Keeping Up With The Phone Calls

Greetings, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you all!

It’s been busy here but I’m sure you are aware of that if you’ve tried to call in the last couple of weeks. Just when it looks like we are catching up on our phone messages, 3 times as many come in. As of this writing it appears we only have four more calls to answer and we’ll be done for the day.

I should point out that we are operating the phones with the usual number of technicians, including myself, but many of the calls last on average over 40 minutes each. While one call is being answered, at least a half-dozen more are coming in. It looks like we are going to need to try something different.

Typically our “busy season” runs from Thanksgiving time to nearly the end of February. So if that trend keeps up, and we are busier than ever before, then we will most likely have to either hire more phone operators or come up with another phone solution. A few years ago, one of the owners came up with the idea of having the caller direct their own call to either a technician to answer questions or to an operator to place an order by pressing a number when prompted. What happened was that all of the calls ended up being technical calls because the customer had questions that needed answering before placing their order. So the technicians were writing orders and only answering technical questions roughly half of the time.

To deal with that problem we tried putting all of the answers to all of the questions we get asked or ever have been asked. The product of those answers became “Water Weekly“. The main problem with the written answer to questions is that most people don’t have the time to dig through pages of on-line text and opt to pick up the phone instead. So while the answers were there, not many people were seeing them.

In the end we got rid of the operators and stick only with technicians for answering phones. The drawback to that method is the number of technicians available does not meet the need for the quantity of calls coming in. Also, during the months of March through October, the majority of the year, two or three techs do not have enough to do. So what is the solution?

One of our competitors has a method that works out well for them and so far as I can tell, they’ve been in the on-line water treatment business even longer than us. They do not have a phone. Well, I’m sure they have a phone, it’s just that they deal with questions via email instead. I will admit that the questions we are emailed take much less time to answer than on the phone. For example, there was a gentleman in Kentucky who was in the middle of remodeling his home. He was speaking to me on a cell phone and I could hear all kinds of people working in the background. Several times during our 32 minute conversation he kept pausing to speak with someone else. And at one time he even had me holding on his cell phone while he spoke on yet another phone! All the while I’m watching the message board on the phone light up with new callers. To be honest, I can’t even remember what he was asking me about but I’m certain he could have found the answers on the web site.

But we could hire more techs, train them and keep them around all year. The only problem with that is, and I hear this every day, we would have to raise our prices. Once our prices go much above the competition, business will drop off. That’s the consensus from the customers I speak with. They tell me that price was their main decision making factor.

So we can either get rid of the phone support altogether, hire more people which will drive up the costs or keep going on the way we are now; getting behind in phone calls but still providing proper service to our customers. I think that lower prices and less-than-award-winning phone support are much better than no phone support at all.