The Most Powerful Tool inYour Office
THE TELEPHONE
BY: DEBORAH MCKENNEY, FRANCHISE CONSULTANT
I n my nine years with Mr. Appliance ® I’ve heard Doug Rogers say several times that he could take any one of the Top Gun franchise owners in the network, drop them anywhere in the country and they would succeed. This year marked an opportunity for Doug’s statement to be proven right when Steven Johnson, Mr. Appliance Over the Mountain in Birmingham bought an existing Mr. Appliance franchise in Cincinnati. The franchise in Cincinnati had struggled for a few years and was just never able to make it over the hump. The main issue from the owner’s perspective was that they couldn’t get the phone to ring. Within three weeks of Steven taking over the business in Cincinnati they were booked out a week with service calls and hiring more technicians. When asked what he did differently, Steven said, “We just answered the dang phone!” The phone had been ringing all the time, but the prior owner was letting the phone go to voice mail on the evenings and weekends. The other thing I’ve heard over and over again from franchisees, “My area is different. My customers are different.” I’ve heard it from franchisees in rural areas and large metropolitan areas from coast-to-coast. The truth is it doesn’t matter where your franchise is located; customers want the same things. Of course they want their appliances fixed, but they also want to deal with a service company that makes it easy for them because they are busy. They want to be treated fairly and get value for the money they spend.
According to a Harvard Business Review study about what customers of service companies really want, 65 percent said they want knowledgeable frontline workers and a one-call-and-done interaction. Most respondents defined “knowledgeable” as able to answer questions without being placed on hold to search for someone or transferring them to someone else. One-call-and-done tells me customers don’t want to leave a message on voice mail and wait for someone to call back. Remember, generally people tend to distrust service companies in the first place. If they have distrust to start with, why would they hold-out hope of getting a call back? People are busy – they want to make a call, schedule the appointment and move on with their lives. When the phone does ring in your office, it’s ringing because you spent money to get the phone to ring. On average it costs about $20 in marketing to get a new customer to call you. Do you really want to risk losing that opportunity because the phone is not being answered by someone that can answer questions and get the van rolling? Your perception may be that customers will leave a message and wait for you to call them back and maybe some do; but are you willing to risk it? Steven has another quote I like a lot about keeping the customer first in everything we do. He tells his employees, “I will inconvenience an employee before I will inconvenience a customer, because without the customer none of us gets paid.”
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toolbox ® |4th Edition
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