How to improve technician performance with competitions

There are a number of different ways to motivate home services technicians to consistently deliver great service. Naturally, different technicians respond to different motivational techniques. 

Typically, when we talk about performance incentives, we’re talking about recognition and financial rewards. Many technicians are motivated by one or both of these incentives: according to our 2024 survey of over 400 technicians, 49% find positive customer feedback highly motivating, while 63% find financial rewards in the form of tips or bonuses to be most compelling. 

But there’s a camp of technicians who respond most strongly to an entirely different kind of incentive. And that’s competitions. 

To date, Applause has helped motivate technicians driven by recognition and financial incentives. Now, we also support technicians with a competitive edge. 

Our new Competitions module taps into one of our most basic human instincts: our drive to outperform our peers. 

Competitions is exactly what it sounds like: a simple module for running contests in Applause where technicians can compete to see who can meet a target KPI the fastest, get the most 5-star reviews, and more. It’s a fun, rewarding way to increase employee engagement and productivity. 

Crucially, though, there is a wrong way to do contests. Inconsistent performance tracking, delayed recognition, or unclear rules can lead to confusion, frustration, and  demoralization. 

As part of this launch, we’ve been researching what separates motivating competitions from administratively burdensome, lackluster, or frustrating ones that fail to drive performance improvements. 

And we’ve found there are a few key elements all contests must have to actually increase technician engagement and productivity. 

In this article, we’ll cover:

• The biggest problems we’ve seen with traditional competitions
• Our solution for helping any home services company turn everyday performance into contests that are simple, rewarding, and fair. 

The problem with traditional competitions

There are plenty of home services companies that run contests to motivate their techs to hit certain goals. But too often, we’ve found that managers are using whiteboards, spreadsheets, or group texts to track their technicians’ stats.

Worse still, they’re manually sending gift cards, money, and other rewards to winners days or weeks after the contest has come to a close. 

That manual setup creates dozens of opportunities for confusion, unfairness, and declining interest from technicians. 

Specifically: 

• If admins and managers are updating scores by hand, there’s the potential for human error. Admins may forget to update scores, update them too late, or fail to assign the right score to the right tech. 
• If the contest leaderboard isn’t easily accessible or visible, technicians lose interest in the contest altogether. 
• If rewards arrive late, the connection between the target behavior and the recognition itself erodes considerably.
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When competition becomes a chore to manage or feels arbitrary to those participating, it loses momentum and meaning. 

Bringing competition into the flow of work

Manual, disorganized, and confusing contests kill morale. 

So we designed a way to run contests that’s automated, clear, and simple. 

Our new Competitions module takes the motivational power of contests and puts it right in the app your techs use every day.  

With Competitions, managers can:

• Create and customize contests around any KPI, from lowest reservice rate to time on site, to best driving score, and more. 
• Segment contests by group or location, so every competition feels fair and relevant.
• Automate payouts directly through Applause. No manual payroll or one-off gift cards.
• Track live standings so every technician can see exactly where they rank in real-time. 
• Analyze results through built-in reporting that rolls seamlessly into existing bonus histories.
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The result is a more connected, transparent, and motivating experience for admins and technicians alike.

Competition creates culture

Just like Scorecards define what “great” looks like, competitions define how it feels to get there.

Every competition you launch sends a message to your team about what matters most in your company:

• Launch a contest around reviews, and you’re telling the team that customer experience wins.
• Run a safe driving challenge, and you’re telling them safety is non-negotiable.
• Incentivize NPS, and you’re reinforcing quality over quantity.

When you run competitions consistently, they create the kind of environment every high-performing technician thrives in:

• Performance is transparent.
• Recognition is instant.
• Winning feels earned.

Automation makes it sustainable

Like everything else we’ve built at Applause, Competitions automates the process of running contests end-to-end.

To make it simple, it’s embedded within the app you and your technicians already use. The metrics live in your scorecards, the data flows in automatically, and rewards are paid out instantly.

Just pick the metric or goal your technicians need to meet, and you're all set. Competitions runs in the background, surfacing progress in real time and celebrating wins as they happen.

Win with competitions

At its core, Competitions is about creating consistent, healthy motivation loops that align technician behavior with business outcomes.

It’s about turning performance into play, and play into profit.

When you make competition fair, transparent, and automated, everyone wins:

• Technicians stay engaged because they can see progress.
• Managers save time because everything’s tracked automatically.
• The business grows because the right metrics move fast.

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Chat with our team to find out how Applause can help turn every technician into a top performer.