Office Staff VS Calling Service

Hey everyone, this is Mike Andes and you're listening to landscapebusinesscourse.com and this is the first episode of this show that we have had in studio. And this is just a part of the studio. Eventually I'll show you the whole thing and we'll have more of a sit down kind of set. But for today, I wanted to jump right in and share with you some questions that I've been getting recently. And we talked about the conference, but I wanted to go over here on the show and just kind of give my thoughts. And that is, when do you have an office person versus having a calling center? So there's lots of different calling centers. You can literally look it up and get 50 of them online. Everything from pink callers to literally there's like dozens of them. And so there is value to those companies. There is value to having your own office staff answer the phone. So today I want to kind of talk about the pros, the cons, and when you, you should switch from one to the other. So I highly recommend that you try at all costs to have an office staff. The reason for that is because they are going to be the same person answering the phone every single time that the customer calls. So, for example, if Bill is inside of your office as the office manager and Susie gives them a call as the customer, every time Suzy calls Bill, Bill will be able to answer the phone, know where he left off with Suzy, what her customer account looks like, the services that have been provided, and kind of an overall kind of picture of the account and the history in terms of payment. And if Susie called yesterday, Bill will remember that today and he'll be able to kind of know where they're at in the process of taking care of the customer. So that's really the optimal thing, is that you have someone in the office taking care of calls, emails, and constantly having that kind of consistent message and experience for the customer. The alternative to that is you have a calling service. So someone like Pink Callers or another service that.

When a customer calls, it doesn't ring your cell phone. It actually will go to the calling service and they will take information. You will give them certain scripts for them to follow based upon setting up an estimate or customer service calls or changing an account, billing information, and every sing calling service a little bit different. Some of them will actually allow you to give them access to your software. So if you use Lawn Pro or Service Autopilot or Jobber or Yardbook or whatever, they will actually get access to your account and can actually Open up that individual customer's account on the phone and really act as if they almost are your office staff. Because to the customer, they're calling your establishment. They don't know that there's a phone calling service that you've been using. They just believe that they're calling your business. And so it can be a great tool. I just find that a lot of times, if Susie calls today, tomorrow, she might call. And a completely different person answered the phone from that calling service and has absolutely no context in terms of what was said yesterday. Maybe there was a complaint that Suzy's following up with, or maybe a change of account billing information. And so the problem is that you're gonna have different people answering the phone from that phone service. So usually how that works is for you as the business owner, you are gonna pay this calling service on a per minute basis. So usually it's like between a dollar and $1.50 per minute. So if Suzy calls and talks to someone for 20 minutes, you're gonna be charged $20 to $30 based upon that minute rate for that calling service. And I would highly recommend, if you use a calling service to just vet them constantly, like mystery shop them, call your number and pretend you're a customer. Pretend like you want an estimate, Pretend like you need to change account information or billing information and see how they react. Is it the type of service that you want to be reflected to your customers? Because I've just heard so many horror stories of customers calling a landscaping company thinking they're talking to you, the business, the establishment and employee. They talk to someone on the calling service, and they're just not polite enough. They're not courteous, they're not having great customer service skills. They're not empathetic, they're not building that relationship with the customer, and at the end of the day, just not providing the experience that you want for your business and that you've been training your field workers for, even. And so you wanna make sure that experience is consistent from your field staff to you as the owner, to the estimator, to the office staff. And so if you're outsourcing your office work and people are answering the phones, you want to make sure they're from the United States. You don't want this to be coming out of, like, India, and people can't understand what the calling service people are saying. But I would highly recommend you to use a calling service over nothing. So I would say that a calling service is a step up from you just taking all of your Phone calls on your cell phone. The reason for that is because if you're out in the field, this might ring while you're at a job site and you might not get to it in an hour or two. Maybe there's five voicemails you might not get till the next day or that evening if you're out in the truck working in the field. And so if you're in that position where you're out in the field or you maybe have one or two employees and you're not always actively able to answer your phone, that's when I think a calling service might come in handy. You pay them only when they're needed. So that in times when spring is there and you're getting 20 phone calls a day, you do pay them a significant amount. However, in the winter when you're getting one call a week, you don't have to pay an office person to be staffed all the time. So there's definitely a massive advantage when it comes to financially for you to have a calling service when you're small. Now there's gonna come a point when you eventually get so many calls every day it actually makes it worth it to have a full time staff office person in doing that all the time. And so in my experience, once you hit about 30, $40,000 in, in monthly revenue, that's when you can usually again usually afford to have a full time office person. And by doing that, it's gonna free you up immensely. You've heard me talk about before kind of three different spots in which your business is gonna really spike and grow. Number one is when you get out of the field. Number two is when you hire an office staff. And number three is when you begin to delegate all aspects of your business and become just working on strategy. So for most of you, you're starting to work on that. Number one, getting out of the field. And that's the first big step. You get three, four, five people working for you. That next step that we're talking about now is getting that office manager position. That's the person that's going to be full time answering the phone, answering emails. And so instead of having that call wait for two hours because you're in the job and they left the message on your cell phone. Now that office manager is gonna take that phone call live. They are going to set up that estimate right away and really follow up on leads that you might be missing by not following up with them immediately. And so there's a definite trade off, I would say, to give you a hard number between 30 and $40,000 in monthly revenue is what you can absolutely afford. And really you can't afford not to have an office manager. Once you hit that inflection point and you have that office manager, it's gonna be a much better customer service, much better customer experience. They're gonna get estimates done faster. So if they want an estimate by the time they call you, get it set up and you're there, can be dramatically reduced once you have an office staff that is constantly answering the phone. So that number 30 to 40,000 in monthly revenue is usually what I give for someone that is looking to hire someone full time in the office. But again, if you're out in the field right now and all your phone calls are coming to your cell phone, all your emails are coming to your cell phone, I would highly trying out one of these calling services and seeing if it's worth paying them a dollar a minute might seem like a lot. You say, well, it's 60 bucks an hour, but if you only get three calls in the day and they average like a couple minutes long, you might end up paying 10, 15 bucks for an entire day of someone watching the phone versus having to pay someone 12, 15, 20 bucks an hour to sit in the office for eight hours and wait for those same three phone calls. So if you're smaller, if you're doing under 30,000 revenue, I'd highly recommend getting a phone calling service, shop around, get two or three, try them out for a little bit, see how they work. I genuinely believe that that is a fantastic business model that you can take advantage of by just paying someone per minute because you don't have that volume. At our office, we're getting dozens of phone calls a day, dozens of emails a day. And so it makes it from a financial standpoint worth it to have multiple people in the office full time. But for you, if you're small and you are still in the field, I definitely would recommend trying the calling service. And if you're able to afford it, even if it seems like it's gonna be a stretch, I highly recommend you getting that office manager position. They're gonna take a lot off your plate. And a lot of the things that you gotta instantly respond to, they take that off your plate, allowing you to focus on sales estimates and follow up, which is gonna be the next step of your growth, getting to that hundred thousand dollar mark in monthly revenue. So I hope that helps a little bit and kind of clarifies my position on when you should get an office staff member if you should get an office staff member and whether or not the phone answering service is something you might want to look into. Thanks again. My name is Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com.