Mike Minutes Mastermind 05/20/2024

Hello destination. Hope you're doing good. This is my second time recording this. First time audio is horrible. This hotel WI fi not great. So hopefully this is good enough. You at least be able to understand what I'm saying. Last time I was in the airport though, so it's loud around me. Anyways, let's try this again. So today's mostly announcement.

So in the name of consistency, announcement. There's three made. Three, three. The last one's longer. First two are pretty straightforward and I've already put on Facebook. The first one is the Chris Lights from Certified Lights. I am in contact with Scott trying to get better pricing. The pricing that's currently on the website is not what we talked about previously. So I'm hoping we can get down to where it works for everyone so we can all use one supplier and just make it way easier for everyone. I am also in touch with another supplier that Jason put me in touch with that is he's used before that's significantly cheaper. So I am trying to work with Scott though because I'm like look, you guys have put a ton of work into like building this website for us in the portal and new support system for us, et cetera, like but it's useless if you guys don't make any money on actually selling us lights and you're not going to if you don't lower your prices. So I tried to kind of lay out a scenario of what you want to do with the Christmas Light program. I thought I'd already made it pretty clear by giving actual projections into dollars and cents for them. So hopefully by doing that a little bit of legwork for them, they'll figure out that hey, we're worth a lot more than just their, you know, regular customers. So sorry about that but based on what they had shown me previously, I thought we were going to be getting much lower pricing. So hopefully they get lease within 10% because I think it would be worth it if we all were using the same same light, same supplier, same system, same everything.

As we share and help each other on the Christmas Light thing. So I will work on that and like I said, I'm going to get a backup supplier in the event that they stay Scrooge with me. Second announcement. Lots of good feedback. Last couple days I got one person had mentioned it was kind of secondary pass along to me. But about on the dashboard, just a lot of stuff being on there. I know over the past four and a half years we've added a ton of stuff in a lot more forms a Lot more videos in terms of Academy and so we've already started rebuilding it. We won't put it out until after spring rush but I put a post in the Facebook group. If there's something very specific that you're like hey, I always get on there and I can't find something let us know. So someone put a really good thing about the directory like can it be searchable by state?

And something other than just the alphabetized of the territory name because.

You don't know the territory names in your state and so you actually go to the map, look there and then go to the directory. So we'll figure out something whether it be map based or at least grouping them by states so you can find owners a lot easier. That was one thing I was mentioned and a couple other things. So if you have something specific go there but you're. It'll be much more searchable and we're actually trying to make it where at least like the latest 10 to 20 mic minute masterminds are transcribed by AI and then you can search them working on that sort of thing and several other elements just to make it easier and way more more searchable. Like when we first started Augusta really the only thing that was on there was like some training videos from the new owners training and then like max metrics. That was really all it was. Now there's like you change your service area stuff your command center services. There's a lot more on there. So we'll try to update that. Not try, we are going to update Summer. But if you have input you're like hey, whenever I go I can't find these certain things on the Facebook page. They are Facebook group. There's a post I made about just search dashboard. You'll see it and put in the comments. Be super helpful. I'll put it onto the web team. We have a full time designer coming on the media team and one of her big projects is that the next couple of months. So it should be much design wise look better and just overall look really good. So that's first. That's the second thing. Third thing I actually, I made this because I have time between the airport and here. I actually threw this together real quick just to kind of a slideshow. It worked pretty good yesterday. If I can pull this up.

Really.

Why did you go back to the homepage? Okay, let's try this again. Boom, boom. All right, we're just going to have to deal with this because I don't have a secondary screen to make this all beautiful. So Bear with me for just a moment. All right, so present, present, Boom. All right, I want to share again a good feedback in the past couple days. A lot of people submitting the forms to Liz on the command center feedback form. That's the best way to get feedback. It goes directly to Liz. She digs right in and starts to pull calls, et cetera. But I wanted to go over some of the things that have been done and are being done at command center since a lot of the feedback was really good and I wanted to kind of give some clarity on that. Where did page. Ah, there it is. Okay, cool. Okay. So really the command Command center's focus, the past eight, nine months has been two, two things. And when I say crush this spring rush and crush the rush command center, some of. I told her that she have a blank check to fix these things. These are the two vectors we were looking at and that essentially don't miss a single call and make sure that we're actually getting estimates out to people quickly instead of in the past. During spring rush is April, May, June, just really being behind and not having it where there's so much backlog that people were leaving at command center, et cetera. So but these are the two major metrics that we were looking at in terms of crushing the spring rush. Now lead Response time in April 2023 was 2.1 days. This is a blended average. And when I would define leaders response time, this is time from lead received until action taken by the agent. So weekends inflates that number a little bit because it's often three days. So for example, the back in the day someone would submit like an estimate request form on say a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, maybe Monday afternoon it gets two because there'd just be a massive backlog from the weekend. And so that's what lead response time super important in my opinion in terms of increasing close ratio. So this year, April 2024, it was less than two hours. And again that is a blended average. That includes nights where if it came in the last minute of the, of the office being open and it was the first hour, the first minute being opened, there's already, there's still eight hours where we're closed each night. So this is. Or 12 hours. Sorry. So that includes all of that. Also this does not include instant quote forms because technically that would bring the number down way, way more. I'm not including instant quote forms because obviously the lead response time to that is zero. But I'm not including that. I'm just including actual estimate Request forms submitted to the website. When I'm looking at this number, if we include instant quote forms, it's like 98, 99% faster. So it's literally two hours versus two days in terms of what the lead response time has been. And that was my main focus. And I'm not sure why. But the second metric is missed calls. And so why we got missed calls during two hours. The easiest way to kind of explain it is if you had one office person every single time they were on the phone. Essentially any call that came in during that time, you'd miss a call. And there's times even if you have one location and say doing a million in revenue, you'd be on the phone for 15, 20 minutes dealing with a really angry customer, and you'd miss two or three calls. And now you are literally going to be behind for the next hour or two, just following up with those other three people. And then when you're on calls, it goes, you get more. So this is what happens even when we had like last year, like 30, 40 people or whatever it was 50 at Command center is just, there's peaks in the day when they're just so many calls. And we can kind of judge for it, but still you have to, you can't staff people for an hour and a half or two hours a day. And so that, that's what caused that in the past. And it wasn't a huge sense like in, in terms of the whole year, but when you look at spring rush, there are definitely calls during those peak hours. And then if someone leaves a voicemail, which again, only 38% of people do, then it goes into a backlog of work that we used to be way behind during the spring rush.

So why was this, these two metrics, such as massive focus? Well, in the past, in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the majority. And when I say that all three of those years was above 50%, as high as 77% of locations throttled or turned off their leads during spring rush. I knew that would not be the case in 24, since I knew, I suspected a lot based on where the economy is going, that that would not be the case in 2024 based upon interest rates and then keeping interest rates higher than anticipated. And so that's why everything's been focused on these two metrics. And sure enough, less than 10% of locations this year, 2024, have throttled leads. And again, throttling leads comes in the form of any way of reducing in person estimates Cutting them out completely turning off leads, completely putting a ban on your site that you're not accepting new clients, et cetera. So what was done so over the past then? What was it since last. So last at the end of last, towards the end of last spring rush till the beginning of this one, What Liz has been working on a ton and all the department heads at command center is these four things. So number one, maps AI. So this, this was removing the spikes in the call volume. And this would be after hours leads would be taken, thereby reducing the morning backlog. Because if we can get 30, 40 people's information and their leads ready to go, it saves a ton of time when, when agents start in the morning to be able to process those very quickly versus having wait for everyone's. We can't call people at 5am Right. So you're gonna have to wait for them. That creates a big backlog. Same thing at night. Like we can't call people on the East coast at 5pm or 6pm Pacific Standard Time. That's literally 8 and 9pm their time. And so something we got to be careful of.

But anyways, Max AI really, really helped with that. When those spikes come in, it evens them out a lot because you can handle so much of it and then take the lead information so that the next hour when there's not very many calls, they can be serviced right away. Instant quotes. So this reduces the amount of admin touch by about 75% compared to a regular accepted admin where you have the over the phone, the information is taken keystroke by keystroke instead of digitally through. Max. Sorry, I'm thinking Max AI Instant quotes is obviously instant. They're putting all the information as the customer. The only admin touch is that Command center then puts that into copilot and then click Accept on the estimate. But there's no OTP required and the keystrokes are done by the customer instead of by command center. So it saves about 75% of admin time. Instant quotes. So that was huge. Also reduces the amount of work in general that they have to do. So the backlog gets reduced during spring rush when the majority of the spike is caused by new leads and new customers coming in. Sunday office hours have been huge. This reduces the Monday morning overwhelming backlog for the agents. A lot of times Mondays when you have payroll being processed, you have billing and invoicing being done. And so it was just always would come in after, you know, Saturday evening, Sunday being closed, coming Monday morning. And that's when like command center will just be thousands and thousands of emails behind hundreds and hundreds of leads, behind hundreds of voicemails being missed on Sunday. And like who knows how many missed calls during Sunday when we're closed, which is a normal thing for an office to close on Sundays. And then you're not going to call back all the people that called you over the weekend. But not optimal. Like we're trying to make this thing better. So Sunday hours have been huge. Having the Philly team and they've been around for more than a year now. So having them, they have capability to be actually be trained enough to be on the phones and be able to do that on Sunday hours has been absolutely game changer.

The fact that someone can Saturday night request a in person estimate. Sunday they called, set that up with an agent and then Monday morning you're there. That would never have happened last year. The thing is, last year.

There were so many. Last three years there've been so many leads coming in. Most of our locations are turning off leads. So if you got an estimate show up on your thing Tuesday morning, you're like, oh great, I got my dispatch board, I got automation saying there's a new lead. When reality that person literally could have called Friday evening or submitted their estimate request for Friday evening. Because of the backlog and because of just drowning and stuff during those spikes, we could literally be getting it on your schedule a couple days afterwards. And so that's not ideal. No one felt the impact as much though because we were all drowning in leads. Like it was way harder to find people to work than leads themselves. I knew that was going to change this year again. I anticipated it would change and it has. It's been like easier to find employees, really difficult to get leads for the vast majority of us. And then getting everyone into one CRM reduced the training at command center so we could train up for peaks and get people efficient at some level. Basic service within two weeks instead of four to six weeks. In the past when we're training two and three different types of CRMs, these are the results. I know I posted this last week on the Facebook group, but you know, as anticipated, number of estimates being sent up only up 1.5%. Not huge. And then you look at average revenue per location up very good. Lots of people raised their price this year. Hit capacity, fantastic. But this is the number that I actually have my eye on because this is the one that the two metrics impact the most, which is the no missed calls. It kind of affects number total leads but more importantly, the lead response time, the close ratio is 8.8%. And I generally believe that these are the things that have led to that impact is changing these two things. Lead response time and no missed calls. And so that's really what Crush the Rush was focused on this year. Like this past eight, nine months, just really honing all of those aspects in to make sure that there was no missed calls that estimates got back to immediately that were always at inbox zero, that people are not completely bogged down Monday mornings and every morning at Command center. And. And, you know, in the past spring rushes, there'd be times where maybe you only got your email checked through one time in a day simply because the amount that was like, just there getting barraged. So those four things that we've really been focused on, and that's why the spring rush, those things have not happened. Calls are answered immediately. There's no missed calls. Even if you're not opt in the max, there's still enough people that have opt in max to take out the caps and make it where we can handle everything. So very good. So now the question is like, what's Command center working on now? Because obviously we've been getting a lot of feedback the past couple days, which is great, but it's already been something we've been working on the past couple months, and Liz at Command center has been since April, and it's gonna be what we work on till next spring rush. And these are the two major things. But there's already several things that have been done, and Liz is gonna make up. I think that's my next slide. Yeah. Liz will have a video update with more details on what these efforts look like. We've already instituted things like the CSAT score, which is customer Satisfaction score. So that way customers actually get a text message after phone calls asking them how it was. And then based upon that, we're able to dig into calls that if any customer calls in and they're mad about something like a damage case, they almost always put a negative response. But if that negative response is how we handled it or how the phone call went, we can dig. We dig into every single one of those. So there's hundreds of those going out all the time.

That'S already been in the works. And this is something that we're working on right now. The first thing is actually what I think is most important, because over the past few days, I've been listening to calls. Liz has been calls. She always does. But better visibility for recorded calls will be really important. One of the things that command center has been doing recently and doing a daily basis is what they call game tape or game footage. It's kind of like sports and athletes, they watch back the tape and see how things did and like, how can you improve? So Liz takes specific calls every single day and for the whole team, breaks down. Here's what was good, here's what was bad. Because the basic you can teach. But then there's so many fringe cases where someone like, for example, if they. If they refuse, absolutely refuse to do a dollar and a half per minute per man, do you want us to cancel the lead or do you want us to set up drive by? We don't really clarify that in most of our wikis. And she was like, well, I'm willing to take the drive by. And sometimes the time of year, if you're like, hey, I need leads or I'll go do the drive by for the initial mo. If they don't want to have that looming over their head. Cause they know it's two and a half feet tall and there's a little skittish about doing that. So those sort of gray areas is where coaching, like, has to be done on a daily basis to define better the edge cases. Even though the edge cases every single day. There's just so many gray areas that happen anyways. Better visibility, though, means being able to hear the calls. So I remember being an estimator, and whenever I'd go out and do an estimate, I always knew if the customer said something stupid about the office, I never believed them. The reason I didn't believe them is because I knew it was like Liz, Charity, Lonnie, Rachel, they were kind of Liz and the three office assistants.

And so I just knew that if they said something dumb or they tried to try to pit the office against me, that they're just blowing hot smoke. And I would always back up the office because I knew I could go to the office, I could talk to them. I've worked with them for a long time and I can hear them take calls. I know they don't do that sort of thing. The challenging part is we've never been able to have great visibility. Mostly around because of Ringcentral how it's set up. It's very manual process to pull recorded calls and then give access. Like, we can't have everyone have admin access where you can hear everyone's calls. They don't have a. They're brutal. If you have ring central in the past, you know how brutal, Brutal Their customer services. It's like next level horrible just to be able to get customer service, let alone them understand what you're saying, let alone actually for them to give you real information. Like, we are usually walking their agents through how their system works. All of that being said right now, if you have a call or customer says something weird or says command center did something I really recommend, ask for the call. Because if you. If you have the customer's name or more importantly, their cell phone, their number, and you give that to Liz, she can pull the calls immediately. And the reason I say this because, like, I listen to a bunch of calls the past couple days where I listened to the call, and I'm like, man, I'm super proud of the agent. I would. I'm glad they're behind me. Like, one the other day I was listening to they're super smart. The customer's freaking out and saying, like, the invoice was wrong because we never showed up and did the work. And she's gonna, like, not pay or invoice and whatever because we were sending her collections. And so the agent was great because now everyone inside Augusta has texting capabilities. So he's like, hey, I know you're mad. Send us pictures. She's like, it's still massively overgrown. And you said you came last week, whatever. Okay, send us pictures.

And I'm going to text you the email address so you can send the pictures. So all of that to say I was really proud of the agent, how they handled the customer. And after customer calls back three times, freaking out, like, you eventually have to say, look, we aren't going to service you, you're not paying your bills, and we're business here. And so the challenging part though is if you don't hear the call and you just hear what the customer says or you hear like a Google review and they freak out and they say like, all sorts of things were done and said, you just kind of like you don't have any other information. And as you all know, when it comes to, like, team members and if you want them to think like owners, give them information and compensate them like owners. So when it comes to owners that a lot of times they say they hear certain things from customers or something said in a Google review about what was the app Command center, they don't have the visibility and the information. We actually listen to calls. So in the past, it's always been like, hey, on your connect team, chat or ask plays.

So you can actually hear what was said.

We are trying to Figure out a way to make this easier, whether it even just be a form that you can really quickly fill out based upon like day and phone number and you get the messages from that. We want to make this easier. We can't give everyone admin access to Ringcentral would be a disaster. I think down the road if we ever integrate with Copilot and Ringcentral this would be an option even for you to be able to jump into your copilot account and call from Ringcentral from your Copilot account. So that way you don't have to worry about secondary phone lines, etc. I'd like that down the road I think that'd be an option. But right now it's not easy. And so if you ever have a call or that you want pulled, you're like hey I A customer said this on a Google review. They said something about that. The office said we just need their number and the date and we can pull calls for you. Now we want to make this easier and give better visibility so you can see this easier. And we're thinking a form. Liz and I have been workshopping this. We'll have some better input. Liz will probably when she makes her video have better input on this. But we worked on this for quite some time. We thought Ringcentral would be have better options but they've just been an absolute pain to work with. So we're going to have to do something more internal. So we're working on something. We will have it, we're going to test it. Liz will come and present that one when she can and kind of already talked about like now. The focus as we move past the past couple months has been and will continue to be is like Frontline call training and quality control. Whether it be listening to more calls and retraining like I said and training daily. In terms of gain footage, what's working well, what doesn't work well. For example, the call I heard where it's like hey, use that text message thing to your advantage. When a customer's mad cause you can immediately send them links is super valuable. Like I would put that in the game footage of like hey, this is a great tactic. If someone's yelling and screaming at you, they're probably going to spell the email wrong. They're not going to want to type in the email or the web address, things like that. You can just send them right away.

So that sort of game footage will increase the Frontline team members and because of what Liz has done and hired so many People this past year we've been able to now get, you know, reduce the amount of people that were not strong. And even though you're re coaching them for several months, you still, you're trying to, but then you eventually have let them go. That, that weeding process has been taken, has taken place and now it's like really, really diving deep on improving the call quality. So.

Those are the two major things we're focused on now. There's a lot of things that will go into these two things similar to what went into, you know, these four things in the past eight, nine months to be able to increase and reduce the lead response time and missed calls. And there's still things that we're doing even on those fronts. So for example, like adding in the evening hours, like the night shift that we're adding in September for Command center will even help more reduce the bottlenecks in the morning. Even though right now it's not very much. They get through it within about 30 to 40 minutes usually if I can remove that, it even helps us more just be more effective, get back to estimates faster, et cetera. And there's so many things like, even in terms of these, like max AI instant quotes specifically that we're making improvements to that'll help in those areas. But really the focus for Command center is these two things in the next several months. So I wanted to be really clear about what has been the focus in the past and what is the focus now. Really there's only two or three things at one given time for any department that I recommend and you ever give as targets otherwise, yes, there's a thousand things you can fix in your business, but knowing what are the two or three metrics we're actually going to nail and then every single gun is pointed in that direction in my opinion, super important. And for us it's been lead response time and getting the calls and that's nailed. And I think there's still marginal improvements that can be made in terms of having like evening hours, et cetera. And max AI can be massively improved. There's a lot of investments we're making into that. But this is the really the focus at Command center over the next eight to nine months. They've been doing it the past couple months a lot with around the CSAT scores and getting taking the 70 agents down to more like a 45 to 50. But now really have the past couple months training retraining like hey, if you can't pass these tests, if you're not certain their Accuracy, you have to be done now. The team is super strong. The ones that are there are actually going to crush it. And I really, really do believe that the efficiency of them as they're retrained, even going in next year there won't require a ton of new people, even if we have more locations being added, simply because they'll have now a year and a half, two years underneath their belt working at Command center with these more stringent training and quality controls and measure. But more updates will come on this in the future. Over the next months, you'll see this. Liz will be having an update in terms of what she's doing with the recorded visibility of the recorded calls to be able to give access to these as much as we possibly can and make it at least easier for you to ask for the calls. Because right now it really is a matter of like on Connecteam or on the form. There's currently a form if you go on the dashboard that says feedback for Command Center. Some people using that. Some people have just emailed our messages directly to pull calls. But I know that only about 10 locations ever do that. I'd like to give much more easier access to be able to see those when needs be. But right now it's just super painful with RingCentral, the way I have it set up. So we're just trying to streamline it. We'll have updates around that in the future, but wanted to give that update. All right, hope you have a fantastic day. I'm recording this on Sunday, but this will be Monday's Mastermind and.

Yeah. All right, that's it. Take care, guys. See ya.