Now that's what I'm talking about, straight forward input, to the point, with a touch of humor and a picture of a cat! And as a matter of fact, we were thinking of adding an "Alistair Cooke" voice emulator, your feedback now confirms that common desire!
All kidding aside, I agree 100% with what you have said. The most prominent hurdle for small companies is having someone with the required talent to answer the phones, properly and concisely. This of course is a human resource expense that is unfortunately viewed as something that doesn't "directly" provide income, although getting a “run of the mill” CSR, an answering service or worst, a recorded message, hurts the business to a far greater extent. Worst of all, this happens without the owner even knowing since the caller will just move onto the next ad without leaving any feedback.
I agree that reading from a script is sometimes transparent but what we are designing is more of a guide than just plain text. It will go to insure that the facts you mentioned, "short and clear", "undivided attention", etc. are respected for all calls and more directives can be added allowing the owner to decide exactly how each call should be handled. Reading from a new script may be required for the first few calls but we expect the CSR to learn and become familiar with the script and, on the short term, apply the essential components using their own words.
Your post is a template example of how we want to provide business owners with the ability to have calls answered the way they want, time after time, without requiring them to either hover over the CSR or take the calls themselves.
And by the way, the statistics discussed are not meant to "calculate the average time per call" but more to find out which call types are approached successfully and which need reviewing. Another small example would be finding out which “diagnostic fee level” is best, should it be waived if the customer accepts the quote or should it be eliminated altogether? Right now, the entire interaction is one sided, providing very little feedback on how to improve. By allowing certain items to be tracked, the business owner can fine tune their approach to customers providing for better results with future calls.
Bottom line, although your front end may be more complete than the norm, the majority of our clients have someone inexperienced in the industry answering calls and being used as a glorified dispatch board as opposed to providing a human touch in identifying and satisfying the first and most important step of gathering new customers, first contact. Those few minutes spent with your CSR is what the potential customer is basing his or her decision on, usually, more of an overall impression of the call than anything else.
Providing identification with the issue, a certain level of empathy, immediate feedback on how the problem will be resolved, continuity from what the CSR says to what happens in the field, all go a long way in increasing the chances of a customer requesting a visit as well as signing off on the work. They are looking for credibility with a touch of compassion in the first 60 seconds, and we think that the best person to instruct the call takers on how to achieve this goal are the owners themselves, just as you have done in your post. We want to make sure that these directives stick, call after call, that they are flexible enough to change with each individual problem and that they can be improved based on tangible results acquired over any given period of time.
I very much appreciate your input and based on this clarification, welcome any additional feedback. It sounds like you could provide valuable opinions to this endeavor and I look forward to hearing more, if you are so inclined, whether on a post or directly via email. Comments like yours are what we want to use in shaping the final version of this solution. In the event you would like to be a beta site for our initial release, I’m sure we would profit immensely from your hands on feedback.
In any case, thanks again for starting this up!
Marc
