Joey Levin
Analyst · KeyBanc. Please go ahead
Yes. So service provider experience is - I just want to highlight again some of the work that's been done here. It is - we talked about retention a lot. We also, I think, last quarter talked about it, but would continue to raise meaningful improvements in bad debt, meaningful improvement in the lifetime value of the service professionals coming on to our platform. And this anecdotally, the interactions we're having with service professionals have, in tone, improved meaningfully. And they see that because I presume and we can measure that, to some extent, and they can measure this better than us that they're getting a better ROI on our platform, which means we've improved pricing and which means we've improved quality. And when those things are happening, pros are happier. And as I said multiple times, pros - when they're happier, more engaged, make homeowners happier and more engaged. The key fundamental element of what a homeowner comes to our platform for is to match with the service professional. And the more - whether they match with the service professional at all is a huge cliff than the more service professionals, they match with, up to a point is very important. That increases their odds of connecting with a service professional and then that increases their odds of hiring a service professional. We're seeing each of those levels of the funnel improve right now. And we still have a lot of tools in there that we haven't launched yet. We've improved messaging, for example, and improved messaging on web and mobile and brought those things to parity. But we have not yet really fundamentally driven the transaction more heavily towards messaging. Still, our interaction between homeowners and pros relies heavily on the telephone. That's good. That's helpful. Pros like to receive phone calls, but homeowners are less eager to receive phone calls than they have been historically. And so getting people to message and getting that back and forth started on our platform, I think, is an area where we still have room to improve. Also, we're looking at acquisition economics and making sure that we're acquiring both homeowners and Pros that are more likely to match on our platform. And so we're taking a look at all of our marketing channels, which we've been doing for a while. Some stuff that was unprofitable was easy to cut and we've talked a lot about that. But we're now looking at channels and saying, how can we demand more out of our existing channels, not just demand more profit out of our existing channels, but demand better customer experience out of our existing channels. And we think we still have work to do there, and we think that will lead to, again, both more profitability and better interactions, better experiences between homeowners and service professionals. And I'll just add one more thing on that, which is people have asked me the question, well, are you cutting marketing here in ways that's kind of overstating the profit or where you're borrowing from the future to cut marketing areas? Truth is we're generally cutting marketing our performance channels. And so performance channels are near-term performance channels. and brand spend is actually up year-over-year and will be up again year-over-year in Q4. So that part of the business is healthy, but we're looking at all the channels and deciding what we want to do and demanding more, again in customer experience out of each of them, so that when we bring a homeowner to our platform, and when we bring a Pro to our platform, the interactions between those two are much more valuable for each other and for our platform.