Roof Life of Oregon Saves Time and Builds a Better Customer Experience with Texting

About Roof Life of Oregon

Specializing in roof maintenance and roof replacement, Roof Life of Oregon is a residential roofing company in Oregon. Roof Life prides itself on delivering friendly customer service with decades of roofing experience. 

The founder, Patrick Morin, built Roof Life after washing roofs more than 40 years ago. Now, the company serves thousands of customers in the Portland area and the surrounding suburbs. 

Melissa Hill, a Digital Marketing Manager at Roof Life, has been at the company for 10 years. She sat down with Podum to share how Roof Life has implemented texting and Webchat to better serve their customers and increase reviews, leads, and traffic to their website. 

The Challenge

Before Podium, Roof Life of Oregon struggled with their online presence, connecting with customers in off hours, and wasting time trying to connect with customers on the phone to schedule services. Specifically, their challenges boiled down to:

Showing up online
Competitors were referencing Roof Life in Google Ads making it harder for Roof Life to show up online and win customers. “The biggest pain was needing to step up our digital marketing by improving our online reputation. Other roofing companies were using our name in Google Ads and we wanted to stand out,” said Melissa.

Creating accessibility for clients
The Roof Life team knew it was important to be accessible to their clients, even on weekends and after hours. Clients have emergency roof leaks at all times of the day and the team knew they needed to increase their accessibility. Melissa explained, “We wanted to be accessible at all times for our clients. Roof leaks and other emergencies can happen at any time so we wanted clients to have a quick way to contact us from our website.”

Spending hours on the phone scheduling services
“We were wasting so much time calling customers. It was one person’s full-time job to call customers to schedule services,” said Melissa. With a company policy in place to call customers three times to try and connect, Roof Life spent too much time on the phone, often without speaking to an actual customer. 

The Podium Solution

With Podium, Roof Life created a better way to connect to prospects and customers, book appointments, and collect reviews. With texting and Webchat, Roof Life of Oregon uses Podium to deliver:

A customer-focused scheduling experience via text
With Podium, Roof Life implemented texting as a channel to communicate scheduling with customers. It’s been so effective that when the full-time employee responsible for scheduling work left the company, Podium messaging replaced all of her work and they haven’t had to hire a replacement.

“The owner loves it. He couldn’t believe the amount of people we actually got to say yes to booking appointments over text. All of a sudden he had 20 renewal clients in one day and he said, “how did this happen?’” said Melissa.

A better way to collect customer reviews and increase their online presence
After implementing Podium to request reviews via text, Roof Life increased their average star rating on Google and Facebook which has increased their overall leads. Melissa explained, “The online reputation tools were huge for us. With Podium, the review request is quick and to the point. It’s not time consuming, it’s simple.”

A convenient way to connect with customers at all hours
“When they know you’re live and right there, we can just chat back and forth, instead of sending them an email and waiting for a response,” said Melissa as she described the benefits of Webchat on their website. With a better way to connect, customers and prospects can quickly get in touch with Roof Life.

Results and ROI

With Podium, Roof Life of Oregon has found incredible results like:

→ Saved 40 working hours per week

Roof Life has now had more than 2,700 conversations with customers via Podium in the last 12 months. These interactions haven’t just saved 40 working hours per week, they’ve saved the cost of one full-time employee. Melissa explained, “ I hear a lot, ‘Thank you for the quick response.’ Customers say ‘wow, that was quick, thank you.’”

→ Increased average star rating from 3.8 to 4.7

With Podium, Roof Life added 331 new customer reviews to Google, increasing the average reviews per month from 2 to 7. “If you want to simplify your life and gain a good reputation online, get Podium,” said Melissa.

→ Increased website traffic by 23%

Roof Life added 1,544 leads from Webchat, a direct result of the 23% increase in website traffic. “Our lead volume has gone up because more people come to the website now, because of better reviews, and fill out the form or text us through webchat,” said Melissa.

“Podium is a game-changer. It’s allowed us to service our clients in a timely manner, improve our reputation online by offering our clients a quick and easy link to leave a review, and an easy way to respond to us with no hassle involved.” 

Podium can help your business too. Watch a demo here.