No one who calls your office wants to wait on hold in order to get assistance for their pet, especially if there is an urgency. Of course, in the veterinary business, customer urgencies are frequent…and too often they occur during non-clinic hours.
Your office is open perhaps 50 hours per week and that leaves 138 “after hours.”
And for that caller, it’s not just about quickly reaching someone who can help.
How does this person handle their problem?
Yes, it’s worth the time to ask: how are your callers handled during these after-hours? You can’t be there to listen. Are these people performing in the same careful manner of your in-house staff during business hours?
In these chaotic social times, the veterinary clinic is especially affected by less-than-optimal after-hours service quality. And it’s not just about treating clients well and paving the way for new clients who will be loyal. It’s about the immediate bottom line, too.
The challenge is to find a veterinary after-hours answering service that is super-efficient; one that has a long-term history of success and therefore can be expected to have a long-term future.
The answering service industry, with 800 answering services nationwide, is in profound flux. Operations are going out of business, multi-national operations are competing with each other to buy out struggling smaller operations, and for every answering service, there is the endless challenge of keeping quality high in the midst of our current economic/social upheaval.
Here’s why Centratel has thrived for the past four decades and remains above the fray:
- Our Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) receive compensation substantially above industry standards which has led to a solid-as-a-rock long-term career staff. Many of our TSRs have been with us for ten years, and some for as long as twenty-five. One just retired after 29 years. Our seven-member top-management team has an average tenure of fifteen years. None has less than twelve
- Every month, individual TSRs receive a performance bonus based on their own individual accuracy and efficiency in the previous month. The bonus can be, and often is, substantial. Yes, they also have health insurance and retirement accounts, and more
- In our answering service industry where finding reliable and high-performing staff is a challenge, we conduct routine yet unannounced drug testing for all our employees. The result? Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs) are personally disciplined, clear-headed, and able to laser-focus on each individual caller, resulting in super-efficient call handling and flawlessly delivered messages
- We use “intelligent staffing” protocols. This includes shift scheduling that includes one or two more TSR’s than what is required per real-time operating data… As a result, we are never overwhelmed with surges in incoming calls traffic and therefore always able to provide top-quality service
- A super-reliable telephony system with full technical off-site redundancy which means we’re minimally affected by outside “technical anomalies.” Operational redundancy is almost unheard of within our industry and for Centratel, it has produced a 99.9999% “uptime” statistic.
- Veterinary answering service is one of our select industry specialties. We focus on it
- Due to the above, the Centratel CRER (Customer Reported Error Rate) is super-low, light-years ahead of our answering service competition
We’re here! And we’ve been here for 38 years and counting. Give us a call and let’s chat.
-sam carpenter
