The answering service industry – like so many other service industry businesses caught up in these economically, politically and socially perplexing times – is dealing with a staff-shortage crisis. Our industry is in a negative flux, with legacy answering service businesses going broke and multi-national service providers scooping up the remains.
In these challenging days, the average answering service owner is losing the battle to provide adequate Telephone Service Representative (TSR) staffing. And this translates to long hold times for your callers…and of course you know that asking your customers to sit on hold for too long means they will hang up (yes, annoyed with you, almost on a personal level) – and very possibly make a call to your HVAC competitor.
You’ve noticed signs at restaurants asking you to…“please be patient. We are understaffed and moving as quickly as we can.” That’s in an establishment where people communicate with each other face-to-face.
In a relatively impersonal telephone call, the caller is far less forgiving.
What happens if your answering service just can’t handle a high volume of calls? Will your
callers wait? If they won’t wait will they call back later? (Your current clients will call back, but a big percentage of your potential clients won’t.)
Remember that the typical answering service serves hundreds if not thousands of clients; clients with personal and business needs just like yours. My industry’s term for too-much-call-traffic? We refer to this condition as “being swamped.” How does this translate to you, the HVAC operator? You lose business as your customers go to your competitors…and no small thing, your reputation suffers (and with that problematic reputation, potential clients won’t call you in the first place).
Solution? Use an elite, high-quality answering service like Centratel.
How does Centratel solve the “on-hold” problem?
- We pay our people substantially more than industry standards and so we have a long-term career-oriented staff: many with ten years tenure. Some with twenty-five.
- Monthly, individual TSR’s are eligible for a substantial bonus for accuracy and efficiency.
- We routinely drug-test our people Our telephone service representatives are personally disciplined and 100% “present” with callers. Transactions are polite and swift; messages are flawlessly recorded and delivered. A TSR trainee can’t do that, and neither can a stoned TSR…).
- Intelligent staffing protocols. Unlike most answering services, Centratel management provides a staffing schedule with one to two more operators than required. This means we’re prepared for the unpredictable and inevitable call-traffic surges. We very rarely find ourselves “swamped.”
Remember that you can’t measure the potential clients who are silently lost due to long hold times, and neither can you measure the aggravation that your current customers endure. And you certainly can’t measure potential customers who never call you in the first place.
