Do you currently work with
Service Monster?
How many operators are live between 8 to 5PM?
How many rings until the phone is answered?
Will customers be placed on hold?
Do you operators know ANYTHING about carpet cleaning? If so, What exactly?
lets start there.
Hey Mikey (think I sent you an email btw about the banner ads)
1) We were trained by
Servicemonster last year to handle our clients calls. We've taken their training and amplified that internally. On our internal network, we have a very similar forum to this one that we use to post videos, training materials, and other informational items to ensure our operators are well trained on a client account. An entire section is dedicated to
servicemonster. Next, we have 3 tiers of operators: CSR I, CSR II, and Lead Operators. Only lead operators who have a minimum 1 year of experience handle job scheduling. We answer over 1.2 million calls a year, and roughly 60% of our business is cleaning & restoration companies. So our operators know the industry very well. Our concentration in the industry continues to grow, and is quickly becoming our main focus.
2) We have about 30 employees total, and have up to 15 operators live at any given time. Typically between 8-5, we typically have ~13. As for the call volume that comes in around that time, we actually just completed a case study of one of our clients, and while about 65% of calls come in from 8-5, the other 35% come in between 6a-8a and 5p-10p, and on the weekends.
3) For any calls that aren't picked up immediately by a live operator, all calls are answered by the 4th ring by an auto-attendant. We consider it a necessary evil of our industry, because I'm sure I like them as much as the next person. The AA is a recording that plays the company name and automatically places the caller in a queue. The strengths of the AA play as a strength to your next question...
4) Once a live operator picks up, the caller is never put on hold at our company. Any company that tells you every call is answered by a live person is either lying to you, or letting it ring, and ring, and ring, and ring...and ultimately dropping a lot of calls. The labor costs to allow a live person to answer every call and cover that many calls would never allow that company to be profitable. We actually offer an option that goes around the auto-attendant, and does allow the calls to just ring until an operator is available, but that's not recommended...still, we leave it up to our customers to decide what is best for them.
5) I'm not going to blow smoke and say that our operators know everything about the carpet cleaning, but they do know a lot compared to the average answering service. For just one of our clients, we get about 60 calls/day for appointment requests. The operators are very well versed when it comes to his carpet cleaning business. I'm not going to tell you the know as much as someone who works at a carpet cleaning company, because every carpet cleaning company is different, but they still know enough to have a very respectable conversion rate. With our customer who gets 60 calls/day, we were just 7 jobs off their pace for the month based on their performance over the same month from 2012. We scheduled 493, while their staff scheduled 500. Still, sales came out being 6.7% higher with our call center
Are we perfect? No. But I'll be damned if we don't bust ass to try and be.
Hope this helps
