Service Excellence is showcasing its PRESS PLAY learning platform through a recent training engagement with The Gentlemen Pros in Calgary, Canada, demonstrating how the platform helps home service companies align sales, service, and management around a consistent customer experience. The training, held May 23-24, involved 25 team members from plumbing, electrical, HVAC, and management roles, focusing on the PRESS PLAY FOR TECHNICIANS program.
PRESS PLAY is a contractor training and learning platform created by Service Excellence for home service companies. It aims to help owners, managers, salespeople, technicians, and service teams use a shared language for customer conversations, trust-building, sales communication, service delivery, and follow-up. The platform addresses a common problem: after training events, old habits often return. PRESS PLAY is structured to help companies teach, coach, inspect, and reinforce behaviors that affect customer trust, revenue, culture, and brand reputation.
“For a contractor, the customer experience happens one conversation at a time,” said Todd Liles, founder and CEO of Service Excellence. “That does not change whether the company is doing one million dollars or one hundred fifty million dollars. What changes is the complexity around the business. PRESS PLAY stays focused on the part that has to remain consistent, which is how your people communicate, build trust, and serve the customer in the home.”
The Gentlemen Pros, with locations in Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer, have worked with Service Excellence on multiple training initiatives over the years. CEO Brham Trim noted that as the company grew, it became important to ensure alignment around a customer-first philosophy. “What I appreciate about PRESS PLAY is that it isn’t focused on selling more. It’s focused on serving better,” Trim said. “The training gave our team a common language and a consistent approach to serving customers, which is critical for protecting and strengthening our brand.”
Service Excellence implemented a six-week reinforcement sprint in the engagement, helping managers coach and support post-training behaviors through short weekly sessions, direct follow-up, and practical field assignments. This structure aims to embed training into the company's operating rhythm. “The goal is not to overwhelm people with more information,” Liles said. “The goal is to make the training usable. When a manager knows what to look for, how to coach it, and how to hold people accountable without making it feel heavy, the training has a much better chance of showing up in the field.”
PRESS PLAY is designed for home service companies that want sales and service to speak the same language. The platform focuses on alignment across sales, service, technician communication, leadership, customer experience, and culture. For smaller contractors, it provides a foundation for customer conversations and technician professionalism; for larger contractors, it offers a repeatable language that can be taught across multiple departments and locations.
Trust in the brand is a crucial growth asset for home service companies, helping them attract and retain customers, earn repeat business, and grow through referrals. PRESS PLAY supports that by making trust easier to teach, coach, and reinforce in the field. The visit to Canada also reflects Service Excellence’s international reach, with Liles having trained contractors in countries including Canada and Australia.
For home service companies, PRESS PLAY connects contractor sales training, technician training, service communication, leadership coaching, customer experience training, culture development, and brand reputation inside one learning platform. “As contractors grow, their operations become more complex,” Liles said. “But the standard for a great customer experience should not become more complicated. A competent salesperson doing the right things and a competent technician doing the right things will always matter. PRESS PLAY gives companies a way to keep that standard clear.”
