ShuBee Customer Care

 2007-09-19

Are you throwing money away by the way you answer the phone?

By: Maurice Maio

 

You might be throwing away nearly a million dollars with your current telephone answering practices!

 

Let's look at the numbers.

First, how much are you throwing away by not turning calls you've generated from advertising expenditures into service calls? Secondly, how much don't you receive in service and repair invoices from those calls?

 

Call Generation Costs

Many established service and repair operations receive 2,000 or more calls a year in response to their advertising. If the advertising costs $100,000 per year - a typical figure - it costs that business about $50 to generate each call. You pay the $50 whether the caller schedules a service call or not. If the telephone rings and you don't get the service

appointment, you just threw away $50.

 

What would make a prospect who's taken the step and called your company decide to go elsewhere -

the way you answer the phone. Have you ever listened to what your phone operators tell callers? How are your potential customers treated over the telephone? Are they told to hold? Do they have to schedule service at your convenience, or their own? How do your call takers respond to requests for price quotations? Tape record a call sometime - you may be surprised.

 

If your call takers are not trained to turn every caller into a client, you can expect to throw away those $50 calls!

If only ten callers are not convinced your company will professionally solve their problem, you lost $500 that day. If that happens six days s week, you threw away $3000. If it continues for 52 weeks, only a year of mediocre call taking, you lost $156,000 just from improper call taking procedures!

 

We're not even finished tallying the losses yet.

That is just the amount you have spent and received nothing in return. We haven't considered the invoices for services - the ones you didn't get.