My partner actually goes a step further and checks Zillow lol. I told her she needs to work for the NSA.
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I literally have three competitors one does crappy work and hires criminals but is cheap, one is an owner operated professional quality business with similar pricing to me, one is a jack-of-all-trades that is cleaning windows, putting roofs on houses, painting, landscaping, building fences etc. They all do in person quotes for windows! I just feel personally by the time I get the contact info the person is ready to get off the phone. Perhaps itās because I am unfamiliar and not confident in a phone bid I will give you that
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I wish I had that kind of competition 
Thereās 3 window cleaners per square mile here lol
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I look at Responsibid as another tool. And another option for me as well as my customers.
I do tons of in person bids. I also get lots of people getting their bids online using Responsibid.
You can usually tell if someone messed up their online bid. Thereās no way a 5000 square foot house has 10 double hungs and 40 storm windows. If thatās the case I have no problem going out to count up their windows for them. If I donāt go out to give the bid we always verify the count before starting work. Iām not a stickler for window count. I add a fudge factor in the back end of Responsibid.
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Itās nice living in a market where they only have a few options that said its also annoying. The one guy like me is of similar quality, pricing and service. The cheap company gets complaints of their crew looking in peoples night stands, jumping to clean windows lol not kidding and just being overall unprofessional and doing a poor job but still have to hear about their prices. The jack of all trades guy is nice but actually drives me nuts. He drives around in his landscaping truck everyday with his dog and anytime he gives an estimate he shows up with his dog to get people all googley eyed and he has his christian logo on his estimate forms, and takes off his hat and bows to people when he meets them. Whats funny is I know employees of his that said he removes hours off their check, will promise bonuses to people he hires and then fire them once they land a big job, or he will talk about Jesus and his wife then go to the gas station with his employee and go did you see that ass on that girl. So basically my competition is a low class criminal hiring cheap company, a guy like me and then mr. goody too shoes that gets everyone by advertising his dog/religion but employees say is a fake. But hey I guess I could have 40 bucket bobs everywhere
Iāve had extremely good luck just having customers text me pictures of their homes if Iām too busy to stop by. Anymore people are so used to texting so Iāll just ask them if they are ok with me texting them a price once they submit photos, itās a no pressure sales tactic and it works. Honestly Iāve probably closed 99% of work through text messaging rather than doing them in person. I only had one older customer who lived too far to give and estimate, didnāt text, but she was able to give me a pretty good description and an accurate window count and my price was pretty spot on.
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I have tried this with people dont live in my direct service area and they always go ya we will do that and then you donāt here from them again lol
āhello maāam, when you filled out our form you said you have 12 windows, we counted 18, were there windows you wanted us to skip?ā
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Does anyone use Responsibid in conjunction with Housecall Pro? I like the idea of DIY/instant online estimates with Responsibid but there is a lot of overlap in other features between the two and the cost of Responsibid is high if you were just using a couple features.
I used to use responsibid but I stopped because we were using it mainly for the automated follow up, which works extremely well if you put the time in. When we would gain a customer weād have to take that customer and put them in our scheduling/crm software which was a little bothersome. Our software provider then came out with an automated communication/email/follow up feature which we were Able to use instead of responsibid. As far as the Automated quotes, we had to turn off the exact window pricing feature and went to square footage only and increased the pricing by 20% based on our average window counts based on square footage. The customers would just get the exact window count wrong so often we were having to constantly change pricing on customers on arrival we started calling the customers after they accepted an online bid. Square footage worked best and we would up the price another 20% for french paned glass.
So for us, the automated follow up was the best part of the system. But once we got that included with our crm, we stopped responsibid because it was an extra expense. Now I will say responsibid follow up is way more sophisticated but the customers donāt seem to care, they just want to be followed up with.
One thing that did always bother me with responsibid, and maybe this has changed, they charge $500 to get live help with set-up and assistance. The features are so complex that you need help with a live person to really understand how to setup some features correctly. The videos are good but itās not always a great solution. And for how much you pay, support should be included. That did turn me off a bit.
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i use quoteflare for all quotes. after initial emails no automated follow up but i like that i can customize the images with actual photos and find the customization more flexible. the way we have it set up the quote is 100% accurate more than 99% of the time.
i am in the process of adding an ecommerce shopping cart to my site which i may switch to to blend and help with our groupon campaigns.
I agree with what both Seth and Chris said. Itās a great tool that gets customers that you would not otherwise get after hours or who just do not call. I am not using all the features offered but the ones we use work perfect.
I use the customer factor and in my opinion it completely demolishes housecall pro. I just got off the phone with housecall pro recently and was comparing features and they pretty much were stumped. They were like oh yeah that is cool, yeah we donāt have anything like that, ummmm no we donāt offer that, ohh good idea. the housecall pro representatives have been nice but if you are using housecall pro instead of the customer factor you are paying three times as much money and getting less.
i agree and foung the same thing a few years ago when i did a rather exhaustive comparison of several systems. unfortunately tcf does not have everything i need for growth but still canāt fins anything better.
What do you mean it doesnāt have everything for growth
tcf is great and i am still using it.
this year i will be soliciting door to door and will need to track sales commissions. there may be a round about way but not a straight forward one.
there is a call back function but we have stopped using it as it does not flow well.
in general you have to do way more clicks than you should to get where you need to get.
itās not perfect but it is waaaaaaayyyyyy better than anything else i have found and has definitely helped me grow.
I think it is great at keeping me organized, keeping my customers in the loop and putting my business in front of customers I have already obtained. So to a degree it does help growth because without it a lot of your current client list would fall off. However I I have very limited time using it as I have been invoicing and scheduling for about a year with it but literally the last two weeks is when I finally got deep into itās full features.
i give tcf LOTS of credit for growth, one of the very best features imho is ability to send snail mail directly from tcf without involving other programs and mail merge etc.
my comment was not that it did not help with growth it definitely does if you use it right. and at this time i still cannot find anything that has itās features PLUS the other things i need/want AS i grow.
Snail mail?
good old fashioned printed letter delivered by post office.
