What levels of income do our Jim's franchisees report?

Every year we ask our franchisees in a survey, which is done, usually done early, sort of autumn. We ask you a number of questions, mainly about the little support you're going to get. But one of the questions we ask is how you rate your income. Now, something over half of you, statistically speaking, will rate your income as good, most of the rest as okay, and about 9% will rate your income as poor. But again, those figures are not random across all franchisees. One survey we did found that, for example, of when you divide franchisees into four groups according level of customer service, very, very few, like about 3% in the top group actually report poor income. Doesn't mean zero. Could be people starting off in all kinds of things, but up to 25% of those in the bottom quartile in terms of customer service. So customer service madness, a huge amount customer service that we all give has a dramatic effect on our ability to keep leads flowing in. It has a very big impact on your likelihood that you will stay in business, that you will sit in business. And it is very, very strongly to your ability to report good or at least satisfactory income. So this is the reason why we start the talk talking about customer service, because it is such a key, key part of your road to success. So let's start talking about what customer service is. What exactly we do to look after customers. What is the first thing that we have to do when a customer rings us, because most customers still phone us? What is the first thing we have to do to give good customer service? Answer the phone. Good answer. We have to answer the phone. The average time it takes for a call to go through here after the compulsory service messages is less than 10 seconds. And I go into the call centre, which is just down there every day, to check on the figures on the board. You'll actually see the figures yourself. It's about seven seconds because that's the recorded announcement. After that we watch the figure. If it goes beyond about 20 seconds, that's an emergency. That's like 13 second wait on average. So by normal commercial standards, this call center here is grossly overmanned because we want to answer the phone quickly. By the way, there's a separate line for you as franchisees to call. That's even faster. That is really, really fast because you're actually the top priority in terms of taking calls. So that's the first thing unusual about a call centre. What's the other thing that could be unusual about that call centre? It's in Australia. Yes. It's not overseas. It Is cheaper to run than overstreet. Somewhere like the Philippines or somewhere like that. We run Australia. Australian people, Australian accents. Understanding Australian accents. Now, we take this so extreme that we're actually trying to recruit call center people in New Zealand. Do you know why? Different version of English. Okay. It's not gyms over there, it's gyms. Anybody here from New Zealand? All right, okay. It's true, isn't it? So even in New Zealand, which is very similar culturally and linguistically, we still are aiming to have our own people answering phones in their own language from that country. That's how seriously we take that alone. So customer service begins as we answer the phone. Does anybody know when we actually speak to a client? What are we actually doing? What are we arranging a meeting, an appointment? So what we're going to do, we find out who's available. It's a system that's very complicated and very expensive to work out exactly who the best person to do the job is. If there is anybody. Sometimes there isn't, of course, quite often. And then we're going to promise the client a call back. How much time have we got? What is the promise? Two hours. It's a two hour callback. Now, I really want to stress this. Two hours is the absolute maximum. Two hours and one minute is a valid complaint. We take that really seriously. However, two hours is not the ideal time to call a client back. What's the ideal time to call the client back? Right away? Right now. Strange as it may seem, speed with which you call the client back has a dramatic effect on your likelihood of picking up the job. We did a survey some years ago where we actually asked people, clients when the call back came and then we looked at whether they actually booked a job. We found that some people, some clients had me run back after two hours. Some of them still booked, but it was less than half when the client reported the callback within the first two hours. But after the first 10 minutes jumped to 78% when the client reported the call back in the first 10 minutes, 85% actually booked the job done. So an extraordinary virtually doubling the conversion rate of leads to job simply by when we return the call. Why do you think that fact actor makes so much difference? Yeah, it stops them calling somebody else. They will usually call us first. We are by far the biggest name in this country in terms of service and also in New Zealand too, I believe by now. But if we ring back very properly, there's no reason to call anybody else. Jim's reputation, they've probably used it as someone else. If somebody calls back really fast, they don't have a chance to ring somebody else. Why else? Do you think ringing back fast makes it more likely we'll get the job? Punctual. Yeah. What does it say about us? Reliable. Do what we say we'll do? Turn up the job. Yeah, and it's pretty reliable, too. If you're the kind of person who rings back after two minutes, you're likely the person will turn up when you say you will. Who'll do the kind of job you say you will. Be easy to do it. Be professional. It's a sign of who we are and how good we are, so the quicker we call back, the better.