🛑 STOP Answering Your PHONE ☎️ | Why Your Business NEEDS a CALL CENTER

Have you ever wondered why in the world people are so incompetent on the phone? And if you could just have somebody on the phone to answer questions properly and to help your customers and help them with their invoices and all their frustrations about the job. You're out there working so hard, you are so good at what you're doing, but oh man, if you could just have somebody professional that mirrors what you're doing in an office to help you out every day. I'm Liz from Augusta and today I want to show you what it's like to have a call center and professionals that are taught to take care of you and everything in your CRM and your account. Come with me.

Some of you have wondered what in the world is a virtual call center and is it something I would ever need? You might think of a big switchboard with a whole bunch of chaos and people turning knobs. But today I want to show you how we have built one. And just from a need of our franchisees. So before I go back a little bit, the day we actually decided that we need to do something like this was Mike and I were hiking this huge tower and we're always thinking of the franchisees. And as we were hiking up, we thought, what can we do for them to lighten the load other than just doing their estimates and things like that? Could we have a call center? So we stopped partway up and we started googling call centers and how much it would be and could we do that for them? And then we realized we should build it ourselves. Mike contacted me and said he needed an office manager whom he could trust because he was just trying to do, you'll understand this, work in the field, laptop in the truck, answering the phone, just trying to do it all himself. And it just wasn't possible at that time. He had an area where people could just drive in. It was retail and that made it possible to, for the office person to be paid for. So any kind of office staff you have, they don't actually bring any revenue to the company. Their time is complete loss. And so my mentality was I make this much every two weeks and my goal was to try to sell enough product at the local shop to cover my wages. And we got so big so fast that we needed to move to a bigger space. So we had 50 lawns when I started and, and now five, six years later, we have over 8,000 customers in our database and about 650 recurring mowing customers. So I would load trucks with product for the Deliveries, and I would be on a tractor. And then the day of Mike's accident that you guys know about, I had just received the first skid steer, so I was learning to drive that. So then suddenly, I'm running the cruise, running the office, and figuring out how to load trucks.

So we moved to the Bellingham shop, and our crews grew, and we started building the systems as we progressed over time, the load was so heavy on myself to be running that many crews, answering the phone. And our philosophy was we never would miss a call. Well, that's completely impossible when I'm out loading customers, running back in. But we would look at the list of the calls we had missed, and I would call every one of them back. I specifically remember one day getting a call from the border patrol. I called them back and left a message for the guy, went back out, loaded another customer. The guy left a message while I was out there. And that happened five times. And it's just not efficient. It's not good customer service. As we moved along, we realized that we needed to outsource some of this. So I got a assistant at the office, and they helped me for two years. So we wanted to test for the franchisees and be a guinea pig, because we want to know everything they feel and what their struggles are out in the field, trying to do all the work, trying to run his office, with us serving on the back end with full service, basic service. But how are those systems really playing out for them? So we realized the only way to know was to do it ourselves. And that is a huge thing to let go of all your personal, really personal relationships with customers that you've taken care of for a long time, Having someone else answer their questions, which, of course, you think, only you can do that. Only you can meet their needs. And when I started, there would be customers that say, I'm so sorry. I know you're a nice person, but I've got to talk to Mike. And we just made sure we never went backwards and had that happen. When you're out in the field and so. And so is calling you about her bill, you can't see the bill now you've got the phone in your hand. You can't go back in your CRM and fix anything. And then the next person calls when you're out in the field and they're asking about their fence that you put up last week. Can you have a look at it? Next person calls and says, when you did the irrigation last week, you messed something up, and they need you to Come adjust the water. So now you've wasted an hour and a half of your workday when you could have just been banging out mows and getting landscape jobs done. So it gets very frustrating.

So then what do you do? You hire your friend down the streets, a teenage kid. So you pay them $15 an hour. They're 18 years old. They come help you for the summer. They have no clue about lawn care. And so they're calling you every 10 minutes. So. And so just called, and they're wondering about this. I don't know what to say. So then it becomes the inexperienced office person who is constantly bothering you. Not really. And you're trying to get them up to be the best they can be for you. And then what happens in the fall? They go back to school, and once again, you have no one. So then you tell your wife, hey, I need your help with this. I don't have anyone. So the day comes when your wife is helping you in the office, and you give her a call and a job, and there's a very angry customer, and you want her to call and deal with it, and it's an emergency, and she says, oh, oh, babe, I can't. I'm taking the baby to the doctor. I'll do that later. And so it becomes a riff in your personal relationship. You need them to help you, but it's really not fair to them when they're taking care of the kids and everything else and maybe working besides that.

Now you don't have to use a virtual call center. That is Augusta. I'm just going to show you today how one works. And ours would be likely different than a lot of other people, because when you build something great, you build it out of a need. And so the franchisees had a need, and we jumped in to meet that need for them. We decided that me working in the office in Bellingham, and we would take away all my phone calls and give them to a virtual call center at the end of the month. I was so upset because my bill was so high, and I immediately wanted to take all the calls back myself. I can do it myself. All they do is charge by the minute. But when they're on the phone working for you all that time and you're marketing and you have tons of estimates going out and a whole bunch being accepted, I'm just putting jobs on the schedule. And then we had hundreds of MO's and projects that we were working on. It left me to just do that. Instead of the one customer that calls three or four times a day. And so Mike said, let's look at the numbers. So by taking my office assistant away, all of their wage was gone, so all of that could be paid to command. And then all the time that I wasn't on the phone, I was able to work with customers, sell jobs, help the team way more efficiently to reroute their day. Because I could actually look at it more in the past. I was so swamped that it would be getting to the end of the day. I needed to move people around, mowers were breaking, and I was stuck on the phone. And it's very important that you're really attached to your crews. They need your constant attention to wrap up the routes efficiently for the day, to make substantial P4P as well as make money for the company.

So how in the world do you find professionals that are trained on the phone that could actually use your CRM, help your customers with every single thing in their profile in your CRM and then resolve all that for you? How do you get people like that? Well, it's as always, systems. Once you build the systems, the systems do the work for you. Here at Command center, this is how we do your virtual phone calls. And you may use another company. And the wonderful thing about having virtual call centers is you only pay for what you use. So in the winter, you wouldn't need it as much. But if you had an office nap, you would still somehow have to pay for their, their employment and to keep them so that they wouldn't leave you for the winter because you work so hard to train them in the systems yourself. So our team is working here. It'll seem like they're very calm and talking on the phone to customers. But we are serving thousands of customers of our franchisees. So come along with me and I'll explain a little bit about what we're.

So you will see all of our crew, they have noise canceling headphones, and they come from multiple different backgrounds, which give them the expertise to handle things in a collaborative way with the team. The wonderful part about all of us being in this room together is by osmosis, people get better and better working with customers. So each franchisee has a primary and a secondary person who takes care of them. So it would be their office assistant, their office manager. So we actually empower them to know as much about their customers and the franchisee so that when someone calls, they have the authority to say, I am the office manager. And then they touch base with their franchisee every day. And then how they want the job scheduled and what their preferences are and what they need to be aware of with certain customers. If you were out in the field and it started pouring down rain and you had 20 jobs that you needed to move, you're wet, you're muddy, and suddenly you're trying to do this on your phone and you're trying to call all the customers. It is extremely frustrating. All you have to do is text us and we will take care of all of that and moving them over for you. So over time, we have gotten really good at this process and we have actually halved the, the training time by putting together a system as each trainer trains, they're able to revamp the system and make it better and better. And as always, we say no one gets anywhere alone. And the individual skills of all the people here is what makes us so good at what we do. The main thing is that we care and we come to work for each other. We understand that just as if you had a child and your child, you had to go somewhere in an emergency, you wouldn't leave your child unattended. We feel the same way about a franchisee. You don't show up to work. Somehow all their stuff has to get done and someone has to do that work. Every single person is trained to take care of a customer when they call. We have what's called customer intelligence notes in each person's account and that is a way to tell us what is happening with all of these people all the time. Say Tom Johnson was just diagnosed with cancer that is in the CRM in his notes. That might be something we put on the schedule for the crew to be aware of that when they come. He just got home from chemo and they know that he's not feeling well. It makes us very self aware and we actually can take care of the customers better than you could as the franchisee or the owner because you just don't have the time or the energy.

Over time, as we grow bigger and bigger, we'll actually have to put a couple people on, say one or two companies because the companies will grow so much. But as of now, we have 50 franchisees. Our goal is 500. So you'll see here, this is a bonus for getting payments in full before going to collections. As you know, all of us have customers that forget to pay, don't want to pay, move and then pretend that they never had this bill. We give what's called one final mercy call, which you would not want to do, but we do all that dirty work for you. I know It's a difficult thing to do. So I motivated the staff by saying if they can call before we send them to collections, which costs the franchisee money, they have to pay 30 to 40% of whatever that bill is to a collections company. So if I can pay my crew some money to get this money, it's fantastic. So if they can call, get payment over the phone right then, then they get bonus dollars.

When you're out in the field, you can barely get the jobs done, the estimates done, let alone do follow ups on your estimates which you paid money for. And I remember when Mike and I were so busy and he would say, oh, we should follow up on some of those old ones. And I'm like, when it's been three weeks and I have no time to do this. And so we built automations so that it would come into the customer. It's been five days since we contacted you. Would you like to get that on the schedule? There are so many benefits to a person, business owner who has a call center to take care of these issues for them. And so it's not like we don't know what we're talking about. We've been where you are, we've been extremely overwhelmed and we have found this to be a savior. So as we have progressed in time, even the corporate shop, we've taken all their emails away. So all they have to do, as we've said, simplify the services, is schedule the crew, be there in the morning to get them off and then we take care of everything for them. They would be what we consider full service. Now, if you had a calling service, you can choose, if you Google them, you can choose in the boxes. Do I just need somebody to answer the phone? And you don't want somebody to just answer the phone. You want them to be able to go in and resolve things, not just take a message. One thing that's important once you do switch to a virtual calling service is to not answer your phone anymore. Flat, don't ever do it. And I know you think, oh my word, I've taken care of Ms. Jones so long, I can't not answer the phone for her. And then guess what, she's probably going to be okay. So what we did is we created an automated message and every time a customer would text one of the franchisees he would just paste that and it would say, please call our office. That's the way you can get help. The fastest. I'm out serving valuable customers such as yourself. And the same on the voicemail. It'll say something like that on the voicemail if they call and when they call and they say, I want to talk to Mike. I have to talk to Mike. And then you can say, actually, he's out serving customers and doing estimates. And I'm really the best person to help you. And every time someone calls, that is what they get from every single person here. They don't have to hand it off. They can all resolve their issue. And that is very important.

Have you ever had to find fire a customer? It is so difficult, especially if they're kind and they've just become so much work that you need to pass them on to a personal gardener. Guess what? With us here, you don't have to do that anymore. A calling service can help you with that. We can take all those difficult conversations, which we are trained to handle, and take care of them. Being in a call center like this, we had one franchisee, and we were called by one customer 10 times in one day. I heard one call, one call, all. And the lady had to tell the story to every single person about how her $86 bill needed to be refunded. Think about the time that took all my employees on the phone, the back and forth to the franchisee. We actually don't bother them during the day. We do call notes, so they can just check it out later or have a look while it's on their route and see if it's something they need to handle right there. And finally, I just checked in with a franchisee that weekend and I said, you lost so much money by having that customer. We really need to get rid of them for you. So you'll find that things in the past that you tolerated on the phone all day, and you're like, I just can't deal with them anymore. We handle all of that in a very positive way for the customer. And in the end, you can actually part friends and send them on to someone else, even recommend somebody else that might be a better fit for them. So I hope you can Google something, try different companies out, give it a whirl. It doesn't hurt to see if a service like that would work for you and save you all the buying tables, computers, toilet paper, all the office things that you need to have to accommodate somebody. It's nice to have somebody that is actually detached and can professionally take care of all your tasks.

Well, I hope you've learned something today. We here at Augusta Lawn Care Services are always here to help and support you, and we just wanted to show how it's done. Here to show you what can be possible for you. I hope you have a great day.

Got it.