeing that they're winning and they're seeing that they're valued. So I just think for a manager, it just, it just makes things so much easier. Before we go, I know that applause was a bit of a love letter to your father and to the men and women who work in the service industry. So if your dad could see what applause has become today, what do you think he would be most proud of or most excited about? My dad was such a great dad that took incredible pride in his kids. I think the thing he would be the most excited about was just tailors being successful. He would just be happy that like I was doing something that I was passionate about and that we were succeeding. And then I think that he would look at, we've got, you know, 20, 30,000 technicians on the tool now. He would look at them as sort of his, his peers and very much relate to the good and the hard parts of their job. 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 think it would be both sides. Taylor Olson, thank you so much for coming on testing class. We're excited for you. We're excited for applause and we're looking forward to watching you grow. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me Amanda. It was a lot of fun.