Chris Anderson of Applause on why great reviews start with your technicians

For a while I had Applause filed under review software, somewhere next to GatherUp and Birdeye. Then I spent a whole dinner at the Swarm Mastermind talking with Andy from their team, and he made it clear reviews were only part of the story. So when Chris Anderson, Applause’s co-founder and VP of Sales, came on Pest Control Legends, I wanted the rest of it.

Chris sees a review as the last step of a good service, and the person delivering that service is your technician, not the owner or the branch manager. Applause pays techs right away for the things that earn reviews.

One pest control company kept texting customers for reviews, ran about the same number of services, and went from 191 reviews in a month to more than 1,300 the next.

Who is Chris Anderson?

Chris Anderson is the co-founder and VP of Sales at Applause, a platform pest control and other home service companies use to collect reviews and pay bonuses to their technicians. It has helped thousands of pest control techs get rewarded for great service.

His background is HR and operations. Early on he started an HR consultancy that placed experienced HR people with small businesses, which gave him a lot of exposure to engagement, retention and the problem of getting a team to act like owners. His partner, Taylor Olson, ran a call center and rewarded reps for great calls, but the bonuses were manual and slow to arrive. The call center served pest control, and Taylor could see technicians weren’t getting recognized either. Most felt underappreciated, finished the route and went home.

They started by borrowing tipping from hospitality. With a digital wallet, a tech on the route would get a ping that John just sent $10 for the last service, and techs began acting like little business owners on their own routes. Some owners didn’t want anyone asking customers for tips, though, and customer interviews kept pointing to Google reviews, which Chris calls the lifeblood of any home service business. So they turned the tip into a bonus for reviews.

Tie every bonus to a business goal

I asked whether owners should pay techs for reviews or just let them collect tips. Chris thinks every business should incentivize, as long as the bonus lines up with a business objective, and reviews clearly do. He calls it a win-win-win, since a review means the customer is happy, it brings in new business through SEO, and it lets you track how each tech is doing.

He’d still pay a base wage that covers what a tech needs, then reward the ones who go above and beyond. Most companies he sees pay $10 to $20 per review, or more if their rating is low and their count is thin.

Before Applause, companies did this by hand. Someone in the office read every new Google review, looked for a tech’s name, matched the customer in the CRM and got it into payroll. Some companies have thousands of reviews, so it’s no wonder owners skip spiffs. Applause built an AI agent to do the matching and pay the bonus instantly.

Reviews are an output

This is what Andy was getting at over that Swarm dinner. Applause is about building a five-star culture, and reviews and NPS scores are its outputs. What produces them is the customer’s interaction with the technician, because the tech is the one at the house.

“If we’re just asking for reviews and not necessarily incentivizing on it, then ultimately we’re just kind of shooting in the dark hoping that we hit on a customer that had a solid experience.”

So Applause focuses on what the tech does every day. Its review request even tells the customer that a five-star review earns their tech a $5 or $10 bonus, which plays on the empathy people feel for the person who just served them.

When I asked what techs can do to deserve five stars, Chris went back to basics.

• Shut the gate. A gate left open is one of the complaints Applause hears most, and it can cost you the rating.
• Get a handshake. It puts a person behind the service.
• Show your work. Customers often aren’t home, so walk them through it when you can, or write detailed notes in the CRM so the post-service message shows everything you did, like the webs you found up in the eaves.
• Look after the pets. I’d heard Tommy Mello suggest dog treats, and Chris agreed. He’d also gather the dog toys in one spot before spraying.
• Be thorough so the customer never needs a reservice.

I summed it up on the show as “show that you care.” Anyone can do the pest control service, but the little things build a relationship, and that relationship is how you get the review.

Ask for one thing at a time

Applause connects to your CRM and texts the customer after the service codes you pick. Chris says text converts better than anything else when you ask a customer for something.

It asks for one thing, usually the Google review, because asking for too many things creates fatigue. Once a customer leaves the review, the AI moves on to an NPS rating (0 to 10). A Google review is one and done, but NPS keeps a pulse on the customer through the year and gives them a way to flag a problem you can fix. Applause also rotates through Facebook, Nextdoor and the Better Business Bureau instead of asking for a review you already have.

As an SEO guy, I loved that. Google will obviously prefer Google reviews, but ChatGPT, Perplexity and other large language models pull from everywhere.

The AI also watches for the right moment to upsell. After a customer gives you a 10, the AI finds a service they’ve never bought and offers it, like $10 off a first mosquito treatment or a free termite inspection. It can ask for a referral instead. (My PCM partner Jonas Olson explains how Pest Badger handles upselling and cross-selling.)

A leaderboard did most of the work

Techs get paid through an app that works like Venmo or Cash App, so a review bonus lands while they’re still in the field, like a little shot of dopamine.

Applause has since added scorecards that show each tech’s reservice rate, driver safety score, attendance, production value, time on site and route completion, and owners can attach a bonus to any threshold. If you’re at 89 on driver safety with a week left and $50 kicks in at 90, Chris figures you’ll be buckling your seatbelt and going easy on the brakes.

One company with about 15 techs had been sitting around 75 to 80 on driver safety and could never reach its goal of 95. After rolling out Applause, 14 of the 15 got above 95 with no bonus attached, just from seeing where they ranked against their peers. With a bonus, all 15 drivers got above about 96.

Techs open the app 3 to 4 times a day. As Chris put it, “if you put money in an app, they usually check it.” Applause uses that attention to show them CRM numbers they’d otherwise never see. At Pest Badger, Jonas tracks reviews per tech too, along with the other technician KPIs he watches.

The same text brought in almost 7 times the reviews

White Knight Pest Control, one of Applause’s early adopters, already texted customers a Google review link before switching. In June, on 27,000 services, that brought in about 191 reviews, which Chris called pretty decent.

The next month, on Applause, White Knight ran about 30,000 services and got more than 1,300 reviews. The ask barely changed, but the techs started working differently. Seeing customer feedback and bonuses in real time made them want to qualify for more reviews, and they started writing better notes in the CRM. Those notes went straight to customers, who could see how thorough their tech had been.

Appreciated techs stay longer

When I asked how techs feel about it, Chris said people get happier when you pay them more. One of the things they love most is hearing straight from customers that their work is appreciated after long, hot days on the route. One tech saved his Applause money for a big-screen TV. Another told the Applause team it pays for Christmas for his wife and kids without touching his base wage.

It also shows up in retention. Certus, one of the larger companies in pest control, used Applause for about a year. Reviews went up significantly, but Chris found the retention numbers more interesting. From July 2023 to May 2024, employee attrition fell 10 points. Each tech you lose costs an estimated $15,000 to $20,000, so losing 5 in a year runs about $75,000.

Customer retention rose 5 points, from about 76% to 81% annualized. By his numbers, those 5 points saved Certus more than $4M in annualized recurring revenue, plus roughly $1.7M in acquisition costs it didn’t have to spend. I’ve done some work with Certus, and they’re crushing it on reviews. I’m sure Applause had something to do with it.

When I asked for his final message to owners, he didn’t make it about Applause.

“Whether you use our system or some other internal program, these guys deserve a lot of recognition. They are the lifeblood of your business.”

Five technicians is about where it starts

Applause works best for home service companies with recurring services and volume. A roofer might do 1 or 2 jobs a week, while one service tech runs 12 to 16 stops a day, and each stop is a chance at a review, an NPS score, a referral or an upsell.

You also need employees, since an owner-operator paying himself review bonuses is just moving money between pockets. Chris says the value shows up at about 5 technicians. Besides pest control, Applause serves lawn care, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pool cleaning and a lot of pet waste companies.

My take

I came into this interview as a fan. At PestWorld about a year earlier, I sat in a session where a speaker was walking through the tech tools her company uses. Someone asked about review platforms, and she didn’t really have an answer, but people all over the room did: “We use Applause. We all love Applause.” When we recorded, Applause was the first sponsor I’d ever taken on, and the booking link below is my referral link.

I’m on the SEO side, and from what I’ve seen, reviews help everything. They help you rank, but they also turn more calls into jobs and keep customers around. You’ll never complain about having more, and you should be willing to pay your techs for them. When Mat Rogers came back on the show, he argued that steady review velocity beats one big push, and a tech who earns a bonus on every review keeps them coming in week after week.

Before Andy and Chris walked me through it, I didn’t realize how much of Applause is an HR idea. A five-star review on your Google Business Profile usually starts with a tech who shut the gate and explained what he did. Chris built a company around making sure that tech gets noticed and paid for it.

Where to find Chris

Chris says the website is the best place to start, and the team has a booth at PestWorld and NPMA events.

• Website: Applause
• LinkedIn: Chris Anderson
• Book a call: Talk to Applause (my referral link)