Our interaction with owners over the past 5 years has shown that the best use of their time was 2-fold:
- Spend time building the business and building relationships with people in the community
- Spend time with technicians making sure they are representing the company and performing well
At some point, every owner has to stop answering the phone himself because the call volume gets too high and frankly…it is just not the best use of your time. The issue is, it is just too expensive to keep exceptionally talented people in your office running the business 24 hours per day.
Missed phone calls, answering services after hours, call centers, lost paperwork, invoice processing, daily turn ins, service agreement scheduling, follow up calls on estimates, thank you calls and notes are all lucrative components in thriving service companies. However, often times you are having to run to the hottest fire and important items and customer follow up just fall through the cracks.
We know that answering services, dispatch centers and call centers are all not good solutions. The reason for their failure is 2 parts: the loss of the personal touch and the lack of financial alignment. More simply: the people do not sound like they are from your hometown and those services get paid regardless of how well your business is doing.
Our conclusion was the creation of The PULSE. The PULSE platform has used state of the art technology to enable the owner to have a level of control that has been non-existent up until now. It’s been attempted on a national scale by many companies and failed miserably…We perfected it 5 years ago.
Every PULSE agent (call takers and dispatchers) is thoroughly interviewed for customer service experience, voice inflection and stress management, etc. Each call taker is graded weekly on a multi-point scale by their peers and managers. We hold weekly lunch and learns with industry experts every Thursday to ensure quality training and a forum for the call takers to trade new ideas. We have really achieved a level of unprecedented excellence as we have a nationally traveled psychologist on retainer that has monitored our interactions with customers to insure customers feel like they are talking to family (pace, pitch, voice inflection, tone, etc). We answer the phone all day every day because we are completely financially aligned with our territory owners.
